Famagusta has always been the key and heart of Cyprus. And perhaps even today her case is the key that will solve the great political puzzle that chains the present and the future of the island and will unlock its wounded heart. So it would be useful to understand it. And there is no more effective way to do that than to walk it.
For Anna Marangou, this is not a tourist tour. Not even for a pilgrimage to a place charged with the sanctity of memory. It is much more of a healing process, a method of recovery. A process of validating the obvious finding that this island only united has meaning and reason for existence. This is the general goal of "Historic Cyprus" tours, but in the case of Famagusta it finds its most solemn confirmation. The process is as simple as it is exciting: talking and walking.
Outside the walls of Famagusta.
She herself did not expect the huge response from these visitors, especially in the occupied territories, and in order to meet the huge demand, she was forced to exceed the limit that she set for purely functional reasons. So an almost full bus with about 50 souls started from Makedonitissa for an uncomfortable and captivating journey in history.
Along the way, you can only miss the harsh reality of division, the toxic effects of the occupation. On the contrary, the shadow of anomaly falls heavily on the whole experience and charges the visit with an urgent feeling of justification.
Look outside the walls above the Ravelin bastion.
Along the way, as Anna Marangou's voice is told through the perspective of an archaeologist and art historian of decades of history, the mind effortlessly enters a time capsule that dates from the Bronze Age in Cyprus to the present day. "Famagusta is an oxymoron because before the 10th century AD. it doesn't exist, but it didn't happen in history all of a sudden, ”you hear the voice say. He explains to us that it is the result of a series of forced population shifts due to either natural or human disasters.
This is what French historian Fernand Brondel called "the long history." That is, the one that is examined not on the basis of facts but on prolonged periods of time and on the basis of historical trends and patterns. It is the perfect example.
The narrative dates back to the time when the area was the first copper export port, the ore that connected its name with Cyprus and put the island on the map in antiquity and was a reference point until Roman times. The first port is in the area of Kalopsida, where the riverbeds of Pediaios and Gialias end.
At some point the port cannot be used and the population moves further north and settles in Engomi. "It is the city that has an urban plan, in the 12th century BC, with a main artery and vertical streets and if someone tells you that only New York is so designed to give it greetings," the voice from the bus loudspeaker is heard. .
Anna Marangou continues the narrative and talks about the destruction of the city that moved the population a little further east to establish in the 11th century Salamis, "our oldest kingdom with the longest duration since it lasts until the time of Ptolemy." Later, the move was made to the south and Arsinoe and Constantia emerged in honor of the emperor Constantius.
The Arab invasions of the 7th century led to new relocations, and that is where the first signs of medieval Famagusta began, tangible traces of which we saw up close, evidence of an era in which the city came to be considered the richest in cities. In fact, the German clergyman and traveler Ludolph of Westphalia's Sutthaim wrote in 1340 "I dare not speak of their riches" describing a cosmopolitan port that was described as "new Jerusalem" and accepted the commercial world of Europe frightened by the persecuted Europe. Saladin.
The golden Middle Ages
The logos of the workshops that carved them can be seen on the stones of the wall.
The old Famagusta is a living museum. At every step you hear gunshots and war cries and you can almost hear the voices of shopkeepers and workers at a time when it was the most important port in the Mediterranean and connected the West with the East, where the Silk Road met the streets of the pepper, where pilgrims and merchants met kings, knights, and crusaders. Greeks, French, Armenians, Genoese, Venetians, Jews, Syrians, Catalans and Pisans, Turkish and Arab merchants of all nations lived and worked, each in his own district with his religion, customs and traditions.
The third Crusade proved decisive for the course of the city, during which Cyprus passed into the hands of Richard the Lionheart, who first sold it to the Templars and then to Louis the Widow in 1192, marking the beginning of Frankish rule. . It is the time when Cyprus enters its medieval history, which we never seriously studied, because it was not Greek or Orthodox. Its history has been given to us by the French.
As Anna Marangou points out, the book-preface by archaeologists and historians is one and only, it belongs to France and was published in 1896. "We never made sure to translate it into Greek, to deal with this period. The older generation was learning a story that was suddenly jumping from Byzantium to the Balkan wars. "
So the Franks imposed feudalism and the majority of the people were partisans or Frankish. The economic prosperity of the nobility turned the city into the open-air museum it is today. In the first years of the 13th century, the famous wall that makes the city almost invincible begins to be built, the port with the two basins is created and temples of Gothic aesthetics are built in infinite beauty.
