Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

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and thank's to EOKA the Turkish Nationalism was rekindled and the Pogroms in Constantinople occurred in September 1955. Thanks to EOKA Cypriots were divided, thanks to EOKA Cyprus began a journey down to Hades. We got independence (1959/1960) but in 3 years' time (1963) we were divided (unofficially) waiting for the official division (1974) And we are still waiting, divided in discord; His early chapter about buying a house in Cyprus is easily one of the funniest things I've ever read. It was only in the hours after reading it that I had to reflect that, hang on, this guy sounds like a real jerk. Although the title gives the game up, this book is like a perfume whose opening notes of neroli and lemon give way to something uncomfortable and off-putting, like strong imortelle. In the first third, helped immeasurably by his knowledge of Greek, Durrell is getting settled in, and it's a sort of Cypriot Under a Tuscan Sun. The chapter in which he buys a house aided by the wonderfully cunning Turk Sabri is alone worth the price of admission. He is a memorable character. Memorable enough to be eulogized in the New York Times, of all places. Sabri died only in 2000, apparently gunned down. He views the increasingly violent campaign for Enosis from a different perspective, perhaps, than would most Americans today. His love for the Cypriot people is clear, but he firmly views them as a rural, somewhat childlike people who are far happier under British rule than they would be under union with an increasingly dynamic and urban Greek nation. Cypriot self-government apart from Greece does not even occur to him as an option. He perceives the Cypriot desire for Enosis as a vague goal the residents love to ponder and discuss, but one stirred into violent ferver only by agitation and arms from political zealots in Greece. He notes, in addition, the strong opposition to Enosis by the island's significant Turkish minority population -- a fault line between the ethnic Greeks and Turks that continues to this day.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell – review, 30/11 Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell – review, 30/11

Invited to write an essay on her favourite historical character, [Electra] never failed to delight me with something like this: 'I have no historical character but in the real life there is one I love. He is writer. I dote him and he dotes me. How pleasure is the moment when I see him came at the door. My glad is very big.' [2] The real position of Lawrence Durrell? "As a conservative, I fully understand, namely; 'If you have an Empire, you just can't give away bits of it as soon as asked.'Did it crossed his mind that Cypriots were not beautiful because they were slaves of races for centuries and centuries, did he realise that Cypriots were indolent because they were illiterate thanks to the dozens of masters they had above them and worst of all the Franks (yes, not the Ottoman Turks; you are surprised, yes, if you read the History of Cyprus you'll realised that Cyprus suffered worse hardships under the (Christian) Franks and Venetians and less under the (Muslim) Ottoman Turks?)

Bellapais Journal; Bitter Memories of a Love Affair With Cyprus Bellapais Journal; Bitter Memories of a Love Affair With Cyprus

This book also awakened me to the difficulty of an outside power (in Crypus' case, the United Kingdom) trying to impose peace on a population who would really rather fight among themselves--or, at least, have animosity. And when religion is mixed into the clash, the results are all the more volatile. It was sad then; it's sad now. But wishing it was otherwise does not make peace any easier. He writes as an artist, as well as a poet; he remembers colour and landscape and the nuances of peasant conversation ... Eschewing politics, it says more about them than all our leading articles ... In describing a political tragedy it often has great poetic beauty.' Kingsley Martin, New Statesman Well, sort of. Lawrence Durrell loves Grecian-ness almost as much as he disparages actual, flesh-and-blood Greeks. He loves classical Greek thought, and certain modern iterations, such as a reverence for the poems of Seferis and Cavafy. But at the end of the day, he's a repulsive reactionary, a proud imperialist, and even though he's smart enough to see all the contradictions of the colonial regime in Cyprus -- the deliberate underdevelopment, the dimwitted little-Englander officials, the way repressive measures invariably give credibility to the anticolonial fighters, an honest respect for the idealism of the Cypriot youth who want freedom -- he still can't escape the notion that an abstract empire is the best steward of his much-adored classical civilization, and like his mentor T.S. Eliot, he far preferred myth to reality. I still haven’t finished the book, I don’t believe I can muster enough patience at any time soon to do so, but here are some examples for your immediate pleasure: In that year, the British began a "war on terrorism" -- and lost the traditional affection of the people they governed -- by hanging a quiet, seemingly well behaved young man who had worked in the colonial government's tax department. It was time for Durrell to leave this warm and beautiful land; his neighbors and close friends could no longer look him in the eye.Bitter Lemons is a passionate plea for "enosis" (i.e. the unity of Greece and Cyprus) written in the 1950s when Turkish and Greek Cypriots were at war. Lawrence Durrell loved Western Civilization with a passion and believed fervently that the great Greek genius of classical era was still alive in the 20 th century. As a teenager, I was utterly convinced. What is travel writing? Consider a book in which the narrative and characters pivot around a single tree, rooted to the centre of a lonely cliff-top village on an island almost forgotten to the world. The tree is more than a totem or a metaphor: rather it is a geocosmic force around which the entire Earth rotates. Younger villagers feel it’s centrifugal effects, spinning them out to sea to be caught up in strong currents and carried off to other lands. The old have learnt to get close to the centre of the force, where all is stillness, willingly embracing the inertia beneath its shady branches. The most successful in the art of doing very little have enjoyed its peace for so long that their olive-coloured wrinkled skins are indistinguishable from its roots and its branches. It is then the ‘Tree of Idleness’ around which the book pivots. Heavy and sweet." This was not so good. A Bolognese is always worth listening to on the subject of wine. No matter. (I should buy a small peasant house and settle in the island for four or five years.) The most arid and waterless of islands would be a rest after the heartless dusty Serbian plains.