Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (3 page)

“I seem to have come to the right place.”

“We are mad about wine.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“And about freedom—our freedom.” Lest the remark might smack of an impoliteness he caught my hand in his own and pressed it warmly, sympathetically, smiling into my eyes: “Freedom,” he repeated more softly. “But we love the British. How could we Greeks not?”

“Are things bad here that you are so unhappy with the British?”

He sighed deeply and his sigh exploded into a “No”; it was as if my question were hopelessly ill-informed, the question of a half-wit or a child. “We don’t want the British to go; we want them to stay; but as friends, not as masters.”

We took a small swig of
ouzo
and finished off the octopus. “My friend,” he said, disarmingly using the rare, rather formal vocative. “We do not have to teach you what freedom means—you brought it to Greece, to the Seven Islands. Why do we call you the Phileleftheri—the Freedom-lovers? In the heart of every Greek,…” His peroration is one familiar to everyone who has ever visited Greece. I must have endured it several thousand times in my life. It is pure anguish—but none the less true and felt. But here in Cyprus I was doubly glad, doubly reassured by having to endure it once more—for it proved that the old sentimental tie was still alive, that it had not been killed by wooden administration
and bad manners. So long as this tie held, fragile and sentimental as it was, Cyprus would never become a shooting affray—or so I thought.

Under the stress of all this intellectual by-play, or perhaps under the impetus created by neat
ouzo
, we had begun to drive very fast indeed, screeching round corners and roaring over the crest of hills. And now at last Nicosia was in sight, the frail fountain-points of the Grand Mosque, and the misty outlines of the medieval bastions. Rising across the dry brown plains we could see the slight, deft aerial range of the Kyrenia mountains, chalky grey under the soft spring sunshine. The air was crisp with a vanished rain.

We had moved insensibly into the great bare plain called the Mesaoria in the middle of which the capital lies. It is dusty and unprepossessing in the extreme. “We will leave it to our left,” said the boy, “and go up there and over. To Kyrenia.” His hand described the trajectory of a swallow—and indeed the speedometer was touching seventy. The
ouzo
bottle was empty, and with a fine disregard for passing topers he pitched it overboard into the ditch. “Within the hour,” he said, “you will arrive at the Dome.” Swiftly and expressively his hand built up a series of belfries and cupolas, of towers and turrets. Apparently the hotel was to be an echo of Coleridge.

*
He was wrong.

Chapter Two: A Geography Lesson

Recent research has carried the history of Cyprus back to the early Neolithic age, around 3700 B.C., when the Island seems to have been first settled by an enterprising people whose origins are obscure.

—Colonial Report
, Cyprus, 1954

If you should come to Kyrenia

Don’t enter the walls
.

If you should enter the walls

Don’t stay long
.

If you should stay long

Don’t get married
.

If you should get married

Don’t have children
.

—Turkish Song

W
HILE I WAS
finding my bearings and conducting an initial exploration I lodged with my friend Panos, a schoolmaster, in two small clean rooms overlooking the
harbor of Kyrenia, the only port in Cyprus which—diminutive, cleanly colored, beautiful—has some of the true Cycladean
allure
. It is on the seaward side of the Kyrenia hills opposite the shaggy Turkish coastline whose mountains sink and rise out of the sea, dissolve and reappear with the transparent promise of a desert mirage.

Panos lived with his wife and two small sons in a house which must once have been part of the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel—up forty whitewashed steps, brilliant with sunshine, into a stone courtyard: the obvious site of the ancient acropolis of the town. The belfry of the church towered over us, its bell banging aggressively for every service, the lazy blue-and-white ensign of Greece softly treading the wind above the blue harbor.

The schoolmaster himself was very typical of Greek Cyprus—a round curly head, stocky body, with strong arms and legs; sleepy good-natured eyes. Through him I made my first acquaintance with the island temperament which is very different from the prevailing extrovert disposition of the metropolitan Greek. The styles of politeness were more formalized, I noticed, even between Cypriots. Forms of address were somewhat old-fashioned and lacking in spontaneity; there was a certain thoughtful reserve in conversation, a sense of measure. Hospitality was unobtrusive and shyly offered—as if the donor feared rebuff. Voices were lower and laughter set in a lower key. But the Greek
Panos spoke was true Greek, with here and there an unfamiliar word from the
patois
of the island.

