A ride into Cyprus
Following in the footsteps of a great travel writer – on horseback
First light: the sound of champing on a bit and stamping of hooves, the creak of leather, the warm tang of horse. Thus in late September began a more than 100-mile ride into Cyprus, both north and south, a journey both literal and metaphorical.
The idea of such an undertaking first began to form in my mind at the time of the opening of crossing-points along the green line and the referendum on the Annan Plan in 2004. My intention was to retrace on horseback the writer Colin Thubron’s itinerary when he walked the length and breadth of Cyprus in 1972, an odyssey he recorded so eloquently and poignantly in Journey into Cyprus.
Thubron went me ta pothia which makes as he put it “the difference between a glimpse and a stare”. He also observed that as walking showed trust, it was the soundest way to reach people’s hearts. I wanted to replicate this tempo in order to try and obtain some sense of what had changed – or what had not – in the Cypriot psyche and way of life since the island’s division in 1974.
Riding offers a further dimension, that of symphonia, not just between land, horse, rider – with the horse as the intermediary between the first and the last – but also in its own interaction with the denizens of the land, whether human or animal.
The original plan was to traverse the island as Thubron had done, from the Akamas to the Karpas, but logistics rendered this impractical. Ironically it would have been easier to accomplish the venture by horse in 1972, when donkeys and mules and grazing for them were commonplace. To undertake an expedition of this kind with horses necessitated a backup vehicle carrying provisions (expertly driven by Caroline Grossmith, who also facilitated the entire operation) and pre-arranged locations for tethering the animals overnight.
Most regretted was the impossibility of replicating the solitariness and spontaneity of Thubron’s journey, but there were compensations: the cheerfulness and warmth of my English companions Bev and Chris on the rides through the Kyrenia mountains and in the south, the camaderie and knowledge of my friend Yianni, with whom I had previously ridden through the Troodos mountains.
Some days we covered over 30 kilometres and spent more than six hours in the saddle – a time-span for horse and donkey travel which used to be known as a chapqun in the Paphos district.
I was well served by a pair of fine horses. In the north I rode Domingo, a tall Bulgarian bay gelding. In the south Yianni mounted me on Farouk, a dark, handsome and clever English thoroughbred. Both are worthy descendants of the steed who bears St George in so many Byzantine frescoed churches in the Troodos mountains and possess the heart of St Mamas’ lion.
Disregarding the heat, they willingly stepped it out up every winding ascent and picked their way over stony tracks and slippery concrete and tarmac. Their sang-froid was to the fore when confronted with the odd dramatic incident: a sleeping snake across the path in the Kyrenia mountains, a brush fire near Terra which ignited in front of us and took a pair of fire-fighting helicopters nearly four hours to douse.
Armed with some Greek and, as Thubron elegantly put it, a courtesy of Turkish, en route I encountered farmers and foresters, monks and mukhtars, taverna and coffee-house-keepers, priests and (former) police officers, hodjas and economic immigrants, expatriates and internal exiles, both Greek and Turkish.
Everywhere the reaction to rider was the same as that experienced by Thubron as walker: one of curiosity mingled with politely suppressed incredulity that anyone should wish to travel by such means for pleasure.
The trek began in the Kyrenia mountains, following Thubron’s steps as he weaved his way northwards. On the first day the route ascended through orchards and olive groves from Agios Epiktitos to the still-lovely village of Bellapais with its ruined abbey, before crossing the range via a cultivated valley and turning northwards along a treeless track to Vouno.
The ride ended at the magnificently located former monastery of the Mother of God Absinthiotissa on the slopes below the peak of Buffavento and with commanding views of Lefkosia and the Mesaioura plain. The Russian monk Bars’kyj came here in 1735 during his extensive peregrinations through the Orthodox world and noted that the name Absinthiotissa, i.e. wormwood, referred to the miraculous discovery of an ancient icon which led to the monastery’s foundation.
As an art historian by profession, I was keen to visit another former monastery in the vicinity visited by Bars’kyj, that of St John Chrysostom at Koutsovendis. In Thubron’s day it was a military camp and he obtained access with difficulty. It is still occupied by soldiers, albeit of another army, and impossible to enter.
The following day the route was rejoined at the Agios Epiktitos – Lefkosia road and took tracks which encircled the dramatic and aptly named rocky peaks of Pentadakylos (Five Fingers). Lunch was taken above the beautifully located but melancholy and ruined Armenian monastery of Surp Magar.
It was not practical to take the horses further north, so the next two days were spent tracing by Landrover the last stages of Thubron’s journey through the remote and sparsely populated low hills and coastline of the Karpas before heading back to the south of the island.
Then began an unforgettable five-day ride from Lara Beach to Yianni’s farm at Omodos, a route traversed by Thubron, although his itinerary was not always precisely followed. The trail, much of it on dirt roads and tracks, encompassed some of the most unspoilt and varied landscapes of the island – the wilderness of the Akamas, the barley fields and olive groves of the foothills below Tilliria north of Paphos and east of Polis, the deciduous woods of the steep river valleys and the pine forests around Panayia and below Kykko, and finally the vine-speckled slopes encircling Omodos. This is a largely silent land, peopled more by scurrying lizards and swooping birds – and the occasional grazing donkey – than humans.
