Ottoman Budapest

I first visited Budapest in the summer of 1991, travelling up from Belgrade to take a short break from the increasingly fraught atmosphere amid the gathering storm of war in former Yugoslavia. Hungary had only recently freed itself from the yoke of Soviet rule, and there were still Soviet soldiers in the city. Like many visitors, I was impressed by the grandeur of Budapest, by the splendid views along the Danube of the parliament building, the Chain Bridge and Buda castle stretched along the hill overlooking the river. I feasted on rich, spicey Hungarian food, and tipped the obligatory Romany musicians. Over the years I visited Budapest several more times. I spent over a week there in 1993, visiting the Yugoslav (Serbia and Montenegro) embassy on Heroes Square every day in a forlorn attempt to acquire a visa to go to Serbia. I went mushrooming with a friend’s family in the Buda hills, north of the city, and stayed in an ethnic-Slovak village, enjoying the local specialities of goat’s cheese and yoghurt. I visited the Serbian Orthodox churches and the art galleries in Szentendre, north of Budapest.

Spending nearly two months in Budapest in the spring of 2022, I searched out the city’s Ottoman heritage. The city’s separate parts, Buda and Pest, were united only in the 19^th century. Buda, overlooking the Danube on the western side of the river, had been the medieval capital of Hungary before the cataclysmic defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent at Mohács in 1526, and the capture of Buda itself in 1541. The Ottomans held sway in Hungary for not quite 150 years before they were expelled by the Hapsburgs at the end of the 17^th century. Their influence was shallower than in the Balkan lands to the south, where Ottoman rule lasted for several centuries. Most of Hungary’s population remained Christian, although many left and sought refuge in territory still under Christian rule. But as in the Balkans, towns became largely Muslim bastions surrounded by predominantly Christian inhabited countryside. So it was with Buda, where in the 16^th and 17^th centuries the view across the Danube was dominated by minarets, and the splendid Matthias church was converted into a mosque.

Rudas baths, Budapest

Not a lot remains of Ottoman Buda. But remnants can be found, notably in some fine Ottoman-era baths. Communal baths were important centres of urban Ottoman life. Architecturally beautiful, they were not just places for keeping clean, but for social gathering, where people could catch up with friends, with news, and with business. Buda is blessed with hot thermal springs that had first attracted the Romans to the area a millennium and a half before, when they built the city of Aquincum. After the Romans, Christian Europe largely lost the habit of cleanliness and of regular bathing. But the Ottomans revived the custom in the lands they conquered, and took full advantage of the hot springs in Buda.

I visited the Rudas baths one evening. Enclosed within a more modern building, nothing can be seen of the Ottoman building from the street. But inside it felt like I was entering a bygone world. The baths were built not long after the Ottoman conquest, and were rebuilt and used by the governor of Buda Vilayet, Sokollu Mustafa Pasha. The octagonal bath is surrounded by eight pillars supporting a cupola with small openings through which shine shafts of light. Around the central bath, in the corners of the room, are smaller baths with different water temperatures. Men wandered around (I went on a men-only day), many of them wearing skimpy loin cloths. They sat in the baths, relaxing, contemplating, chatting in soft tones, against the background of the gentle tinkling of falling water. It was all very relaxing. I could not know how it would have been in the bygone days of Ottoman Buda. No doubt there were customs, etiquette from that era which would have been unfamiliar to us today. But somehow I felt that the essence of the baths, as a place of rest, relaxation and social intercourse, was probably not so different. If the experience was not quite of a time warp, I had perhaps caught some inkling of a past age.

Király baths

Another of the Ottoman-era baths, the Király baths, tucked behind the foreign ministry, was closed to the public when I was there, but, unlike the Rudas baths, the low, stone building, with its green domes, can be seen from the street. The modern city has been built around it, leaving it a little forlorn and out of place, deprived of the context of the city it once inhabited. Yet its discreet presence reminds of the world that was once here.

Another such reminder, renovated with Turkish funds, is the Gül Baba türbe, or tomb, a steep walk up the hill overlooking the Margaret Bridge, not far from the Király baths. Gül Baba was a Bektashi dervish who died either during the Ottoman conquest of Buda, or shortly after it. He was declared the Wali, or patron saint of the city, and Suleiman the Magnificent was said to have been one of the coffin bearers at his funeral. The tomb became a place of Muslim pilgrimage, but after the reconquest of Buda by the Hapsburgs it was converted into a Christian chapel. Perhaps that is why it was one of the few buildings of Ottoman Buda to survive. By the late 19^th century the building was in private hands, and was again accessible to Muslim pilgrims. The Ottoman government commissioned the restoration of the tomb, which was completed in 1914. Today the property of the Turkish state, the most recent renovation was completed in 2018, and the site was opened by the Hungarian prime minister and the Turkish president, a marker of the close ties between the two countries and their like-minded leaders. Like other such tombs in the Balkans, it is a simple, but elegant little building, nowadays shaded by trees and surrounded by rose gardens. Gül Baba was known as the “father of roses”.

Gül Baba türbe

While the visible legacy of Ottoman rule in central Europe may be slight, Hungarians acknowledge other enduring influences apart from the handful of buildings in Budapest and elsewhere. These include borrowings from the Turkish language, as well as dishes such as stuffed cabbage leaves and paprika, a key ingredient of Hungarian cuisine. It was also through the Ottomans that coffee was introduced to central Europe. For Christian Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Sultan’s armies reached the gates of Vienna, the Ottomans represented an existential threat. Recovering Buda and the lands of central Europe at the end of the seventeenth century must have been a profound relief. Yet when we consider the legacy of the Ottomans, not only their aggressive expansionism, but also the fine architecture and the beautiful baths of Budapest, it is hard not to concede the rich contribution they made to European civilisation.

Nicosia, Cyprus's divided capital

I arrived in Cyprus’s divided capital of Nicosia by bus from Larnaca, on the south coast. I first spent a couple of days in the south of the city, the Greek-inhabited capital of the internationally recognised state, before crossing over to the north through the pedestrian Ledra Street crossing. The city is known in Greek by its older name, Lefkosia, and in Turkish as Lefkoşa, rather than the Frankish Nicosia.

The first crossing between the north and south of the island after the 1974 Turkish invasion was opened in 2003. Passing through the pedestrian Ledra Street crossing in the centre of the city is now a quick and painless affair. Very few people were crossing on the days that I passed to and from the north of the city, and I was through in minutes, with just cursory checks of my passport. On my first afternoon in the city, I saw a group of girls arriving in south Nicosia through the crossing, and being stopped by a Greek Cypriot policeman who asked, in English, where they were from? “Lefkoşa”, replied one of the girls. “You are Cyrpiot?” asked the policeman? “Yes”, they replied, and he waved them through without further fuss. An apparently normal occurrence, a group of Turkish Cypriot girls visiting the south of their city. Who knows what they planned to do? Perhaps some shopping. South Nicosia has the well-known western brands of clothes shops that are not found in the north.

