Larnaca- After my hyper brief visit to Athens described in the previous post, I landed in the EU’s southeastern extremity and eastern Mediterranean’s closest thing to stability. In the damp, cold night I somehow found the apartments I had stayed in here back in 2019 run by a friendly Armenian family on the periphery of the city centre. I’m thrilled to be back here in the quiet winter sun. The CBD has lost a bit of its luster owing to the construction of a mall by a South African developer which lured a number of shops out of the centre to glitzier pastures on the periphery. I also discovered that with almost no tourists in town, some shopkeepers have very limited winter hours or may not leave home to bother opening if it. A bit lonely yes, but it provides the solitude to think and reflect. About life in NYC, family squabbles, renewing my own love for life which has become utterly diluted by the personal miasma and societal malaise at home. Yet here sits this lovely island with its tortured modern history and past so far gone I can romanticise it.
Crusaders, Ottomans, Phoenicians, Hellenes. Antiquity and early Christendom. This place encompasses everything I love about our world. Rather than an island paradise it is an island of hard realties. A frozen conflict with a going-nowhere peace process. A massive migrant crisis. But where there is history, there is hope. The ethnic-Greek-administered south of the island is trying to bolster a tech sector to get its economy back on track in the face of soaring inflation. More infrastructure projects are underway to bolster tourism revenue (in the hot season). Despite the banking crisis a decade ago, the Republic has remained in the eurozone making it a beacon of hard currency operating in a sea of soft currencies with hemorrhaging exchange rates (Lebanon, Turkey). Cyprus is a rock, a fissured rock but a rock nonetheless.
Wandering the streets here it’s easy to get lost. Losing my way in this small, intimate place with its serpentine, stone laced streets is a pleasure all unto itself. Century-old tumbledown storefronts with roofs caving in sandwiched between immaculate fashion retailers. It just somehow works. Without any effort and a smartphone offline, I suddenly find myself back at my temporary flat as if it were where I was meant to be. The eden of Aphrodite has called me to pull fruit from her sunburnt trees. Travel is her aphrodisiac.
