Digitizing the Koutrafas Watermill: Preserving Cyprus' Mill Heritage

The Koutrafas watermill, located in the Nicosia District, was recently documented within the framework of the project “Recapturing, documenting, digitizing and promoting the Mill Heritage of Cyprus. The grain grinding mills: animal-driven mills, windmills, watermills, 16-20th century (GraMiC).” The documentation of the Mill was performed by the Andreas Pittas Art Characterization Laboratories (APAC Labs) at The Cyprus Institute in the context of the GraMiC project led by the University of Cyprus led my Prof. Angel Nicolaou-Konnari. Related to the project, the study of water mills in Cyprus has also been the focus of the work of Prof. Ephrosyni Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou (Cyprus Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts, University of Cyprus (Emerita) and The Cyprus Institute).

Designated as an ancient monument by the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, this substantial water mill is located close to the site of a mosque in the abandoned and demolished village of Pano Koutraphas. It is reasonably intact, with a five-tiered penstock and a substantial mill room. The turbine does not survive, but there is a well-formed arch at the opening to the turbine room. The mill room now holds broken millstones and a plaster-lined basin. There are niches in its southern wall, a door aperture on the northern side, and a window above the water outlet with a timber lintel.

For the documentation of Koutrafas Mill, a Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) survey was performed using a high speed time of flight laser scanner. Data from the scanner allowed APAC researchers to create a high-resolution 3D point cloud of the structure describing all the morphological features and architectural details. Utilizing a common pipeline for the post-processing of TLS data, a final point cloud was meshed and combined with an image-based survey of 960 individual images of the Mill, generating a high-resolution 3D model for researchers to use in their further study of the monument.