Nicosia became the capital of Byzantine Cyprus in the 10th century, its relatively safe inland position preferred to coastal settlements such as the ancient city of Salamis, close to present-day Famagusta, which had been plagued by frequent Arab raids. The Frankish Lusignan dynasty, which ruled the island from the end of the 12th century, fortified the city, as well as building the gothic Cathedral of St Sophia and other Catholic churches and palaces. The impressive walls we see today, with their star shape and eleven bastions, were built by the Venetians, who ruled for nearly a hundred years from the late 15th century.

The Kyrenia Gate, then and now

As with Famagusta and Kyrenia, the Venetians substantially upgraded the city’s fortifications in preparation for an expected Ottoman attack. For the most part the walls are still intact, although in places they were breached in the 20th century to make way for modern roads into and out of the old city. The Kyrenia gate, in the north of the city, one of the three city gates built by the Venetians, now stands in a gap in the wall, with roads passing either side. A postcard from 1922 shows the walls linking up with the gate, with paths sloping up on to the walls on either side. The walls are better cared for in the south of the city. In the north they are overgrown with greenery and the ground level is higher, burying the lower part of the walls and diminishing their impressive bulk.

The efforts the Venetians put into building the walls were to no avail. When the Ottoman force invaded Cyprus in June 1520, the Venetians withdrew to their fortified towns, Nicosia, Kyrenia and Famagusta. The siege of Nicosia began in July, and lasted only seven weeks. The victorious Ottomans set about massacring the inhabitants, sparing only the women and children, who were sold into slavery. The city was ransacked, and St Sophia’s and other Catholic churches were converted into mosques. Nicosia remained the administrative seat of the island under the Ottomans, but it was devastated by the conquest, its population reduced to not much more than 1,000 from the 21,000 it had been under the Venetians.

The city recovered under Ottoman rule, unlike the coastal city of Famagusta, whose walled old town has a somewhat ghostly appearance, many of the buildings from the Venetian and Lusignan periods left to crumble, the empty spaces left empty, and relatively little new Ottoman construction. In Nicosia, by contrast, the Ottomans left their mark. The notable Ottoman-era architecture is more to be found on the northern side of the city. Long before the division of the city into Greek and Turkish halves in the 1960s, Muslims settled in greater numbers in the north of the city, where the seat of the governor of the island, the Konak or Saray was situated. The Saray, which had earlier been the palace of the Lusignan kings and Venetian governors, was demolished during the period of British rule, and replaced by law courts. The square is still known to locals as Sarayonu square, despite being officially named after Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic. In its centre stands a column which had been brought to the city by the Venetians from the ancient city of Salamis. The fine-looking law courts are typical of civic buildings from the British period, bright and open, with shady colonnaded terraces, a style appropriate for the Mediterranean, quite unlike architecture of the period in Britain. There are other, more familiar mementoes of British rule, notably the post boxes with the initials of British monarchs, now painted yellow in the south of the island.

Buyuk Han

Perhaps the loveliest building in Nicosia is the Buyuk Han, the Great Han, a caravanserai or inn built shortly after the Ottoman conquest. Its layout is fairly typical of caravanserais around the middle east and central Asia, a square two-story building around a large central courtyard, with colonnaded terraces off which there are rooms which on the ground floor were used for commerce and on the first floor as accommodation for travelling merchants. In the courtyard is a small mosque which was for the use of travellers. Under British rule the han was briefly a prison, and then reverted to its original purpose, as an inn and shops. For a while it served as accommodation for poor families. The building was beautifully restored in the 1990s, and now houses handicraft and souvenir shops, as well as cafes with terraces on the courtyard. It was particularly lovely in the late afternoons, when the January sunshine slanted on to the sandstone arches of the courtyard, while visitors sat and drank their tea or coffee.

Typically of Cyprus, many of the buildings of the Ottoman period were converted Lusignan churches. Nearby the Buyuk Han is the Buyuk Hammam, the Ottoman baths, which had previously been the Church of St George of the Latins. It appears lower than it would have been, as a result of the rising of the street level over time. Also nearby is the Selimiye Cami, Nicosia’s biggest mosque, once the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Sophia. Its conversion to a mosque involved the building of two minarets either side of its entrance. Strung between them today are the flags of Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), which is recognised only by Turkey. Like the converted Cathedral of St Nicholas in Famagusta, on the inside the gothic arches and vaulted ceiling of St Sophia’s have been whitewashed. The tombs of Lusignan kings lie beneath the carpeted floor whose lines point Muslims towards Mecca, its direction indicated by the ornate Mihrab on the side of the cathedral. In the southern, Greek part of the city is the Omeriye mosque, built on the site of the 14th century Church of St Mary, part of an Augustinian monastery. The church was badly damaged during the Ottoman siege, and was rebuilt as a mosque, with the addition of a minaret. However, the outline of the original church is clear to see, with its apse at the farthest end from the entrance, where the alter had once stood. On the outside, behind the minaret, a small rose window can be seen.

Selimiye Cami

Next to the Selimiye Cami is a partially ruined building that has been re-purposed multiple times over the centuries, the Bedestan, or covered market. This started out in the Byzantine period as an Orthodox Church. The Gothic entrance across from the Selimiye Cami dates from the Lusignan period, when it may have served as a Catholic church for a time. Under Ottoman rule it became the Bedestan. When the British took over in Cyprus in the 1870s, they wanted to convert it back into a church, but were unable to do so due to the Islamic prohibition on having a shrine of another religion close to a mosque. Having been recently renovated, it is now a cultural centre.

The south of the city was and is predominantly Greek, and includes the Archbishop’s residence and the Orthodox cathedral, as well as the residence of the Dragoman, a senior Greek official who was the link between the Ottoman authorities and the Greek Orthodox population. The present-day archbishop’s palace, which was built in the 1950s, is large, with spacious grounds. Perhaps this reflects the importance of the Orthodox Church in Cyprus’s history. Archbishop Kyprianos, whose bust stands outside the palace, founded the Pancyprian Gymnasium, the island’s first secondary school, in 1812, and was among more than 400 Greek Cypriots who were executed by the Ottomans in 1821, in response to the wide support of the Greek community for Greece’s independence struggle. Archbishop Makarios III held a leading position in the Greek Cypriot community as it struggled for independence from Britain in the 1950s, and became the country’s first president following independence in 1960. The Cathedral of St John the Theologian, in contrast to the archbishop’s place, is a small, modest building. Built on the site of a Benedictine monastery, it had been turned over to the Orthodox Church in the 15th century, and the church was rebuilt in the 17th. Its modest exterior was required by the Ottoman authorities, but on the inside the cathedral is fabulously ornate.

Not far from the cathedral and the archbishop’s palace is the residence of Cyprus’s most noted dragoman, Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios, who held office in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The term dragoman literally means interpreter, but his duties were much more extensive, including collecting taxes from the Christian population on behalf of the Ottoman authorities. He was a powerful figure, and the opportunity to cream off his share of the taxes enabled him to accumulate great wealth. His fine house, now a museum, attests to that wealth, and is a fascinating insight into how a powerful Christian figure in Ottoman Cyprus could live. The reception room, with its ornate wood carvings and low divans around the walls, indicates that the Greek Cypriot elite in many ways lived in much the same style as their Turkish overlords. However, Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios’s power and the heavy taxes he collected were resented. He was executed in Istanbul in 1809.

