A long journey begins

Barsky went on peacefully teaching the Latin language in Lefkosia (Nicosia) until 10 April 1735. On that day, the Thursday of Holy Week (the week after Easter), an earthquake struck Cyprus and islands nearby, wreaking large-scale destruction. Among the buildings that were worst hit, Barsky mentions the mosque of Aya Sofia in Famagusta, whose nave collapsed. The first shock was followed by others that were no less destructive, then a series of aftershocks, inducing a state of terror in the population. As if this wasn’t enough, soon after the earthquake an epidemic began, forcing people to flee from large towns. Archbishop Philotheus also left his throne, secluding himself in one of the distant monasteries.

Barsky’s first instinct was to leave the island, but nearby islands and harbours had also been hit and disease had already reached them too. Nor could he stay where he was, so he set off to examine the local monasteries and make notes and sketches, as a way of waiting out the epidemic. He tried to avoid the large towns, so as not to get infected. Having sealed his things away in the bishop’s residence to protect them from looters, he donned old, holey clothes in order not to attract unwanted interest, and set out on his way. By his account, there were more than 60 monasteries on Cyprus, so it would have taken a very long time to go around them all. It cannot be ruled out that Barsky undertook this walk on the advice of Philotheus and received from him a list of monasteries and a road map. It would have been impossible to reach so many monasteries just by walking around at random.

At the very end of the journey, when already on a ship, Barsky gives a short list of monasteries which he had not managed to visit. Jumping ahead, he writes that his long walk around the island had ended up lasting five months, and that he had managed to visit 50 monasteries, 20 of which he had even sketched. In fact, drawings of fewer have survived, but even these are of great value for posterity.

 I was then, as I said earlier, on the island of Cyprus, at the court of the archbishop, a man versed in ancient Greek and Latin, and also well-mannered and virtuous, and the year 1735 of the Birth of Christ arrived; the bright holiday of the Resurrection of the Lord dawned. By God’s will, for the sins of man, a great earthquake happened all over the island on the tenth of April, in the first week after the Resurrection of Christ, on Thursday, in the second hour of the afternoon, and went on for five or six minutes, and caused enormous ruin on the island.

Then many Christian churches and Turkish mosques were ruined, especially a very big beautiful mosque called St. Sofia in Famagusta [1], where once, in the time of Christianity, was the archiepiscopal see, of which I wrote before.

Then many high pirgi [2] were also ruined, some collapsed to their foundations.

After this began an epidemic, and that summer many Christians died, and even more Turks, and horror fell upon the world; and the earthquake was not one only; after the first, most powerful followed others.

Then the bishop left his see and shut himself up in one of the distant monasteries; other bishops and many of the Christians also went off and hid themselves away in the monasteries, mountains and deserts. At the time I too was grieving and wondering what to do: I was afraid to sail to other countries, since the surrounding islands and ports had all been struck by the epidemic, and I could not sit in one place, because in all the cities and villages there was also the aforementioned deadly disease. Then I, having donned thin vestments, left all my things under seal in the archbishop’s court and went out of the city, called Lefkosia, and walked on foot between the mountains and the deserts, passing from monastery to monastery to look and pray, and first of all, so as to protect myself from infection, I did not go into any city or village where I heard there was a plague, but passed far around these places, taking narrow and tortuous paths.

Even now, under the Turkish yoke, there are more than 60 monasteries in Cyprus, small and large, where monks live – five–six in some places, 10 in other places, and elsewhere 20–30; there are also main monasteries, in which there can be 50 or 100 monks. Apart from these, there are many that stand empty and dilapidated, from the heavy tributes and intolerable malefactions of the Turks. Of the aforementioned monasteries, I walked around and visited more than 50; I depicted with a firm hand the architecture of 20 of the main ones. I will tell every Orthodox reader and listener about them in detail here.

Stranstvovaniya Vasiliya Grigorovicha-Barskogo po svyatym mestam Vostoka c 1723 po 1747 / Edited by N. Barsukov. Part 2 (St. Petersburg, 1886), 243-245

Location

Coordinates: 35.172400 33.367570 − Archbishop’s Palace in Nicosia

Notes

[1] The Gothic cathedral of St. Nicholas in Famagusta, modelled after the cathedral in Reims, France. It was built in intermittent phases from 1298 to 1400 and consecrated in 1328. Under the Ottomans it was converted into a mosque and given the name of Aya Sofia, in honour of the converted mosque of the same name in Constantinople (the former Hagia Sophia). According to British historians, the mosque-cathedral had suffered from earthquakes before then, but in 1735 part of the nave collapsed (Michael J.K. Walsh (ed.), City of Empires: Ottoman and British Famagusta (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 324). According to modern data, the earthquake, the epicentre of which was located not far from Famagusta, registered 8 on the Richter scale.
[2] From the Greek πύργος (pýrgos), meaning “tower”.

Literature

Zykova N.V., Palomnichestvo na Kipr pravoslavny (po stopam Vasiliya Grigorovicha-Barskogo), (Larnaca, Izdatelstvo Russkogo pravoslavnogo obrazovatelnogo tsentra, 2013), 14-16

Buzykina, Yulia, “Leto 1735 g. na Kipre: puteshestviye Grigorovicha-Barskogo v usloviyakh epidemii”, Rossiyskiy Zhurnal Istorii Tserkvi, 2020;1(3):20-35

© Yuliya Buzykina
English translation by Alastair Gill