City walls of Nicosia
The city walls of Nicosia were built in the last years of the Venetian rule in Cyprus to protect its capital Nicosia against expected attacks by the Ottomans . They replaced a defense system from the early 13th century in the years 1567 to 1570 and are largely intact to this day. As one of the best-preserved facilities, it is one of the most important tourist attractions in the city. In the Renaissance , Nicosia was considered an example of an ideal city . In addition to eleven bastions, the complex has three city gates, which are named Paphos, Famagusta and Kyreniator after the neighboring cities. At the time of the Venetians, whose rule ended in 1570/71, these were called Porta Domenica (after the monastery that had been demolished for the walls), Porta Giuliana (after the fortress engineer Giulio Savargnano) and Porta del Provveditore, which refers to the Venetian military governor, Provveditore Francesco Barcaro and his great contributions to the construction were remembered.
history
The predecessor of today's complex, of which only a few traces remain, dates back to 1211, when King Hugo I of Lusignan had the city fortified, which was threatened by the Genoese who sat in Famagusta . These walls, which replaced the Byzantine predecessors, were wider than the later Venetian ones. They are said to have been built within ten months. The roughly pentagonal course of the wall is unclear, the length was estimated at almost 7 and up to 15 km. The Margarita Tower was built under King Peter I from 1368 onwards . Under Peter II , a wall was built around the entire city for the first time. The said tower, which stood near the Famagusta Gate, was torn down before 1376. The wall had a total of five gates.
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Although the island finally came to Venice in 1489, nothing was initially done to further fortify Nicosia. This finally changed with the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, which the Maltese were able to repel on the basis of their enormous fortress. The local magistrates had been concerned since 1560, when the Ottomans revealed considerable armament efforts along the southern coast of Anatolia. So in 1567 the decision was made to fortify Nicosia, which according to Samuele Romanin had 70,000 inhabitants.
The fortress engineers Giulio Savorgnan and Francesco Barbaro were commissioned to do this, the former having made it clear to the Senate in Venice that half of the old walls were in ruins. Within a short period of time, the old walls were laid down because they would not withstand the cannons that were now widespread, land was acquired and houses and allegedly more than 80 churches and monasteries gave way to the new building project. Their material was built into the walls. The Pedieos was diverted from the city and now flowed into the city moat. The almost circular complex extended over a length of five kilometers with eleven pentagonal bastions. The Porta Famagusta, also known as Porta di Sotto (lower gate), is only 137 (inside), or 132.6 m above sea level, while the Paphos gate rises almost 150 m above the level of the sea. The structural structures above this gate were used by the Ottomans as an arsenal, in 1879 the British had the gate closed, today it is used by the local police and fire brigade. The gate is now below street level, the passage surrounding it was built in 1979. A guard room was built on the Kyrenia Gate in 1821. A fountain was created in the Famagusta Gate. In Ottoman times the city gates were opened with the morning prayer and closed with the evening prayer. The handling in the Venetian and Lusignan periods remains unmentioned in the sources. A mosque, the Bayraktar Mosque, was built on the Constanzo Bastion. An unknown standard bearer (Bayraktar) is said to have been the first to plant the Ottoman flag on the bastion. In memory of him, the bastion was named Bayraktar Burcu. Possibly the name of the "martyr" was Alemdar Kara Mustafa.
The bastions were named among the Venetians by the most important families of the Venetian colony, as well as those who had contributed most to the cost of the structure. The names of the bastions were accordingly: Caraffa, Podocattaro, Constanza, D'Avila, Tripoli, Roccas, Mula, Quirini, Barbaro, Loredan and Flatro. Today the bastions of Caraffa to Tripoli Bastions are in the Greek-speaking southern half of the city, while the bastions of Roccas to Loredan are in Turkish-speaking Northern Cyprus, which has been occupied by Turkey since 1974. Only the Flatro Bastion is in the United Nations buffer zone .
The elaborate three-year construction work was largely complete when the war with the Ottomans broke out in 1570. On July 1, 1570, their invasion began under the command of Piali Pasha . The siege of Nicosia began a good three weeks later on July 22nd. It lasted until September 9th, when the besiegers managed to break through at the Podocattaro bastion. As the historian Étienne de Lusignan reports, not all of the trenches in the Lusignan complex had been filled in, and the walls were not yet completely covered with stones. According to him, the city would have been impregnable with a completed defense system, especially since 250 cannons stood on the walls.
The defenders were executed and the residents taken into captivity. Lala Mustafa Pascha left a garrison of 4,000 soldiers and 1,000 horsemen in the city, but the city was later heavily neglected. First, however, the conquerors had the walls fitted with stones. Craftsmen were sent from the Reich to rebuild the wall and the city. A builder named Bostan oversaw the construction of the fortress. Even if repairs were still being made at the beginning of the 17th century, the city was practically defenseless.
When the British came to colonial rule in 1878, the wall was enough to provide space for the entire population of Nicosia, but the population grew rapidly. In 1879 a passage at the Paphos Gate was broken through the wall, when a bus line was set up in 1929, it could not pass the Kyrenia Gate, so one of the arches was torn off. There was a breakthrough there in 1931. At the Famagusta Gate, part of the walls was torn down in 1945. A total of nine breakthroughs were created, plus some for pedestrians. The palace of the district commissioners was built on the Quirini (Cephane) bastion in 1939 ; today it is a presidential palace of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Under Rauf Denktaş more buildings were added to the Venetian walls. In 2003, Turkish and Greek Cypriots jointly restored the Roccas bastion. A sports club was established on the Zahra Bastion in 1953. Christians used the D'Avila Bastion as a cemetery in the 19th century, but there are no remains there. First a wooden bridge connected the old town with the modern city, later a stone bridge was built. The 2005 tender for the design of the Greek site won Zaha Hadid ; in the north, the Mahmutpaşa car park was built by 2011.
literature
- Zehra Öngül: Historical development of Nicosia Fortifications and its texture along with the Fortification Walls , in: Giorgio Verdiani (Ed.): Defensive Architecture of the Mediterranean XV to XVIII Centuries , Vol. III, Dipartimento di Architettura, Florence 2016, p. 193 -200.
Web links
Remarks
- ^ Samuele Romanin : Storia documentata di Venezia , 10 vols., Vol. 6, Venice 1858, p. 290.
- ^ Archives des Missions Scientifiques et Littéraires , Paris 1855, p. 504.
- ↑ Zehra Öngül: Historical development of Nicosia Fortifications and its texture along with the Fortification Walls , in: Giorgio Verdiani (Ed.): Defensive Architecture of the Mediterranean XV to XVIII Centuries , Vol. III, Dipartimento di Architettura, Florence 2016, p. 193–200, here: p. 196.
- ^ John H. Stubbs, Emily G. Makaš: Architectural Conservation in Europe and the Americas , Hoboken 2011, p. 353 (section Cyprus and Malta , pp. 349-359).