Wandering the streets of Nicosia, there are many beautiful districts where the traditional buildings from the Ottoman period, with their covered balconies, have been preserved, and in many cases sensitively restored. This is particularly the case in the north of the city, perhaps because the relative economic stagnation of north Cyprus meant there was less new development in the old city than was the case in the south. The Arabahmet quarter, in the east of the city, close to the city walls just north of the green line, is particularly attractive. Many of the inhabitants of the district had been Armenian, clustered around their church. There had been an Armenian community in Cyprus for centuries, but during intercommunal violence in 1963-64, when the city was divided between its Turkish north and Greek south, the Armenian quarter found itself in the Turkish north, and the Armenians themselves were expelled. In subsequent decades much of the Abrahmet district and the Armenian church fell into decay and dereliction. More recently the quarter is gradually being renovated, the old houses beautifully restored. While the Armenians are gone, their church has been restored by the UN. It was open when I visited, but without its flock, its community, it was an empty and rather forlorn place.

Close by the Armenian church, right on the green line, next to the Paphos gate, and just beyond the barbed-wire-topped barrier, is a Roman Catholic Church. A little further south is the Maronite church. The Maronite community has existed for centuries in Cyprus, although their numbers have dwindled since the middle ages. They had mainly lived in a few villages in the north of the island, but following the Turkish invasion almost all of them moved to the south.

On the two sides of the city are museums which attest to the different versions of the history of this bitterly divided island. In the south of the city, close to the Orthodox Cathedral, is the National Struggle Museum, dedicated to the struggle against British rule from 1955-1959. It is uncomfortable viewing for a British visitor. The armed struggle had as its aim unification, Enosis, with Greece. It was led by Georgios Grivas, a Cypriot who had served for many years as an officer in Greece’s army, and who founded the EOKA guerrilla organisation. As well as weapons and other possessions of the EOKA fighters, the museum contains photos of killed EOKA members, some of them tortured or executed by the British. Some historians assert that claims of torture by the British were exaggerated and inflated by EOKA for propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, in 2012 the British Foreign Office released documents alleging torture and other abuses by British soldiers. In 2019 the British government agreed to pay £ 1 million to 33 Greek Cypriots who claimed they had been tortured, although without admitting liability.

It is not clear to me why the British government of the time felt it necessary to fight an ultimately unsuccessful four-year war to maintain its rule in Cyprus. De-colonisation was already well under way. A number of former British colonies had already become independent, and several more would follow over the next few years. It was surely clear that the era of colonialism had passed. Shortly before the start of the Cyprus insurgency Britain had announced its intention to move its military command in the eastern Mediterranean from Egypt to Cyprus. No doubt Cyprus appeared to be strategically vital. But Britain could surely have reached agreement with a newly independent Cyprus to retain its military bases, as indeed happened after independence in 1960. Yet at the time the British government maintained that decolonisation should not apply to Cyprus.

The war in Cyprus was a senseless waste, and worse than that, it had long-term damaging consequences, especially in exacerbating intercommunal tensions between the island’s Greeks and Turks. The island’s Turks vehemently opposed Enosis, and thousands of them were recruited by the British as auxiliary police in the struggle against EOKA. This inevitably inflamed tensions between the two communities, as Turks responded to Greek demands for Enosis with their own demand for Taksim, partition of the island. For its part, EOKA extended its attacks against the British to the Turkish community.

In the end, the Greek Cypriots did not achieve the desired Enosis with Greece, and had to settle for an independent state, under an agreement guaranteed by Britain, Greece and Turkey. Most Greek Cypriots were not satisfied, and continued to strive for Enosis, with disastrous consequences, as the coup in 1974 in the name of Enosis provoked the Turkish invasion of the island. On one of the bastions of the city wall is the Liberty Monument, which commemorates the release of EOKA fighters in 1959, prior to independence the following year, one of many monuments to EOKA men in southern Cyprus. But the aftermath of the violence that brought independence left a bitter hangover.

The independence war, with the intercommunal violence that it involved, soured the already strained relations between Greeks and Turks on the island. The baleful influence of both Greece and Turkey made matters worse. Greece’s military junta was behind the coup in favour of Enosis in July 1974 that prompted the Turkish invasion. The Turkish Cypriot minority looked upon the prospect of Enosis with terror, having seen the fate of the Cretan Muslim population who had been forced to leave Crete in 1923 as part of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey.

In the north of Nicosia, Cyprus’s Turks have their own National Struggle Museum. It tells a very different story to that of its counterpart a few hundred yards away in the south. In its telling, EOKA was a terrorist organisation aiming not only to drive out the British and achieve Enosis, but at the elimination of the Turkish community. The 1974 Turkish invasion is presented as a “peace operation” to provide “a peaceful environment for both communities.” The museum contains a memorial to those who died in “the struggle to preserve the Turkish existence in Cyprus.”

The Turkish Cypriot position is related even more vividly at the Museum of Barbarism, in the house of Dr Nihat Ilhan in the suburbs north of the old city. Intercommunal tension and violence had continued after independence in 1960, involving the displacement of Turkish Cypriots into enclaves. This reached a peak at the end of 1963. On the night of 24 December that year, while Dr Ilhan was on duty with Turkish Cypriot paramilitaries, Greek Cypriot irregulars came to his home and murdered his wife and three children, as well as a neighbour. Harrowing photographs in the house show the three children and their mother dead in the bath. There are also photographs depicting other atrocities against the Turkish community. The violence led to the deaths of 364 Turkish Cypriots and 174 Greek Cypriots, as well as the displacement of some 25,000 Turkish Cypriots.

The Green Line, Abrahmet quarter

Following the December 1963 violence, a British general commanding a joint peacekeeping force with Greece and Turkey (a precursor of the UN peacekeeping force) drew an agreed line in green along a map demarking a Turkish North and Greek south of the city. As a consequence of the Turkish invasion in 1974 this green line was extended across the whole island. The green line remains a scar across the city, of abandoned streets and derelict buildings, in what was once its bustling heart. It is easier to approach the line in the Turkish north than in the Greek south, where soldiers keep watch from guard posts painted in the blue and white stripes of Greece’s flag, warning people not to take photos. On the northern side, while there are signs warning that it is a forbidden zone, it is possible to peer into the ghostly dilapidated streets. To someone not used to it, it seems quite bizarre. Just a few yards from narrow old-city streets with bars and shops, you come upon walls topped with barbed wire, beyond them the abandoned ruins of the green line, and just a short distance further the Greek south of the city.

