Cyprus’s strategic location has attracted plenty of unwanted admirers over the ages: the Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Romans, Arabs, Byzantines, Crusaders, Venetians, Ottomans and British all passed through; and then, in 1974, Turkey invaded, and continues to occupy 36 per cent of the island, rendering Lefkosia, or Nicosia, one of the last remaining divided capitals in the world, forever altering the Cypriot psyche. The result is a knotty, fractured identity. Cyprus is a member of the EU, but not quite European. It is Greek-speaking and leaning, but not part of Greece. Though many will try to deny it, it feels undeniably Middle Eastern, closer geographically to Beirut or Amman than Athens or Thessaloniki.
It is pointless, perhaps, to try to untangle my own sense of identity in a place that so struggles with its own. I have returned regularly since I moved away 17 years ago, but this time I set out to properly explore and reconnect. I start in Lemesos’s historical heart, where breakfast in the square in front of Old Port Hotel comes with an archetypal Cypriot view. In the shadow of the 16th-century Kebir Mosque, a remnant of those pre-invasion days when Greek and Turkish Cypriots used to live side by side, old men gather in a kafeneio, an old-school coffee shop, sipping silt-like brews, the clack of backgammon pieces echoed by the sound of prayer beads spun rhythmically around idle fingers. We didn’t come to this part of town in my youth – too rough, too run-down – but regeneration cofunded by the EU has swept out the air of neglect, restored the pretty British-accented, neoclassical, Venetian and Ottoman-influenced buildings and pedestrianised the streets around the University of Technology and the medieval castle, where shiny restaurants, breweries and cafés unfurl onto pavements like the city’s army of stray cats. Amid the concept stores and gelato joints, there’s enough of Lemesos’s grit to keep things interesting: the odd building still boarded up or surrendering to decay, its mud-brick innards on show; or the snarl of street art imprinted on walls, including pro-Palestinian graffiti signed “Eiba” that appears almost nightly.
