SEVERAL volumes of the works of poet, educationalist, researcher and wit Pavlos Xioutas, are being offered by Haravghi newspaper to its readers. Xioutas, who passed away in 1991, is very highly regarded by the commies of AKEL, but do not ask why, because I heard of him for the first time on a radio advertisement promoting the Haravghi offer. I suspect he may have been a bit of a leftie.
A skettos drinking customer was not impressed with all this hero-worship and the marketing of Xioutas as an intellectual giant. Our customer is from the occupied village of Yialousa in the Karpas, where Xioutas had been sent to teach some time around the late forties and destroyed a unique tradition – sexual freedom.
Hard as it may be to believe, Yialousa, cut off from the rest of Cyprus, had been untouched by the Victorian values introduced to the island by the puritanical British colonial rulers when they arrived in the late 19th century (now there’s a very good reason to hate the Brits).
Adultery was rife in Yialousa, where it was considered perfectly normal for the uninhibited villagers to have affairs and have the odd quickie in the fields. Even the village priest was at it, boasting that he had had more women than anyone else in the village, the skettos drinker informed us.
This was quite astonishing considering that in many Cyprus villages – poisoned by imported English Puritanism – in the 1930s and 1940s you only had to look at a woman for longer than two seconds to have your throat slit by her brother or husband, defending the family honour.
Yialousa was an oasis of sexual freedom in what had become a sexually repressed country. And then the austere moralist Xioutas arrived and preached puritanical values such as monogamy, sexual abstinence and denial of all pleasure. Yialousans accepted this crap, as it came from a highly-educated man – he had a university degree – eventually suppressed their sexual desires, forgot their hedonistic pursuits and embraced the repressive Victorian respectability.
Our establishment fully agreed with our skettos-drinking customer, who claimed the arrival of Xioutas was the worst thing that ever happened to Yialousa. I bet his role in crushing an envious village tradition is not included in any of the tomes about his life and work.
AS IF IT is not bad enough being subjected daily to the sanctimonious ranting of our politicians, now we also have to put up with the constant moaning by the former fridge technician Talat, who has made it his political mission to bust our balls with his whining.
The insufferable Talat has been going on about comrade presidente’s visit to Moscow for days and felt obliged to read a self-righteous statement about it at the start of last Tuesday’s talks. He sounded like a nagging wife, suspecting her husband was cheating on her because he took a female business associate to lunch and enjoyed himself.
Talat has bought so much into the myth of Turkish Cypriot victimhood that he feels duty-bound to keep it alive by constantly moaning about grave injustices he has suffered. In the case of the Moscow visit, it was moaning for the sake of moaning. Only a professional moaner would have made such a big issue out of the monumentally meaningless joint declaration on the Cyprob signed by the two countries.
Surprisingly, Talat did not moan about the comrade’s visit to Greece. This was not because he realised he would have looked stupid, given the regularity of his trips to Turkey, but because he was too busy moaning about the oil explorations off Cyprus, which a Turkish warship had twice stopped by threatening force.
THE ATHENS visit of our comrade presidente, as was widely expected, was an unqualified success, but his cheerleaders are still praising his triumphant Moscow visit.
The editor of Haravghi wrote in her column on Friday: “Turkey’s president rushed off to Moscow, while other Turkish officials were sent to European countries in order to reverse the negative climate against Turkey,” caused by our president’s handling of the Cyprus issue. She added: “He [Christofias] has proved that with the struggle and hard work mountains can be moved.”
And while our presidente was moving mountains and “winning things for Cyprus on the world stage, some petty-minded Cypriots, seeking a share in cheapness and TV ratings” had the nerve to criticise him about allegedly practising rusfeti, she complained.
THERE IS little doubt that our presidente loves flattery, which is why Haravghi publishes articles about his greatness, our good fortune to have him as presidente and his ability to move mountains on a daily basis.
Even the AKEL parliamentary spokesman Nicos Katsourides has decided to indulge in some flattery of our great leader. Defending his comrade leader’s anti-NATO rant during the Moscow visit, he managed to slip the following bit of flattery in an article published in Politis on Friday.
“For the first time, after Makarios, does the President of the Cyprus Republic, enjoy such high regard from the people and the international community.”
Now Katsourides is too smart to write such grovelling nonsense, but he is also smart enough to realise that without publicly flattering Christofias, his chances of becoming the new AKEL chief, when the party will choose a new leader next year, would be non-existent. He is also smart enough to know that likening the presidente to Makarios would give his leadership prospects a big boost.
