Cyprus from prehistoric dwarf elephants to Ayia Napa nightclubs
CYPRIA A journey to the heart of the Mediterranean
ALEX CHRISTOFI 352pp. Bloomsbury. £20.
LIKE ALL THE LARGER Mediterranean islands, Cyprus has seen conquerors, settlers and traders come and go. Alex Christofi’s engaging, vigorous and at times passionate account of the island’s troubled history amply reveals how it has served as the crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean. In the Middle Ages, it attracted masters (and, in the case of the Venetian queen Caterina Cornaro, a mistress) from as far west as Genoa and Venice, whose merchants fanned out from Famagusta to Turkey, Syria and Egypt, and exploited the island’s sugar plantations. Then, in the late nineteenth century, the British arrived, and they are still present, both wearing uniform and – in the nightlife of modern Ayia Napa – wearing rather less. Christofi offers a personal account as well as a carefully annotated history that begins with dwarf elephants 100,000 years ago, and remains unresolved: attempts to settle the division of the island following the Turkish invasion fifty years ago are still getting nowhere.
Christofi is at his best when he describes the extraordinary careers of those who have attempted to rule over the island. There was the fourteenth-century regent John I, who suspected his Bulgarian bodyguards of treason and had them thrown one by one out of the highest window in Hilarion castle, whose impressive ruins still tower far above Kyrenia in northern Cyprus. And there was the Italian-born Emanuele Palma di Cesnola, who in 1865 became US consul in Ottoman Cyprus. Obsessed by the archaeological riches of the island, he dug up tens of thousands of ancient artefacts, 35,000 of which were bought by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, of which he later became director. A comparable amount of his loot was dispersed across museums in Europe, which partly explains why so many still have entire rooms devoted to ancient Cyprus.
Under British rule Cyprus was managed by governors who had little understanding of the subject population; one of them, Field Marshal Harding, was an old Kenya hand whose ideas about how to suppress inter-communal violence only exacerbated it. In 1955, prison sentences of up to two years were decreed for those who carried stones in their pocket. Christofi argues that a large part of the trouble in those years originated not so much in hostility between Greeks and Turks, but in deep divisions between the right-wing Greek terrorists of EOKA who wished to force Enosis, union with Greece, and those on the left. The wily Makarios III, archbishop and eventual president of Cyprus, worked closely with the terrorist leader Geor
