August. Try to talk to anyone in Nicosia in August. Impossible. They’re all gone. It is as if the life stopped for a month – a dead end.
I first arrived in Cyprus five years ago on August 16, from London. I wandered down Makarios Avenue on the very same evening trying to find a place to eat. Everything was closed. Finally I got somewhere near Eleftheria Square, my first encounter with the ‘Square of Freedom’. The only bar open was a little kebab place on the corner; the one to which the Russian girls go every evening. For the next few days I lived on lahmajouns and pepsi.
Five years later, I still haven’t managed to master the Cypriot art of ‘August absence’. Everybody else has gone or is just about to go for at least a week. I am still here. Suddenly discovering that all the exhibitions have ended, concerts moved from PASYDY Auditorium to Ayia Napa stadium and my friends to Troodos, but I am still here. Trying to write exciting articles about nothing.
In my search for new topics I was recently walking around the Old Town. Again. First in the south and then in the north of the city. And as the month is all about endings I came across two ‘grand finales’. The first was an exhibition closing, the other was just the end of a wall story.
The exhibition was at the Power House. It was called Accidental Meetings and finished yesterday. Quite a few months ago I went to its opening. It was a posh occasion with all the ‘great and famous’ saying an accidental hello to each other. Hundreds of them! It wasn’t really time for viewing.
This time I walked down the deserted (of course) hall to see the best works of art that both sides of the island have to offer. Some of them were very good, while others were absolutely pointless. Because, as usual, art is not just about an artist but also about what he or she takes from a place they live in. And a good one will always find something valuable out there while a bad one will be stuck with emptiness.
I spent a long time in front of two videos, both about women. The first was by Helen Black and showed an interview with an old Greek Cypriot – ugly, fat and seemingly dead. She was talking about her life. How her mother was beaten up by her father, how she was beaten up by her husband, how all the nice, simple things she wanted from life had never happened.
“I believe,” the woman says, smoking her cigarette and coughing, “all a woman wants from life is to have her bills paid, her electricity paid, her food paid, her shoes and clothes paid. Nothing else. And I had nothing of it.”
It was just a video and just a face but now every time I see a woman like that in the street (and there are thousands of them) I will think of all these times her husband hit her.
The second video was an interview with Turkish Cypriot artist Serap Kanay by the Power House’s director Yiannis Toumazis about her work. Serap describes herself as ‘black Cypriot Turkish speaking’ and her latest project is all about her identity. At the exhibition it is represented by just a line of family photographs – Cypriot men and women during their weddings and family meetings. The only difference with any other family pictures is that Kanay’s family is black. They are Africans and they came, or rather were brought, to Cyprus a long time ago. There are about two to three thousand black Cypriots on the island and most of them live in the north. Toumazis’ interview is very good and he asks really sensitive questions. One of them is how Kanay places herself and her community in the Cyprus problem.
“The island is divided,” Toumazis says. “It is all about the differences between Greeks and Turks. And in a way you are neither. You are black. Where does it leave you?”
And Serap answers that this is actually one of the problems.
“As you already have this division in place there is no space for any subdivisions,” she says. “It is bad timing. There is no space in Cyprus for yet another identity.”
In the next room, Greek Cypriot artist Andreas Savva hung a big cross made of ten-euro notes.
The second ending that I saw was in the north, just around the corner from the Buyuk Khan. A private owner of the Koumardjilar Khan (The Gamblers’ Inn) decided to restore it to “its former glory”. For those who don’t know the Gamblers’ Inn, it is one of the most important Ottoman buildings in Cyprus. It was built in the 17th century by the family of Dervish Pasha and is beautiful. Now, almost half of it is gone as “the western wall wasn’t really original” and as such will be replaced by a “more original one” i.e. done now. Now, I am not an expert but couldn’t this western, 19th-century wall be left in peace?
