My first sight of Famagusta was from a hill overlooking the town in nearby Deryneia. Famagusta, known as Gazimağusa in Turkish, was occupied by the Turkish army during the 1974 invasion, and incorporated into the so-called Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), which is only recognised by Turkey. Having overrun Famagusta, from which the Greek Cypriot population fled, the Turkish army stopped short of Deryneia, which remains under the control of the internationally recognised government of Cyprus. On the edge of Deryneia is the Cultural Centre of Famagusta Municipality, also known as the Cultural Centre of Occupied Famagusta. An information centre about Famagusta as it once was and what became of it, the Cultural Centre also has a viewing point on its roof, where visitors can borrow binoculars to look across to nearby Famagusta.
I travelled to Deryneia by bus from Larnaca, across the territory of the Dhekelia British military base, one of two British sovereign bases on the island. Apart from signposts pointing to the military area, and a wire fence surrounding it, there was little obvious difference between this British territory and the rest of Cyprus. Deryneia is a small town, and I made straight for the Cultural Centre. Looking out towards Famagusta, even with the binoculars, I could not make out very much. Across the fields, in the foreground, the flags of Turkey and of the TRNC stood out on high flag poles above low buildings. The flags are similar, like negative and positive images of each other. The Turkish flag, a white crescent moon and star on a red background, the TRNC flag the same, but with the colours reversed, and with the addition of two red bands at the top and the bottom. Nearby is the Deryneia crossing point between the north and south of the island, one of the most recent such crossing points to be opened, just over a year before my visit, in November 2018.
I chatted with a lady who worked in the Cultural Centre. She could see her former home from the building, she told me. It was just one kilometre away, on the Turkish-occupied side. She had been only a teenager when they had fled in a hurry before the Turkish army advance in 1974. As with all the main towns in Cyprus, north and south, Famagusta had had a Greek majority. Prior to the 1974 invasion, there was no Turkish north or Greek south. Greeks and Turks lived side by side all over the island, except for the capital Nicosia, which had been partitioned in 1964. There had been Greek and Turkish villages, but the towns had been mixed. The Greeks of Famagusta had mainly lived in Varosha, a district of modern blocks of flats and hotels strung out along the beaches south of the old walled city. Not long after the Ottoman conquest of Famagusta in 1571, the Greek population was banished from the walled city, and many of them settled south of the city walls, the origin of Varosha. In the 20th century Varosha flourished. It was the main centre of Cyprus’s tourism industry, and in the early 1970s played host to international film stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Brigitte Bardot. The lady in the Cultural Centre spoke wistfully of those times, of what a wonderful town Famagusta had been. But Varosha had become a ghost town. Following the invasion, the Turks fenced off Varosha. Its Greek inhabitants were not allowed to return, and Turks were not allowed to settle there. The district had been left to crumble and rot.
The lady told me that the Turks kept Varosha as a bargaining chip, promising that, as part of a settlement, the district’s Greeks would be allowed to return. She had voted against the United Nations Annan Plan, named after UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, for the reunification of Cyprus in 2004. Three-quarters of Greek Cypriots had voted against in the referendum, whereas nearly two-thirds of Turkish Cypriots had voted in favour. She said she had three reasons: that under the plan the Turkish army would have remained on the island; that the return of people displaced by the invasion to their homes would be limited and slow; and that the plan was in several respects too vague, and left too much scope for interpretation. She feared that in such circumstances, the stronger party, Turkey, would retain the advantage.
I crossed into northern Cyprus in Nicosia a few days later, and travelled in a minibus down to Famagusta. The minibus dropped me just outside the old town walls. They are an impressive sight, four and a half centuries after they were breached by the Ottoman conquerors of Cyprus. In the long history of conflict between Venice and the Ottomans in the eastern Mediterranean, the battle for Cyprus was among the hardest fought and most bitter, and it was at Famagusta that the Venetians had made their stand. I entered the old city through the Land Gate, next to the Ravelin Bastion, renamed the White Bastion by the Turks, because it was here that the Venetians flew the white flag of surrender. The Venetians had blown the bastion up as its breach by the Ottomans seemed imminent, killing as many as 1,000 Ottoman troops, it was claimed, as well as many Venetians. Inside the gate is a broad ramp leading up to the walls, up which cannon would have been dragged.
Medieval Famagusta had thrived on the trade between the European west and the Islamic east, especially after the fall of Acre in 1291 brought an end to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and an influx of Christian merchants and craftsmen into Famagusta. Cyprus was under the rule of the French Lusignan, or Frankish dynasty, that had been gifted the island by Richard the Lionheart after he conquered it from its Byzantine ruler during the Third Crusade. The Byzantine Governor, and pretender to the Imperial throne, Isaac Komnenos, had incurred Richard’s wrath by imprisoning survivors from three of his ships who washed up on the Cyprus shore, and by mistreating his sister and fiancé.
