6/3/15. Kyrenia Mountains, Northern Cyprus
I caught my first glimpse of the famous Castle of St. Hilarion about an hour after dawn. The weather in Nicosia had been sunny; but as soon as I crossed the mountains abutting the northern coast, the sun was overtaken by cloudbanks. As I climbed into the mountains themselves, waves of mist began to roll over the road, blotting and blurring the hills and valleys on either side. Just below the castle, the fog parted, revealing the fairytale outline of St. Hilarion. The spectacle of those towers and walls, black against a backdrop of swirling cloud, was arresting.
fter trying (with characteristically little success) to capture the scene on film, I drove on to the deserted parking lot. The office was not set to open for another half-hour; but the gate was open, and in I went. The hour and a half I spent among the ruins were filled with visual drama. Morning alternated with twilight as banks of cloud broke over the surrounding mountains, alternately blotting out and framing the castle’s highest towers.
The ruins themselves were very substantial; I was particularly impressed by a well-preserved barracks complex that incorporated a kitchen and refectory. Throughout the site, however, it was the scenery that stole the show. This was particularly true of the highest parts of the castle, whose gray stone melded with the scudding clouds.
I stood for nearly five minutes in the ruins of the royal chambers, mesmerized by the otherworldly spectacle of cloudbanks steaming uphill. Driven by an unfelt wind, waves of fog spilled over the ramparts around me, leaving traceries of dew in their wake.
The view from the highest tower was almost underwhelming after this experience, though the boiling sea of fog neatly complemented its sinister associations – one of the Lusignan kings is said to have thrown his bodyguards to their deaths from its tall eastern window.
My next destination, Bellapais Abbey, sat a thousand meters lower than St. Hilarion, well below the clouds. The corresponding lack of natural grandeur, however, was more than counterbalanced by the old monastery’s fine architecture and parklike setting. Built and inhabited by a remarkably dissolute Catholic monastic community in the Lusignan period (the brothers are said to have only accepted their own bastards as novices), the complex was given to the Orthodox by the Ottomans, and served as a church until the troubles of 1974. The chapel building, long used by the village priests for their services, is in remarkably good condition, and has (unusually for a church in northern Cyprus) retained its icons and sacred furnishings. The real highlight, however, is the adjoining cloister, dominated by four tall cypresses and ringed by a beautiful Gothic peristyle. My appreciation of the architecture was somewhat compromised, however, by the efforts of the military band of the army of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which was rehearsing in the refectory.
I returned to the mountains for my third stop, following a terrifying one-lane access road bounded on one side by a plunging unfenced drop.
After a particularly harrowing bend, my destination, Buffavento Castle, appeared suddenly atop a towering crag to the north. As at St. Hilarion, this first glimpse was arresting. A reddish cliff, perhaps four or five hundred feet high, ran for several miles on either side of my vantage point. Over its entire length, a thin layer of cloud was pouring, a silent waterfall that dissipated to nothing before reaching the cliff base. The towers of Buffavento protruded from the streaming mist, now illuminated by the early afternoon sun, now shrouded by resurgent cloud.
I parked in a tiny gravel lot, and followed a long series of switchbacks into the darkened castle. The ruins were fairly scanty; but the experience of watching clouds pour over the ridge was unforgettable.
As I stood on one of the north towers, the fog parted for a moment, allowing me to glimpse, over the top of another approaching cloudbank, the sparkling Mediterranean, and, just beyond, the hilly south coast of Turkey, turreted by thunderheads. Then the clouds reached me, and everything turned to gray.
