The State of Churches in Northern Cyprus

Next door to the museum in Guzelyurt lies the Monastery of St. Mamas, dedicated to St. Mamas, the patron saint of tax evasion. The bishop of Morphou was arrested one Easter after crossing into Northern Cyprus to perform a liturgy in the church.

From Guzelyurt, heading towards the north east tip of the country and the Monastery of Apostolos Andreas we make stops at various churches.

There is much upset and protest in Greek Cyprus over the destruction of many of the churches, the theft and sale of the icons and other religious artefacts from within the church.

  

Paraphrased from the adjacent sign:

Panagia Kanakaria Church, built in the Byzantine period, most likely late 5th or early 6th century. The church was destroyed by Arabian pirates in the 8th century and later rebuilt, only to be destroyed in an earthquake in the 12th century.
The church was rebuilt once more in the 14th century. It is guessed that the monastery was built later, most probably in the 18th century.

 

The monastery, dedicated to St. Andrew - who according to the bible was the first person called to priesthood by Jesus Christ - became a popular pilgrimage spot after the following miracle:

The shrine only became a popular sanctuary with the miracle of Maria Georgiou in 1895. 17 years after the disappearance of her son, she received a dream in answer to her unceasing petitions to St. Andrew, which instructed her to go from her native Cilicia to the neglected shrine of Apostolos Andreas at the tip of Karpas, Cyprus. On the boat over she explained her journey to fellow passengers and particularly excited the attention of a young travelling dervish. He asked Maria how she would identify her lost son, so she told him of the peculiar pair of birthmarks he bore on his shoulder and chest. The dervish threw off his woollen cloak to expose the same marks and fell on his knees before his mother.  - Source

Some of the damage we had seen on the churches in Northern Cyprus:

Graffiti on walls.

Churches stripped of all icons and wall murals. These aren't the original icons of the church.

Campfires lit in empty churches.  

On occasion, they would smell like someone had used them as a toilet.

This isn't however only something that's happened recently, there are plenty of examples of churches and cathedrals converted to mosques several hundred years ago.

In Famagusta, Saint Nicholas Cathedral was built in the 14th century AD. The Ottomans captured Famagusta in 1571 and converted the cathedral into a mosque, the Saint Sophia Mosque of Magusa and later renamed to Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque.

There's also the former St Sophia Cathedral in the Northern Cyprus part of Nicosia (Lefkosa), which was converted to Selimiye Mosque in 1570.

Inside the mosque, one interesting thing to note is that, in Islam, prayer always faces the Kaaba which is on an angle to the walls of the cathedral. Because of this, worshippers pray at an angle to the walls (you can see this by the run of the prayer rugs) as shown in the following photo:

It's also good time to mention that the largest cathedral in the world (at the time), Aya Sofia, in Constantinople (now Istanbul), was converted to a mosque of the same name at the order of Sultan Mehmed II, upon capturing the city. This was the cathedral where Cardinal Humbert, representing Pope Leo IX and Michael I Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other in 1054, setting off the Great Schism, the biggest split in Christianity where the Eastern Orthodox (Greek) Church and the Roman Catholic (Latin) Church separated and to this day have not reconciled.

Aya Sofia: Cathedral, Mosque, Museum.

In the Greek part of Nicosia, in Greek Cyprus (to distinguish it from Northern Cyprus), the icon museum contains an exhibition: "Hostages in Germany" (PDF), outlining how a police operation in Germany stopped the sale of looted icons from Northern Cyprus. The icons, however have yet to be returned to the Cyprus Orthodox Church.

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