Sunday 18 November - Crusader Castle and ancient Abbey

We were in the coach again bright and early this morning and off to see a crusader castle called St Hilarion, in a mountain range just outside Kyrenia. This location meant it could command the pass through the mountains from Kyrenia to Nicosia. It is the best preserved ruin of the three former strongholds in the Kyrenia mountains, and it is absolutely enormous. I have certainly never visited anything even half as big. I’m viewing it as my compensation for being unable to visit Crac de Chevaliers in Syria, the crusader castle I really wanted to visit. 

St Hilarion castle was apparently named after some obscure saint who fled to Cyprus after the Arab conquest of the Holy Land and retired to a hermitage on this peak. The Byzantines began the fortifications and the castle, along with two others, formed the defense of the island against Arab pirates raiding the coast. The castle was further upgraded under the rule of the Lusignans who may also have used it as a summer residence. In fact, during this time the castle was the focus of a four-year struggle between the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and a crusader knight, John d' Ibelin, for the control of the whole of Cyprus, so you can see what a key castle it was. Just to give you an idea of how commanding its position was, this is a view of it from our next stop.

The castle is on the left peak of the two in my photo, the one with two humps. Heaven knows how anybody could build it up there, the terrain being so steep and rugged. Unfortunately, much of the castle was dismantled by the Venetians in the 15th century to reduce the the cost of upkeep of the garrison.

As you can imagine, the castle is reached by a scenic and winding road, with frightening hairpin bends which once again appeared to leave one end of the coach hanging over an abyss, and the driver had to reverse it up the final part of the road as there is nowhere at the highest point to turn a big coach!

The castle has three divisions or wards. The first one was the Barbican and it was here we really started our climb.

The lower ward probably housed things like the stables, though I was puzzled about how people actually rode horses up there, the terrain being so steep and rugged. Some of our party went no further, there is a café from which you can admire the views.

The climb up to the middle ward was steep and up flights of stairs, mostly with handrails. Everybody stopped now and again to catch their breath and photograph the views. This one shows how some the fortifications made use of the rugged terrain.

There was no way of getting rid of that rock, so it was incorporated into the curtain wall round the middle ward.

The middle ward was approached through a series of tunnels.

The middle ward housed the living quarters for the soldiers.

The views from the up here were magnificent, right down to Kyrenia and the sea.

There was also a café here, for people who felt they could climb no further, which was several more of our party. The path certainly became a lot steeper after that, and there were a lot more stairs, many of them worn and certainly not level.

Paul and I pressed on to the upper ward, which housed the royal family.  

The upper ward was surrounded by a 1.4 metre-thick Byzantine wall, made of rough masonry. The entrance is through a later pointed arch built by the Lusignans and was protected by a semicircular tower to the east. Within this upper the ward is a courtyard, with an extremely ruined kitchen. There are also the royal apartments, dated by various sources to the 13th or 14th centuries, and extremely ruined today, though the building had originally been of a basement and two floors. There are scenic views from the windows of the northern coast of Cyprus, but I won’t post any more views, there are probably enough already.

The Prince John tower sits on a cliff high above the royal apartments.

This is my best photo of it, though from lower down than the royal apartments and from the other side. The rugged appearance of the skyline on the left is the remains of a curtain wall. The royal apartments are the bit on the skyline to the right of the photo.Can you imagine what it must have been like to build all this in such a difficult terrain? I can’t! 

 I was pretty well finished by the time I reached the royal apartments, and the steps up to the Prince John tower are even worse, some not even steps but just huge boulders, so I opted not to climb the final bit. I was disappointed not to have climbed the whole thing, but the last bit looked so rough I though I risked not being able to get down again and having to spend the rest of my life up there! As it was, it took me quite a while to get back down to the lower café and was only accomplished with the help of Paul and by clutching the handrail desperately as the steps were so uneven and treacherous.

We got back into the coach and set off back down towards Kyrenia, then turned away to the south west and headed for Bellapais Abbey, the ruins of a monastery built by Augustinian Canons in the 13th century. 

The Abbey seems to have had a difficult life. In 1373, when the Genoese raided Kyrenia, they almost destroyed Kyrenia Castle and stripped Bellapais of anything that was portable and of any value.

By the time of the Venetians in the 15th century, the inhabitants of the Abbey reportedly took wives, and then to keep the business in the family, accepted only their children as novices.

When the Ottoman conquered Cyprus, they expelled the Abbey inhabitants and gave the abbey to the Greek  Orthodox Church, which then neglected the Abbey and it fell into disrepair. However, the abbey church itself became the parish church for the village that grew up around it, and the inhabitants of the village may have used the abbey as a quarry for stone.

The church is thus in better repair than the Abbey, and looks to be still in use.

Most of the rest is completely ruined, apart from the refectory which is often used for concerts. We walked round the ruined cloisters and also saw the remains of the dormitories and the chapter house.

These are the remains of the cloisters - I had climbed yet more stairs to whatever is left of the second floor

One feature I really liked in the cloister was that under one of the arches  there are two Roman sarcophagi that the canons once used for washing themselves.

The sarcophagi are one above the other, as you can see, with the upper one being decorated, and the lower one plain. Water flowed from the upper to the lower through the holes you can probably see towards the base of the decorated one, and then out of a channel to the cloister garden. This is outside the refectory, so I imagine they only washed their hands and possibly their faces here.

After we had walked all round the ruins, we left and went into the village. We hoped to find Lawrence Durrell’s house, as he lived in the village from 1953 to 1956 and his novel ‘Bitter Lemons’ charts his experiences on Cyprus and the people he met and befriended.

This is the house, located up the steepest hill I think I have ever walked up. It’s a lot less steep when you get to the house, but you can see from the angle between the door and the road that it still isn’t flat. The house is privately owned so it isn’t open to the public and I’m sure they must be annoyed by the constant procession of tourists who come to look at the door. The circular yellow plaque above the door records the writing of ‘Bitter Lemons.’

It was fortunate that there was a different, less steep way down a different street, as I think I might otherwise have been reduced to crawling! Back down in the village, we went to a recommended café and had a late but light lunch of cheese and spinach pancakes, a speciality of the area, which were delicious. I was amused by the fact that, in this restaurant, some of the tables were the pointed base Greek amphorae, on metal stands, with a circular glass top to turn them into a table. I wanted to photograph them but the people sitting there were strangers and not English so I didn’t like to ask.

After our late lunch we got back into the coach and headed back to the hotel. I was very glad to lie down on my bed, and we both fell asleep, being exhausted after all the step climbing.