The Cities of Ottoman Cyprus, as told by a Spanish Spy

Ali Bey al-Abbasi, the pseudonym of Domingo Badía y Leblich, remains an intriguing figure in early nineteenth-century Mediterranean travel. Disguised as an Abbasid prince, Badía was a would-be scientist and likely an agent of the Spanish Prime Minister, Manuel Godoy. His 1803–1807 journey, later published as Voyages d’Ali Bey, remains an underexplored layer of Cypriot antiquarian and archaeological historiography.

 This lecture will explore the value of Ali Bey’s Cypriot passages, which largely lie in their unusual perspective. Writing outside the dominant French and British traditions, and emerging from a Spanish context where such travel was less institutionalized, Ali Bey offers a rare and comparatively understudied lens on the island’s antiquities. His descriptions capture sites, objects, and local engagements with the past before the extractive practices that would later define Cypriot archaeology, and indeed archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant as a whole.

By shifting attention away from questions of authenticity and espionage, which have largely been the focus of previous scholarship, and toward his observational practice, this lecture reframes Ali Bey as a witness to a pre-disciplinary moment. His writings illuminate not only what was seen, but how antiquity in Cyprus was understood before archaeology itself took shape.