Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island

by Lawrence Durrell

  Things were no different in Cyprus; the long persecution of the Orthodox Church by the Latin culminated in the famous Bulla Cypria in 1260 which made the Latin Archbishop the supreme ecclesiastical power in the island over all clergy; the Orthodox bishops were mere dependants of the Latin bishops and at ordination were forced to take an oath of obedience to the Holy See. Paradoxically enough the powers of the Orthodox clergy were only restored in 1575—by the Turks themselves. Presumably they had seen the patient unobtrusive struggle of the Orthodox against the Latins, and wished to make common cause with them. At any rate when they came they were welcomed by many of the Cypriot peasants who had groaned under the harsh military dictatorship of Venice, and under their rule serfdom disappeared and a fair measure of local autonomy was enjoyed by the people of the island. And later?

  The unexpected phenomenon was now seen of the supreme power and authority over Cyprus passing into the hands of the Archbishop of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus after about 1670, he being now regarded as the ethnarch or leader of the Greek-speaking section of the inhabitants. The original cause which brought the Orthodox prelates out of their previous obscurity was the desire of the central government in Constantinople to devise some local check upon its extortionate and not always submissive local officials; but by the beginning of the nineteenth century the influence acquired by them had become so paramount that the Turks became alarmed. In 1804 a rising against the Archbishop was quelled. In 1821, however, a more serious disturbance occurred and the authorities arrested and executed the Archbishop, bishops and leading personages of the Orthodox communion on the charge of conspiring with the insurgents in Greece, then struggling for their independence.*

  From this one could see just how deeply hidden, and in what depths of unconscious historical process, the roots of Enosis lay hidden. Could it be extirpated if it could not be satisfied? I could not find it in my heart to believe such a thing possible. But it might be accommodated and even turned to our advantage; accommodated, that is to say, psychologically.… How could this best be done?

  The absence of a political life of any sort in the island was a major weakness, and the current political scene divided itself neatly into two panels—Right and Left. It was significant, indeed very significant, that even the flourishing Communist party dared not ignore popular sentiment on the ethnic issue, and was forced to keep the Enosis plank as its foundation. This seemed irrationality bordering on lunacy when one considered what short shrift the Athens Government would have to give to the party and its adherents should Enosis come. Was the national call so powerful a vote-gatherer that even Marxists must respect it or see their party founder? It seemed so.

  And then a constitution? The Greeks feared it, for as Panos said:

  We fear that any delay would spell the death of Union. We could easily be led away by political differences. Our unity would be impaired by a long period of waiting. If we accepted any interim state of things we would founder in apathy and self-division. This is where the English could be so strong, if they produced a constitution so liberal as to be unexceptionable.

  But there lay the rub. Unless Enosis itself were a reserved subject (which no Greek would accept) the legislature would always be overturned by the folly and exaggeration of the Unionists, who would clamor for immediate secession to Greece and dissolve the chamber. That explained the narrowness of the constitutions which Britain offered—they could not be broader and workable. An unsatisfactory hedge of thorns for us to climb through!

  These conclusions did not come altogether, but singly and from many sources; the picture I formed was a composite made up of many fragments of gossip and thought, of many stray meetings in coffee-houses or along the hospitable seashore. I tried to condense them simply for the sake of clearness so that my essay for the bulletin should have the balance and perspective of a real document—not an ephemeral production. But even in this I did not feel directly concerned; my angle of vision was a selfish one.

  I had also at this time begun to teach English to the students of the Nicosia Gymnasium—a task which though arduous was most interesting, since here one could feel the true temperature of nationalist feeling among the older students, who hardly a year later were to be among the terrorist groups. They could not foresee this, as yet, however, and their vociferous enthusiasms led them no farther than public demonstrations of faith in UNO. The thought of violence in Cyprus was far from everybody’s mind. The Archbishop was a man of peace and everything would be settled peacefully. In answer to the question: “What will you do if UNO rejects the appeal?” there was at that time only one answer: “We will take it back. We will have peaceful demonstrations and strikes. We will mobilize world opinion.” Nobody ever replied “We will fight,” and if one suggested it oneself as a question a look of deep pain would appear on the nationalist countenance, the voice would fall reproachfully as it replied: “Fight? Against Britain whom we love? Never!” Despite the mounting tide of feeling the mouthpieces of the movement never ceased to underline the phrase: “Enosis contains no anti-British barb. We love them and want them to stay as friends. But we want to be our own masters.” But there were warnings, too, which bade us hurry if we were to contain the high spirits of the people and canalize them productively.

