The school in Lefkara, jointly with the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, a RehabiMed collaborating body, has organized various activities to raise public awareness of traditional heritage, focusing on the value of rehabilitating the urban landscape.
The street and the schemes carried out as part of Lefkaras pilot operation provided the ideal framework for these activities, comprising interviews that the children conducted with the elderly people of the village and drawings of the details of the rehabilitated street that most caught their attention. The children collected the stories of the older residents, acting as little ethnographers and systematizing the information they received in the first person. What were the houses like 50 years ago? Was colour used to differentiate parts of the village? What were the doors of their houses like? Did they used to sit in the street on summer evenings? Who was responsible for cleaning the public area in front of each house? What sort of lighting did they have?
This activity also included drawing, encouraging the children to patiently observe a given part of the street; it could be a door, a lamppost, a rendering or a construction technique. The project raised reflections on the way children perceive things and the need to include the appropriate means to value traditional heritage in teaching programmes.