Author Archives: maxudov

The origins of Cypria

THE USONIAN: What inspired you to write Cypria?

ALEX CHRISTOFI: I always knew I wanted to write about a book about Cyprus. For a long time, I assumed it would be a novel. I started out writing fiction, and I imagined this amazing star-crossed lovers plot set around the 1974 invasion, which would help bring general readers into understanding the complicated politics of the island. But the longer I thought about it, the less realistic it seemed. Some of the stuff I wanted to write about wouldn’t fit within the scope of a novel.

And then I read The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak [which also centers on a forbidden romance between Greek and Turkish Cypriot characters]. [At that point I realized] that [plot had] been done really well, and the idea didn’t need me anymore. It freed me to write a book that didn’t already exist—to write the whole history of the island in a single volume in the English language, and try to bring everything in, from when humans first arrived to the present day.

TU: Cypria is a beautifully told work that compresses thousands of years of history into a manageable text. Before I read the book, I knew a lot about Cyprus, but there were so many stories in this book that were new to me—like how the Crusaders invented the sugar plantation system that eventually was forcefully imposed on the Americas, or how Luigi Cesnola’s problematic excavations actually launched New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. How did you conceive of the structural prism to hold all these stories?

AC: When moving through places [in Cyprus], you move through time. One of the places where this is stark is in Nicosia. At the end of Ledra Street, there’s a checkpoint. And you if you do cross over there, you end up going through this Buffer Zone that’s been basically preserved since 1974—it’s the same with the ghost town of Varosha. So there are all these little places that seem to embody a particular moment in history. There’s a great tradition of travel writing about Cyprus, and I really liked the idea of writing a book that kind of traveled through space and time all at once. It’s a historical tour of the island. That was the only way I could find a real vessel that would allow me to say everything I wanted.

Rather than accepting the world’s narrative—which is that Cyprus is a footnote to world history—I tried to make the argument up front that it’s a pivot point for the world—what Greeks would call the omphalos, the navel of the world. The ancient Greeks thought that was Delphi, but I would argue it was Cyprus, which was this amazing nexus of Eurasian empires. It becomes the story of the world through a grain of sand.

TU: You also start at the very beginning—a prehistoric time of ancient elephants, which, in your telling, inspired the legend of the Cyclopes, and indeed, the name of Cyclopes’ cave in Ayia Napa. Tell me about your interest in the deep history of the island.

AC: I actually found the early history way more interesting than I expected to, so it took up more of the book than I had planned. Part of that story involved the Bronze Age kingdom of Alashiya, which was clearly a really important regional power. The king of Alashiya would address the pharaoh of Egypt as a brother, and the ruler of Ugarit [a city-state in Syria] would address the King of Alashiya as Father. And it seems to have been the biggest copper trader in the world at the time. So it felt important to ground the story in this sense that Cyprus was vital to the emergence of Mediterranean culture.

TU: As you mentioned, there’s a long tradition of travel writers who have written about Cyprus. Your book, however, is from a Cypriot perspective. As a writer, what were you trying to do that Lawrence Durrell or Colin Thubron couldn’t in their milestone travel narratives, Bitter Lemons and Journey into Cyprus, respectively?

AC: I did like the idea of drawing on that tradition. The Durrell and Thubron books are really amazing, particularly the Thubron—he traveled across Cyprus in 1973, so it became this historical document of the last year that the island was undivided. I liked the idea that my book could be a faithful account of the island as it stood in 2022-23.

My heritage is both British and Cypriot, but I don’t think there have been very many books about Cyprus written for an English-language audience, from what academics might call the Cypro-centric perspective.

I do think that colored the way that the way that the [Durrell and Thubron] accounts were written. The modern genre of travel writing began with Mark Twain; rather than setting out to write an uncomplicated account, Twain sent up the conventions of travel—wherever the travelers get dragged, they are super bored, even though they’re looking at a Da Vinci or something—they just want to have dinner or get back on the boat. Some of the narrative irony of that genre got lost over time. And sometimes writers had a tendency to caricature locals as a way of providing light entertainment, which is not the most modern approach.

TU: One thing I loved about the book is that you really spend a lot of time unpacking the history of the cuisine—like commandaria, or halloumi. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that makes Cyprus the island it is through the history of food—and it’s stuff we sometimes leave out in a lot of similar histories. Tell me about that.

