In a previous post, I mentioned the famed British writer Lawrence Durrell who spent three years on the island immediately prior to the movement against the British control over Cyprus in the late 1950’s. Durrell lived in a small village called Bellapaix, near Kyrenia, among Cypriots in an attempt to “experience [the island] through its people rather than its landscape, to enjoy the sensation of sharing a common life with the humble villagers of the place” (52). The following is one of his only mentions in detail of his time spent within the Walled City of Nicosia:
“Back across the Mesaoria, the hot barren plain with the single fortress lying in the middle—its roads radiating out from all directions, starfish-wise, Nicosia was merely a crude echo of the sea-dazzling city we had left [Famagusta]; and its current associations so qualified its own very different beauties that I had often to refresh myself in the knowledge of it by taking solitary walks along the ancient bastions or through the crowded markets. Sitting in the long grass among the spiked and abandoned British guns on the Kyrenia wall, I would watch the Turkish children flying their coloured kites in the quick fresh evening wind which ushers in the summer twilights of the capital” (164).
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| A child playing near the "Kyrenia wall" of Nicosia |
Durrell, L. 1957. Bitter Lemons. London: Faber and Faber.
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