Kilimi (Space)

Kilimi
Area:	Limassol
Active Period:	1981
Political Position:	Anarchism

Kilimi (lit. Kilim) was a self-managed social space in Limassol, which operated for a short period in the early 1980s. It is considered as the first anarchist social space in Cyprus, and the first appearance of the anarchist milieu in Limassol.

Already in Limassol the “space” had undergone a radical transformation from leftism to a diffused anti-authoritarian-alternative mentality, from the early 1980s in a short-lived but decisive series of gatherings in a gallery called kilimi…¹⁾

---

The story of Chrysallida begins in the summer of '81, a few meters up, on the same street, in an old, large house on the northern corner of Agios Andreas Street, which was rented by some Limassol painters and used its large rooms as a studio. When at some point some left, the rest responded positively to a group's proposal to be given two of the rooms to use as a meeting place. Slowly, the circle grew and became a meeting point for several people, from different areas, who in the end became an even larger group. So the summer ends and almost everyone leaves for studies. The next episode finds many in Lyon, France, where another hangout is created, another large group, in a house that for a while functions as a kind of commune. It is there that the one and only issue of the magazine 'Mavres Pinelies' (Black Brushstrokes) is printed in photocopies and circulated from hand to hand, which is important, not so much for its content, but for the fact that it is the first, as far as we know, publication of the Cypriot anarchist-autonomous milieu, in the sense that, although the entire effort was made abroad, it was made mainly by Cypriots.²⁾