Nicossienses
A short
story and lyricism by Cypriot author Niki Marangou.
The story translated by
Xenia Andreou, the poem was translated by Stephanos Stephanides.
Nicosia,
Christophoros was saying, has a tension generated by the Green Line.
Those who live
here long to cross over to the other side and those living in the north want to
come south. This creates a passion in the city. The city bears a resemblance to
Constantinople and Salonica, but none to Athens.
We were
sitting on Constantin’s terrace, the city stretching out around us, the two
main shopping streets, clusters of palm trees, Agia Sophia with the two great
minarets was hidden by some modern buildings.
It was such
an important church, I said, that the Lusignan Kings were crowned here. REGES HIERUSALEM
ET CYPRI.
The voice
of the imam could be clearly heard. It was Sunday and the streets were empty.
Only some confectionaries were open and, on the pedestrian thoroughfare, some
passers-by were peering into shop windows. A huge moon was rising, like a slice
of watermelon.
I came to
Nicosia when I was four, when the clinic my father was building near the
General Hospital, opposite the Courts, was completed. I rode my bicycle up and
down the long, endless corridor of the clinic. Even I, then only a child, felt
a certain strain coming to Nicosia from Limassol. A closed society of civil
servants, colonialists, and very different to the Limassol of merchants and
merrymakers. I retain very few memories of those first years in Nicosia, while
I can describe Limassol’s every corner. Receptions at Government House, the
Queen’s Birthdays and my mother’s evening gowns replaced Limassol’s festive
gatherings around the large, square dining table.
At
elementary school, my mind was aflame with the EOKA struggle against the
British. I suffered greatly when my parents brought home an English lady to
teach us the language, and I considered them traitors.
I got to
know Nicosia better in the 1960s when, as a teenager, I used to get around town
on my bicycle.
We lived
near the river, in an area with tall trees, eucalyptus and palm, very close to
the Turkish quarter of the city. My mother and I visited the Turkish quarter
daily, to shop at the municipal market and pick up my father’s mail from his
postal box at the main post office. I liked the Turkish quarter, ever since I
was a child I had a love for history and old buildings, and I found all sorts
of pretexts to wander there. Streets of different trades stretched out in all
directions off the church of Agia Sophia. Tiny domed shops with goods hanging
from nails on the wall or resting on shelves. Craftsmen sat working before
small, low tables. Mattress-makers with multicoloured duvets and pillows, pink,
mauve, orange – Turkish colours, my grandmother used to say whenever I wore any
bright-coloured clothes. Further down were the shoemakers, with their leather
boots and colourful slippers hanging, the halva sellers, with large pieces of
halva stabbed with a knife, the street of the blacksmiths, the street with the
fabrics. We would enter the municipal market, my mother and I. It smelled of
pastourma, cheese and flowers. She always bought the meat from Hasan, who had
the best. She bought the fish from Andreas and the vegetables from whoever had
the freshest. They all knew my name and would give me a bread roll or whatever
else they sold in their shop. The Turks and Armenians all spoke Greek.
"Good to see you!" I always went to the market with her.
Father was
very strict. I was only allowed to leave the house for lessons. Even to the
British Council I went in secret. But Father never said no to lessons because
he believed his daughters should be educated. Using one lesson or another as
pretext, I would run away from home, often ending up at the Turkish quarter. I
arranged for different lessons that would give me an opportunity to get out. I
had discovered an Armenian woman on Victoria Street who taught typing and
shorthand. Her mother would sit in the overhanging alcove watching the traffic
on the street. The Armenian Church of the Virgin of Tyre stood across from
their house. I had then bought the Gunnis book, in which I had read that the
church had also been a storehouse for salt once. During the Ottoman siege of
Famagusta in 1571, the Armenians, who hated the Latins, assisted the Ottomans,
who, on the fall of the city, granted them the church as a reward. I would read
the book and imagine that I was an archaeologist, and with great enthusiasm I
would discover such and such an inscription or tombstone, as if no one had set
eyes on them before me.
The road of
the goldsmiths had tiny shops with rudimentary window displays. The merchandise
was piled up inside English biscuit boxes, in which I rummaged for hours. I
found a brooch in the shape of a hand holding a flower, a small earring of the
red Ottoman gold made with a lot of copper. Everything was very cheap then and,
from time to time, I could afford to buy something with my weekly pocket money.
