I worked some more on pyZeliard, there now is a tile box system inside. This means I can make up my own rectangle and fill it with tile images. There even is a different tile on the floor where you walk. I didn't use a flyweight pattern but blit my images using pygame and SDL double buffering.

The code can be found at https://sf.net/projects/pyzeliard

Anyway here's a screenshot with a tilemap (fencepost error still left) in the start of the first cavern :