Kyrenia Castle

Kyrenia Harbor has an old fortressy castle right on top of it, which is the only other touristy thing we did besides beaches and a day tour. It was open quite late, maybe something like eight or ten at night, so we went in the evening, after we'd done our daily swimming and such. What the brochures and other publications about the castle failed to mention alongside the main opening hours was that even though the castle's admission is until late, anything inside it, like the gift shop, cafe, and most importantly, the Shipwreck Museum, all closed at five. That was very disappointing.

We didn't take this picture, but we didn't get a big establishing shot of this place, so I grabbed one from the intarvebs.



Anyway, we walked around the castle, and it was quite big, with a lot of rooms and ruined structures and such. Here's us inside a room with a nice ceiling, maybe a chapel:

I always like a good floor plan. You can see how close it is to the shore. It was for protection and stuff, for the various occupants over the last 1300ish years, from different empires and whatnot.

Here's another cool ceiling, possibly the same one from above, from the outside.

The crazy thing about this thing was the we got to the top of one of the towers, where there were these big crenellations (composed of crenels and merlons, heyyy), as you'd expect. But you could get up into the crenels and walk out to the edge of the tower, maybe fall off. There totally would be serious grates or rails blocking that stuff in the States or the UK, and plenty of other places. But I guess they leave the guests to figure it's a bad idea to wander too close to the edge. These next three pictures are taken from between the merlons. You can see how spacious it is, and often there would be rocks placed on the floor to help people climb up.

 They managed to put rails on the stairs and precipices on the inner parts of the fortress, though.

This is the place where they put convicted vampires to wait for the sun.

No castle complete without arches.

Here's the center courtyard. That giant wooden door opens up to the shipwreck museum, I think.

You can walk all the way around the circuit of the castle, but a lot of it has been allowed to be taken over by nature. Much of it has been destroyed, too.

This is a corner shot of the whole thing:

Again, you have to watch yourself in terms of fatal fall to rocky shore below.

This part is cool. Down at the harbor, this thing juts out into the water, and has a walkway so you can go down there and look at the water, and some people fish, blah blah.

But it looks just like my hand-arm! Scroll up and down again to see how well it matches.

Anyway, here's me in a dirty, lit-up cave.

This is the courtyard from within. There were a lot of little rock sculptures and weird things to look at down there, as I recall.

Also, there was a tiny anthropological museum that was still open, and we saw tons of tiny oil vessels from up to like a thousand years ago, along with this odd giant sculpture of one, and maybe there were some early tools, too.

Also dioramas of early man.

Then we found some secret passages that went underground and had a bunch of dark hollows and hallways. We speculated it was a wine cellar or some other type of storage facility. There was a window here and there that looked out onto the ground on one side of the castle, and we could see places we'd walked by and not paid much attention to the windows. We also saw other people walking by, but they couldn't see us, bwah ha ha.

 Ed took a little video down there, and it's pretty worthless for most of it, it being pitch dark down there, but at the end you see a glimpse of the tunnel that took us down there, and that's something.