Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island Read online

  Outside the customs house a mob of expensive-looking taxis had collected, manned by young Cypriots who shouted at me amiably enough. But altogether the atmosphere lacked brio. A vague and spiritless lethargy reigned. I was beginning to think that successive occupations had extirpated any trace whatsoever of the Greek genius when I was relieved by the sight of a bus with both back wheels missing, lying on its side against a house. It was just like home. Three old ladies were dismembering the conductor; the driver was doing one of those laughing and shrugging acts which drive travelers out of their minds all over the Levant; the village idiot was pumping up a tire; the owners of the house against which the bus was leaning were hanging indignantly out of their drawing-room window and, with their heads inside the bus, were being rude to the point of nausea. Meanwhile, a trifle removed from the center of the hubbub, and seated perilously on the leaning roof of the machine, with contorted face, perched an individual in a cloth cap who appeared to be remorselessly sawing the bus in half, starting at the top. Was this perhaps some obscure revenge, or a genuine attempt to make a helpful contribution? I shall never know.

  A grave-looking priest stood on the outskirts of the crowd, uttering the expression “Po-Po-Po-Po” under his breath, gently, with compassion. His lack of frenzy betokened that he had not been intending to travel on the bus himself. He was simply an onlooker, studying the tragedy and comedy of the life around him. From time to time he resettled the black bun of hair on his neck, and muttered “Po-Po-Po-Po” as some new development in the drama became clear, or as the householders reached a new high point of invective.

  “Can you tell me the fare to Kyrenia?” I asked him in Greek and was at once aware of two bright surprised brown eyes staring into mine. “You are English,” he said after a moment’s scrutiny. “Yes.” He seemed taken aback. “But you speak Greek.” I agreed; he seemed taken even further aback. He drew back like a bow-string before launching a smile of appreciation so dazzling that I felt quite bewildered.

  The questions which betoken politeness now followed and it gave me great pleasure to find that I could still, after four years, hold a tolerably steady course through a Greek conversation. My host was even more pleased than I was. He dragged me to a café and filled me with heavy red wine. He himself was leaving for England that night or he would have personally made himself respon sible for this paragon, this wonder of an Englishman who spoke indifferent but comprehensible Greek.…

  Before we parted he drew a piece of brown paper out of his cassock and smoothing it out with an inexpert hand wrote a message on it to his brother in Nicosia who would, he said, be responsible for my well-being until he himself got back. “You will like Cyprus,” he repeated.

  This completed, he led me to the taxi rank and selected a cousin of his, a large contemptuous-looking young man, as a suitable driver to take me to Kyrenia. We parted effusively and he stood in the main street waving his umbrella until we turned a corner of the road. Father Basil.

  The cousin was made of different stuff; his biting air of laziness and superiority made one want to kick him. He answered my politenesses with grunts, gazing at me slyly in the mirror from time to time. He chewed infinite gum. He rasped his unshaven chin with his thumb from time to time. Worst of all, he drove badly. But he inadvertently did me a good turn, for as we reached the last point where the road turns inland from the sea and begins its sinuous windings among the foothills, he ran out of petrol. There was a spare can in the boot so that there was no cause for alarm; but the respite, during which I got out on to the road to light a cigarette, was useful in another way—for we had stopped directly under the bluff where the remains of ancient Amathus stand today. (Mrs. Lewis had eaten a watercress sandwich there, while brooding upon its ancient history.)

  “What is that place?” I asked him, and hardly bothering to turn his fat and ugly head he replied, “Amathus” in a voice full of apathetic disdain. I left him whistling tunelessly as I climbed a little way up the bluff towards the site of the temple. The position of the acropolis is admirably chosen, standing as it does above the road at the very point where it turns inland from the sea. Priest and soldier alike would be satisfied by it. From the summit the eye can travel along the kindlier green of a coast tricked out in vineyards and fading away towards the Cape of Cats and Curium. Here and there the great coarse net of the carob tree—a stranger to me. I noticed that some of these trees had been planted in the middle of fields reserved for barley or corn. They were presumably to give the cattle shade against the pitiless heat of August. But altogether the carob is a curious tree with its red flesh; branches torn from it leave wounds the color of human flesh.

  My driver was seated disconsolately by the roadside, but his whole manner had changed. I was at a loss to explain his smiling face until I saw that he had unearthed my little volume of Greek folk-songs from among the newspapers I had left on the back seat. The change in him was quite remarkable. He suddenly turned into a well-educated and not unhandsome young man, full of an amiable politeness. He was prepared, if necessary, to stay here all night. Would I care to explore the ruins thoroughly? There was much to be known about them. It was at this point that Coeur de Lion actually landed.* “I know this from my brother, who works in the Museum,” he added. As for Amathus, it was up there that Pygmalion.… He plunged once more into the boot of the car and emerged with a bottle of ouzo and a length of yellow hosepipe which I recognized as dried octopus. We sat beside the road in the thin spring sunshine and shared a stirrup-cup and a meze while he told me, not only all he knew about Amathus, but all about himself and his family with an attention to detail which would have been less wearying perhaps were I planning a novel. The only point of interest in this conversation was the continual reappearance in it of an aunt of his who suffered from palpitations of the heart and had to live on the top of Troodos; but the excellent ouzo and his general affability transformed the journey—freeing me at a stroke from my irritation and enabling me to look about me with a fresh eye.

  We moved slowly inland now along a road which winds steeply through a green belt of vine-country, through little whitewashed villages bespattered by the slogan ENOSIS AND ONLY ENOSIS. I felt that it was too early for me to probe the national sentiments of my host and I avoided comment upon this ubiquitous piece of decoration. From time to time lorries passed, or smart saloon cars, and there was not one which did not earn a greeting from my driver. He lowered his window and shrieked across the intervening space as we passed, only to lean back once more and explain, “That was Petro, a friend,” “That was my aunt’s cousin,” “That is a friend of my uncle.” It was admirable practice for my Greek. “You would like him,” he never failed to add, politely including me in the exchange of courtesies. “He drinks like a fish. What a drinker!” We passed a succession of topers in this fashion, quietly finishing our own bottle of ouzo in sips and discoursing vaguely in the manner of old friends. “You seem to know everyone,” I said admiringly, and he accepted my compliment with a self-deprecating smile. “Cyprus is a small island. I think I have relations in every one of the six hundred villages. At least six hundred free drinks,” he added meditatively.

  “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

  WHILE 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 he
avyweight 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.…