Many people work at the Royal Naval Station and the Carnagio, with the Orthodox Romans being mostly shipwrights and kalafats, while there are still Jews, Copts, Syrians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Arabs and Franks. Later, in 1373 the city came under the rule of the Genoese who left no cultural property and in 1426 it became a tribute to the Mamluks with the Lusignan period ending in 1489 when the last queen Catherine Cornaro was dethroned by handing over power to the Genoese government. During the Venetian occupation, reinforcing fortifications were built to shield the city against the Ottomans.
Eleven months. This is how Famagusta endured the fierce siege by land and sea of the numerous army of Lala Mustafa. After the conditional surrender and martyrdom of Markandoni Vragadinos, the inhabitants soon left the city and went to the outskirts, creating today's Varosi, which they were forced to leave in 1974. The Ottoman period ends in 1878 and is followed by Anglo-Saxon occupation. in all evils, an attempt was made to highlight the medieval wealth.
The walk
Saint George of Latin.
The whole city can be seen from Promachonas Ravelin and its sections can be seen depending on the ecclesiastical monuments. Kamig Anlar recorded a total of 27 churches and not 365 - one for each day - according to the legend. During our tour we see the efforts of the Technical Committee for Cultural Heritage to save the monuments from decay and destruction.
Along the wall to the east we first meet the functioning former Nestorian church of Agios Georgios Exorinos and behind it the recently restored church of Agia Anna, a reference point for the Maronites.
Saint George Exorinos.
A little further on, near the well-preserved, strategically and aesthetically exquisite Martinego Bastion, is the Church of the Carmelites, in which is the tomb of their leader, Peter Thomas, a representative of the pope. According to Anna Marangou, the oppression suffered by the Orthodox Church from the Catholic Church, however, this 14th-century church is included in the sacred frescoes of the Apostle Barnabas, St. Nicholas, Saints Constantine and Helen and St. Catherine. . The reference to the Orthodox tradition can be seen as a sign of goodwill. Right behind is the church of St. Mary of Armenia.
The church of the Carmelites.
St. Mary of Armenia with Martinego in the background.
On the way to the Castle of Othello, we find Hamam Kertikli with its six domes and St. George of the Latins in a very bad condition, without a roof and with the keys of the cruciform fallen into the ruins. It is the church that oversees the port and, according to Anlar, "has no past, no present, no future."
The hammam Kertikli.
The purpose of the Frankish Castle is to protect the port to which there are secret underground passages. Later, the Venetians boxed the buildings and barracks and built a trench around it. Maintenance work has been carried out by the Commission on the castle, which took its name from a reference by Shakespeare to a "port of Cyprus" in his play of the same name. The site was renovated by the Commission, but its interior is facing enormous corrosion problems.
Pigeons aggravate the serious problem of erosion in the Castle of Othello.
Agios Nikolaos, the most impressive church in old Famagusta, has never been an Orthodox church. It was dedicated to Saint Nicholas from the eponymous icon that Peter I brought with him from the triumphant campaign in Myra. From 1290 to 1373 he was crowned king of the Lusignan rulers as kings of Jerusalem, having first been crowned kings of Cyprus at St. Sophia Cathedral in Nicosia. By turning it into a mosque, the Ottomans replaced for religious reasons the stained glass windows depicting anthropomorphic figures with geometric shapes made of stone that clearly refer to Lefkaritiko, also adding minarets and mihrab.
The church of Agios Nikolaos (now the mosque of Lala Mustafa) up close.
The interior of the temple.
The church of Agios Georgios ton Ellinon is the largest Orthodox church of the Frankish period. It is in poor condition, almost completely destroyed for centuries with few details of the frescoes preserved. In line with the Orthodox "touches" in the church of the Carmelites there are the frescoes of two popes, a fact that testifies to a distant time when for a while there was an attempt for coexistence and tolerance.
Details of frescoes can still be seen in the half-ruined Agios Georgios of the Greeks.
In the Middle Ages, things were a bit simpler. There were conquerors and conquerors. You made a raid with your fellow men, you grabbed an area by war and it was yours. Until someone else grabs it. Honest things. Net. Today things are much more complicated. But it is not at all irrelevant to the stories of knights and pirates, of castles and besiegers, kings and merchants, nobles and slaveholders, as they spring from every corner of it within the city walls.
Source: philenews