Amathus - in Late Antiquity and The Middle Ages

In Late Antiquity and The Middle Ages

Later, in the fourth century AD Amasus became the see of a Christian bishop and continued to flourish until the Byzantine period. In the late sixth century, Ayios Ioannis Eleimonas (Saint John the Charitable), protector of the Knights of St. John, was born in Amathus.

Amathus still flourished and produced a distinguished patriarch of Alexandria, St. John the Merciful, as late as 606-616, and a ruined Byzantine church marks the site; but it declined and was already almost deserted when Richard Plantagenet won Cyprus by a victory there over Isaac Comnenus in 1191. The tombs were plundered and the stones from the beautiful edifices were brought to Limassol to be used for new constructions. Much later, in 1869, a great number of blocks of stone from Amathus were used for the construction of the Suez Canal.

Read more about this topic:  Amathus

Famous quotes containing the words middle ages, late, antiquity, middle and/or ages:

    “People who are always praising the past
    And especially the times of faith as best
    Ought to go and live in the Middle Ages
    And be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.”
    —Stevie Smith (1902–1971)

    “All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
    —June Jordan (b. 1939)

    “Nothing but great antiquity can make graveyards interesting to me. I have no friends there.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “The blood of Abraham, God’s father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew, and Christian, and too much of it has been spilled in grasping for the inheritance of the revered patriarch in the Middle East. The spilled blood in the Holy Land still cries out to God—an anguished cry for peace.”
    —Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)

    “I have inspected the accommodations and find them entirely satisfactory, and as for those young men, who are of appropriate ages to be my grandsons, they will not trouble me in the least.”
    —Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)