Sylvia Ioannou’s love of books has been, for over 40 years, the driving force behind her quest to methodically collect them. Rare books, manuscripts and maps of Cyprus and the greater region of the Eastern Mediterranean make up the core of the library, which is now owned by the Sylvia Ioannou Charitable Foundation. Today, the Foundation’s Collection is one of the world’s leading private collections of books on Cyprus and it continues to be enriched.

The Sylvia Ioannou Foundation Collection includes 2,500 rare books and manuscripts of the 15th-20th century: original travel and historical documents, accounts of journeys, essays, isolaria, and cosmographies focusing on Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean. In addition, the Collection includes, over 1,000 rare maps of Cyprus and the greater region; most of them are printed but there are also certain manuscript ones. The Collection also contains important works of geography, cartography and spatiology.

Detailed information on selected books and manuscripts of the Collection, together with the history of the ownership of the various documents and their publishing history, is contained in the three-volume catalogue of Cyprus and the Levant: Rare Books from the Sylvia Ioannou Foundation.

The evolution of the representation of Cyprus in printed maps, with images, information and detailed comparative descriptions, is recorded in Cyprus: The Book of Maps. Annotated Catalogue of Printed Maps of Cyprus.

Cyprus – a Digital Humanities Studies research project

With the help of technology and the tools offered by the digital humanities, the Collection’s content is being used for interdisciplinary research:

• Selected travel literature publications (15th-18th century) from the Collection were the subject of the Zefyros research project.
• The Ottoman manuscript map of the 17th-18th century, which was studied with regard to the place names mentioned therein. It was also one of the research subjects of the 3rd International Conference of the Sylvia Ioannou Foundation, with the experts' reports being published in the proceedings.
• The Horatio Herbert Kitchener map of 1885. A model map until the middle of the 20th century, printed in sixteen sheets, it was the result of the first scientific, trigonometric mapping of the island.

A representative sample of the Collection has been digitised, posted online and made available to researchers through the Digital Library, which is continuously being enriched.