Bellapais Abbey, Gothic ruins looking down on Kyrenia

Bellapais Abbey looks down on Kyrenia from the hillside, in the village of Bellapais (Beylerbeyi in Turkish, as OpenStreetMap has it), in the north of Cyprus. To visit, you’ll have to cross into that part of the island (the checkpoints and their paperwork are covered in crossing to Northern Cyprus), and I’d read Northern Cyprus beforehand. The village around it gets its own guide, Bellapais.

Lusignan Gothic

In its overview of the island’s culture, Encyclopaedia Britannica picks out, from what survives of the Lusignan and Venetian periods, the Gothic cathedrals of Nicosia and Famagusta and Bellapais Abbey near Kyrenia. Of the three, this is the one I find most beautiful, precisely because it’s a ruin.

What Wikipedia says

I haven’t found an official account of its history, so here’s English Wikipedia’s, credited as such. According to it, Aimery de Lusignan founded the abbey, with its first buildings going up between 1198 and 1205, for canons who had fled Jerusalem, and from 1206 it passed to the Premonstratensians, the White Canons, which is why some documents call it the White Abbey. The main building dates from Hugh III, and the cloister and refectory from Hugh IV, between 1324 and 1359, a king who, Wikipedia says, had his own apartments built here. The Genoese stripped it in 1373 and, after the Ottoman conquest of 1571, it was handed to the Orthodox Church and slowly decayed. The British used the refectory as a hospital, and George Jeffery, curator of ancient monuments, repaired it in 1912.

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A name with two stories

The usual explanation of the name, which Wikipedia records, is that the French Abbaye de la Paix, the Abbey of Peace, was bent by the Venetians into Bellapais, as if it were bella paese, beautiful land. The historian George Hill wasn’t convinced by either half, and I wouldn’t treat it as settled either. Wikipedia adds that the site was once called Episcopia, which hints that a bishop of Kyrenia may have lived here long before the canons.

What to see inside

The same source says the 13th-century church is the best-preserved part, with its belfry and a nave with two aisles. The cloister has 18 arches, and under one of them stand two Roman sarcophagi that the canons used as a washbasin. Behind them is the Gothic refectory, about 30 m by 10, with a pulpit in the north wall, six windows and a rose window. You can see the sea from inside, and for me that’s the high point of the visit. On the east wall, the same source says, you can still spot the bullet holes left by British soldiers when it served as a hospital.

So you do not lose the morning at the ticket office, browse tickets and tours in Bellapais Abbey on GetYourGuide.

The drive up

On the map the abbey is roughly 15 km from the Ledra Street checkpoint and 5 from Kyrenia Castle. If you take your own car over, gov.uk points to Agios Dometios as a crossing that sells cover for the north. There are no official opening hours or ticket prices I can point you to. A morning at Kyrenia Castle and an afternoon here make a good pairing.

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If you are staying the night, see the best hotel deals in Nicosia for your dates: the well-placed rooms go fast.