582 [Nov. A FORGOTTEN CAPITAL OF THE NEAR EAST. BY LIEUT.-COMMANDER H, C. LUKACH, R.N.V.R. BETWEEN the Kyrenia Mountains, which form, as it were, the northern sea-wall of Cyprus, and the mountainous mass in the south-west of the island culminating in Mount Troodos or Olympus, lies an unwooded but extremely fertile plain. This plain, on account of its geographical situation, bears the name of Mesaoria, "between the mountains," and stretches from Famagusta in the east to the bay of Morphou in the west. Apart from oocasional plantations and from groves of olives beside some of the larger villages, the Mesaoria is entirely treeless; and in aummer, after the orops have been harvested, it has a dreary and barren air when seen from mountains clad with fir. Yet in truth it is anything but barren. It is the granary of Cyprus, very fruitful in wheat and barley; and even in autumn, when the rivers are dry and the sun has scorched it to a dusty brown, the glorious skyline of the Kyrenia range, fantastically serrated, relieves it of the reproach of ugliness and desolation. into a single state, both Paphos and Salamis preceded her in the distinction; and it was not until the advent of the Lusignans that she rose to pre-eminence over the other Cypriote towns. She then became, and for the ensuing three centuries remained, the capital of the most picturesque dynasty and most brilliant kingdom of the Latin East; and in this period, whence date her principal monuments, acquired the primaoy which she has since retained. The Venetian senator Diedo describes her at the height of her prosperity as "a city famed as a fortress, glorying in her buildings, and widely known for her riches. happy position, her pleasant olimate, the gifts showered on her by nature, the added charms of art, had given her a place among the fairest, strongest, and most renowned cities of Europe."1 Her The peculiar charm possessed by the remnants of the Latin East, that East which has witnessed the rule of Crusading knights and the splendour of Frankish merchant princes, is of a rare and subtle kind, the offspring of oriental nature and medieval western art. It lies In the middle of this plain lies the capital of Cyprus, Nicosia, despite the fact that the capitals of islands do not if the attempt to define so generally lie inland. Nor has elusive a thing may be perNicosia always held that posi- mitted-in Gothic architecture tion. After Cyprus was united blending with Saracenic be 1 'Storia della Repubblica di Venezia, Venice, 1751. neath a Mediterranean sky, in the courts of ruined castles overgrown with deep green cypresses, in date-palms rearing their stately crowns above some abbey's traceried oleisters, in emblazoned flamboyant mansions illumined, as they could never be in the West, by the golden haze of the Levant. The most compact relic of the Latin East is Rhodes-Rhodes whose fortifications, one of the mightiest monuments which medieval military art has produced, enclose what has been said to be the most perfect specimen extant of a fifteenth-century French town. And happily, though the Latin East is disappearing amid the upheavals of recent years, the glories of Rhodes are likely to be endowed with a new lease of life. Italy's national device, the letters F.E.R.T., mysterious emblem of the Annunziata, are generally held to represent the words fortitudo ejus Rhodum tenuit; and the Italians of to-day, mindful of the exploits of the Langue of Italy in Carian waters and Carian isles, are carefully preserving throughout the Dodecanese the traces of the great Order, to whose renown their forebears contributed their share. In Syria there survives nothing so well preserved as Rhodes; but the vestiges of the Crusading prinoipalities have not yet vanished completely. There is the town of Tartus, growing out of the Crusading castle of Tortosa like Spalato out of Diocletian's palace. There are the Hospitallers' mighty fortresses of Safita and Merqab and Krak des Chevaliers, the latter now the capital of a district under the name of Qal'at el-Hosn. There are the castles of Belvoir and Blanchegarde, Baniyas and Sahieun, Château Pélerin and La Pierre du Desert, testifying even in their decay to the skill and vigour of their builders. Less military than the cháteaux-forts of Syria, more domestio, too, than the knightly stronghold of Rhodes, Nicosia probably is still, despite the changes and accretions of recent years, the most typical example of a Latin Eastern town. If you approach it from the south by the