Under Lusignan rule, the wealth of Famagusta’s trade paid for magnificent Catholic churches that would look more in place in northern France than in the eastern Mediterranean. The Lusignans favoured the Catholic Church, while the Greek Orthodox Cypriots were over-taxed and downtrodden. In the 14th century, Cyprus became caught up in the rivalry between Genoa and Venice, and in 1372 the Genoese seized Famagusta. However, the tables were turned when Cyprus’s Lusignan King James II married a Venetian, Caterina Cornaro. Following the death of her husband and of their infant son, James III, Caterina became Queen of Cyprus in her own right in 1474, and in 1489, under pressure from her native city, she handed the island over to Venice.
The new Venetian rulers made extensive preparations for expected Ottoman attacks, renewing and expanding the fortifications of Nicosia, Kyrenia and Famagusta, adapting them for the age of sieges with artillery. At the outset of the Ottoman siege of the town, the Venetian defenders numbered some 8,500. They held out for nearly a year against an Ottoman army reckoned to have been more than 100,000 strong. By the time the town fell, in August 1571, fewer than 1,000 defenders remained alive, and the Turkish dead numbered more than 50,000. As the end approached, the Venetian commander, Marco Antonio Bragadin, negotiated surrender terms. However, as Bragadin surrendered, the Ottoman commander, Lala Mustafa Pasha, who was originally from Bosnia, accused him of killing Ottoman prisoners and reneged on the agreement. Bragadin was mutilated and tortured before being flayed alive.
Following the Ottoman conquest, Famagusta lost its importance as a commercial and political centre. To the visitor today it is striking how little the Ottomans did with Famagusta. Much of the old walled city was simply left to decay. The gothic cathedral of the Lusignans, once dedicated to St Nicholas but badly damaged during the siege, was re-purposed as a mosque with the addition of a stumpy little minaret at the corner of one of the destroyed cathedral towers. It was a half-hearted conversion, as if the conquerors couldn’t be much bothered. On the outside it looks like what it is, a ruined cathedral that was never properly repaired. Inside, the gothic arches and vaulted ceiling of a medieval French cathedral are as impressive as they must have been in their Christian heyday, with the addition of a Mihrab on a side wall, pointing the direction of Mecca, and a pulpit, or Minbar, from where the imam delivers his Friday sermons. But now the walls are whitewashed, without paintings or statues of saints, without stained glass windows.
The nearby Sinan Pasha Camii, once the Church of St Peter and St Paul, has a similar look. A large hulk of a church, with a sawn-off stump of a minaret in one corner from the time when it was a mosque. Nowadays it is used for performances. It was locked when I arrived, but I was able to go in thanks to a group of people who were planning an event to take place there. Its bare stone and soaring arches are more impressive on the inside that the rather forlorn and dilapidated exterior. The Church of St George of the Greeks, now a roofless ruin, but with the walls standing on three sides, must also have been an impressive sight in its day. Across from the former cathedral, now the Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque, is the entrance to the Venetian palace where Bragadin had lived, and in front of which he was so brutally killed. There’s not much left of the palace now. The three arches of the façade are supported by four columns taken from the nearby Roman town of Salamis.
As in many towns captured by the Ottomans from the Venetians, the conquerors left the symbols of their vanquished foes in place. The plaque with the Lion of St Mark continues to stand proudly above the entrance of the Sea Gate and over the entrance to Othello’s tower, a fortress standing at one corner of the city walls. The name of the fortress was bestowed by the British who ruled Cyprus for over 80 years until 1960, and is a reference to the principal character in Shakespeare’s tragedy, which told the story of a Moorish general in Venetian service in Cyprus.
At another corner of the city walls stands the Canbulat Bastion, named after one of the Turkish heroes killed during the conquest of Famagusta. Inside, there is a museum of the siege. Close to the bastion, inside the walls, is a small cemetery and monument to “Turks who, unarmed and defenceless, were martyred by Greek Cypriots and Greeks.” It is a reminder of the bitter memories of conflict that remain raw on both sides. The plaque, in English and German as well as Turkish, refers to an alleged attempt “to eliminate everything Turkish to achieve Enosis”, a reference to the Greek Cypriot aspiration to unity with Greece which prompted the Turkish invasion of the island.
Another sad monument to the bitterness of the Cyprus conflict is the forlorn district of Varosha, a short walk south of the old town. Fenced off and with signs warning that it is a forbidden zone, its hotels and apartment blocks crumbling, its cracked streets gradually being reclaimed by scrubby weeds and trees, it is a bleak sight. There would surely be little for the former residents to return to, many of the buildings fit for nothing but demolition. Yet Varosha, with its sandy beaches, remains highly desirable and contested. In 1984, a UN Security Council resolution demanded that Varosha be handed over to UN administration, and that no one but the expelled inhabitants be allowed to settle there. The Turks did not comply, and Varosha was left to fester. In 2019, the TRNC government announced that Varosha would be opened for settlement, a red rag to Greek Cypriots and, if it were to go ahead, an affront to the rights of the Greek former residents.
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