Ship Citadel

Well, interesting. Roy's reference to Urth XXXV was illuminating actually in that an officer tells Severian he is being taken, "To the old port. One of the hulks there has been fitted up to hold prisoners". So perhaps the Citadel is constructed of more than one old ship. But spaceship it is, as evidence by these other passages: Shadow III: Description of the Matachin Tower- "(for the examination room was the propulsive chamber of the original structure)". Shadow XI: Description of Severian's new room after elevation- "because I was the most junior of the journeymen, the least desirable in the tower, a portless cubbyhole". Urth XXXVII: Description of the port in Severian's cell (Roche's future bedchamber)- "its broad, smooth flanges, of a shaped I had never considered, had clearly been intended to hold the void at bay" I think there are one or two more I can't find scattered in the text. I wonder if perhaps the many towers of the citadel were made from the former giant masts. Just speculation there. -Bsharp

<snippety> Actually, I think it is very clear that the individual "towers" in the Citadel are spaceships. The Citadel itself isn't.

there's a part where he compares his tower to other structures that were not meant to fly (to paraphrase) in one of the first four books... I can't remember :)

Yes. The supporting evidence after the bit you quite applies to individual "landers" that have been converted to towers, landers/spaceships that were at rest on a regular old space port. The Citadel is a collection of towers and walls, not a monolithic construct studded with other ships.

There's also a reference in UOTNS to the Beast Tower having originally been a "Zoetic Transport." Macronaut Duncan Truter <dtruter at gmail.com> wrote: there's a part where he compares his tower to other structures that were not meant to fly (to paraphrase) in one of the first four books... I can't remember :)

The above passages prove only that the Matachin Tower was a spaceship. More than once in the Urth cycle Severian dreams/imagines the old spaceships blasting off into space. Somewhere he speculates that, ancient as the Citadel may be, the tunnels beneath it antedate it. There is no doubt about it; most of the "towers" in the Citadel are individual spaceships. But if you want more direct proof: "The Citadel itself was visible now as a whole, and for all its vastness seemed a glittering flock fluttering upon the hill, its thousand metal towers ready to leap into the air at a word." CITADEL, chapter XXXVII And in the next chapter he went looking for Valeria from above. "I asked the castellan for a map. After much searching he produced one, large and old, cracked in many places. It showed the curtain wall whole, but the names of the towers were not the names I knew - or that the castellan knew, for that matter - and there were towers on that map that are not in the Citadel, and towers in the Citadel that were not on that map. " I ordered a flier then, and for half a day soared among the towers. No doubt I saw the place I sought many times, but if so I did not recognize it." The map obviously dated to a time when the Citadel was still being used as a spaceport. -Roy

Okay, some misunderstanding. I thought it was being argued that no part of the citadel was a spaceship. It seems the concensus is that only parts of it were spaceships (especially if Duncan Truter's citation can be found and it does sound familiar to me).

He must be thinking of a long paragraph in chapter XXX of CLAW, when Severian was thinking of his childhood visit to the witches' tower, where he first saw Merryn. His description of that tower shows it to be merely a tall building, after the fashion of modern skyscrapers. It lacked the solidity he was used to in his old spaceship home. -Roy