A village in the Buffer Zone

One of the few remaining inhabited places on Cyprus whose population is still very much mixed is the village Pyla, which today lies in the UN buffer zone. The village has always been bi-communal, with Cypriote Greeks just slightly more represented than Cypriote Turks, although it is the Turks here who own most of the surrounding land.
During the violent events which repeatedly shook the island from 1962 to1974, Pyla remained quiet. The inhabitants of Pyla seemed to have a tacit contract that peace would be maintained. Pyla was not totally unique of course, there were a few other villages where no violence ever erupted between communities. Potamya near Nicosia was cited to me as an example. Today it is also situated in the buffer zone.

A Lusignan cathedral converted to a mosque, Lefkoşa  

As for the case of Pyla, unfortunately that peace was kept only on the surface. Underneath, tensions were seething. The appearance of calm did not mean that the people of Pyla were innocent. While pogroms were raging elsewhere, some of the Greeks of Pyla went to those areas to participate in the assaults on Turks. These individuals would come back boasting about what they looted, and whom they raped, so inevitably everyone else in Pyla would know. This created considerable strain locally on the inter-ethnic relations.
In 1974, with Turkish warplanes bombing Pyla, most Greeks left, thinking that the Turkish government would take over. When shortly after UN forces moved in, they came back.

Armed with that much history, learnt from a few articles I read as well as from the stories of my articulate Couchsurfing host Nikolay in nearby Larnaca, I make a plan to visit the intriguing village. I get on the bus; with me, there are some students from abroad, Nigerians maybe, or Ghanians. Their student residence is on the outskirts of Pyla, that is where they all get off. The entire surrounding area has been taken over by foreigners: Blocks of holiday houses, built by Europeans, defigure the landscape the length of a few kilometers all the way down to the sea.  
I start a conversation with the bus driver. He is a Cypriote Turk, who, he tells me, left with his family in 1974, and who came back some five years ago for economic reasons; he could not find a job in the North.

When I arrive in the town center, one of the first things I remark is that small Pyla is actually quite picturesque. Small streets are lined by white-washed houses with climbing plants at the gate, further down, at a short distance, a large new church invites a visit with open doors, while at the very village square the minaret of a mosque can be seen just behind the pub with the Efes sign. Right in front of it UN jeeps are parked. The UN office is in another corner of the square. In its window a poster reads, "Hunting in the buffer zone is strictly forbidden. Hunters in camouflage carrying guns are easily mistaken for soldiers. They may draw fire from either side." The message is repeated in Greek and in Turkish.

The street signs show the word "street" in two languages, "odos" and "sokak".  The village also has two mayors, the "Türk Muhtarlığı Pile" being situated right here on the square, "Pile" being the Turkified version of the village's name. The most common theory as to the etymologic origin of the name is that it may come from the Greek word "pyli", "passage",  the village occupying a strategic position on the transition point from the coastal area to the central plain.
There is a Turkish primary school in the village somewhere, I was told. At the street corner a kasap advertises both in Turkish and English. The shop keeper may well know that the Greeks anyway prefer to buy from a Greek butcher. As far as I have heard Greek landlords confine themselves to renting out to Greek tenants here, in the same way that Turkish landlords let only to Turks. Despite appearances, it is a bit of a segregated world.

One anecdote Nikolay relayed to me was the one of a Turkish man who always used to come to the Greek tavern. Everyone in Pyla thought he was a spy. Nikolay related it this way: "It may sound incredible, but that is really what people were saying to each other. Personally I don´t think so, I think he was just not very clear in the head. He was probably ever so slightly mentally handicapped, and he also had a gambling problem, that is why he always came there."

