Colin Thubron - Journey Into Cyprus

Contents

About the Book

The people, their history and the beauty of an island on the brink of tragedy.

This is the account of a unique journey a six-hundred-mile trek on foot around Cyprus in the last year of the islands peace. Colin Thubron intertwines myth, history and personal anecdote in a quest from which the characters and places, architecture and landscape all spring vividly to the readers eye.

About the Author

Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first writing was about the Middle East Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled into the Soviet Union in an ancient Morris Marina, pursued by the KGB, a journey he recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier) and Shadow of the Silk Road (all available in Vintage). In 2010 Colin Thubron became President of the Royal Society of Literature.

Also by Colin Thubron

Non-fiction

Mirror to Damascus

The Hills of Adonis

Jerusalem

Among the Russians

Behind the Wall

The Lost Heart of Asia

In Siberia

Shadow of the Silk Road

To a Mountain in Tibet

Fiction

The God in the Mountain

Emperor

A Cruel Madness

Falling

Turning Back the Sun

Distance

To the Last City

This journey, dear Noo-Noo, is dedicated to you, remembering your love.

COLIN THUBRON

Journey into Cyprus

Preface

THIS SIX-HUNDRED-MILE WALK through Cyprus in the spring and summer of 1972 traversed an island which is now no longer recognizable. The world which it depicts a mosaic of Greek and Turkish villages interknit has seemingly gone for ever, and such a journey, wandering at will among the two communities, is now impossible.

Since the Turkish invasion of 1974, the population has drastically polarized. The Greek Cypriots some eighty per cent of the inhabitants have crowded into the southern part of the island, while the Turkish Cypriots occupy the north. The line which divides them runs west from old Famagusta through Nicosia to the Bay of Morphou, reserving to the Turks the rich Mesaoria plain and the long spine of coastal mountains, while leaving the Greeks their ancient stronghold of the Troodos Mountains and the southern cities of Limassol, Larnaca and Paphos.

It is an unhappy and unequal division, but after the atrocities of recent years these two peoples, whatever their political agreement, will live apart. Already the two halves of the island are stamped with their personalities. The north has fallen into neglect, the south into over-exploitation.

The nervous cohabitation which I witnessed in 1972 was, I now realize, the islands halcyon time and this is the record of a country which will not return.

C.G.D.T.

London, 1985

CHAPTER ONE

The Goddess from the Sea

AS THE SEAS flow eastward into one another Adriatic, Ionian, Aegean and Europe merges with Asia, the past leaves itself visibly on the landscape. The soil of the Levant is eroded to its shoreline where forests were felled for ancient fleets, and villages remain on inland hilltops where they were driven by pirates. These half Asiatic lands, dazzled into harshness, elicit awe and a strange excitement. Their beauty is of contour and light. The olive, the rock, an arc of blue their effect is made with magic economy, and to them a man is always, inexplicably, returning, as if their very starkness were a lure.

A March evening brought back this hard affection, on a Cyprus hillside where no colour intimated spring. Below me the land lay in calm. Half the ridges were eroded to glittering bones, and the tracks showed white and permanent in its valleys. Above the grain- and fruit-bearing plains this toughness becomes the countrys core an earth durable rather than resilient, whose rock is the despair of farmers. Too much coveted, trodden by generations of peasants and soldiers, its dust is thick enough with stones to break the back of any plough or man.

Over the hill where we stood, the remains of the Neolithic town of Khirokitia lay in and out of scrub. The paling light lent the walls a variegated softness which was not their own.

You see, its like I told you. The man sank his grizzled head on his hands. Nothing. Just stones. And it is true, these ruins are little more than the foundations of walls built with rocks carried from the winter stream eight thousand years before. But they mark a beginning. Laid down unhewn for streets and houses, they once enclosed the islands earliest men, and my own journey, which is to be a voyage through time as well as space, begins in this archaic twilight.

The old man had attached himself to me out of curiosity. You should go to Salamis, he muttered. There are bigger stones there. Or try the castles round Kyrenia. Now theres something! They grow out of the mountains like horns.

I promised I would see them, Salamis too and all those coasts, and to walk along the mountains.

Walk! he shouted among the country people it is not rude to shout You cant walk here! His bloodshot eyes bulged in dismay. Do you know anything about this country? You wont last a minute! The Turks will think you a spy. Any sentry could skewer you on the spot! Then he lowered his voice and said in a tone almost of comfort: In fact I expect theyll just throw you into prison. But of course nobody will know where youve gone. Youll just stay there for years He made a chewing motion with his mouth and revolved his hands. Years and years and years

I grinned into this stubborn face, which looked back teasingly out of its whiskers. He was genuinely concerned for me and had clapped a horny hand on my knee to prevent my leaving him. But at this time, when there was hostility between Greek Cypriot factions as well as against the Turkish minority, I considered myself safer than him. And in a year, after Turkish invasion and civil war, I was proved right.

But there are things more fearful than the Turks, he said. Grivas is training guerrillas in the Troodos Mountains. Did you know that?

Yes, I had heard that. In these last months of his life, Grivas was still trying to impose his ideal of ENOSIS, Cypriot union with Greece. But if Grivas could escape a hundred thousand British soldiers in the mountains for six years, he would surely elude me?

But what if you cant elude him? He eats Englishmen for dinner. He kebabs them. They just vanish. For all the mans moustache and furious eyes, something was winking under the face. He touched my elbow and added in a whisper, as if the ghosts of Neolithic men might overhear him: Seriously, the Greeks are all right. We are a hospitable, civilized people. But the Turks may the Devil wipe his nose on them! never trust a Moslem.

I looked back at him with the lethargy of someone who has found no nation much crueller than the rest. To experience a land as varied as Cyprus, I wanted to walk. To go through a country which transforms itself valley by valley, from whose mountains the land on one side may throw up a commotion of limestone hills, on the other spread a corn-softened plain, an island which threads between centuries in a perpetual astonishment of architecture to walk here is only reasonable, if a person has time. And I had four months of spring and early summer. To go on foot was to entrust myself to the people, a gesture of confidence, and to approach the land as all earlier generations had known it, returning it to its old proportions.