The island that gave the world halloumi cheese and George Michael’s dad can be an unsinkable plane service from which RAF jets strike Iranian drones. The geostrategic significance of Cyprus has made its historical past wealthy in such contrasts, ever because it was adopted by Zeus’s personal aunt.
Cyprus was as soon as house to dwarf elephants and tiny hippos, however its most consequential in addition to stunning notable native was most likely the goddess Aphrodite, who was born from the frothing semen of her father Uranus and stepped ashore at Paphos. She later goaded Paris into kidnapping Helen, so encouraging the Trojan struggle, whose survivors, too, washed up on the island and started singing of their wonderful victories. Homer himself may need been a Cypriot.
“Like many peoples of the Mediterranean,” Christofi warns us good-naturedly, Cypriots “imagine that the premise of all good tales is exaggeration”. He thus adopts a likable rhetorical technique of treating myths and superstitions – such because the story {that a} church in Cyprus comprises a fraction of the True Cross on which Jesus died, or that his good friend Lazarus moved to Cyprus afterwards – with the identical seriousness and empathy as historic details, for (because the unstated argument presumably runs) a tradition is just not constituted of actuality alone.
Within the historical past of therapeutic thought, the island’s function is definitively immense, as native son Zeno, a rich dealer of purple dye, turned to philosophy and based the college of stoicism. By way of subsequent luminaries such because the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, stoicism survived to encourage the invention of cognitive behavioural remedy and a flourishing motion of neo-stoicism as we speak. Which isn’t to indicate that the island produced solely serene contemplators; Cypriots had been additionally among the many first to forge iron and supposedly supplied Alexander the Nice along with his favorite sword. The truth that the island was already a nexus of the worldwide arms commerce millennia in the past gives an ironic footnote to its current exploitation by Nato forces.
Not that it escaped earlier stretches of colonialism. The Knights Templar occupied Cyprus for eight months within the late twelfth century earlier than begging Richard the Lionheart, who had acquired it virtually by chance on the way in which to do some crusading in Jerusalem, to take it again off their fingers; he gave it to the French as a substitute. In flip, Cyprus was dominated by the Venetians, who finally couldn’t stand up to the fixed offensives of the Ottoman empire. Fortunately, our writer doesn’t resist a sure Pythonesque appreciation of battle’s darkish humour. Of the siege of Nicosia in 1570, he writes: “Their provisions ought to have lasted them two full years within the fingers of anybody apart from a whole fool. Sadly the commander of Nicosia, Niccolò Dandolo, was that fool.”
When the British took over they displayed the identical concern for Cyprus’s priceless heritage as earlier robber-nobles akin to Elgin had for that of Athens, demolishing the acropolis at Kition in order to fill within the harbour with its rubble. Disraeli and others thought Cyprus a wonderful place to maintain a navy harbour in case of bother down in Suez, because it proved a lot later in 1954. The Cyprus Regiment, in the meantime, had fought with the British within the second world struggle, the expertise of which, Christofi argues, set in movement the islanders’ subsequent calls for for self-governance. His account of Cyprus’s bloody guerrilla struggle in opposition to the British – “that disgusting state of affairs which was fully engineered by us”, as Lawrence Durrell, who had labored there as a International Workplace propaganda chief, put it – is sobering and unhappy; much more in order that of the invasion of the north by Turkey, probably with the collusion of Henry Kissinger and the CIA.
Regardless of this, the e book doesn’t finish on a downer. All through, Christofi frames the island’s historical past by way of a travelogue of current day Cyprus, clambering up mountains and kicking again in cafes, usually along with his Cypriot father in tow. Its lengthy backstory of catastrophe and resilience could also be summed up in a single stunning commentary: “Olives are an indication that life continues even when hope is unreasonable.” On this beautifully composed e book, Cyprus’s tastes and the smells are all the time intensely current, as are the island’s innumerable and majestic cats.