The Buffer Zone is a duty-free zone, and despite any existing inter-communal tensions, this incited people to cooperate economically, it simply being in everyone's best interest. Before the border opened in 2003, Pyla used to be famous for its "fish taverns". At that time, the Turks of Pyla were among the few Cypriotes who could go and seek employment on both sides of the divided island. So the Turks of Pyla engaged in trade, bringing cheap fish from the Northern side, delivering it to the Greeks of Pyla who owned restaurants who quickly became famous across Greek Cyprus. The Greek restaurant owners in return would employ Turkish waiters, because it came in handy should a fight break out among customers. A Greek waiter could not possibly hope to meddle in a dispute  involving one or more hot-headed Turks, a Turkish waiter however might try!
While the Greeks had restaurants at the time, the Turks were shops owners. Along with the fish they contrabanded fake brand-name products, clothing or perfums. Pyla was the place to go if you wanted cheap clothes, and also for alcohol and cigarettes. 
Then, in 2003, the border opened, the prices in the North went up, and all that business collapsed.

In the few afternoon hours that I spend in Pyla, there is almost no one on the street. People seem to drive their cars around rather than walk. The woman in the shop advertising "açık" on its door, from which I buy some Ülker chocolate, graces me with a big smile when I change to her mothertongue Turkish after she has not understood my question in English, a language widely understood on the Greek side of Cyprus. I am looking for directions for Pyla's two historical sights: A Venetian tower, and an apparently very well preserved Lusignan chapel (most Lusignan architecture being located on the territory of the Northern government, it has been left to dilapidate).
This woman, and another man later in the pub where I ask something about the bus time table, are my first contacts with Turkish Cypriotes. Curiously I try to analyse their accents and physiognimies. Of course, a couple of weeks later I am going to traverse the border to the North and the importance I attribute to these individuals, right now constituting such peculiar objects of interest which I hold against the light and muster with much eagerness, will then be washed away by the countless experiences and conversations I will have with other Cypriote Turks.


For now I go around finding a place to wait for the bus to come, and just as I sit down with my bag at my feet, the evening call to prayer resounds. It does so very timidly, as if not to disturb anyone, and I would almost not have noticed it. The sound of the television coming out of the door of an empty restaurant on the other side of the square seems to be just as loud!




Such are the rather tame adventures of the day, I muse as I snack on the feta cheese-flavoured crisps that I got together with the Keos beer from the "Antigone" supermarket on the square. Not really that exciting, but I am glad I made the effort.

This is Not a Cocktail Bar

CK One à la Tunisienne

I had to do a double-take, when I first saw this in a village in Tunisia, because it looked like a collection of whiskey bottles. Taking a closer look I realized that this was not in fact an alcohol bar, but an assemblage of perfume bottles. You can come with your own small receptacle to the local kiosk and buy a shot of your favourite fragrance.

Colonial architecture in the centre of Bizerte

The day before, a man had shown us on the market in Bizerte how to artisanally distill perfume from jasmin flowers with a simple metal contraption.

Православная церковь

Another curiosity we came across that day was this: On the outskirts of Bizerte, when hitch-hiking away, we saw the Russian Orthodox church shown here. A man stepped out of the door, closing the gate behind himself by key. His stark blue eyes and fair skin provoked me to chance speaking in Russian to him. He said there was a small Russian community in Bizerte and in Tunis, made up of individuals all exercising different professions. Himself, he claimed to be the only Russian sailor in Bizerte, working as a fisherman.

I was surprised to see a Russian church, although my German travel partner aptly remarked, "Isn't it kind of normal to have different nationalities represented in every country, and also exercising their faith?". I guess I am strangely conditionned by Turkey, where, despite a not negligibly presence of Russians in certain areas, you would never see a church of such typical architecture. The American protestant community in Ankara for example rents the bottom floor of a normal residental building, and only a plastic board discloses the fact that it functions as a church.

A part of Bizerte's port
The French stayed here until 1963, six years after Tunisian independance.

When reading the commemorative plate on the outside of the church we found out that indeed, the unusual architectural sight had a special history. It was built in the 1930s as a monument for the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Tsar. The fleet had escaped the Bolshevik revolution, and via the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles crossed the Mediterranean. Its last stop ever, in the early 1920s, became this Tunisian port, at the time under French occupation.

Most of the sailors were later granted political asylum in France, whereas the ships were restituted to the Soviet government, although in an already irreparable state.

Bizerte City Square

A day alone in Pakistan

The friend with whom I had travelled for two weeks had left, and this was my first day alone Pakistan. Together, we had hitch-hiked the Karakoram highway. It had been a long trip up to the mountain capital of Gilgit and I was still physically tired from the long road. I did not want to venture too far away yet, instead my plan was to go and visit a village somewhere nearby. Just to see what happens.