The best place to get a view over Nicosia is from the top floor viewing point of the Shacolas Tower, in the south of the city. From that vantage point, one gets perhaps the best view of the Selimiye Cami. Surrounded by the narrow streets of the old city, it is hard to get a proper view from close up. Looking east towards the Abrahmet district, you can see the Maronite church and the nearby Catholic Church on the green line. Just to the north is the Ledra Palace Hotel, once Nicosia’s finest. Now stranded on the green line, after 1974 it had for decades served as the headquarters of the UN mission. But in 2019 it was vacated due to inadequate health and safety measures. On a mountainside north of the city a vast, provocative TRNC flag has been painted. Alongside, on a painted flag of Turkey, is the famous quote from Ataturk, in Turkish, “How Happy is the One Who Says I am a Turk.” Many Cypriots still live in hope that such provocations, and the bad memories of strife and violence, could one day be put behind. That Cypriots from both communities now travel back and forth and have renewed mutual contacts may give cause for that hope. Younger Cypriots are perhaps less burdened by the tragedies of the past. The incentives to reunite are strong, especially for the north, internationally isolated and unable to fulfil its potential. But the persistent failure to find a solution indicates that the obstacles remain great.

Famagusta, Cyprus's ghost town

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.

Land Gate, Famagusta

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.

Lala Pasha Mustafa Mosque (St Nicholas Cathedral), Famagusta

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.

Larnaca, Cyprus

Larnaca has Cyprus’s biggest international airport. Arriving on an evening flight, my decision to spend my first days on the island there was based on convenience more than anything. Larnaca became one of Cyprus’s more significant centres during the period of Ottoman rule, following their conquest of the island in 1571, when the town became an important port. With its long promenade and beaches, today the town no doubt attracts tourists during the summer months, although less than resort towns such as Limassol, Pafos and Agia Napa. When I was there in January, it was quite sleepy. The seafront restaurants had few customers.

At one end of the promenade is the fortress, originally built in the 14th century, rebuilt by the Ottomans, and used as a prison by the British, who ruled the island from 1878 to 1960. It is much less substantial than the huge fortifications built by the Venetians at Famagusta, Kyrenia and Nicosia, as they prepared for the expected Ottoman onslaught. Larnaca warranted less attention. Close to the fortress is the Grand Mosque. Originally a Catholic Church, it has been much rebuilt since the Ottoman takeover. It was being renovated when I visited. A handful of people were praying inside, almost all, I think, south Asian immigrants, the town’s Turkish population having departed following the partition of the island in 1974, when Larnaca found itself in the southern, Greek part of the island.

Hala Sultan Tekke, Larnaca

A more impressive mosque is the early 19th century Hala Sultan Tekke, on the edge of the town, not far from the airport. Sitting on the edge of a salt lake, among palm and cypress trees, the water shimmered in the winter sunshine, reflecting the mosque. It was a fine sight as I approached on foot. Further out on the lake pink flamingos idled in the water. Apparently in the heat of summer the briny water evaporates away leaving hard white dry salt. The special importance of Hala Sultan Tekke is that it contains a tomb said to be that of Umm Haram, whose brothers and husband were companions of the prophet, and who is believed to have died during an Arab raid on Cyprus. Hala Sultan Tekke was for me the most beautiful mosque I saw on the island, not only because of its wonderful setting on the shore of the lake. Unlike so many mosques in Cyprus that were repurposed Christian churches, architecturally awkward, Hala Sultan Tekke was purposely built as a mosque in the classic Ottoman style, with its elegant domes and pointed minaret.

Round the corner from the Grand Mosque is the church of St Lazarus, who, according to the Bible, Jesus had raised from the dead. The story is that Lazarus, facing plots against his life, had fled to Cyprus, and been made the first bishop of Kition, as Larnaca was known in antiquity. In 890, after a period of Arab rule, a tomb was found with the inscription “Lazarus, four days dead, friend of Christ.” The remains were transferred to Constantinople (from where they were looted during the sacking of the city during the Fourth Crusade). The church was built at the spot where the tomb had been discovered. The building’s history reflected the story of the island, becoming a Catholic church under Frankish and Venetian rule in the 13th-16th centuries, then a mosque after the Ottoman takeover, and then, shortly afterwards, returned to the Orthodox Church, after which it was used for both Orthodox and Catholic services. The church’s complicated history is reflected in its mish-mash architecture. A Gothic portico was added during its Catholic period. The domes of the Orthodox basilica, as well as the original bell tower, were destroyed following the Ottoman takeover, and a new bell tower was constructed in the mid-19th century, when the Ottomans again allowed Christian churches on Cyprus to have bell towers.

At the far end of the promenade, next to Larnaca’s marina, stands a memorial to the 1915 Armenian genocide, on the spot where thousands of fleeing Armenian refugees first landed upon arrival in Cyprus. On the four sides of the plinth are inscriptions in Greek, Armenian, English and Turkish, explaining the memorial, and expressing the gratitude of the Armenian nation to the people of Cyprus for their assistance and generosity. In my travels around the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea regions, I have so often come upon reminders of the tragedy of the Armenian people a century ago, sometimes in places where I was not expecting it, such as in Byblos, Lebanon, and now in Larnaca.

Haji Bektash Veli

Cappadocia is a popular tourist destination. Visitors are drawn by its striking rock formations, its houses, medieval churches and towns carved out of the rocks, its troglodyte underground settlements. It is all very compelling. A different sort of visitor is attracted to the little town of Hacibektaş, a site of pilgrimage for Muslims from around Turkey and beyond. This was once the centre of the Bektashi dervish order, inspired by the medieval sage Haji Bektash Veli, after whom the town is named.

Haji Bektash Veli is believed to have come from Turkmenistan. After his travels, he settled at this town in central Anatolia. The mystical Sufi order he inspired became very influential over centuries throughout Anatolia and the Balkans. It was the official sect of the Janissaries, the elite Ottoman troops recruited among the Sultan’s Christian subjects through the ‘Devşirme’ system of blood tribute. Some have suggested that the eclectic belief system of the Bektashi, with its wide-ranging influences, may have appealed to men who had in their early childhood been Christian. When the Janissary corps was abolished at the order of Sultan Mahmud II in the so-called ‘Auspicious Incident’ in 1826, and thousands of its members massacred, the Bektashi too were driven underground. Although the sect experienced a revival during the ‘Tanzimat’ reform period during the 19th century, it was finally driven out of Turkey in 1925 by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, along with other Sufi orders.

Haji Bektash Veli, with gazelle and lion

The Bektashi sect’s headquarters was moved to Tirana. The Bektashi had long been influential among Albanian Muslims. Ali Pasha Tepelena, the early 19th century ruler of southern Albania and most of Greece, is believed to have been an adherent. Bektashism thrived in Albania until the communist takeover in 1945, following which many dervishes and babas, the heads of the Bektashi Tekkes (communities somewhat akin to Christian monasteries), were executed. With the banning of all religious practice in 1967, the Bektashi, like all religious communities in communist Albania, were shut down. But since the end of communist rule in 1990, the Bektashi have experienced a revival. While I was working in Albania in 2011, Hajji Reshat Bardhi, the Dedebaba, the overall head of the order, died. Leading politicians and foreign diplomats were among those who paid their respects, indicating the influence of the sect in the country.

