English Travel Accounts on Cyprus (1960-2004) the Journey to Europe
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Eroulla Demetriou and José Ruiz Mas ENGLISH TRAVEL ACCOUNTS ON CYPRUS (1960-2004) THE JOURNEY TO EUROPE Centro de Estudios Bizantinos, Neogriegos y Chipriotas Eroulla Demetriou and José Ruiz Mas ENGLISH TRAVEL ACCOUNTS ON CYPRUS (1960-2004) Eroulla Demetriou and José Ruiz Mas ENGLISH TRAVEL ACCOUNTS ON CYPRUS (1960-2004) Centro de Estudios Bizantinos, Neogriegos y Chipriotas GRANADA 2018 Biblioteca Chipriota Director Moschos Morfakidis Filactós Comité Científico José M. Egea Sánchez, Andrés Pociña Pérez, Juan Luís López Cruces, Matilde Casas Olea DATOS DE PUBLICACIÓN Eroulla Demetriou and José Ruiz Mas . English travel accounts on Cyprus (1960-2004) pp. 144 1. Historia de Chipre 2. Literatura de viaje 3. Literatura inglesa © Centro de Estudios Bizantinos, Neogriegos y Chipriotas C/Gran Vía, 9-2ºA, 18001 Granada, Telf. y Fax: (+34) 958 22 08 74 © Eroulla Demetriou and José Ruiz Mas Primera edición 2018 ISBN: 978-84-95905-93-2 Depósito Legal: GR 403-2018 Edición técnica: Jorge Lemus Pérez Impreso en España - Printed in Spain Reservados todos los derechos. Queda prohibida la reproducción total o parcial de la presente obra sin la preceptiva autorización. To Andreas and Katerina Giorgiou and their children Iacobos, Kyriacos, Dimitris and Elena Contents Prologue ...................................................................................................... 13 Introduction ............................................................................................... 15 Bibliographies of travel accounts on Cyprus ............................................ 19 Corpus of English travel accounts on Cyprus (1960-2004) ...................... 23 Appendix I ................................................................................................ 127 Appendix II ............................................................................................... 131 Appendix III .............................................................................................. 135 Index of authors ....................................................................................... 137 Index of travel books ................................................................................ 141 Prologue The Mediterranean Sea has traditionally been the start and finish of numerous travellers’ journeys of a wide number of nationalities, languages, religions and historical periods, all of whom have allowed themselves to be embraced by its versatile arms. This has been possible thanks to its central position within the civilized world of Antiquity, as the very name of its location, the Mediterranean Sea implies. A European-centred world such as today’s has allowed this area to remain one of the key cultural centres in the 20th and 21st centuries. The extensive Mediterranean shores have allowed the building and development of a multi- faceted mosaic of cultures that include the sunny and tawny Spanish beaches and islands, the aristocratic Riviera and the evocative French islands, the boot- shaped Italian coast and the zigzagging Balkan beaches, the constellation of Greek islands, the lands of the Great Turk, the sensual Cyprus of Aphrodite, the mysterious Albania, the Biblical Palestine and Israel, the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the exotically Oriental and Punic Maghreb, the shy central position of Malta, etc. The Mediterranean has provided the genre of travel literature with ample food for description, adventure and thought. Its author-travellers have poured into their travel accounts their dreams and expectations, their prejudices and fears against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea. The British, a nation of die-hard travellers, have politically and culturally dominated the Mediterranean basin at different times of our recent history. With Gibraltar (which they still retain) at one end, Malta at the very centre (a British colony from 1814 to 1964) and Cyprus (from 1878 to 1960) at the very eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea, it is no wonder that they once dared boast that they considered it as their own, the English Lake, as they proudly used to call it in the heyday of their empire, a term resonant of the Roman’s claim to “their” Mare Nostrum. At given moments of the 18th and 19th centuries Britain also owned the Ionian Islands (until they were ceded to Greece in 1864) and the island of Minorca (gained in 1713 and returned to Spain in 1783). The British had colonised Egypt from 1814 and held it as a Protectorate from 1914 to 1922, and they had dominated Palestine and the Transjordan region through 13 Eroulla Demetriou and José Ruiz Mas the so called British Mandate of Palestine from 1923 to 1948, etc. All these historical facts are evidence enough of