Larnaca road, it is hidden from sight until you are within a mile or two of it by intervening ridges of hill. Then, when you have topped the rise, whence in 1570 the Turks launched their last successful assault, there is suddenly revealed to you, lying in a little hollow, what seems to be a city of dreams. Like Damasous as seen in springtime from the eastern slopes of Hermon, a white city girt in a belt of brilliant verdure, so is Nicosia engarlanded in green, in a cincture of pine, cypress, and eucalyptus, growing from the medieval fosse by which it is encompassed. No longer flooded with the waters of the Pedias, when, after the winter rains, that mountain torrent tumbles headlong from the hills above Machaera, the moat of Nicosia has become a flourishing plantation, a delightful bower for the walls and for the city within them. Above the trees, as you look from the ridge, appear the Venetian ramparts, a perfect circle, with their eleven bastions set at regular intervals. Enclosed by this double ring of green trees and goldenbrown masonry lies Nicosia, a medley of churches and mosques, of medieval palaces and Turkish qonaqs, of datepalms and orange groves, groves, Gothic turrets and Saracenic minarets. Precisely in the middle of the town stands its noblest and most arresting monument, S. Sophia, once the oathedral of the Lusignan kings and now the principal mosque of Cyprus, Harmonious in its proportions and beautiful in its details, this glorious building dominates not only the town but the entire vicinity; while its twin minarets that rise, slender and graceful, from two unfinished Gothic towers, embody in this combination the very essence of the Latin East. It happens only too often that towns, which at a distance wear the beauty of enohantment, surrender something, at any rate, of that beauty on closer acquaintance. The charm of the ensemble is dissolved by propinquity; sordid details, unobserved from afar, obtrude themselves on approach with vexing persistence. The latter, moreover, being of ruder stuff, produce the more enduring effect, shattering the delicate illusion of the distant view, all too fragile to be re-created. Happily Nicosia is one of those rare places where anticipations may be realised to the full. Cross the mile or so which still separates you from the walls, and you find yourself at the Caraffa bastion, beside which the Porta Giuliana,1 or Famagusta Gate, a deep and vaulted gallery, yawns cavernous and black. Plunge by means of this tunnel 28 romantic an entrance to a city as you could wish to see-through the thicknesses of the ramparts, and you emerge in the most picturesque of towns, filled with folk as picturesque as itself. Orthodox peasants from neighbouring villages, in top-boots and baggy breeches, are driving in their donkeys, laden with bales of fragrant throumbi 2 for sale in the bazaars. Longhaired cassooked priests are sitting under the trellis of a coffee-shop, pulling vigorously at their narghilés. Turkish ladies, heavily veiled, pick their way daintily across the muddy streets; others look down from projecting baloonies of lattice, which the Turks call shahnishin, "the place for the king to sit." Elderly khojas, in fur-lined gowns and white turbans, pass solemnly by, fingering the tessbih, or conversation beads, which hang like rosaries from their wrists. Grave Turkish merchants squat cross-legged 1 Named after Giulio Savorgnano, the celebrated Venetian, who designed the fortifications of Nicosia. 2 The dried leaves of the wild thyme, much used in Cyprus for kindling fires. in their booths, seemingly in- while it has certainly averted different to the prospects of the ruin which would other a deal. And so, through tortuous streets alive with motley crowds, you wander on, lighting, as you pass, on many a sculptured fragment on porch, cornice, and coatof-arms, once parts of some Lusignan or Venetian mansion. Finally you reach the heart of the town and the constellation of medieval monuments which is grouped around S. Sophia. For a detailed architectural description of S. Sophia, the reader is referred to Monsieur Camille Enlart's 'L'Art Gothique et la Renaissance en Chypre,'1 a work indispensable to those interested in the medieval glories of the island. Nicosia's Lusignan cathedral is of much more than local eminence: as a product of the best French work of the thirteenth century, it claims the attention of every student of Gothic architecture. Begun, it is generally assumed, in 1209, probably on the site of an