Exploring Cyprus

On Sunday, after my last visit in 1995 I went to the Turkish side of the old city of Nicosia, not a lot has changed, a few important buildings have been renovated or are being renovated with EU money (how does that work?) and there are a few more tourist oriented cafes and shops but they are still selling the same kind of copy sports clothing they were 25 years ago. The biggest difference is the border crossing in the centre of the old city and the ease of getting through, just show your passport and that is it. I had imagined that the Turks being mainly moslem and that their holy day is Friday this being a Sunday the place would be just a normal working day but no they seem to have stayed with the Sunday day off as it would have been before partition. Imagine the thrill I got when crossing the UN buffer zone to find two full teams of Pakistani workers on their day off, playing an ad hoc game of cricket. The pitch was a dust bowl in the middle of the buffer zone - what would have been the moat - the boundary was marked out with old tyres and cans and there was only one set of stumps but don't get the wrong idea this was a serious match and the bowling was lethal, I wasnt the only spectator.

I went exploring last week and ended up at an excavation at Choirokoitia, it is a large Neolithic village site dating back over 10000 years which was discovered in 1934, I spent an interesting couple of hours there and felt that after walking over the whole site that I had earned a big slab of locally made chocolate cake.

Today I got as far as Limassol and I went to the castle which is also a museum, the museum was mostly a collection of old pots which does nothing for me but one of the gravestones on display took my eye, it showed the figure of a man obviously wearing chainmail, I wonder if he may have been a Crusader - fantasy is a great thing. What was really interesting was looking at the building itself, it had been a defensive or religious site for nearly two thousand years and you can see parts of earlier structures within the current building indeed some of these were pointed out notices on the walls provided by the museum staff.