Every evening we took a glass of sweet, heavy Commanderia on his little terrace, before walking down the tiny winding lanes to the harbor in order to watch the sunset melt. Here by the lapping water I was formally and civilly introduced to his friends, the harbormaster, the bookseller, the grocer, who sat by the lapping water sipping
ouzo
and watching the light gradually fade over the stubby bastions of Kyrenia Castle, and the slender points of the Mosque. Within a week I had a dozen firm friends in the little town and began to understand the true meaning of Cypriot hospitality which is wrapped up in a single word—
“Kopiaste
” which roughly speaking means “sit down with us and share.” Impossible to pass a café, to exchange a greeting with anyone eating or drinking without having the word fired at one as if from the mouth of a gun. It became dangerous even to shout “Good appetite,” as one does in Greece, to a group of laborers working on the roads when one passed them at their lunch-hour seated under an olive tree. At once a dozen voices would reply and a dozen hands would wave loaves or cans of wine.… After ten days of this I began to feel like a Strasbourg goose.

But these evening sessions by the water were of the greatest value to me in another way, for I was able to get a fair picture of the cost of living in the island, and more important still, the cost of buying a house.
The harbormaster came from Paphos, the bookseller from the mountain villages, while the grocer came from the more cosmopolitan surroundings of Limassol. All of them were lavish with their information, though, somewhat to my disappointment, none of them were topers.

Panos himself was the only one of them who knew that I was something more than a chance traveler, that I planned to stay in the island, and he nobly respected the secret though he went to no end of trouble to obtain information for me about relative prices and conditions elsewhere. Walking by the water, holding his two little boys by the hand, he talked excitedly of the house I would buy and of the vine he would plant for me as soon as I had bought it. “You will find nothing better than the Kyrenia district,” he said. “My dear friend, it is not selfishness, though we would like you to be near us. No. It is the greenest and the most beautiful part of the island. Also, though near the capital, you can find quite remote villages within half an hour of shops and cinemas.”

But no schoolmaster can be without a blackboard for long and in his anxiety to present as clear a picture as possible of the island he would inevitably jump down on to the spit of sand under the castle and say, “Look. I will make it clear.” His sons watched this frequent demonstration with grave pride, each sucking a sweet.

With a certainty born of long practice, for his subject was the history of Cyprus, he sketched in the odd,
snouty and rather charmless outline of the island on the wet sand, cross-hatching in the two great mountain ranges which traversed it, and inadvertently falling into the rather bookish manner of exposition which he doubtless employed with his classes. “The name is obscure; some say the island gave its name to copper which was mined here. Some say it derives from its shape which is that of an ox-hide pinned to a barn-door to dry after being salted. Who can tell?”

Michael and Philip nudged one another admiringly and watched my face to make sure that I was suitably impressed. I was, for Panos’s exposition was always precise and economical—obviously the fruit of long practice spent in simplifying his ideas in order to get them into the heads of village children.

“First there were two islands,” he said, lightly touching the two parallel ranges of mountain. “Then the plain rose from the sea to join them—the Mesaoria—flat as a billiard-table. The winds find a clear thoroughfare to roll from sea to sea across the center of the island. The two islands are now two groups of mountains, the big Troodos range and the little Kyrenia range.” He continued in his sweet level voice, aiming his disquisition obliquely at his two small sons. By frequent repetition I could see them already quite clearly—the two mountain ranges and the grim, beautiful Mesaoria which linked them. The Troodos range was an unlovely jumble of crags and heavyweight rock, unarticulated and sprawling, hanging along the fringes of the Mesaoria
like a backcloth. Such beauties as it had were in its hidden villages, tucked into pockets and valleys among the foothills, some rich in apples and vines, some higher up smothered in bracken and pine; once the green abode of Gods and Goddesses, the Troodos range is now extravagantly bald in many places, its great shoulders and arms thrusting out of the painfully afforested areas like limbs in a suit too small for them. Snow covers it for part of the year when its grim and eagle-patrolled fastnesses match those of the Taurus Mountains across the water, reminding one that the whole island is geologically simply an appendix to the Anatolian continent which has at some time been broken off and set free to float.

The Kyrenia range belongs to another world: the world of the sixteenth-century print. Though it is about a hundred miles long its highest peak is just over three thousand feet. Running as it does along the sea-line its graceful and various foothills are rich with running streams and green villages. It
is par excellence
the Gothic range, for it is studded with crusader castles pitched on the dizzy spines of the mountains, commanding the roads which run over the saddles between. The very names smell of Gothic Europe: Buffavento, Hilarion, Bellapaix. Orange and mulberry, carob and cypress—the inhabitants of this landscape discountenance those other green intruders from the Arabian world, the clear green fronds of palms and the coarse platters of banana leaves.…

But I had already begun to see the island as whole, building my picture of it from the conversations of my host. With him I spent three winters snowed up on Troodos, teaching in a village school so cold that the children’s teeth chattered as they wrote; with him I panted and sweated in the ferocious August heat of the plains; suffered from malaria at Larnaca; spent holidays among the rolling vineyards of Paphos in search of vines to transplant; like him I came back always to the Kyrenia range, to cool my mind and gladden my heart with its greenness, its carpets of wild anemones, its castles and monasteries. It was like returning to a fertile island from a barren one—from Cephalonia to Corfu.