Spirit of Othello haunts old Famagusta and gives it celebrity

The road from Nicosia to Famagusta crosses the stiffling, flat Mesaoria plain, bleached beige by the unrelenting summer sun. The new town is slack and sleepy; beyond the low gate through thick 15th century Venetian walls lies the old city. This is the "SeaPort in Cyprus" where William Shakespeare set his tragedy Othello.

Most of the action of the play takes part in the citadel, known as "Othello's Tower" which looms over the port on the seaward side of the old town. The town walls, on average 50 ft high and 25 ft thick, were originally constructed by the Lusignans (1192-1489) during the Crusades and reinforced by their successors, the Venetians, in 1492, the year Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World. At the heart of the old town is a wide plaza dominated by the elegant 14th century Cathedral of Saint Nicholas. Here were crowned the Lusignan rulers, who styled themselves "Kings of Jerusalem" after the Holy City was reconquered by the Arabs.

The cathedral, a perfect example of soaring Gothic architecture, became a mosque when the Turks, under Lala Mustafa Pasha, captured Famagusta from the Venetians in 1571. He destroyed many of the city's landmarks, including most of its 365 churches, built to atone for Famagusta's fabled sinfulness. Outside the mosque is a bust of Mamik Kemal Bey, Turkey's national poet, who was imprisoned here between 1873 and 1876 for defying the sultan. His narrow room in the ruin of the once-grand Venetian palace - a police station and prison until recently - has become a museum visited by a steady stream of Turkish Cypriot school children.

In the covered market only two stalls are working, one selling spices from India and herbal teas from Turkey, the other a butcher's displaying a few withered chunks of meat. There are no customers. Streets are potholed, shop signs faded. A black bust of Ataturk mounted on a squat column gazes across a dusty, empty schoolyard. The town Othello came to defend from the Sublime Porte is in the hands of the Ottomans' successors.

Over the entrance to Othello's Tower is a plaque bearing the winged lion of the Venetian republic. Within lies a courtyard with a rough wooden stage at the far end where concerts and plays are performed. The fictional Othello haunts this place and gives it celebrity. But then Shakespeare's character was almost certainly based on a real Venetian officer who served here in the 16th century.

Shakespeare borrowed the story of the moorish general from The Hundred Fables (Heca tommithi) of Giambattista Giraldi Cintio, published in 1565. Traditionalists hold that the moor was modelled on General Christoforo Moro, governor of Cyprus in 1508, who lost his wife on his voyage home at the end of his tour of duty. In Italian, moro can mean either a moor, a person of Arab or Afro-Arab origin, or a mulberry tree, the emblem of the Moro family crest.

However, according to Sir Harry Luke, a British administrator who served on the island from 1911 to 1920 (Cyprus, a Portrait and an Appreciation), a Venetian nobleman, Count Andrea da Mosto, conducted extensive research in Famagusta's archives during 1932 and came up with a second candidate.

A captain of southern Italian background, Francesco da Sessa, known as "Il Moro" or "Il Capitano Moro" because of his dark complexion, served in Famagusta until 1544 when he was arrested and returned to Venice in chains. In January 1545, he stood trial and was sentenced to a term of banishment. No mention was made of his crime.

Since Cintio's work appeared only 20 years after da Sessa's trial, the writer might well have heard "Il Moro's" story and adapted it for the Fables.

The British historian of Byzantium, Sir Steven Runciman, mentions in his volume, The Great Church in Captivity, a third possibility. In the 17th century a member of the wealthy and influential Mavrocordato family of Istanbul claimed he descended from the original of Othello: a Greek general in Venetian service whose name was "Mavros", or "black".

The claimant argued that mavros had been transformed into moro or moor. General Mavros married a young woman of Greek-Italian background called Cordati, hence Mavrocordato. But since Runci man does not give anything of Mavros's history, it is impossible to see why Cintio would appropriate him as a character for the tales.

Shakespeare chose Cyprus as the setting for his play because ordinary theatre-goers in London were familiar with this distant Mediterranean island. Its goods were freely available in Elizabethan shops and markets: Lefkara lace, a fine material resembling lawn or crepe called "cyprus", brocade, carob beans and syrup, sweet Commanderia wine, salt from the salt lake outside Larnaca, pottery, barley, cotton, copper, asbestos and indigo.

English sailors on the queen's ships called at Famagusta and other Cypriot ports. So familiar was Cyprus that Shakespeare mentions the island in at least two other plays: globalisation is nothing new.