I went hitch-hiking along one of the roads leading out of Gilgit. Soon enough, I ended up in a small village called Sultan Abad, visibly an Ismaili village, because at its entrance a huge sign of the Agha Khan foundation stood. It had a dusty main street lined by small, white-washed houses. The rest of the village was made up of homes and gardens clinging to incredibly steep slopes. The Indus river passed further down from the road. It was the early afternoon, and the village youth were streaming out of the school building to go home after their lessons. A young woman with a big smile spotted the foreigner and invited her home. Her name was Naima, and it turned out her house was the highest one up a steep path, the last one to reach after a long, sweaty climb. It goes without saying that the views over the surrounding mountains only improved as we toiled up the incline. 
Once inside the house, after having made me sit down on the carpet in her living room, I was given the first cup of salty tea of the trip - and of my life. The drink proved so unusual for my taste buds, I could not finish it. 

In the course of the conversation, just between the two of us, Naima showed me a picture of a young man about her age: "Look, this is my fiancé!", she was squeaking with excitement. "How did you meet your future husband?" I asked. "After our engagement", was the answer. The way I must have goggled at her did not throw her off: "It was an arranged marriage", she explained to me with the utmost naturalness. "His sister works together with my father. My parents chose for me." The fact that a working woman helps arranging a marriage for a relative telescopes how progressive Ismaili society is on some points, while being able to remain traditional on others.
 "But you are okay with their choice, you like him, right?", I asked, a bit worried for Naima's well-being. I did not have to be: "Oh yes!", she shrieked as if the guy on the picture was some sort of pop-star. 

Later she left me sitting with a few female cousins of hers who had just arrived, walking off to talk to her husband-to-be on her mobile phone outside of the room for a long time. They talked every day, but never in real life, only on the telephone. When we later heard that he was coming, that meant the group of us girls would walk back down the mountain, so that Naima could cast a spying eye on the man for just a short while.

He had come in his car, stopping on the street. We stayed a bit further up the hill, watching Naima´s older brother talk to the pop-star. I realized now that the picture she showed me must have been taken a few years earlier. Neither of the two men did as much as look up the hill, which would have been acknowledging our presence. The men finished their tête-à-tête carrying out that man hug thing, slapping each other on the shoulder like two business partners who knew their dealings together are going well.

We went back up home. At this point, the girls offered me my first ever glass of lassi. It is  a yoghurt drink sometimes prepared like ayran in Turkey, mixing yoghurt with salted water, but in Pakistani villages usually made by taking the liquid that forms on the top when making butter from yoghurt in a receptacle, or at least that was what I was explained! This drink, too, my taste buds at first rejected, finding it a little too zesty and unusually bitter this very first time. 
Over the following weeks however, I was going to grow to love the taste of this particular drink, and when offered the blander 'ayran version' of it, I would wistfully remember that first, authentic drink of lassi that I had that day, in that village, with that girl called Naima.

Photo courtesy of http://www.tripmondo.com/pakistan/gilgit-baltistan/haraj/picture-gallery-of-haraj/

Hitch-hiking the Axis of Dodgy

"Aileniz var mı?", Jo tried out her halting Turkish. Did our driver have a family, she was asking. "Yes, I have a wife and a son", the nice smiling man replied obligeingly. He paused for a bit, then continued in an unsolicited manner: "They live in a village seven kilometres from Trabzon. In the city, I have another house. There I have a girl-friend, too. A Russian lady." He paused again. "But she is in Russia now" Another pause. "You know, our work is very hard sometimes."

Jo hitching, somewhere else, when it was warmer

I was getting angry now. I had earlier blocked the conversation at the necessary points, trying to steer another way, clearly showing my displeasure. When I asked Jo to take turns, she started the conversation over in the most innocent fashion, as described above. However our driver started again in the same vein, not heeding our reactions.
I long knew the Eastern Black Sea Region to be one of the dodgiest areas of Turkey for a female hitchhiker, and I had learnt long ago to avoid trucks there especially. However, this time I had a travel partner, so I had breached the old rule and my friend and I got into the first truck that stopped... Once more, that proved to be a mistake.

