Jun 14, 2008
It was a matter of chance that we got to Cyprus at all.. I was due to make my second trip to Syria, and I had phoned Ed Feliu in Rome to see if he could arrange it so that the Syria trip could follow on from my third visit to Korea. As it happened Frank Strong, the Canadian entomologist I had worked with in Korea, was sitting in Ed’s office at the time, discussing an assignment he had coming up in Cyprus. So when he heard that Ed was talking to me, he said to Ed, “Ask him if he wants to go to Cyprus.”
“Sure,” I said, “If you can fit it in with the other two trips.” And that’s what Ed did.
Frank was to go to Cyprus to reorganise the plant protection services between the Greek and Turkish halves of the island, (he had previously worked in Greece and could speak some Greek), and he wanted someone to look into the biosecurity side of things. The Greek orchardists had suddenly become aware of the fireblight disease of apples, and of course they wanted to blame the Turks for introducing it. In fact Cyprus had already had an American plant pathologist to look at the problem, and he had explained to them that the disease had probably been there since the time of Alexander the Great, but the old apples and pears that they previously grew, flowered late, by which time the climate was too dry for the bacterium to take hold. So it was always there, even though it was never a problem, except occasionally in wet years. However, when they started growing early apples for export to the European Common Market, the disease soon took hold and became quite serious.
Nevertheless, the Greek Cypriots preferred to blame the Turks, and asked the United Nations to send a plant quarantine specialist to investigate the quarantine procedures on the Turkish side, confident that they would find them inadequate. I got the job. United Nations, however, thought I might as well look at quarantine on the Greek side too, which I did. It had some good features, but the administration was careless and corrupt. The director was a Dr Zyngas, a plant pathologist by training, who, like so many of his kind, was only tentatively in touch with the real world. He made up policy as he went along, so his staff had no manual to guide them and had neither leadership nor support. In fact there were always two or three of them playing cards near his office in case he thought of something he wanted someone to do. Real border control was pretty well non existent.
So when Pam and I got off the plane at Larnaca airport after our trip to Korea, we were met by Frank and his wife Annie, and installed in a gracious apartment in Nicosia for a very pleasant six weeks.
Old Nicosia is an ancient walled city, its central area surrounded by a sixty to eighty foot high crenellated wall built about 1400 by the Venetians to keep the Turks out. From above it forms a many pointed star with bastions forming the points at intervals, and a deep moat, (now dry and used for car parking). The old city is further subdivided by a sort of “Berlin wall” of concrete blocks and barbed wire, with bored Canadian troops patrolling to keep the Greeks and Turks from each other’s throats. On the south side the Greek Cypriots have built a rather prosperous modern city of high rise office blocks and apartments. The Turkish side is much less developed, and is still dominated by the mosques.
I regret to say we didn’t study Nicosia very much, except for shopping and the coffee bars. That’s the problem when you have good friends to talk to. You don't get to know the locals. But we did meet a vet and his wife who took us home to dinner. He had done his degree at Massey and they both had good English, so we had a pleasant evening talking old times. We also found a grand daughter of my mother’s cousin, a bright Englishwoman, married to a well healed Greek lawyer. They had two daughters at university in England a nd a son, Alexander, still at home. Christine had done a master’s in English literature, with a thesis on the Australian author, Patrick White, whom we also admire, so we found plenty to talk about. However the incident I remember most was when Georges took us out to dinner. Apparently the bread served with our meal was not sufficiently fresh, though it seemed alright to me, so Georges called the waiter over and threw the bread on the floor and demanded better. The waiter apologised but didn’t seem at all taken aback. Neither did the guests at the other tables react at all, though they noticed the performance. Presumably it is common practice in Cyprus.
We also met an American from the US embassy. He claimed to be a sea captain by trade and said he was employed at the embassy to keep track of purchases. He also claimed some expertise in entomology, as a specialist in carabid beetles, but failed to show any interest when I offered to introduce him to the Cypriot beetle specialist in charge of collections. Frank claimed he was really a functionary of the CIA.