AC: In my education, I was taught in the grand old historical mode of the “great man” theory of history, the idea that the dates of monarchs and great battles were the stuff of history. And the older I’ve gotten, the more problematic I’ve found that approach. Apart from occluding the roles of people in the working class, peasants, women or people of color, the great man theory also served to focus on conflicts more than interchange.

If you don’t talk about culture, it’s very hard to show the positive side of cultural interchange. If you’re presenting history as something that’s staged as a pitched battle, then it’s always going to seem that different cultures are irreconcilable. I didn’t want to shy away from the fact that there’s often been very violent conflict on the island, but that’s not the whole story, and it’s dangerous to say that it is. I also just really wanted to write a thousand words on halloumi.

TU: Great works of narrative history often animate larger than life characters. In your book, there are characters like the insufferable “emperor” Isaac Comnenus, or the many enigmas of General Grivas and Nikos Sampson—and the persistent mystery regarding Henry Kissinger’s alleged influence on the outcome of the 1974 Turkish invasion of the island. How do you balance the need for narrative clarity versus historical speculation?

AC: Whenever something’s political, the easiest thing in the world is to tell the set of facts which accords with the conclusion you want to draw. Very often in my research, I found a bunch of circumstantial evidence for something that didn’t amount to a “smoking gun.” From almost the moment it happened, many people in Cyprus were absolutely convinced that there was a conspiracy led by Kissinger to invade the north of the island, that it was all pre-planned, and that he knew exactly what he was doing.

And the minutes of some of these secret meetings, which we can now see, just don’t seem to indicate that Kissinger was on top of his brief. He thought Famagusta was called “Samagusta.” He didn’t know the basic geography of the island. I mean, obviously, as a Cypriot, it hurts to think that it’s beneath Kissinger’s notice; it’s dignified to think that Cyprus was in a really important geopolitical position.

Maybe the reality is something sadder, which is that [the conflict] was collateral damage that Kissinger took very little notice of. So I wanted to leave open possibilities for interpreting things in in different ways—that is the only honest way to narrate such a disputed history.

TU: Many histories of Cyprus tend to focus on antiquity, or the Crusades, or the Cyprus Problem, but you contended with a lot of the phenomena that have happened recently—like the commercialization of Ayia Napa, the geopolitical scramble for natural gas, or the more recent Russian influx into Limassol. Where do you think Cyprus is headed, and do you see a future in which the reunification of the island might be achieved?

AC: The reason the book is called Cypria is that I wanted this book to be the kind of prequel to the present in the same way as the original Cypria served to show everything that had led to the Trojan War. That Cypria was supposedly written by a writer called Stasinus. It told all of the founding myths that led up to The Iliad and the story of the Trojan War.

Aristotle said that you could make one or two tragedies out of an Iliad or an Odyssey, but you could make a dozen out of the Cypria. So setting aside the literary qualities of Homer, which I don’t think you can dispute, the content of the Cypria was super important. Sadly, we have only a few fragments left, so we have to infer much of its contents from other later writers.

The present conflicted, contradictory nature of the island is so much easier to understand when you can see that, for instance, Ayia Napa was a replacement tourist resort for the loss of Varosha. Now we’ve got this absurd situation where you’ve got a resident population of less than 4,000 in Ayia Napa that can all fit into the city’s biggest nightclub. And then we’ve got 1.9 million tourists a year. It’s like the lunatics are running the asylum, but with a wash of Russian money.

I think it’s so much easier to understand where we’ve arrived if we can concede that each of the incremental, reasonable decisions that people felt had to be taken at the time have in turn led to this mess.

In terms of the future of the island, [Turkish Cypriot leader] Ersin Tatar is very aligned to [Turkish President] Recep Erdoğan, and I can’t see any realistic way to bring him to the negotiating table in good faith.

So for the next political cycle, however long that may be, it’s hard to imagine the stagnant situation really shifting. Change could take place if countries like Turkey, Greece, the US, and the UK felt it was in their vested interest to have a peaceful, solid, and unified island in eastern Mediterranean. For instance, if they felt it was worth having Cyprus joining NATO, or having the north of Cyprus be part of the EU—to be less susceptible to people smuggling and drug smuggling. There were good reasons to suppose that those things will become more important in the future, but we’re not going to get a kind of easy diplomatic negotiation in the next few years.

All of that said, University of Warwick professor Neophytos Loizides recently published a fascinating study showing the ‘zones of agreement’ between the two main communities that could pave the way for a lasting settlement on the island. So the possibility exists if the will is there.