I was sick of the man's advances now and said to Jo that we should to stop the lorry and get out in a good spot to hitch-hike on. "I think he would stop this behaviour if  you expressed very clearly that you are unhappy", Jo said to me. I tried to explain to her that I had already done that very clearly, by refusing to answer those kind of questions. As she had herself, too. "You should tell him exactly why we are leaving", she said, as she climbed out and I handed her our bags, one after the other. While tying my shoes (I had been sitting on the bed in the middle of the lorry), I did so. When I came out Jo asked "was he surprised that we left? Did he say 'I am sorry I am sorry I am sorry' three times?".

Jo can understand most of the words spoken in Turkish, but there is a gap as it takes some time for the meaning of each sentence to trickle down. Afterwards her memory of the conversation was more blurred than mine. To me it was clear that I had shown my displeasure in an unmistakable manner, and that we both had said exactly the correct things to create the right impression of us being nothing else than tourists.

So what was my answer to her question? Had the driver said "I am sorry" several times, and looked surprised at our sudden egress? I do not remember what I said exactly to her, but my thoughts were: Hell no he did not! He did not seem very worried about getting me to accept his 'sorry' at all. He just said "sorry" once just when I was already half outside. He seemed mostly disappointed he did not get to screw to be honest!

I repeated all the conversation as she and I had led it. Me, I had blocked his dubious questions about whether we were "working" very clearly and stated twice that we had visited the Sumela monastery near Trabzon. Even though that was not true at all, by telling this I was leaving no space for anything else than the impression that we had come to immerse ourselves in Turkish history and culture; and not for "work".

 On a truck, in Turkey, Kat

 

I guess the man with the smiling face could have his agreeable moments, and maybe in a different situation when he was not expecting sex, he might just be happy to have company and light conversation for a couple of hours. He had a kind face, and I could see how when not understanding the language perfectly you could have gone along with him a lot longer. It was unfortunate for me that I understood everything he said beyond any doubt about the possibility of misunderstandings!
Myself I had many lifts with truck drivers who, after an initial "trying advance" turned out to be very kind, even genuinely hospitable. Jo was under the impression that this one could turn out like that.
The problem with this particular one was exactly that he was NOT one of those. He did not take our indirect, but very clear "no's" for what they were at all, he just kept pushing further.

As I wrote earlier, Trabzon is the major city on the Black Sea coast, the first stop-over region for sex workers arriving from Ex-Soviet countries. In the very centre down at the sea front, there is a row of low class hotels; in the very small alleyways seperating them you can see the women stand in short skirts or tight jeans.
Jo had been to Trabzon once before, knowing nothing or not much about the situation. She asked at the reception of one of those hotels to use the toilet. When she opened the door to step out of the cubicle, the receptionist was standing at the door, watching her every move and asked her for sex right there.

What happened next after we got out of that truck, was not surprising: Immediately, without us even trying to stop any car, two more lorries stopped for us.
We diligently ignored them this time.

I am blogging this as part of an on-going discussion about sexual harassment when hitch-hiking in Turkey on this blog here.

In Tuva

"Oh my god, we searched for you everywhere! My name is Ayan, and you, I already know, are Iris!", the Minister's translator had walked towards me, taking my right hand with both of his so as to shake it most vigorously. "The whole city knows you already, your description was transmitted to all police agents!", he recapitulated the events of the past two hours. For the lack of anything else to say, could I formulate it the way that I was at least flattered that they put so much effort in trying to find me? Not really. For Christ's sake, it wasn't like I was really lost, to start with!
But that is another story.

