The house is nondescript, a two-storey family home near the Green Line in Nicosia. The man himself is also nondescript; if you saw him on the street you’d see just another senior citizen (he’s 74) with thin white hair and glasses, whose eyes crinkle when he tells a story. Yet the man living in this house is Panos Ioannides, an award-winning author, playwright and poet, and – despite his mild appearance – a man who’s always had a fire burning inside him, like a demon tugging at his earlobe: the burning desire to create.
“Let me tell you something,” he says, his eyes already crinkling as he sips a cup of coffee in his book-lined study. “Let me confide something in you. Ever since I can remember, when I was still seven or eight years old…” He stops, having forgotten to set up his characters: “My father worked for the railroad” – this was when we still had a railroad in Cyprus, running from Xeros in the west to Famagusta in the east – “and got transferred from town to town. He was a station chief – and I, still a child of six or seven, used to walk along the railroad tracks, walking for miles on end, and already I used to dream that I’d someday get involved in the arts. That I’d get involved in literature and write an important book, that I’d get involved in painting and paint a great composition, a fresco. That I’d get involved in sculpture, in theatre, etc. So already, from that time, I felt my destiny in this field.”
As a child, he was madly creative. He painted; he played the violin and mandolin; he tried his hand at sculpture, using long needles which he spent hours pounding so they became flat, like chisels. Already, in high school, he was writing plays – often adapted from well-known books – which he directed and starred in, also building sets and making costumes. Earlier, still in primary school, he’d fallen in love with books, thanks to his grandma Rodothea – a refugee from Asia Minor, born illiterate, who’d taught herself to read and write: “She had a closet,” recalls Panos, “and inside that closet were all the classic novels”, Jules Verne and Goethe, Dumas and Dickens. “That’s where I read all classical literature – Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Gogol. I read them all in elementary school, with my grandma’s help.” He’s been writing seriously since the age of 20. His first collection of short stories (In Ethereal Cyprus) was published in 1964, his first novel (The Census) in 1973.
Some writers are coy when discussing their work, shying from praise and pretending not to remember; Panos is different, happily rattling off the plots of his books and laughing uproariously at the good bits (much of his work is satirical). He’s always had an extrovert, self-confident side as well as the introverted writer’s side: “I have a very positive element to my personality,” as he puts it, a knack for wrangling and organising. As a youth, he founded book clubs; as an adult, he founded the Cyprus chapter of International PEN (the worldwide fraternity of writers) and rose to Head of Programming at CyBC – a job with administrative duties, motivating others to create. He’s also directed for stage, TV and radio, though working with others can never match the “freedom” of a writer at work. A writer has a spark of the divine, he points out; “He is, in quotation marks – very large quotation marks – a god. He’s creator, law-maker and judge, all at the same time.”
There’s a slight paradox in Panos’ life, in that he spent decades in the System – he joined CyBC as a 20-year-old, and stayed till retirement – yet led a double life critiquing (and sometimes making fun of) the System. It must be said his dedication was amazing – more proof, perhaps, of his burning desire to create. For years, he set his alarm clock for 4am, got up, had a coffee and hammered away at a typewriter till 7, when the family woke up (he has two grown children, a son and daughter) and he went off to work; then at night, “after the social and family life, I once again shut myself off and worked for several hours”. Admittedly he’s one of those lucky people who don’t need much sleep, but it’s still remarkable to have done this for decades – “seven days a week, Christmas and Easter” – while also raising a family and holding down a big job. The only downside, he adds wryly, is he now finds himself waking up at 4am and unable to sleep – though all he gets to write nowadays (at least in the wee hours) are emails.
The trouble wasn’t that he wrote in his spare time, however – it was what he wrote, sparking some controversy despite awards and acclaim. His second volume of short stories, Cyprus Epics (1968) – in which he “satirised, rather mercilessly I would say, cultural matters in Cyprus” – caused offence, “to the point where some close friends refused to talk to me for decades”. When the book won the first-ever State Book Prize, certain politicians took it upon themselves to protest, and Makarios ordered an inquiry. Panos was apprised of the situation, and warned that he might have to give the money back; unfortunately, he’d already spent it on a washing machine for his young family – so he wrote a letter to the Ministry, apologising for being unable to return the prize but promising to “send you the washing machine, so you can wash your dirty linen!” Fortunately, the relevant committee found the book a deserving winner and the letter was never sent, though he still had it published in the paper.
