Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum

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Located in Houston, Texas, USA the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum is a small part of the overall Menil Collection and is in close proximity to both the primary Menil Collection building and the Rothko Chapel.

The museum was opened in February 1997. Intimate in scale (4,000 square feet), the Chapel Museum is the repository in the United States for the only intact Byzantine frescoes in the entire western hemisphere. These masterworks from the 13th century — a dome and an apse — were ripped and stolen out of a chapel near Lysi in the Turkish occupied section of Cyprus in the 1980s, cut into pieces, and smuggled off the island by thieves prepared to sell them piece by piece.

The fresco fragments were rescued from the thieves by the Menil Foundation with the knowledge and approval of the Church of Cyprus, the rightful owner of the frescoes. The Menil Foundation then funded a painstaking two-year restoration of the paintings. Numerous private donors helped fund the construction of the Chapel Museum, which combines rough stone, opaque glass, and rich woods, to extraordinarily spiritual effect. The Church of Cyprus is allowing a long-term loan of the frescoes in the new building designed especially for them by architect François de Menil.