The tinkerer and hoarder
From 1957 Vauxhalls to ancient Oxo cubes, Haig Indjirdjian treasures them all. But his domain in Nicosia’s old city is under threat
On a wet February evening in 1957 a Vauxhall Velux sank into the rain-sodden earth at the back of where the Castelli Hotel in Nicosia is now. This caused quite a stir and all the children of Ouzounian Street turned up for the show in their galoshes and parkas.
A seven-year-old Haig Indjirdjian was there too, because it was his uncle’s car that was hanging halfway into the muddy abyss, and his uncle’s driveway that was now the mouth of a grotto.
When Haig looked into the hole, he saw a tunnel, and in that tunnel paintings, and next to the paintings, a treasury of Venetian armour that must have struck the boy as greater than anything Blackbeard had ever buried. And then, in a breath, he said, the canvases all went to dust. They just disappeared.
I first met Haig on a winter morning 50 years later, when it wasn’t raining and his uncle’s business on Rigenis Street had been gone for decades. Haig was in his shop on Voulgaroctonou Street, a sort of wunderkammer of vintage knick-knacks and eviscerated timepieces. I hadn’t been looking for anything but walked away with an antique set of drawers from the Mesaoria. Negotiations had been rough. I’d called him a thief and he’d called me a thief, and then we’d settled on a price and became friends.
I’ve since been back there often because I’ve always liked a cluttered shop and the kind of men who can go about their business buried up to their chins in bric-a-brac. Haig has amassed plenty of it, and with an almost baffling faith in the strolling junk-hunter’s willingness to pay steeply for what he wouldn’t look at twice in a batty old dowager’s attic – Chinese flute players, Ottoman water pipes, antique dominoes, porcelain boxer dogs, sandstone swans, vintage musical cigarette boxes, postal scales, exotic tobacco and biscuit tins. Outside, next to a golf ball lamp and a tasselled wine sack, five Smith eight-day pendulum clocks have been on sale for as long as I’ve been passing by.
Haig’s workshop is next door. It’s filled with bits and pieces of things that may never be whole again. If you tried to count up all the washers and screws and exotic-looking tidbits tucked away in the miniature drawers behind Haig’s workbench you’d go blind before you hit the third row. Paintbrushes and hammers sprout from ancient oilcans like lollipops, precision machines choke the aisles and boxes of queer, scavenged items are scattered here and there like breadcrumbs dropped in a dense forest.
Haig is a tinkerer by nature; his tinkering is ecumenical. According to his own principles, there is nothing he can’t fix – strainers, cuckoo clocks, Toby mugs, gunnysacks, snuffboxes, his own boots. In the workshop he stands; in the shop he sits, and when he sits, he smokes Virginia Golden tobacco rolled into thick coffin nails with an OCB roller.
Haig has theories about many things. We’ve discussed the true identity of Jack the Ripper, Prince Albert, the Monkey Girl found last spring in Indonesia, mental institutions, quartz movements, rinderpest, Kontiki, but always there are the mountains of junk. My eyes, and thoughts, often wonder back to them.
“I’ve been hoarding my whole life,” Haig admitted one day. “I’m a hoarder.”
I lifted a tin. Glycomol pastilles. Haig pointed out another one. “Oxo cubes,” he said. There were plenty more. Three Nuns Tobacco, Craven A, Metropole, A.C. Spares, Archer’s Medium.
“I suppose it’s genetic,” he said of his hoarding. “My father was a great hoarder.”
Fleeing Caesarea in 1919, Haig’s paternal grandfather, a diamond setter by trade, diversified into shoe moulds in Nicosia. By the 1960s the Indjirdjians had expanded into watches and clocks, then faux bijoux, records and record players. Hoarding. The shambles of their first shop can still be seen above the barrier of the Ledra Street sentry post, another Dead Zone relic. In 1963, when the intercommunal troubles blew up, Haig’s father moved shop opposite the fire station where the Classic Hotel is now, and stayed there for 40 years.
His mother’s family had come from Adana and settled in Adalia, a traditionally Armenian village not far from Kyrenia. Haig’s maternal great-grandfather was a cook at the Melconian Institute. He was the first, Haig says, to bring doner kebab to Cyprus. His son, Haig’s grandfather, started out selling shamali from the back of a bicycle.
“He would pedal all the way to Kythrea. There was a big waterfall then.”
Haig banged on a pot he’d been tinkering with, and ignoring me, squinted at it. “The Armenian monastery was about 16 miles away. He saw my grandmother there and fell in love with her. After that, he pedalled up there every day just to see her walking with her sister. They got married in 1932 or 1933 and moved to Nicosia. He was learning a trade, tyre repair.”
From tyres to shoe heels to valves for the Keo factory, by the 1940s the shamali peddler had the Cypriot rubber market cornered with a contract from Her Majesty’s Army. I thought he must have been one of those filthy rich Armenians I’d never heard of but who have sad little streets in the crumbling heart of old Nicosia named after them.
