Today Limassol is Cyprus’s second largest city. Known as Lemesos in Greek, it is best known to history as the place where Richard the Lionheart landed in 1191, on his way to the Third Crusade. During a storm, some of the ships in his fleet put into Cyprus, or were wrecked on its shore, including one containing his fiancé and his sister, and another his treasury for the crusade. The Byzantine governor of the island, Isaac Komnenos, had mistreated his fiancé and sister, and also imprisoned survivors of the wrecks. Richard’s troops, led by Guy de Lusignan, quickly conquered the island. Richard initially sold Cyprus to the Knights Templar, before handing it over to Guy de Lusignan, thus inaugurating 300 years of rule on the island by the French Lusignan dynasty. Before his departure from Cyprus, Richard married his bride in Limassol.
Guy de Lusignan is said to have built a fortress in Limassol, but the castle we see today was built by the Ottomans following their conquest of the island in the 16th century. It is now a museum. The town has had its ups and downs. It fell into decline under the Ottomans, who favoured the port of Larnaca, along the coast to the east. But it experienced a revival under British rule, and by the end of the 19th century was an important port. Limassol’s rising importance was further boosted following the 1974 Turkish invasion of the island, both because of the loss to the Republic of Cyprus of the port of Famagusta, Now under Turkish control, and because of an influx of Greek Cypriots displaced from the north of the island. Modern Limassol has stretched eastwards along the coast, and has become one of Cyprus’s most important tourist destinations. It has also acquired a multicultural air, with migrants from Russia as well as well as middle eastern countries. The town centre, close to the castle, is now filled with bars and restaurants mainly catering to foreign visitors. Even in January, when I visited, tourists were very much in evidence.
From my perspective, Limassol was less appealing than other places I visited on Cyprus, the tourism overdone. To the west of the town is the British sovereign base of Akrotiri. An unexpected benefit of the presence of this base is that it blocked the spread of the tourism industry along the shoreline with its sandy beaches west of Limassol. I took a bus that skirted around the British base, meandering through small towns and villages as it went, to visit the medieval castle of Kolossi. The original castle on the site was built by the Knights Hospitaller in the early 13th century. It was an important crusader stronghold, especially after the fall of Acre in 1291, when Kolossi became for a time the principal base of the Hospitallers.
Reduced to ruins by Mameluke attacks in the 15th century, the castle we see today, a hulking square keep, was built in 1454 by the Hospitaller commander, Louis de Magnac. His coat of arms can be seen on the exterior of the castle, together with that of the Kingdom of Cyprus and two grand masters of the order. The interior rooms of the three-story castle, with their imposing fireplaces with the Magnac coat of arms, may well have been splendid in their time. Today it is hard to imagine how these bare stone walls, without furnishings, the window alcoves with bare stone seats, might have looked. Did the occupants live in comfort and luxury in these vaulted chambers? Did they have splendid feasts? Without the trappings that would have given these walls life, the bare stones appear austere, the world that once existed here hard to fathom.
Close by the castle is large vaulted building that looks very much like a church, although it is in fact the remains of a medieval sugar factory. Cyprus became an important producer of sugar for Europe in the middle ages, and in the 15th century was the biggest producer in the Mediterranean. In the 16th century Cyprus was overtaken by the sugar plantations of Madeira and the Canary Islands, and later the Caribbean. Like them, the sugar plantations of Cyprus employed slave labour, probably from the Black Sea region. Sugar production continued in Cyprus until the 17th century, by which time it could not withstand the competition from the West Indies.
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