There’s a well-told story of the island as one riven by conflict, where each moment of new cultural impact becomes another kind of division of the island’s history and its culture, a division or a dilution. And to me, one of the things I absolutely love about Cyprus is its hybridity—it feels like a kind of layering. And I think if you can see each of these cultures as being additive, that has a huge impact on how you see the present situation, and hopefully charts a route out.

Interview with Harrison Blackman first published in The Usonian.

Varosha

How and when did you find out about Varosha, and what do you find interesting about it?

I remember when I was younger, being taken to a lookout post in the south east of Cyprus. There was a long telescope that pointed not at the sky, but at an empty city. I was told this was the closest we could get – that the people who lived there had fled one morning in 1974, and no one had been inside since. I remember wondering whether I would ever set foot there and dismissing it as unlikely.

Could you briefly explain what happened in Varosha – what was it like before 1974 and why was it abandoned?

Varosha was one of the most glamorous beach resorts in the Mediterranean. It was a favourite with Elizabeth Taylor and the jet set, as well as the birthplace of ABBA. But in 1974 the military dictatorship in Greece tried to depose the democratically elected President of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios III, in a coup. In response Turkey invaded from the north. When Turkish airstrikes hit Varosha on 14 August the inhabitants evacuated. Most took nothing with them as they expected to return quickly. That was fifty years ago. The city was fenced off as a bargaining chip for negotiations, but there was never a peace agreement, only a ceasefire.

What were the logistics behind your visit – e.g. did you need to get permission to enter, were you free to roam on your own, etc?

Bizarrely, the Turkish military, which is still in de facto control of the perimeter, has decided to open it up to tourists. They have re-paved one of the main streets (it is already cracking because of all the plant roots) and you can hire a bike or walk around. On the desolate beach front there is an ice cream stand. Turkish Cypriot police stand guard and all the buildings are roped off because the ceilings are falling in. Parts of the city are also mined.

What kind of emotions did you feel as you were walking around?

I felt quite dissociated as it was difficult to process what I was seeing. There was almost no one else there. With the rope barriers, it felt as if I were touring the set of a film about a disaster that had wiped out humanity – as if I was about to turn a corner and see Pedro Pascal in a dirty utility shirt having his makeup touched up. At the changing of the guard, tannoys would play Für Elise, which was unpleasantly reminiscent of Squid Game.

Is there anything in particular you’re trying to capture in these images?

Opening the place to civilians seems to invite disaster tourism, but it feels important that we keep sight of the fact that these thousands of buildings each represent the ruin of a life. A building without people is a kind of corpse, a body missing its soul. There is something deeply melancholy about what remains, offering suit tailoring for missing bodies, glasses for missing eyes. A discotheque with no dancing feet and no warm breath. Here is a Kodak sign and an empty beach; there is a Coca Cola sign and no one to drink.

Why is now a good time for us to think about Varosha and Cyprus more generally?

I find it hard to believe anyone would look at this place and see victory. Cyprus stands as a warning that the opportunity for a just solution can expire. There are people on both ‘sides’ who left home half a century ago and never returned. Contrary to popular belief, concrete doesn’t last for ever: you can see in Varosha that it barely lasts fifty years. The city, and the past it represents, cannot be re-inhabited now, only condemned. So if one of our most beautiful places is ever to be lived in again, we will have to build something new. It is easy to see the tragedy in that judgement, but it is possible to find hope in it, too.

As a British Cypriot, why was this book important to you personally?

When I think of my own dual identity, it is clear that my life has been enriched by it, and that offers me an important vantage from which to recast the island’s history. We have already begun to move away from saying that someone is ‘half British, half Cypriot’, like an Exquisite Corpse, and towards a more layered understanding of identity. But we have yet to extend that understanding to hybrid cultures like that of Cyprus. If we view a cultural influence as competing with what came before, it becomes a source of conflict; but when we view it as additive, we open a space to understand how each new layer enriches the community.

These responses were given as part of a photo essay for the Observer. An extract from Cypria depicting Varosha is published in the New European.

Interview: Cypria

1. Cypria is a beautiful exploration of Cyprus’ history and its unique place in Europe, but it’s also a personal story for you as a British-Cypriot. You mention in the introduction it’s something you’ve long wanted to write about. When did you first get the idea for a book like this? Did it change as you were writing it, or is it how you envisioned it?