A dervish in the early 20th century, Hacibektaş

The pilgrims visiting Haji Bektash Veli’s mausoleum in Hacibektaş when I visited bore witness to his continuing influence outside Albania. The former centre of the Bektashi order is now a museum. Although Ataturk had closed down the sect in Turkey, a sign at the entrance asserts that the ideas of Haji Bektash Veli were applied by Ataturk in establishing the Turkish Republic. Indeed, Haji Bektash Veli’s enlightened teachings were in many ways ahead of his time. He was a noted advocate of the rights of women, arguing that a society that did not educate its women could not progress. Among sayings attributed to the sage in the museum is one that states that ‘In the language of conversation, you cannot discriminate between man and woman. Everything God has created is in order. To us, there is no difference between man and woman. If you thing there is, you are mistaken.’ He was also a pacifist, and in the most famous painting of him, he is depicted holding a gazelle and a lion, illustrating his words quoted in the museum that ‘Greed and malice disappear by love in our midst, Lion and gazelle are friends in our embrace.’

The Hacibektaş complex

The 14th century ceremony and meeting house holds an exhibition of artefacts and photographs, including a group picture of some of the last dervishes and babas when the order was closed down in 1925. In the kitchens, the famous black cauldron of the Bektashi is exhibited. The cauldron symbolised fellowship, and also held a symbolic importance for the Janissaries. In his novel The Janissary Tree, Jason Goodwin describes a murderous plot in the 1830s involving surviving former Janissaries against the modernising reforms of the Sultan. As an ominous warning of their intent, the Janissaries bang their cauldrons, their traditional protest and precursor of violent demonstrations.

The Master House, which contains the mausoleum of Haji Bektash Veli, included the oldest part of the complex. The ‘Cilehane’, or ‘Suffering Place’, is a small room where dervishes would withdraw for prayer and fasting, and is believed to originate from the time of Haji Bektash Veli himself. Pilgrims, the majority of them women when I visited, shuffled around the mausoleum, praying before the tombs of the holy men, reaching out and touching them. One group of men whispered in Arabic among themselves, reading the explanatory plaques in English rather than Turkish. The scene was very much reminiscent of Christian pilgrimage sites, with the veneration of saints. One could see why more orthodox Sunni Muslims might look askance upon Bektashism. The legacy of Haji Bektash Veli is complicated and controversial. Many Muslims claim he did not found any distinct Bektashi order, which only emerged after his death. Alevis claim him as a teacher of Alevism. Whatever the truth, which is by now lost in the mist of the past, I found his humanism, his tolerance, his espousal of women’s rights, attractive, and a valuable counterpoint to so many of the trends in modern Islam.

Xanthi, a beautiful town in Western Thrace

Continuing eastwards from Kavala, I reached Xanthi, in western Thrace. Xanthi has a well preserved, beautiful old town. Many of its old buildings have been sensitively renovated. Ottoman-style houses, with their first floors built out over the narrow streets, as if reaching out to touch each other, are interspersed with grand mansions more in a European style, built by rich 19th century merchants. Streets lead into little tree-shaded squares with stylish cafés. Xanthi has a bohemian atmosphere. Sculptures, fashioned out of metal, are dotted around the old town.

The region of Xanthi was known for the quality of its tobacco, and the city’s mansions were built by the mainly Greek merchants who prospered from it. Especially impressive is the house of Vasilios Kougioumtzoglou, built in 1877, with its colourful, decorated exterior. The Kougioumtzoglou family also owned another large house on the same street, which today houses Xanthi’s folklore museum. Inside, the visitor can walk through rooms depicting the life of a period Greek home of the 19th century. The family also owned a house in Plovdiv (Philippopolis in Greek), in present-day Bulgaria, indicating the one-time interconnectedness of the region.

Kougioumtzoglou mansion, Xanthi

Xanthi was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912, when it was taken by Bulgaria during the first Balkan War. Together with the rest of western Thrace, it became part of Greece after the First World War, and, apart from a period back under Bulgarian rule during World War II, it has remained with Greece since then. More than anywhere else I have been, in Xanthi I could see vestiges of the prosperity and accomplishment of the Ottoman Greeks. The once great cosmopolitan cities of the eastern Mediterranean, Smyrna, Salonika, Alexandria, have been devastated by the tragic events of the 20th century, destructive fires and war, which have left only traces of their past glory. But, on a smaller scale, Xanthi has been preserved, and some flavour of that past era can be sensed today, walking among the mansions of this once flourishing town.

The Ottoman Greeks enjoyed levels of prosperity and development far beyond those of the independent Greek state in the 19th century. Greek Levantine merchants and financiers spread their wealth and power around Europe. Their educational establishments and cultural achievements were widely admired. In the fine little town of Xanthi this has left an echo which has largely been lost in most of the rest of the region.

The Muslim quarter, Xanthi

Xanthi also offers a reminder of the cosmopolitanism of so many eastern-Mediterranean towns before the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of the narrow nation state. When Greece and the newly established Turkish republic agreed, by the Treaty of Lausanne, on the population exchange which in 1923 ended centuries of co-existence between Greeks and Turks, two exceptions were made. Muslims (Bulgarian speaking Pomak and Romany Muslims as well as Turks) would be allowed to remain in Greek western Thrace, and Greeks could remain in Istanbul. Most of the Istanbul Greeks were driven out in the 1950s, leaving only a tiny remnant today. But the Turks of western Thrace are still there.

Life has not always been easy for them. At the beginning of the 20th century, Muslims formed a significant majority in Xanthi, but, following the settlement of Greek migrants from Turkish eastern Thrace and Anatolia, and outward migration by local Turks, they are now very much a minority. Events outside Greece have sometimes had negative repercussions for them. Following the 1955 pogroms against Istanbul Greeks, Greece retaliated by introducing a law depriving Muslims who left Greece of their citizenship. And in response to the declaration of independence by Turkish north Cyprus in 1983, the Greek government adopted a policy of referring to ‘Greek Muslims’, no longer recognising a Turkish minority. Greek courts outlawed the term ‘Turkish’ in reference to the community in western Thrace.

Achrian Mosque, Xanthi

Such treatment no doubt made Turks in western Thrace feel less than welcome, and there were protests. But they clung on. And now, as far as can be seen, they rub along with their Greek neighbours, much as they have for centuries. Walking around Xanthi, women in headscarves go about their business. At one end of the old town, climbing up the hill, the old Muslim quarter remains just that. At the top of the hill, the Achrian Mosque, built after 1850, has notices outside in Greek, English and Turkish. People greet each with ‘as-salaam alaikum’, and chat away in Turkish. Children kicking a ball around shout to one another in Turkish.

I liked Xanthi, a town that has preserved its heritage, architectural and communal. Here, unlike almost anywhere else in either Greece or Turkey, the history of co-existence between Greeks and Turks has been preserved, and it seems to work.

