Sunday at the market
With one day off a week, immigrant workers give the feel of a public holiday to the weekly market held in Nicosia
From dimmest antiquity Greeks have harangued each other in public. They were not alone in this. Where they stood apart perhaps was in having the foresight to restrict the loudest of their pests to a central venue – the agora. Initially an assembly, then an assembly place, and finally a market, the agora, as an institution, was what distinguished barbarians and cannibals (ie the world at large) from law-abiding, discourse-loving humans (ie Athenians and the residents of several Ionian islands) as early as Homer.
When Telemachos addressed the downtrodden folk of Ithaka, and was pelted off the stage with tomatoes by Penelope’s malicious suitors, he would at least have had the civilized pleasure of standing in such a place, and hadn’t been compelled to squat at the mouth of a damp cave like the Cyclopses, Persians and Italians all presumably did.
The ancient Greeks even formed verbs from the word agora, typically verbs for buying or loafing about the market, agorazo – indistinguishable pastimes as they may be – and speechmaking, agorevo. The nuances of the latter are manifold and embraced the weepy, fiery, agonised, farcical, frothy, vengeful and spectacular varieties of demagoguery known at the time. With a little pantomime and bloodshed thrown in, we must therefore posit that the origins of Athenian drama are also in the agora, and have nothing to do with primitive fertility rites or any moony raptures inspired by Dionysus, as many eminent scholars have suggested.
So the agores were not only emporia, but tribunals and public forums as well, where justice was meted out and slavering activists stood on olive crates before the great unwashed masses, waving their fists for the first time in history. It was no doubt in Athens’ central agora that a radish seller first had an inkling of the great democracy to come, and another radish seller, many of them perhaps, agreed not many years later to do away with the great rabblerouser, and loafer, Socrates. It is a shame that these traditions have lost favour and we can no longer execute our enemies based on public sentiment alone outside of the continental US.
In Nicosia, this great public spectacle seems to be dying out. The Saturday vegetable market is a wounded creature, or so it seems. There are plenty of weed-laden crates, but the sellers aren’t loud enough, their produce not very appealing. The inside hall is gloomy and half-abandoned, and the sine qua non of a street market, swindling, is not so apparent. Here they look too worn down to cheat you.
Then there is the Sunday market, next to Solomou Square. If this market is more ragged-looking than its Saturday counterpart, it is not nearly as enervated. A five-minute walk from the boutiques of Stasikratous, it is also stands out as a paradigm for Sri Lankan-Cypriot mercantile cooperation, the Greeks collecting and the foreigners barking the wares for pocket money.
Since Sunday is the only day of the week our immigrant workers can stretch their legs, the mood there is practically that of a public holiday. Smartly dressed, they emerge from our homes and shops and gambling dens to gossip and fraternise and spend their hard-earned money on goods that probably originated in their own impoverished countries.
Approaching the market from Paphos Gate, you will find a file of Sri Lankan entrepreneurs selling dried chillies and ground spices on a low stone wall opposite the Holiday Inn. They also have bags of a threatening, cucumber-like vegetable a friendly vendor once identified for me as petooramagalamba, and steaming buckets of a milky, aromatic liquid they ladle into plastic cups and sell for 20 cents.
Just feet from where the last bag of petooramagalamba spreads its gnarled tentacles, there is a taxi stand; opposite the taxi stand is Periptero Helvetia. Outside the periptero, huddled around tables like a squad of p?tanque players without a court, are grumpy old Cypriot men who seem perpetually baffled at the exotic circus that has engulfed them.
At ten o’clock in the morning the market isn’t a vortex of activity, but there is usually enough of a crowd. I was sucked into it and spat back out in front of a tent where a disconsolate Cameroonian was standing before a pyramid of quilts trying to keep warm.
The wind had started to blow and the tent’s canvas roof was flapping about. I picked up an electric juice extractor and the table collapsed. Then the roof peeled back and blew away. I moved on to a table where a man with a booming voice was periodically shouting for no apparent reason.
Behind this man was a multi-coloured sea of fabric being picked through by a factory line of dark, matronly hands. He was sitting on a stool before a low table covered with plastic trinkets. I asked him about business.
He indicated the table, the furiously picking hands, the forlorn merchandise. He had owned a diner in Astoria, Queens for 15 years, he said, but he was happier here, even selling rags. The work ethic in the US had worn him down.