Growing up I always thought it was odd that there was no modern, single-volume history in English – if you wanted to learn more, people would recommend books like Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, a memoir (a very readable one) that covers about two years of the island’s history. For a long time, I told people I wanted to write a Great Cypriot Novel, but as the years passed, it seemed increasingly outrageous that this history of Cyprus – the one I wanted to read growing up – didn’t exist. So I went back to learn everything I could, starting 12,000 years ago when humans first arrived.

I knew there was a lot of 20th century history to write about, from the violent struggle against the British to the conflict that led to the island being torn in two; what I hadn’t realised was how rich the island’s early history is. Even before the name Aphrodite was uttered, Cyprus had the first water wells in the world, the first pet cat, its own writing system and a powerful lost Bronze Age kingdom named Alashiya.

2. Was writing about something you have such a personal connection to a very different experience to your last book, Dostoevsky in Love?

Both have been a labour of love, but in different ways. Dostoevsky in Love was a bit like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle composed of the writer’s complete works – an Oulipian approach to biography – whereas Cypria addresses the island’s politics partly through deeply personal family history.

I take readers with me to visit some of my happiest memories; to the village café where generations of my family whiled away hours drinking thick, sweet coffee, playing backgammon and talking about communism; to a coastal fort where my great-grandfather was imprisoned by the British for years.

Growing up, we used to walk around the fort all the time to get our favourite rose-flavoured ice cream at the beach front, but we never went inside. To tell you the truth, I was afraid to know what the cell looked like, or to stand at the gallows where he was almost hanged. I promised myself that if I were to write this book, I would visit these difficult, terrible places too.

Cyprus is not simply a footnote, condemned to the periphery of other peoples’ histories.

3. You did a lot of research for the book, including multiple trips to Cyprus. Was there anything that particularly surprised or challenged you?

I wanted to see everything with my own eyes and photograph everything. That meant going to places in the northern part (controlled by the Turkish army) that I’d never visited before, as well as hotspots for political tension. I confess I was a little paranoid, having barely set foot in the north before.

When we got to Kyrenia we were buzzed by Turkish fighter jets at low altitude – I later found out that they were practising for a parade but I didn’t know that when it happened. We were among the first civilians allowed into the ghost town of Varosha, which was encircled by the Turkish military in 1974.

My dad and I also inveigled ourselves into the compound of the Presidential Palace, and later we accidentally started a row at a UN checkpoint while trying to photograph the abandoned Ledra Palace Hotel during a protest. I also didn’t enjoy crawling into a tiny guerrilla hideout used during the insurgency campaign, as it is exactly the kind of place you’d find a scorpion, or perhaps the deeply venomous blunt-nosed viper, which hibernates at that time of year in caves on mountain slopes. I might go back to writing novels.

4. What is your favourite fact about Cyprus?

That is a tough one! I think the facts that stayed with me were those that showed Cyprus is not simply a footnote, condemned to the periphery of other peoples’ histories. For instance, it was fascinating, if disturbing, to learn that the sugar plantations now associated with the West Indies were pioneered in the Middle Ages on Cyprus. The Cypria itself, a lost ancient ‘prequel’ to the Iliad, seems to have been an important ancient text; Aristotle claimed that ‘out of an Iliad or an Odyssey only one tragedy can be made, or two at most, whereas several have been made out of the Cypria’. But I think my favourite fact is that the Bronze Age king of Alashiya addressed the Egyptian pharaoh as ‘my brother’, assuming an equal status. It makes you question how different history might look when told from the Cypriot perspective.

5. Finally, what do you hope readers will take away from Cypria?

I want people to see that the island’s history is so much richer than its recent conflicts. Firstly it is crucial to understand that Cyprus experienced remarkably little ethno-national conflict until recently – Cypriots of all kinds got on with their neighbours for thousands of years. But also because it is only when we see history as something additive that we begin to understand what makes Cyprus so special.

The tendency to chop up history makes Cyprus look like a queasy salad of Mycenaeans, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians, Romans, Umayyads, Abbasids, Byzantines, English Crusaders, Templars (for one year), French Lusignans, Venetians, Ottomans and again the British. What if, instead of dividing and diluting Cypriot identity, we see each of these periods as contributing a new layer of complexity? What if we stop seeing the island as a mongrel and start seeing it as a unique hybrid? Taking that perspective solves fundamental questions, not just for Cyprus but for all multicultural societies.

First published on the Bloomsbury website.