Greek – or more accurately Cypriot – must be the only language with two different words for ‘watermelon’. The official Greek word is karpouzi but there’s also patticha, its local-dialect equivalent with the heavy peasant consonants. You can often hear the words used symbolically when a middle-class customer meets a watermelon seller, one of the well-known vendors standing at long-established street corners, guarding trucks piled high with the bulbous green fruit.
‘Can I have a karpouzi, please?’ asks Mr (or Mrs) Respectable. ‘This patticha right here is the best!’ replies the watermelon seller – and what often happens next is that the customer adapts his (or her) vocabulary for the rest of the transaction, switching to patticha because, after all, it’s assumed the watermelon seller isn’t going to switch to karpouzi. Watermelon sellers hold a special place in the middle-class psyche; they’re the salt of the earth, just as if they’d wrested the karpouzi – or patticha – out of the ground with their own bare hands. Especially when they also wear a vraka, like Andreas Polykarpou.
Andreas cuts an impressive figure in general. He’s tall, his silver hair and bushy beard making him look slightly older than he is (he’s 50). The nose is thick and somewhat hooked, like Fagin’s; the eyes are expressive, capable equally of gentleness or flashes of temper; the hair is tied in a pigtail. With his black clothes and dignified bearing, he might be a priest – but in fact he’s not dressed in a priest’s cassock. Instead he wears a black headscarf, a black shirt and of course the vraka, the traditional baggy skirt that often looks like its owner has tied a black plastic bag to his midriff. “It’s the uniform of the Cypriot,” he announces proudly, meaning of course the True Cypriot.
The costume gets him noticed, if nothing else. I thought it’d be quite original to talk to a watermelon seller, and was quite surprised by how casually Andreas assented, and how fluently he shared his views on the world – at least till he explained that he’s done this before. Every summer since he started wearing the vraka three years ago, at least one newspaper or TV channel has asked for an interview – all of them drawn primarily by his unusual get-up.
After all, no-one wears a vraka anymore. He first put it on as a lark, and family members protested when he announced his intention to wear it permanently. ‘What will people say?’ was the gist of their objections. “They’ll think ‘There goes the crazy vraka-man’,” said one of his brothers, threatening never to speak to him again if he went through with it (they’ve now reconciled). “My wife told me, ‘If you wear the vraka, we’re getting a divorce!’,” he recalls, with the air of someone telling an oft-told anecdote. The vraka stayed, and Andreas is still married.
So why does he wear it? His answer is revealing. “Since we lost the vraka, honesty and decency have disappeared,” he intones, “and so has the word of honour. People used to shake hands in the coffee shop and arrange for their children to be married, and neither the son could object, nor the daughter. A man used to sell a piece of land and give his hand – and his word was his word. Today, the world is rotten. I live with the same head as my grandfathers had, the same mentality.”
That, at least, is the official line – but later, Andreas also mentions another reason why his uniform comes in handy. When people buy a watermelon, he explains, and it’s good, they naturally tell their friends about it – but it helps if they can say who they bought it from. “There are many watermelon sellers,” he chuckles, “but there’s only one with a vraka!” It’s not that he doesn’t believe the salt-of-the-earth pronouncements; I’m sure he does. But Andreas is also canny, and his business is also a business.
Actually, it’s more of a vocation. “I’ve been selling watermelons since I was in school,” he explains. “In 1974, after the Turkish invasion, I was selling watermelons outside the Presidential Palace”. His father sold them too, though only Andreas (as the eldest) followed in his footsteps. Didn’t he go to school? Primary school, he replies, then two years of secondary. Couldn’t he have finished his education and sold watermelons? He shakes his head: “This work is a science. The
One thing he does know – unsurprisingly – are watermelons, how to tell the good, the bad and the great, though it’s not something he can easily share: “It’s a matter of experience”. Sometimes you can tell by the tail, or the roundness of the “navel”. The colour is sometimes a giveaway – the more yellow a fruit is, the more ripe it’s likely to be – then again sometimes a watermelon ripens while shielded from the sun by leaves, so yellowness is lacking.
Obviously, I don’t expect to learn all the tricks of the trade. Watermelon sellers are a tight-knit bunch, unlikely to reveal all to outsiders; indeed, many of Andreas’ colleagues are also his mates, his koumbari. One sold watermelons with Andreas (and his dad) when they were children. Another is godfather to his eldest son. Andreas’ current location, just behind the English School in Nicosia, used to be occupied by Mr Hambis, who passed away – and Andreas often visited him in the hospital just as, the day before our interview, he visited Mr Kokos, another watermelon-seller who’s sick with lung cancer (“it’s all the fumes from the cars,” says Andreas darkly). It’s quite sweet in a way, this community of men united by the humble watermelon.
The patch behind the
No surprise that he loves this job – though the main reason, he adds (referring, I suppose, to his customers), is “because you’re around people with families”. Family, he insists, is the most important thing for him. The beard, for instance – he indicates his bushy beard – is because he’s in mourning for his father, who died a year ago; even now, says Andreas, he can’t go in the cemetery and look at the gravestone without bursting into tears. He himself has four children. “My daughter, I’ve married her off now, she’s given me three granddaughters with a fourth on the way. My son was in
When his beloved watermelons aren’t in season, he criss-crosses
The thought that his son-in-law shouldn’t be going into cabarets in the first place doesn’t seem to have occurred to him – and Andreas’ views on women aren’t exactly liberated. Like his dad, and “people from Tylliria in general” (he was born in the
He married young, barely out of his teens. Does he ever wish he’d waited, I ask, maybe lived his life a bit more? “What life?” he shrugs. “Life is drab. People grow up, whether male or female, so they can reach an age to start a family. Love is children, love is family. Not like young people today – boys and girls – who stay up all night in pubs and discos, smoke hashish, come home drunk. In the old days, there was honour! If you married a woman in the old days and she wasn’t a virgin, the next day you went to her father and her father would beat her black and blue and throw her out, ‘You’re a whore’ he’d say to her!”. Andreas seems to approve of these extreme measures. Then again, he also believes it’s disgraceful for girls to wear tight trousers, and even his daughter – who’s now 28 – must wear baggy pants, or face his wrath. A couple of years ago she wore a thong, he recalls, visible through her trousers. “I planted my hand on her backside and told her: ‘Take off that crap, and go put on some proper underpants!’”
Clearly, wearing a vraka isn’t just a fashion statement for Andreas Polykarpou – and his more ‘European’ watermelon-buyers might be rather shocked if they had a chat with their salt-of-the-earth vendor. Then again, that’s the worldview of a man who’s been working since his teens, got married at 20 and has always lived his life by certain rules, above all “honour” – the kind of rules many people just don’t think about today. At one point in our conversation, a car stops by full of passengers and a woman with a foreign accent asks for directions. Andreas obliges, but – I note – doesn’t give her very good directions, guiding her part of the way then telling her to ask someone else. ‘Why didn’t you explain more precisely?’ I ask, once the tourists have driven away. Because she didn’t get out of the car, he replies, looking very serious. If you’re going to ask a service of someone, the least you can do is get out of your car.
Clearly, the True Cypriot has his hang-ups, like his modern counterpart – but at least he knows his watermelons. I admit I wasn’t sure; I wondered if the so-called expert knowledge was perhaps a bit of theatre, like the vraka – at least till Andreas Polykarpou climbed up on his truck, rummaged for a while then chose a watermelon for me to take home, where I cut it open and swooned at its sweetness and fragrance. Was it karpouzi or patticha? Who cares; it was manna from heaven.
