Kyrenia Castle

The castle occupies the eastern end of Kyrenia’s old harbour and has a roughly four-sided plan. The landward approach was once protected by a water-filled moat that functioned as a small harbour before the fourteenth century. A bridge crosses the moat to a north-west entrance; visitors pass through a first gate into a vaulted passage that links the later Venetian wall with the older Lusignan gate complex.

From that vaulted corridor a side passage gives access to the Church of St. George, a cruciform building brought inside the fortification by the Venetian works. The church is attributed to the Byzantine period, generally dated to the eleventh or twelfth century, and its dome is carried on marble columns topped with Corinthian-style capitals that were taken from an earlier late Roman building. These reused capitals are visible in the chapel and testify to the recycling of older building material.

Domestic and service spaces open onto an inner courtyard, which is lined with guardrooms, stables and living quarters. Arched rooms to the north and east served royal guards and prison functions, while the royal apartments occupy the western side and are reached by a flight of steps. The southern side of the courtyard incorporates older fortifications and masonry of Byzantine origin. Ramps and stairways provide access to the upper defences on the curtain walls and to the artillery ramps added during the Venetian rebuilding; below ground are dungeons, storage chambers and former powder magazines.

Defensive work from the Lusignan and Venetian phases survives in the towers and wallface. The Lusignan programme introduced a new approach and added square and horseshoe-shaped towers with openings for missile weapons and cells used as dungeons. Venetian contractors later thickened the curtain walls, cut gun-ports for cannon at several levels and installed long ramped ways to move artillery onto the battlements. Some Ottoman-period changes were recorded and later removed during the British period.

One room off the central courtyard is the Shipwreck Museum, which preserves a Greek merchant hull dating to about the fourth century BCE. The vessel measures roughly fourteen metres and was built of Aleppo pine; it is sheathed in lead and was conserved within a controlled environment along with the amphorae and cargo recovered from the wreck. Additional documentation describes the hull as held with copper fastenings and treated with an outer covering of leather. The castle also contains the tomb of Admiral Sadik Pasha from the 1570 conquest, and many parts of the fabric show a sequence of Byzantine, Lusignan and Venetian building phases preserved in situ.