I remember pendants on silver chains used for the poll tax, which the Greeks
had to pay to the Turks. Anyone who did not pay the tax had his head cut off. I
would stare at these boxes, engraved with representations of executions but I
never bought one. There were also silver wedding bands. During the war in the
1940s, many women exchanged their gold wedding rings for silver ones, inscribed
with “War of Liberation 1940”. Most goldsmiths were Greeks who, after 1963,
left and dispersed all over town. I met one of them, Eteoklis, years later. He
had tried to reopen his shop but he could not make ends meet, readymade
jewellery was being imported from abroad, and there was no demand for the
handmade. So he opened a tavern, well, a sort of tavern, it was just a bench in
an old house where he and his Spanish wife lived. He had become an alcoholic.
As I became
interested in boys, the first rendezvous took place on the domes of Agia
Sophia. We used the hollow space between the domes like a chaiselong made of
stone. I watched the valley turn green in the spring and yellow in the summer.
I would climb up the narrow minaret stairs and the whole of Nicosia lay at my
feet, all the way to the Pentadactylos range. Sevah the Seaman galloped from
the one minaret and Jane Austen from the other. I read incessantly.
I carried
on going to the Turkish Quarter even when roadblocks were erected on both
sides. As a young girl on a bike, no one thought of stopping me.
The line of
division cut the town in two precisely at Hermes Street. That was the street
through which we passed almost daily with my mother. Endless, long and narrow
shops with glassware, plates, metal toys, a cascade of colours, the first
plastics in pinks and yellows, Chinese tin plates with fish painted on them.
The area is desolate now, the shops have moved elsewhere, at the SPITFIRE
coffee shop by the Paphos Gate you can barely make out the sign, an old Vespa
rots away in a deserted shop, sandbags, trenches.
I left
Nicosia in 1965. I went to Berlin to study. There, I experienced a different
Nicosia, the nostalgia for it. I returned in 1970 to find the town changed, but
I had changed too. I had lost my bearings and I could no longer either write or
paint. I wrote articles about the “New tendencies in European Socialism” which
were well received, but I had been grafted with a north European sadness. I had
lost my pencils. Only the torpid Nicosia afternoons helped me remember who I
was. Idleness, and palm trees on the horizon. And the sea.
Before the
invasion of 1974, Nicosia was practically a seaside town. In twenty minutes you
could reach the sea. The car climbed uphill and the road would then abruptly
descend towards Kyrenia, towards the sea – an enchanted sea. I often close my
eyes and make that mental journey to the sea. It has been 26 years now. To
reach such a sea now you have to travel for more than two and a half hours. The
sea has vanished from the everyday life of the city. Looking northwards to the
Pentadaktylos Mountain that hides the sea, I see a huge Turkish flag painted on
the mountain. I avoid looking north.
I often
walk in the old city, the half that is left. All the streets end up on sentry
posts. I walk down Ledra Street, the old central shopping street that has now
become pedestrian. At the far end, you can make out the minarets of Agia
Sophia. During Ramadan, small multicoloured lights hang between them. I turn
right to reach the church of Phaneromeni, the hammam of Emerke in the heart of
the red light district. ‘Emerke’ comes from Omerye mosque, the mosque of Omar,
an old monastery of the Augustinians that became a holy place for the Muslims
when, legend has it, Caliph Omar spent a night there. The monastery had once
been a holy place for the Latins too. Old chronicles speak of the imperishable
body of Saint John de Montfort. John came to Cyprus in the summer of 1248 with
Saint Louis to prepare a crusade to the Holy Land. They spent the winter in
Cyprus and an epidemic decimated their army. Saint Louis lost more than 250
knights. That winter, John died and was buried at the Augustinian monastery.
Stories have been told of a German pilgrim returning from the Holy Land who
spent a night of prayer next to the Saint and then bit off a piece of his
shoulder to take with her. Her ship, however, would not set sail until she
confessed her deed and returned the holy relic, which grew again on the dead
body.