Kavala and Mohammed Ali Pasha

To the east of Thessaloniki, on the Macedonian coast, Kavala is an attractive little town. The old town climbs up a hill above the bay, its narrow streets lined with Ottoman-era buildings, with their enclosed balconies reaching out across the road. The roads lead up to the Byzantine fortress, which was extended by the Ottomans. Beyond the hill is an aqueduct, built during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, in the 16th century. I enjoyed an evening meal at a restaurant owned by Greek migrants from Georgia, some of the many Black Sea Greeks who have moved to Greece since the end of the Soviet Union, the final extinction of a community going back nearly three millennia. Looking through the menu, I spotted khinkali, a kind of big Georgian ravioli, filled with seasoned minced meat, and a delicious broth that has to be slurped out. It is a Georgian dish, explained the waiter, who then told me that he and his family came from Tbilisi. The khinkali were not bad either. Not the best to be had, but not bad, so far away from Georgia.

Kavala was part of the Ottoman Empire from the late 14th century until 1912. One of its main claims to fame is that it was the birthplace of Mohammed Ali Pasha, father of modern Egypt, which he ruled for the first half of the 19th century. He founded a dynasty that reined until Nasser’s revolution in the 1950s. In 1801, Mohammed Ali had gone to Egypt as second-in-command of an Albanian contingent of an Ottoman force sent to restore authority after Napoleon’s brief occupation. By a mixture of military campaigning, cunning and ruthlessness, he managed to seize control of the whole country. At its height, his power eclipsed that of the Sultan, and for a time his rule extended over much of the Near East, almost reaching Istanbul itself.

The Imaret, Kavala

But Mohammed Ali did not lose contact with his roots in Kavala. He commissioned the building of the Imaret, a Muslim theological college. Nowadays it has been renovated as a luxury hotel. From the outside, stretched along a hillside overlooking the sea, it is an impressive sight. It has been described as the best preserved Ottoman-era building in Greece. Unfortunately, it was closed for renovation when I visited, so I was unable to see the interior.

Mohammed Ali Pasha’s home, Kavala

Close by the Imaret is Mohammed Ali’s family home, preserved as a museum. Upstairs, a large living room has been restored in the style of a traditional Ottoman haremluk, surrounded by low divans, covered with cushions, a low round table in the middle, and a conical fireplace on the back wall. I had seen such recreations before, in Albania, but what I had not seen before was a restored privy and washroom. I confess I was fascinated. In concept, it was not much different from the outdoor hole in the ground toilets I have encountered in rural areas in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

In a square next to the house is a statue of Mohammed Ali on a horse, in the act of either drawing or sheathing his sword, a rare example of a Greek town honouring one of its sons who was a Muslim, and who was not Greek. But what was Mohammed Ali? I had understood he was Albanian, like the troops who were the backbone of the army he led to Egypt. When, in 2011, I visited the Alabaster Mosque in Cairo, which was commissioned by Mohammed Ali and which contains his mausoleum, my Egyptian guide too described him as Albanian (see post of 5 January 2012). But the young Greek guide at Mohammed Ali’s house in Kavala told me this was disputed, and that in Turkey he was claimed as a Turk. It was claimed, so he told me, that the notion that Mohammed Ali was Albanian was a misunderstanding caused by the fact that the troops that he led to Egypt were Albanian. The issue could apparently inflame passions. The young man told me of an occasion when parties of Turks and Albanians visiting the house at the same time had a fierce row over the matter.

Mohammed Ali Pasha, Kavala

In the Ottoman period, the question of Mohammed Ali’s nationality would have been of secondary importance. He was an Ottoman Muslim, and that was what counted. Although he ruled over Egypt, he never learned Arabic, and the language of his court was Turkish. Some contemporary diplomatic visitors claimed his native language was Albanian. But indeed, he might in any case have known the language of his soldiers. The young Greek at Mohammed Ali’s house in Kavala told me that at the time of his birth, in 1769, the population of Kavala was almost entirely Turkish, with just a very small Christian population. He thought there would have been very few Albanians there, apart from the soldiers of the garrison. Yet there were Albanians almost everywhere in Greece during the Ottoman period, including nearby Salonika. With the information I had, I could not conclude either way. I had liked the idea that an Albanian, a chancer from one of Europe’s smaller nations, had become ruler of an Empire in Egypt, Sudan, western Arabia and the Levant, and one of the most notable historical figures of his day.

The Yeni Tzami, Salonika's Esoteric Mosque

The last mosque built in Salonika, in 1902, the Yeni Tzami, or ‘New Mosque’, is also one of the city’s few Ottoman-era mosques to survive to the present. And it is one of the most unusual mosques in the world. It was built by an Italian architect to serve the city’s Dönmeh, or ‘convert’ community. The Dönmeh were descendants of Jews who had converted to Islam in the 17th century.

They were follows of Sabbatai Zevi, a Jewish mystic from Smyrna, who proclaimed himself the Messiah. He attracted a huge following among the Jews of Europe and the Levant, antagonising the Jewish establishment in the process, and, with his claims of earthly kingship, attracting the wrath of the Sultan. Finally, he was brought before the Sultan in Edirne in 1666. Offered a choice between conversion to Islam and impalement, he chose the former. Many of his followers reverted to Jewish Orthodoxy, while some continued to believe in their Messiah. Still others, the Dönmeh, followed Zevi’s example and converted to Islam.

The Yeni Tzami, Salonika

Salonika became the main centre of the Dönmeh, where some of them were prominent merchants. While outwardly Muslim, they retained many Jewish practices and continued to speak Ladino, the dialect of the Spanish Jews. Disapproved of by both Jews, for whom they were apostates, and strict Muslims who rejected their crypto-Judaism, until the late-19th century they practiced endogamy, marrying only within their own community. They were politically active, and were prominent in the Young Turk revolution of 1908, which originated in Salonika. As Muslims, they were included in the population exchange in 1923. In the early years of the Turkish Republic, they continued to play an important role, as merchants and as supporters of Ataturk’s secular, modernising reforms. However, during the 20th century many of them have gradually assimilated into the broader Turkish society.

Their remarkable, eclectic mosque in Salonika reflects the complex, ambiguous identity of the Dönmeh. A hybrid of European and Islamic styles, fusing Baroque, neoclassical, and Byzantine, it also contains Jewish features. Walking up the road towards it, the initial impression is one of extraordinary oddness. As well as a Mihrab, pointing towards Mecca and the direction of Muslim prayer, the six-pointed Star of David is repeated around the exterior and interior of the mosque. The mosque did not function as such for long. Scarcely 20 years after it was built, its faithful departed for Turkey under the Lausanne Agreement. Some tried to claim they were not in fact Muslims, hoping to be excluded.