  The Nicosia Gymnasium was a large rambling building inside the old Venetian walls; together with the Archbishop’s palace it formed the spiritual nerve-center of the Greek community. With its rococo-Doric portals it looked, as all Greek gymnasia do, like a loosely adapted design based on an early illustration of a Doric temple by Schliemann. But it was a handsome place with its broad roadway and feathery green pepper trees, and the little Church of Saint John opposite was a delightful example of Byzantine architecture.

  By electing to live in my own village rather than in the capital (which might have been more practicable) I retained a link with the rural community, even though my hours were such that I had to leave the house at about half past four. I rose, therefore, with the shepherds and scrambled down to the Abbey with the first wave of sheep or cows to where my little car stood, white with dew, under the Tree of Idleness. Light would just be breaking up out of the sea, and against it the rosy spars of the Abbey ruins outlined themselves in sulphurous streaks of bronze and scarlet. The dawns and the sunsets in Cyprus are unforgettable—better even than those of Rhodes which I always believed were unique in their slow Tiberian magnificence. As I breasted the last rise where the road falls like a swallow towards Kyrenia I paused for a minute to watch the sun burst through the surface mists of the sea and splash the mountain behind me with light. Usually I had someone with me—a shepherd cadging a lift to some distant holding, or the sleepy postmaster hurrying to Kyrenia for the first sorting. We smoked in silence and watched the slow conflagration of the world from this little tableland before humming down the breathtaking declivity into Kyrenia. A quick loading of oil and petrol and I would start to climb the range, the sun climbing with me, balcony by balcony, ridge by ridge; until as I breasted the last loop of the pass the whole Mesaoria would spread out under the soft buttery dawn-light, languid and green as a lover’s wish; or else shimmer through a cobweb of mist like the mirage of a Chinese water-print. And always, far away, at the end of the great plain rose the two steep fingers of Santa Sophia which marked the capital.

  My links with my village were also fortuitously preserved in another way—for some of my villagers had sons and daughters studying at the Gymnasium, and there were at least three or four of them waiting for me when I arrived, ready to carry my books and claim friendship with me because their fathers were my friends.

  This indeed was the perfect laboratory in which to study national sentiment in its embryonic state—indeed a Greek island within Cyprus, with its spiritual and political aspirations condensed around the person of the Ethnarch (who was often visible, pacing the old-fashioned balconies of the Palace with an air of gentle reserve) and embodied in Greek language and Greek institutions. Here, too, bloomed th
at extraordinary flower of chance, the quixotic irrational love of England which no other nation seems to have, and in a fantastic sort of way it flowered in blissful co-existence with the haunting dream of Union. It was almost impossible to believe one’s ears at times, so contradictory and so paradoxical did the whole thing seem. The portrait of Byron, for example, in the great hall, at the head of the whiskered team of shepherds and farmers whose efforts brought freedom to Greece. On the headmaster’s desk stood a portrait of Churchill gravely listening to his fervent denunciations of British policy and its injustices to the Cypriot people. “We will never flag, never give in,” he assured me, glancing at the portrait as if to draw moral strength from the grave toby-jug face with its sulky reproving glare.

  Modern Greek history can hardly explain the fantastic romance which the Greek mind has built up around the story of the 1821 Revolution; England sent her greatest poet to help them raise the flag. He died for Greece and England—they are both not countries, but symbols of liberty incarnate.” (This from a school essay.)

  I was swept along on the tide of these feelings whose bewildering polarity and succession of moods followed one another so fast that there was hardly time for one to cohere before another took its place; from the Girls’ Sixth form, plunged in anti-British anarchy, I crossed the road to hear a classics student reciting Byron with tears in his eyes. They were admirable children, each wrapped in the bright silken cocoon of a dream; sleepwalkers who were awakened only by the crash of a pistol or a bomb, and who then gazed about them wonderingly to find that all these brilliant words and thoughts had a resonance only in death, and that the stark geometrical designs of commerce and policy cared nothing for these flowing free-hand poetical designs of a perfect world where Union with Greece meant something not unlike the mystic’s Union with the Infinite. The tragedy is that it need not have happened.

