Limassol...Three Sights

Today, I made my way firstly to the District Archaeological Museum. It was quite a walk, as there is no sufficient parking nearby. The museum was quiet and cool. I browsed the exhibits and was charmed in an instant.

The museum was built in 1975. Inside, you can view artefacts taken from Amathus. Of particular interest, is the famous head of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, which comes from Amathus and was made around 480 BC. The fact that Egyptian gods were also worshipped at Amathus, is confirmed by Hathor and by the small limestone statues of the god Bes.

My next stop, was the Municipal Art Gallery. The gallery, designed by Benjamin Gunzburg, who also designed the Town Hall, was built in the 1930s. Inside there were notable works by the eminent Cypriot artists Victor Ioannides (1903-1984) and Nikos Nikolaides (1884-1956). Also on display, were works by artists who wanted to express their viewpoint on the Cyprus Emergency (1955-1959). Of particular interest in this section of the gallery were quite a few exhibits such as, Andreas Charalambous' Infusion of Ideals, Andreas Makariou The Bible of the Struggle, Andreas Ladomatos  A Tribute to the Pure Ideals of the Struggle for Freedom and Nikos Kouroussis Heroes and the Lost Vision.

I was however particularly drawn to the paintings of Andreas Efesopoulos who donated his 27 oil paintings to the gallery in 2022 as well as the paintings of Spyros Demetriades.

My last and final stop was the Limassol Castle. The earliest reference to the castle is 1228. It acquired its current form after the final conquest of the island by the Ottomans. 

On display are 13th to 16th Century tombstones as well as a headless skeleton which was exhumed in 2001 in Nicosia from the moat in front of the Podocataro Bastion. It belongs to a man in his twenties, obviously a soldier who was beheaded after the city was captured by the Ottomans in 1570.

The stronghold, which is the castle, was built by the Lusignan princes on a foundation erected by the Byzantines. Later, Venetian, Ottoman and British occupiers strengthened its defences. In 1191 the castle chapel, which doesn't exist today, was the venue for the wedding of Richard the Lionheart to Princess Berengaria of Navarre. 

The writer Leto Severis, in her book 'Ladies of Medieval Cyprus and Caterina Cornaro,' describes the wedding in detail. It is taken from George Jeffery's book 'Cyprus Under An English King in the 12th Century.' He describes the wedding in a lot of detail, extracts of which are written below:

The bright May morning of the twelfth of the month-most auspicious of all seasons for matrimony-with its golden dawn and "old ocean's myriad smile" sparkling on the wavelets of a sapphire sea, was heralded by the blare of trumpets on the shores of Amathus Bay.

The ladies taking part in the wedding were all dressed in their most magnificent clothes and jewels: cloth of gold lined with miniver and ermine, stiff embroideries enclosing precious stones, and the still more precious tissues of fine silk, were displayed to the utmost extent considering that the resources available in the baggage of an army on the march were to some extent limited. 

The squalid appearance of a mud-built Levantine town of the twelfth century was covered over to some extent by silken hangings, eastern carpets and the gay heraldic banners brought with them by the Crusaders.