Kyrenia Castle 12 November, 2009

We continued our family tour of Cypriot castles with a visit to Kyrenia Castle, another millenium-old structure that dominates the picturesque protected harbour of Kyrenia town, known to the Turkish locals as Girne.

The port area is exceedingly picturesque, small and easy to walk around, protected from the sea by its harbour wall made of large stones. The three and four-storey buildings squeezed in around the harbour give it a Cornish feel, the public walkway overlooked by narrow, high buildings with restaurants on the ground floor and rooms to let above.

The meters-thick castle wall overlooking everything was faintly reminiscent of Fort Jesus in Mombasa, though it had several hundred years more history to it, such has been Cyprus’s importance to the various sea-faring empires of the Middle East and Europe over the centuries.

Remnants of some kind of fortification have been uncovered in the castle’s deep, dungeon-riven foundations dating back to at least 600 years before Christ. The first written record of the castle, though, comes from 1191, when British King Richard (the Lionheart) took time off as he travelled to the Third Crusade to wrest the castle from Turkish King Isak.

Some time later, Richard sold the island to the Knights Templar, whose strange history intertwines with so many fortifications here. (For example, Kolossi.) Then he got it back (presumably before the order fell out of favour with the Pope – the circumstances aren’t clear to me yet), and sold it to his Lusignan cousin Guy, the displaced King of Jersualem. Kyrenia Castle, gradually extended and strengthened, became the centrepiece of a line of fortifications that would protect the Lusignans until the end of the 15th century – though it got a good thumping by the Genoese in 1373.

Into Kyrenia Castle - picture by Anisa Marsh

The Venetians were the next to take the castle over, and added more bits and pieces, taking over neighbouring land and even swallowing up the little Byzantine chapel of St George. Formerly the religious house nextdoor, it was absorbed into the wall, a fossilised church entrapped in stone. We were amazed at being able to walk into the church through a long tunnel, then later discover roof as we walked the top of the playground-wide castle walls, its barrel-vault ceiling emerging from a ramped wall leading to the viewpoint over the harbour.

The Venetians had less than a century in control before the Ottoman empire attacked the island and the Kyrenian citizenry surrendered the castle to them. There is still a dead Ottoman admiral lying in his tomb in the entrance passages, but most of the changes made by the Ottomans weren’t to the taste of the British, who took over later and undid most of them.

I have just finished Lawrence Durrell’s evocative memoir of his life on the island, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, and was startled to discover that the British temporarily used the castle as a prison for suspected EOKA terrorists (or the students and young men who were twisted and spun into adopting a wholly uncharacteristic aggressive stance against their occupiers by Colonial Office ineptitude, depending on which way you look at it.) Durrell notes that it was media pressure from Athens that brought an end to this use of the castle, as reporters challenged the administration on the fact that the castle had no latrines, and therefore living conditions must be awful.

We can happily report that there are very good toilets in the castle now – any trip with three children will quickly furnish these details. The Department of Antiquities of the administration in power since the 1974 Turkish invasion has done a commendable job of making it tourist-friendly and highlighting interesting aspects of the castle’s history, with tableaux, waxwork figures and historical artefacts. The arrangement is somewhat haphazard, with different parts of the castle’s history overlapping each other according to the most interesting fact the curators could find about each room, but the presentation succeeds in a curious way.

The waxworks are particularly evocative for the children.  In one castle gallery, historians have created a waxwork-and-wall-mural reconstruction of a Bronze Age village, whose remains were discovered nearby. (Anisa, scandalised: “Mum, why didn’t the women in those villages wear tee-shirts?”)

Deep in one dungeon there is the sobering sight of a naked, eight-month pregnant princess who was hurled into a deep pit for falling foul of some royal politics. Now THAT caused some interesting discussion with the girls, amplified further by events in the next room, showing a man being broken on the wheel while a Greek Orthodox patriarch looks on in pleasure – a less-than-subtle public relations twist by the Turks.

The biggest surprise of all, though, doesn’t really belong to the castle at all. The great hall has been turned into a museum for a single artefact – the 2,300 year old hulk of a trading ship that was discovered in the sea just off the harbour, raised, and brought ashore. Many of the pottery amphorae on the ship were still intact. It seems ill-advised that, while you are sealed off from the ship itself, you can actually touch these ancient storage pots in the display anteroom. You shouldn’t, but of course, you do. Samples of the goods that were being carried – olive stones, poppy seeds, nuts – were preserved and can be seen in the display.  I can remember, as a trainee journalist in Portsmouth, UK, being around to see the Tudor warship, the Mary Rose, being raised and housed in a climate-controlled purpose-built warehouse, and the excitement that operation caused. This ship in Kyrenia Castle is 1,800 years older still, a most remarkable prize indeed and worth celebrating.