The Dönmeh never really fitted. Only in the diverse, cosmopolitan atmosphere that was Salonika before the Balkan Wars did they find their place. Perhaps that was why they supported Ataturk, hoping that they could find a new home in a modern, secular state. They were to be disappointed. Ataturk’s vaunted secularism was in reality a sham. The very core of the new Turkish identity was in fact based on religion. At the start of the new republic, Turks were defined as Muslims, and a Turk could be a Muslim from anywhere in the Balkans, no matter whether he had spoken Turkish or not, so long as he identified with the Turkish nation. A Christian from Turkey, by contrast, even if he spoke only Turkish, could not be accepted as part of the new Turkish nation, and had to be expelled to Greece. The aim of Ataturk’s secularism was to keep religion in its place, out of the sphere of government, so that he could set about building his modern republic unfettered by competition from institutions that had held immense power and importance under the Ottoman order. But within the state, one religious community, Sunni Islam, was given a privileged position, under firm state control, but favoured over any rivals, be they non-Muslim or other branches of Islam. In this world, the Dönmeh, with their esoteric brand of Islam, their fusion of different faiths, were decidedly suspect.

Venetian and Ottoman Crete

One of the main themes of my journey through Greece in the autumn of 2012 was visiting former territories of the Venetian Republic: Corfu; Preveza; and Chalkida/ Negropont. I finished this journey at one of the most important and longest standing of Venice’s overseas territories, Crete. Taken during the carve-up of Byzantine territory following the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, Crete was ruled by Venice for more than 400 years. Crete was much more than a trading outpost or a naval base defending the republic’s trade routes to the east. Crete was a colony. Venetian families settled there, and took the best, most productive land for themselves. Sugar plantations were established, in a medieval prototype of the later slave economy of the Caribbean. The slaves were mostly Christians seized in raids by the Crimean Tartars and sold at the Black Sea ports.

The Lion of St Mark, Rocca al Mare fortress, Heraklion

For the hordes of tourists who visit Crete, the main historical interest for most is found in the ancient Minoan sites. I had visited Knossos during an earlier stay on the island in 1996, as well as the museum in the nearby capital of the island, Heraklion. Undoubtedly the Minoan remains are remarkable. But I was put off by the garish reconstruction plucked from the imagination of the British archaeologist Arthur Evans. I had been more stirred a few years earlier by the more modest remains from the same period on the Aegean island of Santorini. No reconstruction or guesswork there. You are walking the street where the residents had strolled three and a half thousand years earlier. But on this visit I was more interested in Crete’s later history.

During two visits in 1996, I stayed in the village of Anogia, in the mountains above Heraklion. Here is a very different Crete from that of the coastal towns, with their Venetian, Ottoman and ancient remains. In isolated villages like Anogia in the island’s interior is the Crete of the Greek shepherds and goatherds who had lived there for thousands of years, outliving the comings and goings of one invader after another, their lives revolving around their flocks and their traditions. Anogia is a conservative place. The culture of the blood feud, I was told, had hardly been consigned to history. The blood feud has been, or still is, a feature of a number of such regions in the eastern Mediterranean: mountainous landscapes with pastoral societies. In this respect, there is much in common between the cultures of Montenegro, northern Albania, Sicily and Crete, as even some of the natives recognise. During my second stay in Anogia, with a group of students from around the Balkans, at one point a local Anogia lad embraced a young man from Montenegro, and declared emotionally, ‘Cretans and Montenegrins, brothers.’

Weapons are an important part of life in Crete’s interior. One evening in Anogia, sitting in a café garden, I watched as a man repeatedly walked out from a bar and fired his pistol several times into the air. What was the reason, I asked a Cretan companion? He has just heard that his wife is expecting a child, the reply. Not an occasion to stay and celebrate with his spouse, it seemed. Rather, an evening with his male friends, and his gun.

There was a wedding while I was in Anogia, a huge event, and everyone present in the village was invited, even unknown foreigners like me. They had slaughtered 300 sheep for the occasion. The mutton is boiled, and then the water is reused to cook pasta, imparting the flavour of the meat. The wedding took place in the evening, but the celebrations went on all day. On Crete, it is the groom’s family that hosts the wedding and provides the feast. Throughout the day, visitors were welcomed at his family house. I went along with my companions, a Dutchman and two Greek women from Athens. We were greeted by the groom and by his parents, and sat down to a pasta lunch, washed down with local wine. The village church was small, and most of the guests stood in the square outside, some of them wearing traditional Cretan costumes, the men in high leather boots. As the wedding came to an end, and the couple emerged from the church, the shooting began. And boy did they shoot. I had witnessed weddings involving shooting in Montenegro. Men fired pistols into the air, a dangerous and sometimes tragic practice, as the bullets come down, and from time-to-time people are hit. But in Anogia they used automatic weapons, machine guns blasting away. Afterwards the revellers dispersed around the various tavernas in the village, all of them taken over for the wedding feast. As we ate our supper – more mutton-water pasta, sprinkled with grated feta, the persistent shooting made us rather jumpy.

Anogia is well-known in Greece, owing to a notorious massacre there during the German occupation in World War II, when, as a reprisal for resistance activity, the order was given to slaughter the entire adult male population. Most of the men were away in the mountains, with the resistance, but many were killed, and the village was raised to the ground. It was rebuilt after the war. When I told some Greek friends back in Oxford that I had stayed in a village on Crete, they asked me which one? I did not suppose it likely they had heard of a small village in the mountains. But they had, and they were impressed. ‘Oh, Anogia, Anogia is famous.’

The Venetian Loggia, Heraklion

Apart from being a starting point for visits to Knossos, most people do not rate Heraklion highly as a tourist destination. Indeed, other towns on the island, such as Rethymno and Chania, are more attractive. Yet Heraklion boasts some of the most impressive Venetian remains on the island. In Venetian times, this was Candia, the island’s capital, whose name was also usually applied to the whole island. Much of the massive city walls built by the Venetians, interspersed by huge bastions, remain intact. Protecting the old harbour is the 16th century Venetian fortress of Rocca al Mare, or Koule, as it came to be known under Ottoman rule. On the fortress, as on the city walls, big stone plaques of the Lion of St Mark, symbol of Venice, remain in place. Close to the fortress, the Venetians built long, vaulted, tunnel-like shipyards, where their galleys could be built or repaired. Most have been demolished, but some remain, although no longer open to the sea. Similar shipyards are also found at Chania, at the western end of the island. The most elegant building in the city is the 17th century Loggia, the centre of civic life in Venetian times, and nowadays the town hall. Close by is the Morosini fountain, an elegant monument of now worn stone, with lions standing guard around a central bowl. It is another memento of the cultural flowering the island enjoyed during the Venetian period.

There are reminders of the period of Ottoman rule too. The Ottomans invaded Crete in 1645, after a ship carrying eminent Ottoman subjects home from their pilgrimage to Mecca was taken by the Knights of St. John, from Malta. The captors tried to land on Crete, but were turned away by port after port, eventually abandoning the vessel. Crete’s Venetian rulers did not want to risk Ottoman displeasure. Despite this, the Sultan took advantage of the opportunity to order the invasion of Crete in reprisal. With most of the island taken, the Ottoman army laid siege to Candia in 1647. The siege was to last for 22 years. The Venetian fleet attempted to seal of the Dardanelles, to prevent the supply of the Ottoman besieging force, and managed to frustrate Ottoman attempts at a naval blockade of Candia. The Venetians even won some notable naval victories.

