Day 7 (March 20, 2015): Derelict buildings - of both medieval and 1970s vintages

It finally arrived: the first day of spring AND the last day of our visit to Cyprus. Our hotel, The Rocks, is fairly swanky. So we were wondering how the breakfast would stack up -- it stacked up quite well, in fact!  Omelettes and cappuccinos were consumed and we hit the road around 9:30AM, driving though the mountains here on the north coast to Famagusta on the east coast. Known for its medieval ruins and Venetian walls, Famagusta gave us the most enjoyable day of our vacation. 

We had no map, but somehow we luckily stumbled on the most common starting point for exploring the city -- the Land Gate, as it was called, in the Venetian walls. The first couple of photos show the magnitude of the walls, which are 15m high and 8m thick!  They stretch on for three kilometres, but could not keep out the Turks in the 16th century. 

Next, we started roaming the old city to explore the ruins of several key structures. See the captions below for details. 

The St. Peter and St. Paul Church (14th c)

St. Nicholas Cathedral - now the Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque (13th c)

Bland interior of the cathedral (now mosque)

This fig sycamore tree was planted in 1299 and is the oldest tree on Cyprus!

Remnants of the Gedikli Baths 

St. George of the Latins Church (14th c)

St. George of the Greeks Church (15th c)

I know, it just looks like a day of looking at old rubble. But the ambiance of Famagusta was really exceptional. We thoroughly enjoyed exploring the city. The best, however, was yet to come...  

We ate lunch at a cafe in the main square.  Having heard of an abandoned city named Varosha in the UN Green Line zone, we asked the waiter how we might find it. Although it's out of bounds, he told us a strategy, and it worked beautifully. We found a place as close to the Green Line as is possible to reach and then walked the beach to the barbed wire marking the Green Line zone. What met our eyes was simply the most unbelieveable sight we had ever beheld. And perhaps the most eerie...

The city of Varosha was quickly abandoned in 1974 as the Turkish Army advanced. Everything was left behind by the Greeks. There is even a car dealership in the town with a 1974 car still sitting in the show room. (We didn't get to see that, but read about it.). Yes, looting was horrible at the time, but the city is now off limits and what is left is simply decaying. It sits on the best beach in all of cyprus and back in the early 1970s, it was THE place to vacation. 

Eerie Varosha: Hundreds of buildings and high rises, all abandoned in 1974. 

What made it even more poignant was that we met a Finnish gentleman and his wife on the beach. He had been a UN peacekeeper in Cyprus at the time and today was his first day back since that time. He had shared living quarters with some canadian peacekeepers, in fact. As he stared at the decaying city with us, his eyes filled with tears. He told us how Greek and turks lived side by side back then. But how the war made enemies on both sides. 

After lapping up the view of the Mediterranean, we walked away from the ruins of Varosha and started the drive back to Kyrenia around 3:30PM, arriving at our hotel by 5:00PM. We closed the day with some souvenir shopping, a light dinner, packing, and I did another run around town. 

The beautiful Mediterranean. 

Signing off from Kyrenia. Good night!