The only other Cypriot I got to know at all well was a quarantine officer called Christiachos. His father had been the mayor of their village before the troubles of 1974 when the Greek Cypriots under General Grivas and Archbishop Makarios decided they would unite with Greece, and throw the Turks off the island. Christiachos said they had lived quite peacefully as neighbours until then, and his father had taken some trouble to nip in the bud any racial tensions that the villagers tried to exploit. But bit by bit the races became suspicious of one another, and the more they withdrew into their racial groupings the more suspicious they became, until at last the Turks were forced to desert their homes and move to the north. We have seen whole villages in the poorer country, with deserted houses, once occupied by Turks, and now occupied by no one at all. Christiachos said that if we, as United Nations employees, needed someone from the Greek side to negotiate with the Turks, he was willing to participate. But it never came to that while we were there, and still hasn’t.
It was Christiachos who also took me to visit the Stavrovouni Monastery, built in the third century it is said, by Saint Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, to accommodate the cross of the penitent thief, Dismas, along with a fragment of the true cross that she had brought back from Jerusalem. How she got even slaves to build this great fortress on top of a high and barren mountain, God alone knows. It has fallen down several times since then, and was utterly destroyed by the Turks when they took Cyprus from the Venetians about the end of the 16th century, to be rebuilt by the Orthodox church in 1824. And yet the cross, it is believed, wrapped in white damask, somehow still remains.
Why is it that people prefer to cling to bullshit when there are so many real problems to be addressed? On our visit, Christiachos pointed out the little terraced gardens where the monks try to grow enough vegetables to feed themselves. He also explained that women were not permitted to enter the monastery. When we met one of the bearded fathers in his funny hat, I asked him why this was so. I had thought that perhaps the presence of a scantily clad American girl might put the monastery in an uproar, but he explained quite earnestly, that they believed that if they excluded women, the Turks would go away! How dumb can you be? And him a grown man !
Agriculture varies of course, according to the terrain. On the flat plain that occupies most of the middle of the country there are some good gardens of strawberries and vegetables, as well as carob trees and rough grassland with goats, usually tethered, and rats and snakes. Cypriots have an irrational fear of snakes, probably based on the biblical teachings, and kill them at every opportunity. Christiachos told me to beware of them, for they may hide in the grass with their tails projecting onto the path, (which he pronounced “bath”, leaving me confused for a bit), and when you inadvertently step on the tail, they whip round and bite you. Frank, however, pointed out that snakes are almost the only control of the rats which infest most of the countryside, and only very rarely harm humans. He felt the snakes deserved to be encouraged.
Here and there, there was some cropping, - a field of potatoes with some shapeless peasant ladies harvesting them in a desultory fashion. Weed control seems to be a problem everywhere. There are no fences of course; - Roman aqueducts are more in evidence than fences, - so rank grass grows unchecked around the cultivations. But there are plenty of weeds within the crops too, and we saw fields of broad beans brilliant with red poppies, and purple vetch and pink and white cistus grew among the barley. In the foothills of the Troodos range were many untended plantings of grape cuttings, usually in terraced rows. Frank said the peasants got a subsidy of about a dollar for each grape they planted, but as there was no reward for tending them, they were generally planted and then left.
There are also some cute little villages with picturesque churches, asnd we had some fine coffee at outdoor cafes, sometimes sitting among the aged locals under the “tree of idleness” where they spent the day discussing the village gossip. The coffee is served with an accompanying glass of water, from which a little is poured into the coffee before drinking, “so that any poison that has been slipped into the drink will precipitate out and sink to the bottom”! Like I say, they have an affinity for bullshit, however irrational.
High up in the Troodos we were lucky enough to observe clouds of ladybirds flying up from the valley to cluster in great clumps on the rough bark of the old pines , Pinus nigra, that grow there. I had read about this annual migration of ladybirds in California, but had never expected to witness it. Apparently they accumulate in the mountains at the end of summer, and hibernate on tree trunks and rocks until the spring when they return to the lowlands to persecute the aphids as they emerge. In America, bears feed greedily on the clusters of ladybirds in the mountains in winter.
