A canter up Kantara 13 January, 2010

Room with a view ... a very high view

At the weekend we went to the last of the big Crusader castles on the Kyrenia mountain range that we had yet to visit, Kantara Castle.

Neither as extensive as St Hilarion, nor as eerily precipitate as Buffavento, it is still a fine example of a fortification built high in the mountains, dominating the land all around it. Partly carved into the cliffs and partly built with the same colour rock as the mountain, it seems to have grown organically from the terrain rather than to have been built on it. The product of centuries of additions and changes, then half a millenium of weathering, the image is partly true – the castle in its current form has been here for more than 20 lifetimes, and began as many lifetimes before. It is no-one’s creation. It belongs to the land.

Last refuge for the prudent baron

The story of the castle is becoming familiar to us now. The first fortified construction was in the tenth century or before, when the place was used as a lookout tower. The long and largely unrecorded background gets crystalised in 1191 when English King Richard the Lion-hearted arrives, along with scribes and scholars to document his exploits on the way to the Crusades.

Richard dislodged Byzantine prince Isaac Comnenos of Trapezus, one of the many visitors in history to have proclaimed himself King of Cyprus. Isaac hid out in Kantara for a while. (See also our entry on Buffavento, where King Isaac also spent some of his time on the run.)

Short fat soldiers need not apply

After Richard, the Lusignan royalty took over and worked its magic on the eyrie-architecture, creating a refuge for many a ruler who had come to grief in some Euro-Eastern conflict or other. When the Genoese overthrew John of Antioch in the port city of Famagusta in 1373, for instance, Kantara and St Hilarion gave him respite. His brother James got the message. He did some re-fortifying when he later became king in his turn and got enough peace to do some home improvements. Most of what is still visible is work he commissioned, more than 600 years ago.

The castle declined in the 16th century, under the Venetian rule, as did its sisters on the Kyrenia range. The Venetians took the view that you were better off preventing your enemy landing on the shore in the first place, rather than wait for them to chase you up the mountains. Kyrenia Castle and similar coastal forts must become greater; their mountainous counterparts could be allowed to crumble.

Joel and I did our usual survey of ways to attack the castle. Kantara seems more pragmatic than the other castles, though none of them is a push-over. Kantara can only be approached from one side, and the access is blocked by a sturdy barbican. A cunning arrangement of walls and towers with slitted windows for archers makes the best use of the natural defences. Assuming the bastions and walls have more than a few men to defend them, there is a lot of work to do before you get anyway near the nobles and gentry in the castle itself.

At the highest point is a tower that was used to watch for signal fires at Buffavento, and to return the compliment with signal flares. From here, looking south west, the whole range of the mountains can be seen. South is the Mesaoria plain and Nicosia; north is the coast, and beyond that, over the grey and vaporous Mediterranean, Turkey.

A different part of the castle looks north-east, up the “pan-handle” to the island’s tip, which points to the border of Turkey and Syria. From here both the north and south coasts of this extruded part of Cyprus are visible, even on a strangely smoggy, murky day like the one on which we chose to visit.

Looking north east from the castle ... but not looking down

Being a mountain fortress, Kantara comes in layers. One level’s floor is the roof of another – a strange thought as you walk on a very thin shell of rocks over a six metre fall to the floor underneath, reliant on the artful construction techniques of 600 years ago. The chimney holes through which you can see the rooms below (and down which you could easily fall) were of great interest to the children, along with the ability to walk up to the edge of gut-churning walls which merge with cliffs below. And let’s not forget the mediaeval toilet, a very important topic for children’s contemplation.

Buffavento Castle 24 November, 2009

"We've got to walk up THERE?" Tackling Buffavento would have been a daunting challenge at any time.

Of the ruined castles we have visited so far (see previous posts) this one is the hardest to get to.

Not that it’s as difficult to find as some guide books would have you believe. Rather than go via Kyrenia we headed east from Nicosia then struck out north, and as we rose into the Kyrenia mountain range we found the castle signposted. It’s a remote location, but not impossibly so.

What is a little harder is the climb to the top. St Hilarion had steeper and rougher steps. Buffavento’s path is quite well made, but it snakes back and forth up the steep cliff face, rising steadily all the way. The castle, even ruined, gazes down at the weary attackers as they prepare their ascent, an impenetrable facade of two metre thick walls and ominous windows.

Halfway up, the long zig-zag path makes the ascent easier than it would have once have been

You ascend from the south side of the mountain, but about three quarters of the way up the path cuts across a defile, and for a stunning moment the north coast is visible, a stiff, cool breeze ripping through the gap. The castle was probably originally built to protect this pass at a time when Arab raiders threatened the occupiers.

By the time you eventually reach the fortifications at the peak, the wind is coming from both directions. This cooling wind is the source of the Italianised name Buffavento – a castle buffeted by the winds. At this time of the year it’s quite chilly, but even now the respite from the heat of the climb is welcome - in the baking sun of the summer the refreshment after the stiff climb must be glorious.

This castle is small, compared with St Hilarion and Kyrenia Castle, but it made a vital link in the chain of Lusignan fortifications. At 950m it was higher than the other castles, midway along the mountain range; an ideal spot for a signal fire, visible from St Hilarion to the west, and Kantara to the east.

Once you'd fought your way up the hill, you'd fight the soldiers here to get into the castle itself

As with the other mountain castles, the structure is layered – ordinary soldiers and servants in the first section, trusted warriors in the next, and the nobles at the top.

The view from the topmost layer is splendid, with a commanding perspective. North is the Mediterranean, with the Turkish mainland clearly visible.

South is the stark Mesaoria plain, now dominated by Nicosia city, with the Troodos mountains as a backdrop. East and west, the view clearly shows how improbably narrow is the Kyrenia range, a true wall protecting the island from invasion by sea-borne hostile forces coming across the narrow plain from the port.

As so often, the English king Richard the Lionheart is linked to the fortification. When he came and took over Kyrenia in 1191 the Byzantine king Isaac Comnenus is said to have run to this protected but stark eyrie for protection.

A tall view makes up for the impact of the climb on little legs

After the Lusignans were overcome by the Venetians the castle was doomed to destruction not by war, but by neglect. These new occupiers preferred to defend ports, rather than wait to fight off invaders on land. They relied on the castles at the main ports of Kyrenia and Famagusta, and allowed the mountain castles to fall into disuse.

Even if there was no castle, you'd want to be here for the astonishing views

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.