Cypria
Alex Christofi's spellbinding journey into Cypriot history
In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with author Alex Christofi about his book Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean (Bloomsbury, 2024). [This post also functions as a crossover with The Cyprus Files].
You can order the book from Bloomsbury, Bookshop, or Amazon.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.
THE USONIAN: What inspired you to write Cypria?
ALEX CHRISTOFI: I always knew I wanted to write about a book about Cyprus. For a long time, I assumed it would be a novel. I started out writing fiction, and I imagined this amazing star-crossed lovers plot set around the 1974 invasion, which would help bring general readers into understanding the complicated politics of the island. But the longer I thought about it, the less realistic it seemed. Some of the stuff I wanted to write about wouldn’t fit within the scope of a novel.
And then I read The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak [which also centers on a forbidden romance between Greek and Turkish Cypriot characters]. [At that point I realized] that [plot had] been done really well, and the idea didn’t need me anymore. It freed me to write a book that didn’t already exist—to write the whole history of the island in a single volume in the English language, and try to bring everything in, from when humans first arrived to the present day.
TU: Cypria is a beautifully told work that compresses thousands of years of history into a manageable text. Before I read the book, I knew a lot about Cyprus, but there were so many stories in this book that were new to me—like how the Crusaders invented the sugar plantation system that eventually was forcefully imposed on the Americas, or how Luigi Cesnola’s problematic excavations actually launched New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. How did you conceive of the structural prism to hold all these stories?
AC: When moving through places [in Cyprus], you move through time. One of the places where this is stark is in Nicosia. At the end of Ledra Street, there’s a checkpoint. And you if you do cross over there, you end up going through this Buffer Zone that’s been basically preserved since 1974—it’s the same with the ghost town of Varosha. So there are all these little places that seem to embody a particular moment in history. There’s a great tradition of travel writing about Cyprus, and I really liked the idea of writing a book that kind of traveled through space and time all at once. It’s a historical tour of the island. That was the only way I could find a real vessel that would allow me to say everything I wanted.
Rather than accepting the world’s narrative—which is that Cyprus is a footnote to world history—I tried to make the argument up front that it’s a pivot point for the world—what Greeks would call the omphalos, the navel of the world. The ancient Greeks thought that was Delphi, but I would argue it was Cyprus, which was this amazing nexus of Eurasian empires. It becomes the story of the world through a grain of sand.
TU: You also start at the very beginning—a prehistoric time of ancient elephants, which, in your telling, inspired the legend of the Cyclopes, and indeed, the name of Cyclopes’ cave in Ayia Napa. Tell me about your interest in the deep history of the island.
AC: I actually found the early history way more interesting than I expected to, so it took up more of the book than I had planned. Part of that story involved the Bronze Age kingdom of Alashiya, which was clearly a really important regional power. The king of Alashiya would address the pharaoh of Egypt as a brother, and the ruler of Ugarit [a city-state in Syria] would address the King of Alashiya as Father. And it seems to have been the biggest copper trader in the world at the time. So it felt important to ground the story in this sense that Cyprus was vital to the emergence of Mediterranean culture.
TU: As you mentioned, there’s a long tradition of travel writers who have written about Cyprus. Your book, however, is from a Cypriot perspective. As a writer, what were you trying to do that Lawrence Durrell or Colin Thubron couldn’t in their milestone travel narratives, Bitter Lemons and Journey into Cyprus, respectively?
AC: I did like the idea of drawing on that tradition. The Durrell and Thubron books are really amazing, particularly the Thubron—he traveled across Cyprus in 1973, so it became this historical document of the last year that the island was undivided. I liked the idea that my book could be a faithful account of the island as it stood in 2022-23.
My heritage is both British and Cypriot, but I don’t think there have been very many books about Cyprus written for an English-language audience, from what academics might call the Cypro-centric perspective.
I do think that colored the way that the way that the [Durrell and Thubron] accounts were written. The modern genre of travel writing began with Mark Twain; rather than setting out to write an uncomplicated account, Twain sent up the conventions of travel—wherever the travelers get dragged, they are super bored, even though they’re looking at a Da Vinci or something—they just want to have dinner or get back on the boat. Some of the narrative irony of that genre got lost over time. And sometimes writers had a tendency to caricature locals as a way of providing light entertainment, which is not the most modern approach.
TU: One thing I loved about the book is that you really spend a lot of time unpacking the history of the cuisine—like commandaria, or halloumi. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that makes Cyprus the island it is through the history of food—and it’s stuff we sometimes leave out in a lot of similar histories. Tell me about that.
AC: In my education, I was taught in the grand old historical mode of the “great man” theory of history, the idea that the dates of monarchs and great battles were the stuff of history. And the older I’ve gotten, the more problematic I’ve found that approach. Apart from occluding the roles of people in the working class, peasants, women or people of color, the great man theory also served to focus on conflicts more than interchange.
