The border crossing is easy enough and we are back on the Cypriot side. And with the weather improving we are ready to explore the area a bit more. We discover an old church near the border that seems quite interesting and even the schools in the downtown area have impressive buildings.
Similar to the Turkish side there is graffiti on many buildings but here at least some are captioned in English :). In fact a whole wall seems to serve as a type of message board across time and nationalities, interesting.
We wander the narrow streets enjoying the solitude whenever we find it. Our wandering is taking us however slowly away from the pedestrian area towards the Cyprus Museum our next goal. As on the Turkish side we see signs of the British occupation, the most obvious being the mailboxes which still seem to be from British times.
We follow roughly the perimeter of the buffer zone and this comes with sights of both the boarded up buffer zone and fortresses on the Cypriot side. One of the more interesting sights is the Holy Cross Catholic Church for which some entrances were blocked as they were leading into the buffer zone after the war of 1974.
You can however enter it and given the opulence of other Catholic Churches we find it a bit understated. Still it is a historical site that we are happy that we are able to enter as it closes its doors right after us.
We continue along the buffer zone as we find this area to be quite interesting. You can see abandoned buildings and fortifications, all of them worthwhile to see for us.
The majority of our walk in this area is along the wall, it seems that at least some part of the buffer zone is following the old walls.
Then we turn “inland” away from the buffer zone and passing the Theater we reach our goal, the Cyprus Museum. The museum is the premier archaeological museum on the island and as such a top goal for us.
The museum is a square type building with each side of the square filled with artifacts from the antiquity. It is also surprisingly full with tour groups which makes for a weird experience as sometimes you are in the middle of a large group with the tour guide shouting loudly over the group while otherwise you are all alone in the hall.
The objects are quite interesting and well realized. They would not be out of place in any modern exhibit – I am not sure if I would be able to distinguish them.
The most famous and impressive, to us, exhibit is the one from the sanctuary of Ayia Irini. There are rows and rows of votive figurines, over 2,000 in all, found in the sanctuary that were left as offerings to the goddess of the place between 1,000 and 500 BC.
We continue exploring the exhibits enjoying the pottery but also the stonework on some statues that are exhibited here.
And most statues are stone with the only one made out of bronze that survived being that of the emperor Septimius Severus.
At the midpoint there are the restrooms and also a few rooms that differ from the overall layout, they are downstairs and have quite some eclectic artifacts. One of them is focused on tombs and what was excavated around them.
Another room has something more unexpected, a chair and a bed that are over 2,000 years old. What is impressive is that they wouldn’t be out of place in a modern home, quite interesting.
Another section here is dedicated to a few tombs showing the succession of styles and fads regarding how people were buried across the centuries.
As we get close to the exit/entrance there is another very interesting exhibit, collecting similar figurines across multiple topics. It starts with the plank figurines/goddesses, a style that was very popular in the Cyprus area during the early antiquity. Then iti progresses to more typical figurines of the goddess, which is considered a precursor of Aphrodite.
Other topics covered are war and theater, two topics that are quite distant from each other – unless the war is represented in the theater I guess.
And then it is time to exit the museum and return to the parking which is more exciting than we hoped for as now suddenly it seems to be on top of the wall and we somehow have to make our way up the wall. But we manage and on we go towards the mountains.
