Cyprus
september 2021
35.1264° N, 33.4299° E
sun soaked, eerie.
i was surprised, to say the least, when she asked me to join her on a trip to Cyprus. we had just met. yet she trusted me, which certainly meant a lot. so we went.
***
my balance was thrown off as soon as i hit Cypriot soil. i found the sight of old, expensive cars on desert-like backdrops close to incomprehensible, almost as if i’d wandered off from the prescribed attractions of a dubious sightseeing trip. i could, however, pick out hints of British familiarity, which helped ground me firmly in reality.
i would soon find Larnaca similarly confusing - perhaps on account of the pandemic, the city did not appear to have a central hub. granted, we did not take the time to comb every street of the sprawling city, but we did have a good look around. a waterfront with the fittings of a heavily touristic city held its place, yet the pandemic had made sure the glitzy nightclubs and “traditional” tavernas looked deserted.
beautifully empty
deeper into the city, we found seemingly vacant living quarters - the sort of residential aggregation which renders owning a vehicle a precondition to social life. in effect, the slew of dusty, perhaps abandoned cars did not appear out of place at all. though Cypriot september averages out at over 30°C, which may discourage some from wandering about, i recall spotting little life even later in the day. it was a lot like walking through a very expensive film set - lifelike, yet lacking in any real essence.
with the pragmatism i have come to admire, my travel companion’s focus swiftly shifted away from the barren landscape to the coordinates of our accommodation. as an experienced professional in the field, all things hospitality interested her and she clearly spoke the language of the staff. not a single detail eluded her gaze and more than once she skilfully engaged in the well orchestrated ritual of hospitality customer service. for overcritical me, it certainly helped focus impulses and i wholeheartedly trusted no minor detail of our stay would go unnoticed. in other words, she knew what we were supposed to get and elegantly made sure we did.
nonetheless, a short walk outside begged the question: was anyone living in Larnaca at all? were any of the dusty (yet contemporary) cars still in use? was Cyprus even a genuine country?
destitute of inhabitants, virtually all day long
as strange as the latter question would come across to any level headed reader, i could not help but feel as if we were visiting the site of an art project. the barren landscape did very little to encourage my imagination when trying to picture every day life on the island in the long run. i had questions about what the local economy could offer too. i soon found that Cyprus had scarcely any agrarian potential, but the oil and gas reserves on the bottom of its slice of the Mediterranean may help prop up the economy in the future. unquestionably, there was redemption in the tourism industry, yet, i thought to myself, the pandemic had made sure to starve that particular cash cow, perhaps to death.
unbothered by my questions, my companion appeared to be laser focused on making the most of the situation: with a thirst for sun, sand, and saltwater, she followed through on her promises of hitting the beaches early in the day. i followed along gratefully and for once, acquiring the “big picture” fell by the wayside. thus, our shared time finally allowed for disengaged enjoyment, which i quickly chose to indulge in.
where the island nation truly shines is its favourable tax regime and relative diplomatic openness, enabling it to act as a gateway for external investment within the EU. in fact, so much has this openness caught on that Cyprus launched a wildly successful “golden passport” scheme in 2013, effectively trading passports for foreign money flows. in the wake of a particularly hard hitting journalistic investigation, the passport scheme was suspended - turns out some successful applicants’ criminal records were not particularly clean, violating one of the fundamental requirements of the scheme. good news, perhaps, yet this did little about the (potentially dirty) investment which had already poured into country: merely 45 passports were revoked in the wake of the investigation. the “upfront” cost of a Cypriot passport would have started at around 2.2 m euros, all of which had to be invested in real estate. for the truly wealthy, this could have almost been an “affordable” European passport.
luxurious, yet frigid.
while reading up on the passport scandal, i found that the Russians topped the golden passport application charts. “it makes sense”, i thought to myself, yet i doubted this would have motivated so many Cypriot business owners to change their signage to accommodate the native language of about 900 golden passport Russians. instead, Cyprus is home to a 10,000-strong Russian community, perhaps even larger. perceived as “big spenders'' by some Cypriots, the Russians would have likely seen the island nation as the ideal gateway to the “West.” as such, Larnaca’s agglomeration of cyrillic-written signage comes as no surprise: not only do these cater to all the Russian tourists - there was no shortage of the latter-, but also to those living there permanently. in some backhanded way, Cyprus’ diplomatic openness towards Moscow appears to have paid off.
to add to the list of Cypriot oddities, the island nation’s conflict with Turkey has birthed the last divided capital in the world. Nicosia, Cypriot capital and the largest financial centre, is split by a so-called “buffer zone.” the latter has been in place since 1964, when Turkey seized a large chunk of the island’s northern half. though unanimously unrecognised by the international community, Kuzey Kıbrıs (i.e. Northern Cyprus) remains under Turkish governance. unsurprisingly, the territory to the north is visibly at an economic disadvantage, with the vast majority of Cyprus’ economically significant institutions (i.e. corporations and government branches) flocking to Southern Nicosia. i couldn’t speak about cultural influences however; nonetheless, rumour has it these would be of little concern should a unified Cyprus emerge eventually.
as i mulled over the idea of an unsegregated Cyprus, i came to as she expressed her desire for a cone of ice cream. our day trip had allowed for very little time in Nicosia, which i wished to capitalise on by checking out the UN buffer zone. there was little of visual interest around the checkpoint and i preferred not to take any photos - local authorities had done an excellent job of making the area as inconspicuous as possible. nonetheless, i walked away satisfied, as i had visited one of the most peculiar phenomena in modern history. in spite of my unusual enthusiasm, my companion had humoured me, patiently walking along to the edge of the buffer zone. as i’d ticked my box, she expressed her own desire to explore the surroundings in whatever precious little time we had left in Nicosia. a short walk away and we stopped for a cone of ice cream. approaching the lady behind the counter, she requested a vanilla cone, but alas! the machine producing the dubiously coloured stream had not yet cooled down appropriately. i laughed to myself as she recounted her conversation with the shopkeeper, who had broken the devastating news. instead of what would have otherwise been a tiny wafer cone filled with vanilla of undesirable consistency, she had bought the strawberry flavoured cream. tasting the bright red product, she conceded defeat and in a manner untranslatable to English, she declared: “i’ve been duped!”. we then scuttled off for a full day of sampling the offerings of the Cypriot landscape.
hard to fault Cyprus’ rural landscapes
so just to quell the mounting anger of some readers - Cyprus is by all means a genuine country, a beautiful, complex, and historically rich country. in spite of its (subjectively) strange contrasts, the island nation boasts a great standard of life and quite frankly, is doing really well considering its circumstances. nonetheless, the reader forgive me, a week would have been far too short a vacation to gain a deeper understanding of Cypriot realities. this matters little in the grand scheme of things - the rocky Mediterranean island is where i once again learned to momentarily do away with the politics of existence and focus on being comfortable or happy.
