Giannakis Ioannou, a retired teacher originally from Kaminaria, deals with painting on pumpkins.
From a young age he had a special love, he told KYPE, for folk art and crafts in general. However, he loves painting on pumpkins more.
As he tells it, when he was in the army a group of soldiers had all bought a pyrograph to “fill” their free hours inside the camp. With that pyrograph, he continued, he drew signs of the soldiers and sold them to them for a pound each out of his pocket.
When his commander found out, he brought him a pumpkin and asked him to decorate it. Mr. Ioannou told him that he had not dealt with such a thing before, so his commander took it upon himself to make pencil drawings on the pumpkin, which Mr. Ioannou then painted.
Initially he remembers having reservations because the surface was not flat like wood. The result, however, left him satisfied and so he started painting other pumpkins.
In the beginning he dealt with geometric shapes, subjects from the animal and plant kingdom of Cyprus, flowers, the wild, the partridge, the hare.
He then moved on and painted agricultural operations such as ploughing, sowing, picking olives, grinding and more. It was also inspired by Greek mythology, by the feats of Hercules, Theseus, Olympus, Dionysus and the Trojan War, by Cypriot and Greek history, the Greek revolution, the struggle of EOKA, the invasion of 1974, the creation of the Green Line, the roadblocks, the occupied.
He added that pumpkins were used as a container for water or wine. Besides, the small ones could also be used to transport food to the fields. Today it is a lion of souvenirs and decorations, he added.
Giannakis Ioannou currently has a large collection of painted pumpkins. He gave some to people who appreciate his work, as he said.
As he mentions, he never sold any, while Metropolitan Kykkou Nikiforos, when he was informed about his collection, created , on his own initiative, an exhibition in the Kampos of Tsakistras where today hundreds of painted pumpkins are hosted.
Specifically, more than 300 pumpkins are exhibited with themes from mythology, history, tradition but also everyday life.
Source: KYPE