Tuva

In any case, my travel partner and I, we had found each other again. Now, how to get rid of our chaperones? They had taken us to the tourist office and were, in fact, engaged on an advertising bender, opening all sorts of brochures in front of us, trying to sell to us the best hotels, cruises and resorts of the region (well, if Tuva had any resorts or cruises...). There was no way we could convince them that we wanted to just stick our thumbs out and hitch-hike away from here. After I had got 'lost' to so dramatic effect already one time today, they wanted to make sure we slept in one of the city's best hotels tonight!
We negotiated for a bit, and got to a compromise that pleased neither party involved, but placated both: Gregor and I would take a minibus to a small town an hour south of here, and stay in the only 'hotel' there, the municipal guest-house. The sort of thing all decent-sized villages have, most of the time used not by travellers but by workers arriving from other villages or the city, laying new gas pipes for example, or working on the municipal telephone lines.
By moving there, we would have the change of scenery from the capital city that we desired, and it would be cheaper.

The minister and Ayan escorted us to the minibus station, and Ayan warned us one last time, that he told the driver exactly where we were headed, and that he was also going to phone the hotel tonight and tomorrow morning to see what we were up to. "So please guys, no funny tricks!" If I had entertained the thought of starting to walk away trying to hitch-hike instead, this uprooted the idea. The message was clear, and so we stuck around, finally took our places in the back of the vehicle and paid the fare.
A girl came and sat next to me, and started chirpily chewing my ear off, with precisely the openness and sociability with which Tuvans strike you so often. After she had peppered me with questions about my life in Europe for a good while, she invited me and Gregor home: She lived on a stoyanka, a traditional farm, with cows and sheep guarded by big, dangerous dogs, her and her family housing in yurts, making their own butter and yoghurt. We would have to get off some 20 kilometers after the next village, and then we would have to walk four kilometers out into the countryside from the road. We would for sure love staying with her, she would give us lots of salty tea to drink and stuff us with gorgeous food! It sounded enticing indeed, but our path had been laid for us by others: The people at the hotel were waiting for us, and Ayan would soon call them to see if we had arrived.
However small the chance, if Ayan and the minister indeed would get the police to actively look for us, as they said, that was potentially bringing trouble on any alternative hosts. So really, we had to decline. A phone, the girl did not use. This was a one-off chance, and it had just effectively passed, even before the offer was made.

We ended up getting off the bus as convened over an hour ago in the village of Saryg-Sep, the minibus driver dropping us off exactly at the door of our quarters for the night. A hotel worker was already standing outside, smiling at us and enthusiastically waving, before she came scurrying over to help us carry our bags inside. "Oh my god! Foreigners arrived! I am going to tell everyone that I met foreigners today! I work here for years, and the last foreigners came two years ago in 2010! They were French and driving their own car. I did not work that day and I missed them!"
Once inside, she made us each a cup of tea and sat us down to register our arrival. Handling our passports she looked at them as if they were articles beamed in from outer space, and filled in all needed detail into the large, frayed ledger with a hesitant hand, as if she had never done this before. "You live in Amsterdam? In which country is that?"
There were some letters from the Latin alphabet she could not read, about which she asked me for help: 'W', the letter with which Gregor's surname begins and 'r', the second letter of my name.
But she did not see the task as a chore; all the while she was excitedly giggling as if she could not believe the adventure coming over her today!

