Cyprus mouflon (Lefke/Lefka) “I am just Cypriot,” I find myself saying in an interview recently having already declared that I was half Irish, half Cypriot.* For some Cypriots the question of identity is very simple: they may simply be Greek Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot, for others identity tends to…
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Yesterday when I sat down to write, I didn’t want to write about the one thing that’s been on our lips for some time now: Andreas Soudjis. Soudjis was recently sentenced to a month in prison in north Cyprus for taking photos in a military area, more precisely the fenced…
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‘Bravery’, ‘mother Greece’ and ‘Greeks of Cyprus’ were just a few of the phrases I heard during an impassioned speech made by Education Minister Prodromos Prodromou at a church service in Kakopetria recently. The speech, lasting around 30 minutes, was to commemorate the memory of EOKA fighters at the hands…
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“I hate to be morbid, but if war broke out in Cyprus where would we go? We don’t have a metro,” I asked a colleague as war broke out in Ukraine. She reminded me that we have bomb shelters. It was a stark reminder that as much as we try…
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The Cyprus problem is like a European summer; you know there’s going to more rain than sun, but each day you find yourself holding out just a little hope for a dry and sunlit day. Just last week I started writing a post about how the island is edging ever…
Read moreDear friends, The river Gialias has arrived! In fact, due to heavy rains islandwide over the last month, the river has been running for at least a month. It wanes and then replenishes itself. For Cypriots living in Cyprus (and permanent residents) this is indeed a bit of a novelty…
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Submerged in Nicosia traffic, check after check at non-existent checkpoints, and an hour and a half later I arrive at my destination, our choir rehearsal. This was the first time I’d crossed to the north since the start of the covid pandemic in Cyprus in March, 2020. As I was…
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Being the other, or at least feeling like the other, can come in many forms. It is a topic I keep returning to (including here in a very early blog post in 2015). In Cyprus, where the dominant community is Greek Cypriot and also Greek Orthodox, belonging to another community…
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“I am a child of Anatolia. Everything on me is Turkish. My roots are in Central Asia. I am Turkish in my language, culture and history. My country is my motherland. Cyprus culture, Turkish Cypriots, Greek Cypriots, a common state, all these are nonsense. The Greek Cypriots are Byzantium, they…
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Gogo: “Gidelim?” (Shall we go?)Didi: “Εν μπορουμε, καρτερουμεν τον Γκοντο.” (We can’t, we’re waiting for Godot) As if on a merciless loop, the words were uttered in desperation time and time again throughout the play. Didi and Gogo, played by Giorgos Kyriacou and İzel Seylani respectively, performed their parts in…
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