Being United Nations employees, and therefore international, we also got to visit the Turkish side of Cyprus, including the ports of Kyrenia and Famagusta. Kyrenia is a tiny port dominated by an enormous fortress, and it has a fine museum which includes a wooden boat dredged up off the coast, and dated from 300 BC, and sundry ancient bronze candle holders and ornaments of even greater antiquity. But I found Famagusta much more interesting, because of its ruins and its turbulent history. I found no fault with the quarantine arrangements at either port. The Turks seemed to run a very tight ship.
Famagusta was a port of no particular significance before 1291 when the last of the Crusaders set up there after they were expelled from the Holy Land with the fall of Acre to the Muslims. With the retreating Crusaders came the merchants and bankers of Lebanon and Palestine, to re-establish themselves around the last deep water port in the region, and within a generation Famagusta became very rich. It received and redistributed all the trades of the East and its citizens were said to be the richest in the world. Merchants bribed their patron saints by promising to build basilicas if their cargoes came safely home, and by the middle of the 1300’s there were 365 churches in the city.
Then in 1372, after a falling out between Venetian and Genoese factions in Famagusta, the Genoese invaded the island and sacked the larger cities. Famagusta has never really recovered. A new city has arisen alongside it, but the ruins of the stone churches and cathedrals stand desolate in fields of yellowing grass. Palm trees grow in their aisles, as if in imitation of the remaining vaulted columns which once supported the now absent roofs. When, five hundred years after the sack, the Suez Canal was opened, stone from these churches was looted to build the city of Port Said.
The ancient fortress at the harbour entrance still stands though. It is apparently the original setting for Shakespeare’s play, Othello. There is some confusion about the true identity of Othello himself, - perhaps he was one of a group of three military officers banished from Venice to Famagusta in 1545. One of the three was nick-named Il Moro, on account of his dark skin, and the others were Iago and Cassio. Their crime is not recorded, but an Italian writer, Cintio, wrote a trivial novella about them, and this was the source of Shakespeare’s drama. An alternative theory has Othello as Christoforo Moro, who was a governor of Cyprus about the same time, and whose wife died at sea during their return to Venice. Who knows? But I have looked out to sea from Othello’s tower, and thought of Desdemona.
The vast gothic cathedral of St Nicholas, where once European kings were crowned, in this, the Christian church closest to the Holy Land, has also been well maintained. Since the Turks invaded Cyprus and finally overcame Famagusta in 1571, it has been converted into a mosque. Its Latin icons and statuettes and coloured finery have been removed, and its interior, now painted entirely in white, somehow shows off the soaring gothic forms more simply and impressively than they ever could have been amid all the previous Catholic distraction. My guide, Mr Achey, the head of the quarantine service, happened to be an old school friend of the Mullah, and asked him to run through a chant for me, to demonstrate the wonderful acoustics of the place. The old fellow, in his robes, closed his eyes and tilted back his balding head and gave forth with amazing power. I was suitably impressed, and afterwards asked Mr Achey what it all meant. “Oh, he said in a rather off-hand manner, “God is great, three times, and so on.” He seemed to sense that it would be of limited concern to an infidel.
Afterwards he took us to lunch at a curbside eatery where we had lamb chops cooked in one of those dome shaped ceramic ovens and served with a yoghurt and garlic sauce. Delicious!
When we visited the port a ship was loading oranges, and the wharf was bright from end to end with great open crates of them. Some things are timeless. Oranges at Famagusta called to mind the verses of James Elroy Flecker:
I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep
Beyond the village which men still call Tyre,
With leaden age o’ercargoed, dipping deep
For Famagusta and the hidden sun
That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire;
And all those ships were certainly so old –
Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun
Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,
The pirate Genoese
Hell-raked them till they rolled
Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold.
But now through friendly seas they softly run,
Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green,
Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold.
Conflict and history and ancient monuments have a powerful effect on those of us raised in our raw and predictable land. A walk through the past of older countries, with their violence and greed and waste and suffering, make us so much more aware of what we have so far managed to avoid.