Returning From Texas at Age 700

The dome fresco from a church in the town of Lysi will return to Cyprus Hester and Hardaway Photography Kelly Crow 24/9/2011 After more than two decades, a pair of Byzantine-era chapel frescoes in Houston is heading home—to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Houston’s Menil Collection on Friday said it had agreed to return the 700-year-old wall paintings to the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus, ending a long-term loan arrangement between the museum and the church. The frescoes originally adorned an 8-foot-wide dome and apse in a 13th-century Orthodox chapel in Lysi, a town in northern Cyprus