If you don’t talk about culture, it’s very hard to show the positive side of cultural interchange. If you’re presenting history as something that’s staged as a pitched battle, then it’s always going to seem that different cultures are irreconcilable. I didn’t want to shy away from the fact that there's often been very violent conflict on the island, but that’s not the whole story, and it’s dangerous to say that it is. I also just really wanted to write a thousand words on halloumi.
TU: Great works of narrative history often animate larger than life characters. In your book, there are characters like the insufferable “emperor” Isaac Comnenus, or the many enigmas of General Grivas and Nikos Sampson—and the persistent mystery regarding Henry Kissinger’s alleged influence on the outcome of the 1974 Turkish invasion of the island. How do you balance the need for narrative clarity versus historical speculation?
AC: Whenever something’s political, the easiest thing in the world is to tell the set of facts which accords with the conclusion you want to draw. Very often in my research, I found a bunch of circumstantial evidence for something that didn’t amount to a “smoking gun.” From almost the moment it happened, many people in Cyprus were absolutely convinced that there was a conspiracy led by Kissinger to invade the north of the island, that it was all pre-planned, and that he knew exactly what he was doing.
And the minutes of some of these secret meetings, which we can now see, just don't seem to indicate that Kissinger was on top of his brief. He thought Famagusta was called “Samagusta.” He didn’t know the basic geography of the island. I mean, obviously, as a Cypriot, it hurts to think that it’s beneath Kissinger’s notice; it’s dignified to think that Cyprus was in a really important geopolitical position.
Maybe the reality is something sadder, which is that [the conflict] was collateral damage that Kissinger took very little notice of. So I wanted to leave open possibilities for interpreting things in in different ways—that is the only honest way to narrate such a disputed history.
TU: Many histories of Cyprus tend to focus on antiquity, or the Crusades, or the Cyprus Problem, but you contended with a lot of the phenomena that have happened recently—like the commercialization of Ayia Napa, the geopolitical scramble for natural gas, or the more recent Russian influx into Limassol. Where do you think Cyprus is headed, and do you see a future in which the reunification of the island might be achieved?
AC: The reason the book is called Cypria is that I wanted this book to be the kind of prequel to the present in the same way as the original Cypria served to show everything that had led to the Trojan War. That Cypria was supposedly written by a writer called Stasinus. It told all of the founding myths that led up to The Iliad and the story of the Trojan War.
Aristotle said that you could make one or two tragedies out of an Iliad or an Odyssey, but you could make a dozen out of the Cypria. So setting aside the literary qualities of Homer, which I don’t think you can dispute, the content of the Cypria was super important. Sadly, we have only a few fragments left, so we have to infer much of its contents from other later writers.
The present conflicted, contradictory nature of the island is so much easier to understand when you can see that, for instance, Ayia Napa was a replacement tourist resort for the loss of Varosha. Now we’ve got this absurd situation where you’ve got a resident population of less than 4,000 in Ayia Napa that can all fit into the city’s biggest nightclub. And then we’ve got 1.9 million tourists a year. It’s like the lunatics are running the asylum, but with a wash of Russian money.
I think it’s so much easier to understand where we've arrived if we can concede that each of the incremental, reasonable decisions that people felt had to be taken at the time have in turn led to this mess.
In terms of the future of the island, [Turkish Cypriot leader] Ersin Tatar is very aligned to [Turkish President] Recep Erdoğan, and I can’t see any realistic way to bring him to the negotiating table in good faith.
So for the next political cycle, however long that may be, it’s hard to imagine the stagnant situation really shifting. Change could take place if countries like Turkey, Greece, the US, and the UK felt it was in their vested interest to have a peaceful, solid, and unified island in eastern Mediterranean. For instance, if they felt it was worth having Cyprus joining NATO, or having the north of Cyprus be part of the EU—to be less susceptible to people smuggling and drug smuggling. There were good reasons to suppose that those things will become more important in the future, but we’re not going to get a kind of easy diplomatic negotiation in the next few years.
All of that said, University of Warwick professor Neophytos Loizides recently published a fascinating study showing the ‘zones of agreement’ between the two main communities that could pave the way for a lasting settlement on the island. So the possibility exists if the will is there.
There’s a well-told story of the island as one riven by conflict, where each moment of new cultural impact becomes another kind of division of the island’s history and its culture, a division or a dilution. And to me, one of the things I absolutely love about Cyprus is its hybridity—it feels like a kind of layering. And I think if you can see each of these cultures as being additive, that has a huge impact on how you see the present situation, and hopefully charts a route out.
Alex Christofi is Editorial Director at Transworld Publishers and author of four books published in 12 languages, including the novels Let Us Be True and Glass, winner of the Betty Trask Prize for fiction. He has written for numerous publications including the Guardian, London Magazine, White Review and the Brixton Review of Books, and contributed an essay to the anthology What Doesn't Kill You: Fifteen Stories of Survival. Dostoevsky in Love, his first work of non-fiction, was shortlisted for the Biographers' Club Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and named as a Literary Non-fiction Book of the Year by the Times and Sunday Times. He followed Dostoevsky in Love with Cypria, a new history of Cyprus and the Mediterranean.