Kyrenia Castle: the Department's building investigations

At Kyrenia Castle the Department of Antiquities began building investigations in 1950, after the castle's transfer to it, to distinguish the different periods of construction¹. In 1953 work on the earliest of three successive south walls exposed a tower of very elongated plan with a semicircular front and a cistern; Megaw described it as better built than, and evidently earlier than, the Byzantine structures then known at the castle². In 1954 an epitaph of Charmus was found immured in the west wall of the Byzantine fortress, and Mitford suggested that it was Severan³. The same year, excavation on the foreshore east of the castle exposed a postern in a curtain wall running to a circular tower at the water's edge, which the report identifies as part of the Frankish outworks³.