Severios Library

Severios Library is located in the old town of Nicosia, on Archiepiskopou Kyprianou square and very close to many cultural sights of the capital of Cyprus, while it belongs to the adjacent Pancyprian Gymnasium.

Opposite the Library are the Archbishop’s Palace, the Byzantine Museum of Nicosia, the Nicosian Struggle Museum and Agios Ioannis Cathedral,

A building that was inaugurated in March 1949 and was designed by Michaelides’ architectural office, the Severios Library is a donation of Demosthenis Severis, a graduate of the school, who gave £5,500 after a fundraiser launched by the-then-principal Konstantinos Spyridakis for the needs of the Pancyprion Gymnasium. During the execution of the works, his children, Maria Blackawl and Christodoulos, Kostas and Zenon Severis, contributed £1,000 each to furnish the new reading room and library annexes.

The building complex now includes a large reading room, a donation room hosting donations of private libraries made by the owners or their heirs, a room with old and priceless books, as well as the Cypriot section of the library. Its collection includes more than 75,000 volumes of books, mainly literary and historical, and series of volumes of Greek and foreign magazines, many of which are no longer published and are rare material.

The classification of the book by the DEWEY decimal taxonomy was done in 1967, and in 1989 the Severi family offered £35,000 for the modernisation and expansion the library, and the Ephorate donated another £15,000, money spent on building improvements and the placement of central heating.

Severios Library is one of the richest libraries in Cyprus and is free to the public for students, college students, researchers and anyone interested.

A milestone in its history was the battle with the English and Turkish auxiliaries on January 27, 1956, with the participation of pupils from other Nicosian schools. Students set up barricades and were holed up in the shelter of the Severios Library. They collided with security forces using stones, bottles and tiles they had found from the construction works that were being done in the building. Finally, the English closed the school.