  Need not? It is easy to be wise after the event. Yet in all honesty I cannot be sure whether my own approach to the problems of Enosis would have been more fruitful if it had been embodied in a policy and applied. But in these early days, under the spell of the summer sun and the unpremeditated kindness everywhere, there hardly seemed to be the need for undue haste and worry.

  The Greek educational system itself is an oddity. It was designed by the Germans with a thoroughness and efficiency which is spellbinding. The curriculum might have been designed to keep the student awake all day and all night—so overloaded was it, and so crammed with subjects. In the hands of Greeks too, it had acquired a few subtle modulations without losing its basic form. Teachers were issued with a huge register graduated and squared in which one apparently entered every breath drawn by one’s charges. Intensive tests and checks had to be listed therein and a complicated system of marking adhered to—based apparently on the Queensberry rules. As the curriculum was so vast there was no time to expound. Blocks of printed matter were hurled at the students to learn parrot-fashion. The results were carefully noted on a sort of temperature-chart and then transferred to the register. As there was always a riot if students found their marks falling below the required pass standard one began to fudge them—if only for the sake of peace and quiet. The teacher’s life was a rather tricky one, for the student regarded it as his right to complain to the head if he felt that he was being victimized—and everybody who did not get ten out of ten felt immediately victimized. Many were the storms, the public inquiries, the denunciations, while more often than not the parents of a protesting child would appear at the hearing and wave threatening umbrellas at the responsible master. It was marvelous, and the situations which arose would have delighted the heart of a Dickens. But the professional teacher in the Gymnasium lived a life of acute mental unease. Twice I heard of cases where the teacher undermarked, i.e. victimized, the daughter of a rich and powerful man, and brought down the father’s wrath upon the unfortunate headmaster. “Tread softly, tread lightly, piano pianissimo” was the watchword.

  The composition of the classes was pleasingly democratic, though, and very reminiscent of a Scottish school. There was absolutely no class feeling; Andreas’s son in his tattered clothes sat next to the son of Mr. Manglis, my millionaire, and they were firm friends. But then in this sense Greeks have always been the world’s greatest democrats.

  I was exposed to three of the school’s many classes—the two Sixth forms, male and female, and one which roughly corresponded to an English upper fourth. Epsilon Alpha. This was full of incorrigibles aged around fourteen who spent their time in a variety of ways—but never in listening to me. To achieve silence was impossible—a soft but persistent susurrus like a slow puncture was the nearest one could get to this—and the normal was a growling wave of chatter which rose and fell like a sea. I tried, as an experiment, sending talkers out of the room one by one, in order to see at what stage the class became controllable. I was left at last with three students. As no corporal punishment was permitted in the school it was impossible to do more than gesticulate, foam, dance and threaten: which is what my Greek colleagues did for the most part.