earlier building, much advanced through the munificence of S. Louis during his sojourn in Nicosia in 1248, consecrated in 1326, and never wholly completed, this cathedral, in the purest style of the Ile de France, remains, despite its chequered history, one of the noblest productions of the Latin East. The fact that it has been a mosque for three and half centuries has done little, if anything, to detract from its beauties, wise have overtaken it, as it has overtaken countless Crusading churches not diverted to the use of the Moslem conquerors. It is true that the mihrab, which is built into the south transept to face Mecca, gives a slightly twisted appearance to the interior, but this does not destroy the impressive lines of the vaulting, or the building's striking proportions. The whitewash on the walls is far from unpleasing in these latitudes; the plain shields bearing the names of Allah, Mohammed, and the first four Khalifs are in harmony with the severity of the decoration. The very remarkable narthex, with its sculptured panels of Pentelio marble, remains 88 it when built by Archbishop John de Polo in 1326. The Cypriote Turk is the most tolerant of men - he has retained the Christian appellation of his principal mosque, and he attends the Anglican Church on the King's birthday, and at Bairam or the Night of Power, or other great festival, Christian visitors are invited to witness the ceremonies in S. Sophia from the women's gallery. Carpets and rugs, some of considerable beauty, are then laid out in line with the mihrab, the chandeliers are ablaze with a thousand lights, and the spectacle afforded by the rhythmic prostrations of the congregation in these surroundings is 1 Paris, 1899. VOL, CCIV.-NO. MCCXXXVII. 2 R probably not less dignified only divided from it by the than was a function in the width of the road. days of the Lusignans. S. Sophia is a gem, and it rests in a worthy setting. Faoing its north door are the remains of the Palace of the Latin Archbishops, now the charming residence of an English lady. To the east is the buyük medresé, or principal seminary of the Turks, whose library of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts admirable specimens of Oriental caligraphy-is a haunt of ancient peace. Off the south-east corner, where S. Sophia throws a flying buttress across the road, stands a well-preserved fourteenth-century house, perhaps the medieval Deanery. To the south, opposite the narthex, is the Church of S. Nicholas of the English architecturally a pleasing mixture of early and late Gothic, with traces of Byzantine and Renaissance influences, and historically of especial interest to Englishmen. This church owes its name to the fact that it was the home in Cyprus of the English knightly Order of S. Thomas of Aore, founded during the Third Crusade in honour of Thomas à Beoket. In 1570 it fell into the hands of the Turks, who call it the Bezestan (cotton market), and use it as a grain store; but it is kept in repair by the Department of Evqaf (Moslem Pious Foundations), and has lost few of its essential features. Its three beautiful northern doors make it 8 worthy pendant to S. Sophia, From the roof of S. Sophia, a forest of delicate buttresses and tapering finials, you enjoy a wide view over the churches and palaces and mosques of Nicosia. The Archbishop's Palace, the Deanery, and S. Nicholas are at your feet. To the south rises the 'Omerieh Mosque, the Augustinian Church of Latin times, rich in tombstones of Frankish knights and ladies. In the west there appears the white dome of the Arab Ahmed Mosque, where a hair of the Prophet's beard is preserved in a casket of mother-of-pearl, and is shown to the faithful once a year. Only a few hundred yards to the north you see, as if etched against the Kyrenia Mountains, the slender traceries of the Church of S. Katharine, now the Haidar Pasha Mosque, the most graceful and perfect of the Gothic buildings of Cyprus. You realise also from this height what is not evident below-namely, that every house in Nicosia, however small, has its garden, hidden from the street by high walls of sun-dried mud bricks. From your eminence you see the town as a ohequer-board of white and green, with towers and minarets for kings and queens, and the domes of mosques and Turkish baths for the lowlier pawns. And from the green squares there rises to meet you the heavy perfume of orange blossom, and the scent of jonquils and other wild flowers that are one of the joys of spring in Cyprus; from the |