Our `Hotel`

Her name was Natalya, and after she finished signing us in, she made us another cup of tea, and kept us for a rather long and intense exchanging of ideas. So interesting, a tète-à-tète with real foreigners!, she must have been thinking. Foreigners! Not Kazakhs or Chinese, no, Europeans! She bestowed a lot of local knowledge on me over the course of the following few cups of tea, and I began not to regret having come anymore. Gregor patiently sat on the chair next to me and listened to the conversation in the foreign tongue. At some point Natalya paused, seemingly randomly in the middle of a sentence. "Cлышали гул?" Did you feel the rumble? I had not. But twenty minutes later, there it was again. Very faint and far away, I would not know how to describe the phenomenon other than the earth grinding its teeth somewhere miles beneath.
"They always told us in school that Tuva lies on the sutures of a geological Tuva-Mongolian micro-continent, and that it is therefore a high risk seismic  zone. But we never believed it! Only thirty years later, December last year, the first serious earthquakes of our lives happened! And we have been shaking the whole year! There were times when the earth was like gelatine. The lights go out, and you try to run outside as far away from the houses as possible. You hold on to a tree, so as to try to stay on your feet. There were workers here, who arrived laughing: "As a child I survived the earthquake of Tashkent", one of them said to me, "I am not bothered by your earthquakes here."  With the Tashkent earthquake he meant the most devastating earthquake of Central Asia which happened back in the 60s. But days later him and the other men, they sat out on the street the whole night after an earthquake, pissing their pants so scared they were!"
The seismic centres were always somewhere out in the taiga, in uninhabited places, the first being over a hundred kilometers from the village Saryg-Sep, where we were now. But since then they had been coming closer: The centre of the strongest earthquake in February 2012 was only 50 kilometers from here, and right here in this village they measured 8,5 points on the MSK scale. Russia uses the Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik scale on which the highest point is 12, rather than the Richter scale we use in the West, which measures intensity on a scale between 1 and 10.
Indeed only a week after we left Tuva, there was an earthquake whose seismic centre was located as being only 15 kilometers South-East from the capital city Kyzyl. Thankfully, it was only 3,2 points on the MSK scale, and ended up being the last earthquake of the year.
     "The worst thing of this was that the earthquakes destroyed parts of our homes, our ovens especially. The government promised to dole out subsidies to those most affected, but in the end we received nothing. People with historic, a hundred year old houses even received nothing! And there were devastating hail storms this year as well, which completely destroyed this autumn's harvest; and it is not the first time something like this happened. The politicians put all the money into their own pockets and live in the lap of luxury, while the people suffer. Me myself, I am already a pensioner, and yet on top of the pension I receive I have two jobs to make ends meet." I thought back to the lady we met earlier today, coincidentally, the Minister of Finances. What a long day it had been! In any case, it could hardly be expected that she would be the glorious exemption from the systematic embezzlement going on among the ranks of those of her profession.
  We drank the last cups of tea by candle-light, then Gregor and I wandered off to our room as Natalya put the generator on. 

There can be said to have been a bit of an anti-climax as we realized we were paying for a place to stay for the first time in two weeks, but there still was no shower to scrub off the filth of the hundreds of kilometres of Altayan mountains and Tuvan steppe left behind us. The female toilet, an outhouse like usually, was lacking toilet paper, but had half a book (about plumbing, with text and illustrations) from which you could tear one yellowing, rancid page at a time. The male toilet did not even have an analogous book, I heard from Gregor.

Cowering trembling behind the generator, Gregor found a kitten. It may have been deaf to choose that particular spot to sit in. Even standing next to the thing, the noise was ear-splitting.  The frail, jittering animal had eye-disease and was barely bigger than Gregor's palm. Scooped up with the left hand and sheltered by a cupped right hand from above, it purred blissfully as he held it close to his body, onto the hollow above his solar plexus. He took the smelly little furball to bed later that evening.

Before bedtime we wanted to go out to get some beer, but Natalya advised us against this: "You know, the locals all get drunk after sun-down, and if you are from outside, they can easily start making you problems." It was a story we had heard many times before.
I let Gregor play with the furball, wrapped myself up in a few blankets, and simply snoozed off.

Vote Costas!

"You came with Costas Kyriacou? The guy who is running for president next month again?!" Mikhailis was almost shouting with visible excitement. "You are joking! You simply can't be serious! I vote for the guy!"
Mikhailis was a friend of a friend who had just picked us up to drive into the mountains in search of the abandonned village Frodisia.  "No, of course it is true. We have spent three winters on Cyprus with our kids so far, and two years ago, when we first came, Costas was simply the first local we ever really met!", my friend Lena replied. It was when they went on a long walk discovering the area, that, about 10 kilometers away from their town, the two of them turned into a village to ask for the way. The majority of the village's population seemed to be rather hostile Cypriote gypsies, immigrants from the North of the island, abiding in some sort of temporary dwellings, huts or caravans. The only English speaker Lena and the Joker could find by asking around was a friendly man called Costas, a simple farmer, and, as it turned out later, a nation-wide known screwball.