“Bullshit,” Haig dropped the pot. “His principle in life was ‘I came naked into this life, I will go out naked.’ If the Governor of Cyprus made £30 a month, my grandfather made £20 a day. And every evening he used to go out and enjoy it with all his friends – merchants, fishermen, all ranks of people – and there was a huge table filled with food and drink. When he died in 1972, he left me an £8,000 debt, God bless his soul.”
Around the corner from Haig’s atelier is Ouzounian Street, where Haig grew up half a century ago. Today Ouzounian is a Western Union, a sex shop and a Sri Lankan billiards hall, but in the 1950s locals called it the royatiko, the royal neighbourhood. Ouzounian Street was home to a slew of literary men, wealthy businessmen, travelling salesmen and civil servants. I don’t know how all those types managed to share the same block of flats, but they did.
“Opposite our house there was Michaelides. Next to him was Bambolos Merchants, a novelty shop, and next to Bambolos, the editor of Eleftheria newspaper. Then Georgiades, the editor of Alithia, and the Zavallis Press. The Turks used to call it the long street.”
The long street was a world away, but it was a short jump to the rest of the present-day squalor, so it wasn’t easy to see the old neighbourhood as Haig remembered it, a thriving Champs ?lys?es with kids, Greek and Armenians, playing marbles and lingree in the streets, and throwing cow joints for dice. Drinking water was collected from neighbourhood taps, bath water pumped directly onto the roofs by a certain Mr. Antonis. There was a tap on the wall of Casteliotissa, Haig said, and another across from where the Dog Shelter Shop is now, a resting place for pilgrims on their way to Agia Sophia centuries ago.
And then an incredible thing happened on Ouzounian Street on par with the launching of the Sputnik in the autumn of 1957.
“In ’56 or ’57, my uncle bought the first television in the neighbourhood, a Nordmende, and then we bought ours. Every afternoon there were a few hours of broadcasting. We didn’t even have enough chairs, so all the kids from the neighbourhood would come with their own, and we made a little cinema in our living room and watched The Flying Doctor, William Tell – what else? – Robin Hood with Richard Green. And then at about six or seven everybody went home.”
At about that time Haig went to work for a neighbourhood fabric seller. Scrawny and prone to sudden nosebleeds, he was there, he said, to improve his arithmetic.
“He used
to bring his girlfriends behind the bales of fabric. I don’t hold it against him, but he spent a lot of time behind the fabric. So he’d send me all the way out to the government buildings on my bicycle, sometimes on foot. There was a kiosk there, Petros’, and he’d send me there to bring him back three lottery tickets. Always three tickets. That’s when I started going to my father’s shop.”
Raised on bric-a-brac, Haig had a Shangri La of odds and ends to monkey with in his father’s shop. Six years later he’d mastered The Practical Guide to Watch Repair and could take apart and reassemble a Smith clock with his eyes closed. He went on to study at the British Horological Institute, and finally made the pilgrimage to Switzerland to study with Rolex.
In 1978, with the introduction of quartz movements, traditional watch repair went down the drain, so Haig re-specialised, like all the Indjirdjians, and moved into antiques. It couldn’t have been an easy move, and Haig has an attachment to the pre-quartz days, the days of British curfews, enosis and mounting intercommunal violence, a certain nostalgia.
“It’s not like today. People were nice. We grew up differently. There was no malice, no cunningness. Now, society being what it is, everyone’s after a quick profit. Everyone wants to screw the other.”
Haig’s house on Ouzounian Street was demolished in 1981 to make room for the Holiday Inn, a case in point.
“I went to work in the morning one day and twenty minutes later the house was gone.” He rooted around in a grimy crate and pulled out a piece of his old sofa. “Here’s a leg from one of the settees.”
And then he went back to the pot.
“I’m a qualified watchmaker, a qualified antique restorer, lathe turner, engraver … I’m a craftsman. But in the wrong country.”
Or century. Like Ouzounian Street, the shops and apartments of Voulgaroctonou are slowly being emptied of their residents.
No stranger to complaints and litigation, Haig has already been to court over the matter of the re-appropriation of his shop and says he won the case ‘with concrete evidence’, but lost the verdict. I wasn’t sure what he meant but imagined that if he’d left the courtroom with 18 months’ rent, £1260, as compensation like he says, he would be packing his bags soon enough.
The old quarter is going slowly. Whatever is left of it will be gone soon enough, the old tailors around the corner, the tinkers at the old city market, the shoe sellers of Phaneromeni, the cloth merchants of Onasigorou, where pre-invasion suits are going at pre-invasion prices. Only the coffin makers will stay because no one, not even the biggest developer, would pay off the coffin man to slap a high-rise down on his caskets.
Still, visit soon, buy a frumpy suit or a leopard print nightgown, shell out for a pair of loafers that would draw stares in Mindanao, and have a coffin measured the old-fashioned way, before the Alamo folds without a whimper.
Photos Theopisti Stylianou