Britain’s interest in the Mediterranean. As far as Cyprus is concerned, the long occupation of Britain –though brief in comparison to other peoples who inhabited and colonised the island such as the Greeks, Egyptians, Venetians or Ottomans at different times of its history, as it only spanned from 1878 to 1960–, left an indelible mark on the Cypriot culture and political situation as we know it today. Indeed, to many, the ill-fated events that were to take place during the 1960s and above all in 1974 were attributed to Britain and their doings in inspiring the feeling of a divided country and bringing to the fore the religious, cultural, idiosyncratic and linguistic differences between the two Cypriot identities and to their lack of initiative instead of guaranteeing the newly-born country’s integrity against a foreign invasion. Our role as literary researchers as well as the main purpose of this book is to highlight the relatively high number of travel accounts that English- speaking travellers have written after their visits to a small but varied and complex island in the forty odd years, indeed nearly half a century, since its population gained their long-fought-for independence from the metropolis and started their journey limping towards prosperity and happiness, which alas, has not been fully achieved. Cyprus’s entry into the European Community which culminated in 2004 has put a provisional ending to a turbulent and recent past and opened a new future to a country that longs for peace and amity, perhaps still with a little help from her (European) friends. There are nevertheless large obstacles to surmount on the way, indeed major issues to solve in the –hopefully– not so distant future. We cannot but pray for a prompt and adequate solution to the full satisfaction of both parties, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. May God/Allah hear us! 14 Introduction This book is a sequel of our English Travel Literature on Cyprus (1878- 1960) (Granada: Centro de Estudios Bizantinos, Neohelénicos y Chipriotas and A.G. Leventis Foundation), published in 2004. In the previous work we concentrated on the travel books (travel accounts, travel pamphlets, autobiographies and guidebooks) written by English speaking travellers on Cyprus during the 82-year period of the British occupation that started in 1878 and ended in the island’s independence, in 1960. The insurmountable number of travel/political/propagandistic pamphlets published on Cypriot affairs after 1960 (especially after the 1974 troubles), as well as autobiographies of politicians, military men and UN officials who have been posted in the country (again, especially after 1974), and above all, the innumerable amount of guidebooks published after Cyprus’s tourist boom throughout the last decades, make the task of including and analysing them all in a single book a true gargantuan task. This is the reason why we have concentrated exclusively on travel accounts. After all, our interest is in English literature, that is, in literary works written in the English language, and travel literature is the most “literary” one amongst the genres mentioned above. This book begins with travel accounts published in 1960, the year of Cyprus’s independence from Britain, and ends with those printed in 2004, the year when the island gained full official admittance to the European Community. We include travel accounts written by Anglophone travellers to the island in the hope of being able to see how the European feeling of the people of Cyprus is transmitted through the pages of English travel accounts. The travel accounts described and analysed in this book can be classified into three groups. The first of these groups is formed by those that were published up to 1963, which concentrate on the struggle of the Cypriots (normally Greek-Cypriots) to rid themselves of the British yoke. Their main issues are naturally the EOKA activities, the Cypriots’ aspiration or struggle for or against enosis and the first signs of disagreement between both Cypriot communities. They were published in Britain just after the proclamation of 15 Eroulla Demetriou and José Ruiz Mas the independence of Cyprus, but their contents also allude to the authors’ impressions of the last turbulent years of the British occupation. As most of them were British travellers, they all lament that violence was the means by which Cyprus achieved her independence. The second group of English travel accounts covers the 1964-1974 period. The works published within this decade concentrate on depicting the increas- ing tensions existing between Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots that culminated in the Turkish invasion of the northern part of the island. These tensions contrasted with the positively ideal conditions that any foreign traveller could enjoy whilst being on the island at the time, either