Concrete jungle erasing our memories

I share your reader’s dismay in his June letter on the plan to build a church at the Paphos Town Park (‘Park is quite heavenly enough’, Sunday Mail, June 14). It seems that everybody nowadays sees heaven in concrete monstrosities – be it churches, office buildings, luxury condos or just slaps of meaningless monuments.

I see red where everybody else sees development and fondly remember the beautiful green small patch of cider trees surrounding a late 19th century Protestant wooden house in Larnaca, right across from the American Academy high school.

Even in the lean years of my youth, it was always a mesmerising vision of peace and tranquillity.

Unfortunately many years ago somebody decided to build an ugly complex of apartments and stores there. Paradoxically, the little wooden house was allowed to stay there – fading away, forever choked in a concrete nightmare.

What is the worth of a person in this life or next, once his memory is long gone, and has nothing to leave behind but the destruction of a treasure?

Demetris Ioannou,
Larnaca

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.