  Stigma Gamma was the appropriate title of the Girls’ Sixth, and here I began my ministrations at seven each day, entering the large unheated classroom with a shiver. They rose politely enough and repeated a prayer under the prompting of the head girl. Then I read out their names from the register—like the dramatis personae to a Greek tragedy: “Electra, Io, Aphrodite, Iolanthe, Penelope, Chloe.” Like the boys, they were a mixed group in the social sense; Electra’s father was a gardener in Kythrea, Io’s father a judge, Penelope the daughter of a shoemaker. They comprised a cross-section of Nicosia and the surrounding districts. But they were uncomfortably united in one thing, besides Enosis, and that was a passionate, heart-rending determination to marry their English teacher. Every morning my desk bore half a dozen offerings—Electra brought black roses and white, Chloe a special kind of meat ball made by her grandmother, Aphrodite a volume of poems I had mentioned. If their devotion had been accompanied by greater self-control in class life would have been easier; but no sooner had I opened the proceedings than each started to do work of her own. One sewed secretively, another made darts, a third made a catapult from a paperclip, a fourth decided to enter up her diary for the day (“Today he looks cross, my teacher, his jaw is set, his brow grim, but I love him all the more”). Reprisals were always accompanied by agonizing tears as the expelled creature betook herself to the library where she ran the risk of being found by the headmistress. Heaven alone knows what punishments a girl student might be liable to undergo. I never dared to ask. I maintained throughout a decorous reserve which always hovered on the edge of laughter. Aphrodite, appropriately enough, was the most spirited and most difficult of the girls. Her father was a rich confectioner of the town and she had all the confidence and repose which comes of never having been short of money. She was indeed as beautiful as her counterpart in myth was supposed to be; but she was something more—she was a writer. She read poetry to herself in a low murmuring voice and behaved for most of the time as if she were succumbing to ether. But these dreamy Chopinesque moods alternated with moods of anarchy. Invited to the blackboard, she had a habit of passing behind the back row of girls and with one flowing movement, invisible as a conjurer’s pass, of tying their pigtails together—so that by the time I was studying her blackboard technique a riot had broken out among the back benches, where six girls found themselves yoked like oxen. Invited to write an essay on her favorite historical character she never failed to delight me with something like this: “I have no historical character but in the real life there is one I love. He is writer. I dote him and he dotes me. How pleasure is the moment when I see him came at the door. My glad is very big. How pleasure is that moment. As all people are dreamed so am I,” and so on. Her essays were a perpetual delight; but they were not the only ones. Dimitra also wrote some which were memorable, though she always verged upon self-pity. “I am orphan and have never been enjoyed,” was the beginning to one. She also wa
s afflicted by the verb “dote,” as indeed the whole class was. This was the unfortunate fruit of a day when Aphrodite asked me slyly why English had only one word for “love” when Greek had several; in my attempt not to let the Empire down I produced “adore” and “dote.” The latter stuck like a burr. But unfortunately each girl elected to marry it to a different preposition so that my essays the next day were full of heart-rending examples. Electra described the King and Queen of Greece “doting at each other”; while Chloe wrote: “When they married they were in a great dote. He was so excitement and she was so excitement. They were both excitement.” Which was fair enough I suppose; only it was difficult to see how on earth to correct such work intelligibly. Driving home in the afternoon I used to brood on these problems, mentally conjugating “dote” like a Bach fugue, “I dote, thou dotest, he dotes.…” On Independence Day I found the blackboard shrouded with crape and with the legend on it “WE DEMAND OUR FREEDOM.” Everyone was looking extraordinarily tense and self-possessed. After prayers Aphrodite stepped forward and handed me a petition signed by the class insisting on the right of the Cypriot people to be free. I thanked her. “You understand us, sir,” she said, and her voice had a distinct tremor in it. “So you will understand this.… We do not wish to be impolite or embarrass you.… We love England.…” I laid it silently beside the black rose from Kythrea and the meat pie and the confiscated knitting, hair-slides, ribbons and copy of Endymion. It seemed to me to symbolize the situation perfectly.

  The boys were quite as colorful, though in many ways more exigent. I am thinking of Stephanides, the wine-merchant’s son with his battered grin and pocket comb, of Kallias, of that fat ruffian Joanides, of Spiropoulos and Grikos and Aletraris.… It cost me something to hold them in check. Yet they were an easygoing and polite lot of youths, no better and no worse than their counterparts in Europe, and all bedeviled by the national dream. Handsome Leonides, for example, who stayed behind one day and asked me whether I would assist him in writing to a pen pal in Glasgow. Her letter and photograph were produced after much blushing and scraping of the floor with his toe. It was an odd letter from a factory-hand who was dying to know about the world and thought that a pen pal was the best way to find out. She asked Leonides whether everyone was black in Cyprus and wore nightshirts. These questions did not hurt so much as astonish him. “I thought such an advanced race as the English would know this sort of thing. If I, a Greek, know that they are white in England and only wear nightshirts in bed, how is it that she …?” I answered these questions as best I could, and drafted a reply or two for him, leaving one or two of his characteristic mistakes; but here again I noticed in his draft the word “dote” which proved that he had somehow been in contact with the Girls’ Sixth. When I accused him of it he blushed and grinned. “It is Aphrodite,” he admitted at last, overcoming a formidable resistance. “We ride home together on our bicycles. We are doted on each other, sir.”