Nicosia is
full of such stories, as are all old cities that carry with them layered
memories. Further down, the Dragoman’s mansion and the old churches. The old
town has a series of beautiful old churches with exquisite icons. Often, the
donor who paid for the painting of the icon is depicted at the bottom. Dutch
merchants, Latin ladies in lace, fine-looking deceased maidens in scarlet gowns
with their hands crossed on their chests, children wearing strange hats. The
Holy Week services in those churches are devout, with canopies decorated with
flowers by neigbourhood girls, following ancient customs of Adonis or Osiris.
Only in those churches of the old town do I like to listen to the Easter
services. Everyone is there. The man with the ancient Greek profile, the
Romans, the Lusignan ladies with nets in their hair, the Saracens, the Copts,
the Nestorians, Marcus Diaconus, the young woman dressed in black, the
theologian in the old-fashioned suit, all dazzled among the gold and the velvet
“for fear of the infidels”.
Further
along, the Cross of Misirikos, which is a mosque, reveals the full confusion of
this city. An old Byzantine church of the Cross, with gothic, Italian and
Frankish elements, ‘Misirikos’, which perhaps comes from Misiri, Egypt in other
words, and with a minaret.
People
deserted their homes along the Green Line, the line that divides the town in
two. Those houses then became workshops for Gabriel the tinsmith, or storerooms
for Petros, the itinerant seller, to keep his carts which, in the morning and
depending on the season, he fills with lemons, melons or candles for Easter.
Next door, one-armed Paul cuts wood, Stephanos runs the hammam, and Mr Spyros
mends shoes. On the wall, someone painted the word “Respect”.
At night
the streets are deserted and anyone walking on the city wall lined with palm
trees may suspect a sea lapping underneath his feet, or at least a river. But
Nicosia has no oasis of water to disperse the summer heat of the Mesaoria, the
plain that stretches around the city, yellow for the best part of the year. It
is in the summer heat that I like Nicosia most, when a west wind picks up at
night and the scorched city breathes a little. And everyone goes out
into the gardens and balconies.
At the
beginning of the 20th century, when the city walls could no longer accommodate
any new houses, the first neighbourhoods were built outside the walls, with
beautiful colonial or neoclassical houses in spacious gardens. These are the
most beautiful neigbourhoods of the city, which have been thankfully preserved,
for those built in recent years have never managed to become true
neighbourhoods. Money has come to Nicosia in the last few years. Following the
Turkish invasion, many Cypriots who had lost everything went to the Middle
East, worked hard and returned to rebuild the country. Wealth is visible in the
new areas of the town. Houses imagined by their owners through TV serials and
in which, once they inhabit them, they may feel estranged. These areas are
drained of colour, the new houses with tall columns and endless rooms could be
just anywhere.
It is the
old town that defines me, the sense of history that each crumbling wall carries
within it. It is there also that I can sense Nicosia’s geographical location
facing the East. And as the years go by, I, the once passionate traveller, no
longer feel the urge to leave. There are times when it seems the whole world
has been confined to my garden where
In
company with the aphid and the grasshoper
I have planted roses this year instead of writing poems
the centifolia from the house in mourning at Ayios Thomas
the sixty-petaled rose Midas brought from Phrygia
the Banksian that came from China
cuttings from the last mouchette surviving in the old city,
but especially Rosa Gallica, brought by the Crusaders
(otherwise known as damascene)
with its exquisite perfume.
In company with the aphid and the grasshopper
but also the spider mite, the tiger moth, the leaf miner,
the mole and the hover-fly
the praying mantis that devours them all,
we shall be sharing leaves, petals, sky,
in this incredible garden,
both they and I transitory.
I have planted roses this year instead of writing poems
the centifolia from the house in mourning at Ayios Thomas
the sixty-petaled rose Midas brought from Phrygia
the Banksian that came from China
cuttings from the last mouchette surviving in the old city,
but especially Rosa Gallica, brought by the Crusaders
(otherwise known as damascene)
with its exquisite perfume.
In company with the aphid and the grasshopper
but also the spider mite, the tiger moth, the leaf miner,
the mole and the hover-fly
the praying mantis that devours them all,
we shall be sharing leaves, petals, sky,
in this incredible garden,
both they and I transitory.