Cyprus Chronicles -Part II: Treasures from the Past

I wrote a bit about the more recent history of Cyprus and it’s capital city, Nicosia in my last post. In this post, I’ll delve a bit further back in history.

We visited the Cyprus Museum, which has an amazing collection of antiquities from around Cyprus. We also visited the city museum of Nicosia and learned that the city has been inhabited continuously since about 2,500 BC. Seeing the ancient artifacts made me reflect on how the present era is just a very short blip among millennia of lives lived. Yet, we share the same primary joys and sorrows as the ancients – celebrating the miracle of childbirth, remembering loved ones who pass, and honoring the sacredness in life.

Fast forwarding into more recent history, I visited the Buyuk Han (or Big Inn) which is situated in the Turkish-occupied section of Nicosia. It was built shortly after the Ottoman invasion in 1571 as a place where Ottoman official travelers could stay. It’s now a marketplace and cultural center.

We visited the house of a Greek Cypriot tax collector/translator during the Ottoman occupation (built in 1793) which is now an ethnographic museum. Here again we saw the mixing of eras and cultures.

We made one excursion outside of Nicosia to a mountain village called Kakopetria, about an hour away by bus. Legend has it that the town got its name, in English translated as “bad rock”, when a young engaged couple went to get their photo taken by this large rock which fell over on them. We decided to steer clear of the rock in question and I highly recommend the town hires a public relations firm to come up with a better story as the old part of the village is absolutely charming and definitely worth a visit.

The old part of the village has small homes with this particular half stone, half earthen construction. Some are still inhabited, others rented out to tourists and quite a few are in decay. When we tried to visit the folk museum and found the doors closed, D. asked some women passing by if they knew if it would be opening and they yelled up to one of their fellow neighbors who quickly came out to unlock the door. She apologized profusely saying she had been coming from church. Among those still living in the old part of the village, life still has a taste of timelessness.

In the next and final Cyprus blog, I will share a bit about a few people (and four-legged animals) I encountered while in Cyprus.

P.S. Please feel free to leave comments anytime. One question I had was whether readers prefer the pictures in a slideshow or the gallery mode. The slideshow is where you can flip from picture to picture and the gallery mode is where you see small insets of a few pictures. Happy for any feedback. Thanks for reading.