1001 Nights Cast

Longing

The old archaeologist, now in his ninetieth year, seemed to be deeply preoccupied with the intricacies of the past almost as if in some way he ‘remembered’ the seventh century.

He had been thinking about the ruined Crusader castle near the port of Paphos in Cyprus since 1957 when he first started excavating it. Much earlier travellers arriving in the abandoned ancient town assumed from the scattered granite columns that the ruin might be an ancient temple, perhaps a temple of Aphrodite. But it turned out to be a medieval fortified castle, built long after the passing of the Greco-Roman world. The grey gold ruin had extensive tumbled walls with stairs leading upwards to broken towers, and one stone archway poised over labyrinthine passages. Military architecture needed speed and economy, and it is thought that as the Lusignan builders did not have the technology to cut the hard stones from the Roman city, they recycled the grey granite columns from Egypt without cutting them, placing them horizontally through the immensely thick walls like giant nails. In the hard light of midday the stones hummed with silence, and the whisk of a cat’s tail vanished into a dark opening.

The castle evolved during a period of flux in the eastern Mediterranean, as Byzantine Constantinople and the eastern Orthodox church tried to balance the competing interests of the ‘Latin’ Crusader countries of France and England, against the constant threat from the Islamic east. ‘Triple-harboured Paphos’ the archaeologist commented, ‘Strabo said it all, succinctly.’ He looked at me as if I might have a handy volume of the ancient geographer in my pocket. The Frankish Lusignans built the castle on the middle lobe of the harbour around 1205, and what was the harbour is now a parking lot on reclaimed land. ‘It was lost to memory, this huge building, it was just a mound’. He told me, as if it had recently happened, that on 7 May 1191, Richard the Lionheart defeated Isaac Comnemus, setting up an independent Cyprus, and was declared ‘Emperor of Cyprus’. Byzantium regarded him as a troublemaker in their area of influence. When Richard left for the Crusades, Cyprus was put in the hands of the Knights Templars, and from them the island passed to Guy de Lusignan.

These ‘Latins’ or Franks ruled Cyprus for three hundred years. Destroyed in an earthquake of 1222, the castle may have been in use for barely thirty years. The archaeologist in his courtly English, told me about first starting to dig at the castle through the generosity of the mayor of Paphos, who gave him access to the land in those days when the town was a distant village far from the tourist itinerary. ‘We used Hassan’s mud brick house as a base,’ he said. ‘Hassan was a poor Turkish farmer who had ploughed the stony land by the edge of the sea, but there was no proper storage, and bora beetles ate the shelves. Things got lost, labels got eaten too.’

Under the great staircases and passages of the castle was an earlier fort, which may have been the first overseas Arab position in the seventh century. It is significant that when the descendants of Mohammed conquered Cyprus about 643, they formed a garrison on this site. The old man is obsessed with a well of that date found deep below the castle, a well that he had excavated without realising its significance. In the well was a group of strange coins re-issued in the later seventh century after the Arabs had come. At first, he thinks, the Arabs came to negotiate only and the Cypriots tried to keep on friendly terms with each of their large armed neighbours, the Byzantines and the Arabs.

Looking into the distance, to the heat hazed horizon, he spoke of that Arab garrison as if he had been there. ‘Cyprus was almost completely occupied by the Arab raiders until the tenth century’, he said. ‘Traces of archaeological evidence such as the well, seemed to give a glimpse of this Arab presence. I think we can place the very severe earthquake that set life back for a generation about 680 AD’ he observed, tapping his stick on a subsiding wall.

The great castle, which had held hundreds of men in its courtyards and majestic halls, was destroyed in another, later, catastrophic earthquake. The excavation gave haunting evidence of the extent of the damage as the diggers slowly unearthed the spaces beneath the major public rooms. After the first shock of the great quake people must have run away from the towering and shaking structure. Then there would have been a moment of calm after the initial tremor. During the lull, one soldier was struck by yearning for an exceptionally lovely glass flask, purchased at great cost from a merchant from Syria. Deep blue, with spirals of gold and clear yellow coiled into the elegant neck and high handle, it may have held costly perfumes. He may have thought of all the sacrifices made to acquire this beautiful object and rushed back into the castle to retrieve it. But then a larger shock came—he was caught by the roar of falling masonry, but somehow managed to get down into the substantial drains beneath the castle. He was alive beneath a mountain of tumbled stone in the dim tunnels that ran in a warren of passages below the stairs. Unfortunately, iron grilles covered their entrances to protect against subversive attacks from outside the castle. The whole town was devastated and although alive, the soldier was trapped and died there, probably after many days, with the staircase collapsed above him, holding his treasure. ‘Poor chap’, said the archaeologist, ‘We found fragments of his skeleton, and part of his sword and scabbard, as well as the glass flask’. It now sits on a shelf in the Museum.

A girl student from an Australian team ran through the dark tunnels that served as both drains and subversive passages and knocked her head so badly she was concussed for days, as if there might still be an uneasy presence in the empty spaces of the ruin.