All democratic procedures will be followed in the election of a new AKEL leader, once Christofias tells party members who to vote.
AGRICULTURE Minister Michalis Polynikis might avoid attending official dinners at the EU because he does not speak a foreign language and cannot take his interpreter with him to ministers-only events, but he has other talents, I am pleased to report.
According to a press report from October 9, sent to our establishment, the Paphite doctor and hotelier is an accomplished dancer. He displayed his dancing abilities during a bash he threw for hacks at a Nicosia tavern last month, when he did his funky stuff on the dance floor. And according to the report, his preferred dance is the ‘zeibekiko’, an improvisational, macho dance which only one man at a time can perform.
“Polynikis gets full marks for his zeibekiko,” wrote the reporter. He scored much less in a poll about his ministerial abilities. He had the lowest approval rating of all ministers (two out of 10) as respondents were not aware of his zeibekiko abilities.
DANCING and foreign languages are not Polynikis’ only talents. A report about the bash for hacks, which appeared in another paper, informed us that he can also sing. After a dare by a hack he picked up the microphone, and gave an ‘anguished’ rendition of an old Greek classic, but the reporter did not give him full-marks for his singing. Dancing is obviously his strength and he should stick to it if he wants to rise from bottom place in the ministerial hit parade.
Another talent the doctor displayed during the bash was the ability to smoke a cigar. He did not take the smoke down, he was quick to explain – being a lung specialist he was aware of the harm it caused – but liked to have the odd cigar as it helped him relax and forget about scrapie, the drought, the cattle farmers and being a Paphite.
I AM BEGINNING to suspect that dancing zeibekiko in front of hacks is a calculated public relations ploy by the government. Ten days ago, the defence minister, Costas Papacostas, threw a party for hacks, dealing with defence issues, at a Nicosia taverna and, believe it or not, he also got up and did a zeibekiko.
Pictures of him doing his manly moves were taken by the Press and Information Office photographer and distributed to all the papers, because high art like this deserved to be seen by a wider audience. Papacostas, however, neither sung nor smoked a cigar.
SMUG PAPHITE health minister Christos Patsalides, meanwhile resorted to a different approach for winning over hacks, in the bash he gave for health correspondents, at the taxpayer’s expense. Patsalides sent his ministerial limo to pick up his favourite female hackettes from their respective offices and take them to the tavern.
When you can’t dance you need other ways to win over female hacks. Trust a big-headed, Paphite alpha-male to do it by crudely showing off his ministerial power.
Pats has been much less assured and cocky in his populist campaign, with Phil as his media sponsor, against private doctors, whom he openly accused of ripping off their patients.
Apparently, he gave up his crusade after being informed that several doctors were about to sue him for libel, demanding huge amounts in damages for defamation, if he carried on. The threats brought the campaign to an end and the Paphos piranha turned into the Paphos pussy.
THE ZEIMBEKIKO dancers did not fare very well in a survey on the public approval ratings of the ministers. Polynikis, despite his dancing abilities, received the lowest approval rating, 21 per cent. Third from bottom was the other dancer, Papacostas and in between them was the commerce minister who can only waltz.
The highest approval rating was deservedly given to labour minister, Sotiroulla Charalambous, undoubtedly the ablest member of the government and the only minister with real style. It says a lot about her personality that, even with the name Sotiroulla, she commands respect and stands head and shoulders above her male colleagues as well as her boss in the ability stakes.
‘THE ENLIGTHENMENT campaign about the Cyprob being conducted by the ‘Paneuropean beacon of liberty and justice,’ also known as Anorthosis, has not had the positive effects on the world stage, our politicians had hoped for, despite the team’s excellent performances in the Champions’ League.
In spite all the campaigning, there are foreign journalists who still do not know that Anorthosis is a Greek Cypriot team from a town occupied by the Turks. Last Thursday morning a BBC radio sports reporter spoke about “Anorthosis of northern Cyprus” (we did not hear Talat complaining about that).
Two days earlier, the German magazine, Kicker, previewing Werder Bremen’s Champions League tie against Anorthosis, reminded its readers that Werder had been beaten twice by Greek clubs in the last 12 months and added:
“The only encouraging thing is that Anorthosis is not from Greek territory, but from territory that belongs to Turkey.”
We must have the worst diplomats in the world, if as some politicians claimed, the Cyprob enlightenment by Anorthosis’ footballing success was more effective than the work of 30 ambassadors.