Mounds of black slag from ancient copper-mining in the coastal foothills below the Paphos Forest and Tilliria, the modest versions of the Roman underground workings explored by Thubron, bore witness to the age-old exploitation of the island’s mineral wealth.
After being washed down and fed, the horses were tethered overnight in a variety of locations: a tennis-court at Droushia, a field at Lysos, the garden of a private house at Kannavioiu and, most romantically of all, the arcadian setting of the ancient Kelefos bridge over the Dairizos river.
The stillness and varied natural beauty demanded contemplation and reflection, so usually we rode in companionable silence, broken only by my quizzing Yianni on subjects encompassing moufflon, Cypriot equine lore and dialect. The most frequently repeated words were directional: aristera, theksia or eshia. When in doubt well-founded trust was put in Farouk’s uncanny radar and memory.
This is a rural Cyprus still I think for the most part recognisable from 1972: the pick-up truck may have supplanted the donkey, but the pattern and pace of life – dictated by the climate, which at the time of the ride was unseasonably hot and parched – remains much the same.
Were he to return today, Thubron might struggle to disentangle the two-donkey wide alleys of Omodos from the blanket of lace and souvenirs with which they are festooned, but in general we made our way through a country and communities remote from tourism and in which the trappings of modern life seem superficial. There are still villages inhabited by black-clad widows sitting by their doors, and you can still see the occasional goatherd with his flock.
It is sti
ll a way of life, at least for older Cypriots, and is thus no less real a Cyprus than that of the urban centres and coastal resorts which were already in evidence in the late 1960s, but now further engorged by the rash of speculative building under construction at breakneck speed for foreign buyers on both sides of the green line.
But for how much longer? The more remote villages are struggling to survive as communities, a trend already apparent in Thubron’s time. The taverna-keeper at the beautiful mountain village of Mylikouri observed that they offer nothing to meet the expectations of the young.
In contrast one ancient Cypriot institution has undergone a dramatic revival. When Thubron enjoyed the hospitality of the picturesque Chrysorrogiatissa monastery overlooking the village of Panayia, it was in what appeared to be irreversible decline, peopled by a few aged monks struggling to perform the Liturgy and maintain the buildings. Other venerable Orthodox religious houses – even the fabulously rich and famous Kykko – were in an equally sorry state. Since the 1980s Orthodox monasticism has thrived on the island, thanks to the influx of a new generation of monks, who have also been prominent in the recovery of the great historic centre of Mount Athos.
“This is the record of a country which will never return,” wrote Thubron in his preface.
The island I rode through is indeed a different Cyprus from that experienced by him.
From the Akamas to the Karpas it was impossible to ignore the scars of conflict, separation and displacement.
Thubron saw enclaves and divided communities. I came across ruined and empty villages, with their disused places of worship and desolate and neglected cemeteries. I visited settlements in which the original inhabitants have been replaced by refugees from the other side.
The sadness of the physical traces was underlined by encounters with visitors, not residents, to their former communities: Greek ladies from Limassol speaking Essex-English cleaning the Apostoleas Andreas pilgrimage church at the tip of the island, a Turkish family at Vrecha (“This was Paradise” one observed regretfully), where Thubron met only dogs and a sentry.
Almost never – and only then very guardedly – did people refer to the events which led to their displacement. Understandably the memories are too painful and too personal to share with an outsider.
And yet, despite political impasse and the ease with which myth becomes history and history becomes myth, the commonality of welcome and friendship equally in evidence from Greek and Turk, not just towards a foreigner but between each other, suggests there survives in this island a mentalit? which transcends differences of creed and ethnicity.
To a horseman, like any other traveller, Sto kalo and Merhaba have the same value.
Perhaps there still exists, concealed beneath layers of mutual suspicion and prejudice, a mosaic composed of different elements. The mosaic shares the same values of courtesy and filoxenia and is surely more durable than one constructed on a false ideology of ‘national’ identity. And I hope it is more characteristic of the people of Cyprus than that suggested by the strident nationalism of the flags proclaiming separate identities on both sides of the green line.
The bombastic rhetoric of the gleaming new mosques at Famagusta and Rizokarpaso and the inflated neo-Byzantinism of churches in the burgeoning suburbs of towns in the south are equally alien intrusions, especially when compared with the homely unobtrusiveness of the humble mosque and adjacent church in the deserted village of Melantra.
The minaret of the former points a modest finger heavenwards, its companion hugs the ground from which it emerges. By their proximity and scale both acknowledge that there are more paths than one to God and appear to be cognisant of the ephemeral and transitory nature of human life. Here church and mosque spring from the same soil and are in harmony, not conflict.
Like the same wild flowers which flourish on the beaches of the Akamas and Karpas they do not recognise barbed wire and watchtowers.
Richard Marks is Professor of the History of Art at the University of York
Postscript: if anyone is interested in riding in Cyprus, contact (for north
Cyprus) ?atalk?y Riding Club, run by Di Silbery and Bev Jones (
[email protected]/www.catalkoyridingclub.com) and (for the south) Yiannakis Ioannou
(tel. 99 108 799/99 772 371).
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