Larnaca- I have a new piece out this week on The Redline Podcast site on the election of Nikos Christodoulides as the republic’s new president, it’s youngest and therefore first post-1974 generation leader. This island has long fascinated the hell out of me. A really basic take is whether this former Ottoman, Venetian, Hellenic, and Phoenician domain is part of a greater political Europe or a sea-borne exclave of the Levant.
After the past few weeks what I can attempt to say it Cyprus is somehow both. It’s very existence and history belies the notion that Europe and Asia are in fact discrete geographic entities. A dubious intellectual construct of bygone era. It can be seen as an extension of Greece in terms of language, orthodoxy, Hellenism and a host of other things. It is also part of the former Ottoman realm or perhaps neo-Ottomanism in terms of the current occupation of the north by the Turkish military.
In the streets of Nicosia it feels like Queens minus the Latinos in terms of the sheer number of languages overheard just walking from my hotel to Ledra street. Punjabi, Bangla, Igbo, Cebuano, Krio, Russian, Moldovan, the list could go one for a while not to mention Levantine Arabic, Armenian, Modern Hebrew, and of course Cypriot Greek. And this is all happening in such a small city. I might not seem as remarkable in a sprawling centre like Athens but here on this finite Kissingerian ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ it’s quite striking. Oh and let’s not forget English! Three percent of the country is sovereign UK territory conveniently located astride the Middle/Near East.
