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Countries / Southern Europe

Cyprus

works
12
11 books · 1 film
period covered
1868–1975
language of writing
Greek

Cyprus entered world literature as a Venetian outpost described from London. The English tragedy of 1604 set there was written by a man who had never been there, and the tower of the port of Famagusta has borne the name of its hero ever since. Aphrodite is born there in the Greek hymns, a lost epic of the Trojan cycle is attributed to a poet of the island, and during that time the Cypriot poets write in a dialect that readers in Athens decipher badly.

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The island was Byzantine, Frankish, Venetian, Ottoman from 1571, British from 1878 to 1960, and divided since 1974. Two communities live there, Greek and Turkish, with two languages and two narratives; Nicosia is the last capital in Europe cut in two. Literature was therefore constituted on a permanent choice: to write in common Greek in order to be read outside, or in the island's dialect in order to be exact. Vasilis Michailidis chose the dialect at the beginning of the twentieth century, and he died in the poorhouse of Limassol in 1917.

The form is the short poem and the brief narrative, backed onto a history that leaves no room for frescoes. The price is that of an island in conflict: the struggle against the British between 1955 and 1959, whose best-known figure a 1973 film recounts, then 1974, the invasion, the hundred and sixty thousand displaced and the closed town of Varosha, which Kyriakos Charalambides writes as a place from which one does not come out. Panos Ioannides and Evi Meleagrou recount the island from within, and Turkish Cypriot literature, written a few kilometres away, is not translated on the Greek side, nor the reverse.

What awaits the reader is a poetry of restraint and of loss, in which a line of three words carries a war. The collection that opens this page consists of very short poems, often of a single line, in which a thought or an image is caught in flight; it appeared in Nicosia in 1958, on the eve of independence, and made its author's name.

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A way to begin

Moments

Costas Montis · 1958

Very short poems, often a single line: the book that made Costas Montis known as a poet.

The entry See the author

Very short poems, in brief epigrammatic sections, often a single line, in which a thought, an image or an irony is caught in flight. Through these fragments Montis builds a view of the world without lengthy development.

Timeline

  1. 1898–1919Poets of the dialectLipertis and Michailidis write in Cypriot rather than learned Greek.
  2. 1935–1964The independence generationLefkis, Montis, Charalambides, Ioannides.
  3. 1969–1973Before partitionEvi Meleagrou publishes; the country shoots its first film, on Afxentiou.

Reading keys

1Names and kinship
  • Greek Cypriot names often carry suffixes in -idis, -iou or -opoulos, and many families have a name in use drawn from a trade or a village.
  • Turkish Cypriot names follow Turkish usage, without a surname before the law of 1934, and the same place bears two names according to the community.
  • Baptismal godparenthood creates a kinship that binds, and the village of origin remains the first belonging, including for those displaced in 1974.
  • The grandfather's first name passes to the eldest, so that one and the same first name runs through a narrative over three generations.
2What is said and unsaid
  • The events of 1963 to 1974, the intercommunal violence, the coup of July 1974 and the Turkish invasion are recounted in two irreconcilable ways, and the file uses the terms of each community without deciding.
  • The missing of both camps, whose remains a bicommunal committee searches for, are a subject approached with caution.
  • The relation to Greece, enosis and its failure remain a disagreement internal to the Greek Cypriot world.
  • Turkish Cypriot literature is almost absent from Greek catalogues, and the reverse is true: that reciprocal ignorance is a fact to be signalled rather than to be filled in with a word.
3Religion and the unseen
  • The Orthodox Church of Cyprus has been autocephalous since 431 and played a direct political role, its archbishop having been the country's first president.
  • The Turkish Cypriot community is Sunni Muslim, with mosques installed in former Gothic churches, a superimposition visible in descriptions of towns.
  • The cult of Aphrodite, born at Paphos, belongs to the ancient stock and not to living belief, but it structures the island's tourist image.
  • Practices of protection against the evil eye, common to both communities, appear in the narratives without comment.
4Colours, rites, mourning, feasts
  • Orthodox Easter commands the year, with the fire of Holy Saturday and the fast that precedes it.
  • The carnival of Limassol and the village festivals around wine and the vine serve as seasonal landmarks.
  • Mourning is worn for a long time, the black of the widows still being visible, and the commemorative meals are fixed in the calendar.
  • A wedding gathers hundreds of guests with the custom of banknotes pinned on the couple, a scene that contemporary narratives take up.
5Shared references
  • Sakellarios's folkloric collection, published in 1868, is the early source for the language, the songs and the tales of the island.
  • Michailidis's poem on the hanging of the archbishop in 1821, written in dialect, is the patriotic text that every schoolchild knows.
  • Digenis Akritas, hero of the Byzantine frontier songs, is said to have left the print of his hand on a rock on the coast.
  • The Kypria, a lost epic of the Trojan cycle attributed to a poet of the island, is the country's oldest literary claim.
6Misreadings to avoid
  • Greek Cypriot is a really distinct dialect, with its phonetics and its lexicon, and its use in a text is an identity choice, not local colour.
  • Cyprus has been a member state of the European Union since 2004, and not a piece of Greece or of Turkey.
  • The demarcation line is not a recognised border, and the vocabulary used to name it is a political act.
  • The catalogue contains only Greek Cypriot authors, which reflects the state of French translations and leaves out half the island's production.
  • Poetry dominates, not through Mediterranean temperament but because the market is too small to sustain novels.

Tales and mythologies 1

Available in English 3

The books from this country that can be read in English, in the original or in translation.

  • PoetryMomentsΣτιγμέςCostas Montis · 1958A poet from Famagusta invents a poetry of one-line fragments, on the eve of the island's independence.Literature
  • Short storyGregoryΓκρέκορυPanos Ioannides · 1964Four years after independence, a radio man from Famagusta looks back on an episode of the uprising against the British.Literature
  • NovelEastern MediterraneanΑνατολική ΜεσόγειοςEvi Meleagrou · 1969Six years after the first intercommunal clashes, a woman from Nicosia writes the first great modern novel of her island.Literature

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