This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

My earliest memory of Cyprus revolves around being plucked out of the sea when I was a toddler. A young cousin had insisted on carrying me out into the waters of a beach near Famagusta, but when either I or the waves had become too much for her to cope with, she dropped me. Fortunately, my father was nearby and rushed over to scoop me out of the brine. 

But for many years, because my traumatised memory was of the water and of seeing my father, I was convinced he had been the one responsible for casting me in. It was a terrible injustice inflicted on him by the workings of an innocent and disorientated mind. But in Cyprus, distorted memories, half-remembered truths and the grievances and suspicions that often arise from them are seared into the historical landscape and the collective imagination. 

This theme comes across very clearly in Alex Christofi’s highly personal and poignant Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean. The book is a history of the island from the pre-historic period to the present day, informed by the author’s own memories and those of his family. Like me, Christofi was born to a British mother and a Greek Cypriot father, but the age gap between us perhaps makes aspects of that history feel a little less raw in his case than in mine. 

My parents fell in love as teenagers at the height of the Greek Cypriot uprising against British colonial rule in the 1950s, when anti-Greek Cypriot feeling was running high (something I still encountered as a schoolboy into the 1980s). 

Likewise, the one time I attempted to visit Turkish-occupied Kyrenia as an adult, I found myself ultimately unable to board the tourist coach that would have taken me there from the south: Kyrenia had been my late father’s favourite place, one I only knew from photographs of my sister and me as we sat there sweltering and smiling in the summer heat, just two weeks before the Turkish invasion of July 1974. I could not face returning to see what had become of it.

Christofi’s account in no way underplays the violence of Cyprus’ history from the 1950s to the 1970s. With respect to the preceding period of British colonial administration (as indeed with respect to the Medieval and Ottoman periods), however, his emphasis is rather more on the co-existence of, and convivencia between, Christian and Muslim, Greek and Turk. As he brings out, Cyprus is an island of enormous contradictions, and the more we learn about it, the more paradoxical in many ways it becomes.

When Lawrence Durrell arrived in the 1950s, for example, he found it disappointingly un-Greek. What he was encountering, of course, was the last vestige of an eastern Hellenism that had been finally expunged in Anatolia several decades earlier. Nowhere boasts a longer and more continuous history of writing in the Greek language than Cyprus, and genetic studies have recently revealed that Greek Cypriots (along with their cousins in Rhodes) are far more closely related genetically to “ancient” Greeks than any other modern Greek population.

Christofi’s book is particularly engaging when dealing with the cultural politics of colonialism, the shady workings of the antiquities markets and the rogues’ gallery of characters who took advantage of the loosening of Ottoman rule and the arrival of the British. Chief amongst these was the Piedmontese grave robber “General” Luigi Palma di Cesnola who ransacked Cyprus of many of its finest artefacts, to the great benefit (amongst others) of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he ended up as its first director. 

Christofi’s account of the Constantinopolitan Greek conman and arms dealer Basil Zaharoff (born Vasileios Zacharias), who would later go on to inspire Ian Fleming’s criminal mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld, is also particularly fine. Through a series of ruses, Zaharoff managed to get himself the commission to build the first British governor’s residence in Nicosia, which would eventually be burnt down in 1931 by rampaging Greek nationalist demonstrators (including a great-uncle of mine). The dynamics of British colonial rule are captured with depressing accuracy.

Cypria is an impressively wide-ranging history of a fascinating island, written with a grace and lightness of touch that still manages to convey much of the bitterness of Cyprus’ recent past. It is a book to be enjoyed on a hot summer’s day, perhaps on a sunbed in Paphos, but also to be pondered when darker nights draw in.