Echoes of Byzantium ...
...can be found all over Cyprus, even in the now-Muslim north. The double-headed eagle, once the standard of the Byzantine emperors now flies over churches across the land. Its history has been long and courageous in the face of much adversity. When the wildfire spread of Islam saw the island fall to Arab invaders in the 7th century, the golden age of Classical Greece, Rome and early Byzantium came to an end, the coastal cities were abandoned and anyone who could found themselves a bolthole elsewhere in the Orthodox Christian world. Many of those who remained withdrew to the safety of the mountains and for the next three hundred years the island was dominated by the Arab invaders.Despite the threat from the new religion that was now dominating the southern shores of the Mediterranean, Byzantium was by no means a spent force and towards the end of the 10th century, the empire reclaimed...