“Here you don’t see Cyprus people,” he went on, as the hands continued to pick. “They don’t want to mix with the foreign people. When I was in New York I lived with the black people, the Italian people, the Chinese people. I don’t care. I don’t have anything against them.”
The market forms a T. At the far left corner of the T is Stelios’ tent. It is probably the most cheerful, democratic and well-stocked. Even his assistants seem happy. I arrived in the middle of a bargaining session. Stelios was surrounded by a bevy of Sri Lankan women, fending them off with appeals to their consumer integrity. The object in question was a package of 30 dishwashing cloths. It sounded like the New York stock exchange. Today, Stelios was sporting a greyish cast that had turned his money-counting hand into a claw.
There are inventors whose contributions to domestic well-being will remain a mystery till the end of time. Stelios seemed to specialise in these items. Battery-operated ladybugs, violin-playing cherubim, musical penholders, and all these oddities mixed in with more useful items like alarm clocks, transistors, convection ovens, tea sets and hairdryers. There was a troupe of dancing Santa Clauses swinging disembodied gaslights. One of Stelios’ assistants suggested I buy a tea set. I declined and asked which item was the most popular.
“All of them,” she said.
“What about the battery-operated ladybug? No one buys that, I bet.”
“So.”
She left me. Stelios was now howling at the Sri Lankans.
“Come on! Six pounds! Six pounds! Six pounds! Don’t be cheap!”
One of the ladies peeled off five ones and held them out for inspection. Stelios was incredulous.
“Mana mou! You know the value of these things, and I know. Now give me what they’re worth!”
The final bill was extended ruefully and swiped up.
“Bravo!” Stelios said, stifling an instinct to bow. “See you next Sunday!”
Having sold very little in my life, I still knew the tremendous elation one feels at breaking a will for the price of a cheeseburger. Watching Stelios, I couldn’t help feeling some admiration. Every Sunday he was the impresario and ticket-collector of his own show, the Stelios show, and he seemed to enjoy it. I approached the peddler.
“Ah, you again.”
I suppose I had become a bit of a loafer myself. One of the Santa Clauses had begun to jiggle about arthritically in the meanwhile. I asked Stelios if he had sold any.
“Santa Clauses? I sell different styles, many types. The people buy what they touch.”
“What about that bug?”
“Of course they buy the bug. Everything.”
“How many bugs have you sol
d lately?”
“About twelve, fifteen, thirty. I have about two thousand different items.”
We were interrupted by a Russian gentleman holding an aluminium pot.
“The best Russian soup they make in this pot,” Stelios said. “100 Russian soldiers could eat out of this pot.”
At that point, the Russian’s translator, a stocky, thick-fingered man in a black leather coat, intervened. He had no interest in the pot and asked about something else, possibly a dancing Santa Claus. Stelios slipped into a casual intimacy.
“There are two prices, my friend…” he began to say.
The man shrugged. “Yes, one for me, and one for the rest. I know.”
I traversed the T. Sitting at a table laden with perfumes whose names were vaguely recognisable permutations of department store brands, were a Cypriot and a Chinese.
Noticing my camera, the Chinese absented himself with lightning speed, covering his face with a sleeve like a sleepy vampire caught unawares by daybreak, while the Cypriot preened himself and settled into a pose.
At the opposite end of the T was an upscale clothing tent. I enquired about the price of a tawny rabbit-skin vest. The assistant, a personable Bangladeshi, couldn’t say exactly. He showed me a steel-studded brassier instead. Expensive, he said.
I was determined to buy something, but was losing hope.
Just then a colourful shirt in a neighbouring tent caught my eye, a peculiar, but pleasant-looking garment you would expect to see high up in the Andes on a dark little man with a team of llamas. The price, 50 cents, was obviously non-negotiable. I was encouraged to try it on. It fit me like a smock. When I peeked in the mirror, I saw a riotous, two-legged tablecloth with puffy arms and a head.
The crowds had already begun to dwindle by eleven-thirty. The rag-picking was intense. One man, half Syrian, half Greek, was screaming in three languages, “One pound, twenty pieces!” At his feet were ten squatting ladies, each rifling through one of his baskets at breakneck speed.
On the stone wall the mysterious Sri Lankan liquid hadn’t run out. I paid for a cup of it and sipped it slowly, the heat filling my stomach, the aroma of parsley and coconut cancelling the dread of Sunday. It was a euphoria I rarely experienced for so little and knew that the Sri Lankans wouldn’t have believed me even if I had told them.