That was light-hearted in comparison to the problems he faced over ‘Gregory’, a story in Ethereal Cyprus which he later re-wrote as a stage play (it won First Prize in a pan-European contest in Sofia) and filmed for TV. ‘Gregory’ is set during EOKA – albeit not explicitly – and tells the tale of a soldier who’s ordered to kill a hostage. It’s been translated into many languages (even Braille!), and indeed Panos’ most recent published book is Gregory and Other Stories (2009), which includes the story in English translation. How long did it take to write, back in the 60s? “An hour and a half,” he smiles. “On my little typewriter. I was a newlywed, my wife had gone to bed. I’d heard the story from a cousin who’d been an EOKA fighter.”
Panos himself “didn’t take part in the [EOKA] struggle,” he admits – and indeed has a measure of ambivalence, not about the struggle itself (which he always supported) but some of the “extreme acts” it occasioned. The killing in ‘Gregory’ – based on the killing of a real-life British hostage by EOKA fighters – was one of those acts, and when the story screened on CyBC it led to death threats. “One shameless person even sent me a letter,” recalls Panos, “in which he enclosed a razor blade, and he wrote: ‘I’ve seen your play on TV, and if you don’t cut your own throat I’m going to come over and cut it for you’.” Fortunately, there was no follow-up.
It might sound from all this that Panos Ioannides is a bit of a troublemaker – but nothing, he insists, could be further from the truth. In the first place, he thrived in the System, even while acting as “a stern critic” in his literary work (the only possible consequence of his double life was never being appointed Director-General at CyBC, though he claims he never wanted such a job and never asked for it). In the second place, he loves Cyprus, and has done much to promote Cypriot writers abroad through PEN. Is there such a thing as a uniquely Cypriot (not Greek) sensibility? What are its main traits? “It’s a difficult question,” admits Panos – but part of the answer has to do with the history of Cyprus, the way it’s been shunted from one invader to another. “The Cypriot [writer] has a constant bitterness about the fate of his country,” reckons Panos, adding that a prime element in Cypriot writing is “the desire for Cyprus to achieve what it’s craved since the dawn of its history – which is basically its freedom.”
That also comes close to describing his own beliefs, which are simple: “I believe in freedom,” he declares. “The freedom to be who you are.” Once again, we delve into his oeuvre, recounting the plot of his first novel, The Census – a kind of updated Nativity Tale where a new Messiah is born in a village in Cyprus, except the child in question isn’t a child but a burst of pure energy which affects everyone it comes into contact with. Some do good, some bad – but all act according to who they are, because that’s what the new Messiah stands for. “The first Messiah, Buddha, brought wisdom,” explains Panos. “The second Messiah, Jesus, brought love. The third one – as I conceived him, and tried to depict him in my book – brings freedom. Freedom to be who you are, to express yourself freely.”
Is it any wonder that self-expression is so important to a man who’s burned with the need to express himself since childhood? Surely not – and surely that’s the key to Panos Ioannides, his unquenchable “urge to communicate”. Is it any wonder he believes in freedom, when he’s known the perfect freedom of sitting down with a blank page and creating a world out of nothing? Isn’t it bizarre, when you think about it, that this courteous, ordinary-looking gentleman sat down in this two-storey house in Nicosia and invented grisly murders, ribald jokes, passionate trysts, troubled relationships, made-up worlds, outrageous characters?
“When I write, I’m hypnotised,” says Panos, smiling in the study with books – his own and others – lining the shelves all around him. “I lose myself”. Is it difficult? “No, it comes very easily. I’ve been writing since I was 13.”
How fast does he write? “When you start to write, it just gallops along,” he replies. “You lose yourself in that world, you lose all sense of your environment, you don’t hear noises. It truly is like being hypnotised when I’m writing. That’s why sometimes when my wife comes in to bring me a coffee or whatever, I get a shock – I really get startled. I’m not there, you might say. It’s like waking up from a nightmare.
“No, when I start to write I write very fast, and with great concentration,” says Panos Ioannides. “And when I’m writing, I don’t want to stop.” Seven decades on, the little boy on the railroad tracks still feels the dream of creation.