During the siege, Crete received little support from the rest of Europe, now much less concerned with the eastern Mediterranean since its focus had shifted to the Atlantic. France, under Louis XIV, maintained good relations with the Sublime Porte, while allowing French volunteer forces to join the fight in 1668-69. To no avail, the French withdrew after they failed to push the Ottomans back, followed by other small forces from elsewhere. Finally, in 1669 the Venetians surrendered. They were granted honourable terms by the Grand Vizier, Ahmed Koprulu, an Albanian, and allowed to leave the town. Venetian power in the eastern Mediterranean had been all-but-snuffed out, despite the retention of a few bases. Venice did, however, manage to push the Ottomans back a little in Dalmatia, capturing the strategically important fortress of Klis, just inland from Split.

Crete was in Ottoman hands for more than 200 years. It was the island’s second experience of Muslim rule. For 150 years in the 9th and 10th centuries it was the Emirate of Crete, having been conquered by Arabs from Al Andalus, modern Spain. The island had been retaken for Byzantium in 960-61. There were repeated revolts against Ottoman rule by the island’s Christian population. Following the Congress of Berlin, in 1878, the island became semi-autonomous, with a Christian governor. But tensions between the island’s Christian and Muslim communities continued. Following a massacre in 1898 of several hundred Greeks, as well as 17 British soldiers and the British Consul, Ottoman forces were ordered off the island by the great powers, and replaced by four occupying powers, Britain, Russia, France and Italy. Nominally, Crete remained under Ottoman suzerainty, with a High Commissioner appointed by Athens. But Ottoman rule had effectively come to an end, and the island was incorporated into Greece in 1913.

Many Cretan Greeks had converted to Islam during the Ottoman period, and some estimates put the Muslim population of the island at almost half by the early 19th century. Some of them remained crypto-Christians in the privacy of their homes, and subsequently reverted to Christianity, while others left for mainland Turkey during the repeated violent conflicts of the 19th century. By the beginning of the 20th century, Muslims are reckoned to have made up not much more than 10 per cent of the population, the last of them leaving during the population exchange in 1924.

The Church of St Titus, Heraklion

The island contains several Ottoman-era remains. Of particular interest in Heraklion is the Church of St Titus. The earlier Christian church on this site had been converted into a mosque by the Ottomans. However, following its destruction by an earthquake in 1856, a new mosque was built. Following the departure of the last Muslims from Crete, it was in turn converted into a church, but it retains some typically Muslim features, notably ornate little niches in chapels on either side of the entrance, which have been adapted as Christian shrines. Another notable remnant of Ottoman times is the Sebil of Haci Ibrahim Agha, a public fountain, whose builder ordered that snow be brought regularly from the mountains during summer, so that passers-by could quench their thirst with cool, fresh water. Nowadays it houses a café. Next to it is the older Bembo fountain, named after the Venetian governor who had it built. In the run-down narrow streets of the old town are many, often dilapidated houses dating to Ottoman times, typical of that style. On the façade of one shop is an engraved sign in both Ottoman Turkish and Greek.

Rethymno, westwards along the coast from Heraklion, is a very attractive little town. Its old district, mainly dating from the Venetian period, is much better preserved than the island’s capital, with many fine buildings indicating the prosperity of Venetian Crete. In the central square, the Rimondi Fountain was once the centre of the town’s life. The nearby Loggia now houses a shop selling reproductions of classical artwork. On a hill above the old town stands the huge 16th century Fortezza fortress, claimed to be the largest of all Venetian fortresses. It had been intended to hold the entire population of the town within its walls, and at one time included the sumptuous residence of the Rector of the town. Most of the buildings within the walls are gone, but the Ottoman-era Sultan Ibrahim Mosque still stands, minus its minaret.

The Kara Pasha Mosque, Rethymno

There are other Ottoman-era buildings in Rethymno. One fine house now has shop windows on either side, but in the middle, above the entrance, is the date, 1844, and inscriptions in Greek and Ottoman Turkish. The elegant Kara Pasha Mosque, near the seafront, nestles among palm trees and bushes, the simple beauty of its domes and arches accentuated by the sunlight playing on it from different angles at different times of the day. The Neratzes Mosque, in the town centre, now houses a music school. Its exterior is graffiti covered, but the minaret is being restored. Nearby, another minaret sits alone amidst a cluster of buildings. A little outside the town centre, the Veli Pasha Mosque is in better shape, and now contains a museum.

Chania, at the western end of the island, is considered by many to be Crete’s most attractive town. It became the island’s capital during the period of the autonomous Cretan state, before unification with Greece. And in Ottoman times the Pasha of Crete resided there Eleftherios Venizelos, a leader of Greek rebellion against the Ottomans on Crete, and later Prime Minister of Greece, was from near Chania, and his final resting place is there. The town’s name originated during the Arab Emirate of Crete, when it was called Al Hanim. To the Venetians it was La Canea.

The Yali Mosque, Chania

Chania’s picturesque old harbour surrounds a bay ringed by restaurants and cafés. On one side of the harbour, the Kucuk Hassan Mosque, popularly known as the Yali (Seaside) Mosque, minus its minaret, was built in the 17th century, not long after the Ottoman conquest of the town, following a two-month siege. Jutting out on a long wall protecting the harbour is a Venetian-era lighthouse. Across the harbour from there is the low Firka fortress, where the Greek flag was first raised on the island upon unification in 1913. In the inner harbour several of the long vaulted Venetian dockyards remain.

Away from the harbour area, so popular with tourists, are some very charming quarters. Some sections of the impressive Venetian city walls, as well as bastions, remain. I particularly liked the Spiantza district, not far from the harbour, a maze of colourful lanes. At its heart is a leafy square. In contrast to the cafés of the harbour, when I visited in November, on this square I only saw Greeks, quietly sitting in the shade of the old trees. Old men seated at a café window cheerily sang along to traditional songs, while a couple of Romany boys accompanied them on an accordion. A Greek coffee here cost two or three times less than at the harbour. At one end of the square is the odd hybrid church of Agios Nikolaos. During the Ottoman period, it was converted into a mosque, and while it is now a church again, the minaret is still there, at one corner. Not far away, another minaret stands on its own.

The cultural heritage of Crete is exceptionally rich, spanning civilisations over more than three millennia, from Minoan, to Classical Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Venetian and Ottoman, and through it all, the traditional lives of the hardy Greek villagers of the mountainous interior, outlasting all the island’s varied rulers. Much of this heritage is still there to see, and as elsewhere in Greece, perhaps the more recent Venetian and Ottoman layers, as well as the older Byzantine and ancient remains, are being accorded greater value and respect than was often the case in the past. Crete’s history was frequently troubled, by war, invasion, rebellion and natural disasters. And while invaders were generally not welcome, and their rule was often oppressive, the diversity they bequeathed is today one of the island’s most appealing features.