I had met him for the first time the day before, when he tried to drive us to Frodisia, a ghost village which has been empty for almost thirty years, since the split of Cyprus in 1974. Then, the Turkish inhabitants of Frodisia were evicted from their homes to be allocated places of residence in Northern Cyprus, according to the contract between the Greek and Turkish Cypriote governments.
 At the turn-off from the asphalt road, there had been the promising remainder of decades past - a roadsign communicating the general direction to our destination. But at the end of four and a half hours of erring about on little used forest roads we had to give up and turn back on our tracks.

For us that day, the problem was that after the initial indicator, the road split in three parts, and from there on we could only guess where we had to go. We chose the middle path, and drove onwards, over ten kilometers before we had established with defineteness that we were headed the wrong way. The road was littered everywhere with rocks big and small that impeded the forward movement of our car and it was evident no one had made use of this particular pathway for months. Since I was on the passenger seat, it became my job to jump out of the door and clear up in front of us. It was rather energizing since it pumped fresh mountain air into my lungs, and the views over the wooded gorge we were driving through were equally invigorating. In the distance in front of us where an intensely blue sky hung instead of further mountain ranges, you could surmise the sea.
Although our mission was not going to be fulfilled, I had a good day.

But back to Costas 'Outopos' Kyriacou. To Lena and the Joker, as to anyone getting to know the man, it became evident that their new friend was a little special quite early on after meeting. But they only found out about his island-wide notoriety, when they went to a carneval celebration in the town Pafos and a group of strong-armed youth pounced on Costas as soon as they saw him, throwing him into the air several times shouting his name. Maybe Costas mistakes this kind of enthusiasm for his personality for actual political loyalt? In any case, it is with genuine sadness in his voice that he relates that the two precedent elections were "so wrongfully" taken from him, despite the fact that the results should have accounted 73,4% and 74,8% of all votes to him.
As I sat next to the man in the car, he started handing me some of his propaganda material, a large flyer with his plans for planet earth and humanity and a brochure containing, what? His election programme? On the back of the brochure, speaking of himself in the third person, he proclaims that the following step in his career will be "claiming the position of the General Secretary of the United Nations, a position which he aims to use to succeed his further purpose in this world which is not else but the consecration of one Universal State, one Universal Language (the Greek Language) and Civilization" (all English mistakes his, in this case).  He proudly told me he wrote three books in Greek, one of which is called "My Fight". Combining this with the fact that one of his main axioms was that of 'Free Love', he cheerfully nicknamed himself "The Hitler of Love".
If I had not been sure it was my friends who got me into the car in the first place, I might have felt slightly uncomfortable at this place, to, for once, make use of an understatement. In any case, the cringe was hard to supress, and I inwardly shivered stirred by a whole range of negative emotions combined with the accompanying tickle to laugh out loud. When Costas explained how in order to raise fertility on Cyprus all women from the age of 14 should be prohibited from wearing underwear, I tried to look out of the window with well-groomed indifference.

As I turned my attention to unfolding the "flyer" that I had also been given, I realized that 'Outopos' took the idea of creating a new world extremely literally: There were computer-generated images of "The New Earth" (a lot of land on the planet with water only where today are the North and South-poles); cities and even the countryside were represented by red and brown squares surrounded by green ones. Everything was perfectly symmetrical. It looked less like something inspired by Le Corbusier, than the dawdling of a kid trying out some very basic computer graphics programme moving around coloured pixels in a chart.

Anyway, how does Costas "Outopos" Koryacou envision his elucubrations will come true?

"Note that I call [the new world] Utopia not because I consider it as something impossible to be realized (no,no,no), but because its designer is Outopos. He just believed in Somebody who had already created things much more admirable than this. Let's Say that He entrusted to me the mission to design, to advertise and prepare the eople of the world about what is going to happen. Its realization will be of course exclusively a work of Him and it will be, very possible for Him an action of routine. The most I cando as a human is to hope that after its realization He will entrust me also its ruling."  (again, in this case all English mistakes are his).

That next day, with Mikhailis, we made it to the place we sought very easily. On the way, along the coast, we could see the Turkish mainland very clearly on the horizon. Even though he is local, Mikhailis said he had never seen its outline appearing so closely. Soon we took a road forking off into the mountains. After not less than a few kilometers, at a particularly beautiful spot where the river below fanned out into a broad ramification of waterways intertwining with each other, we stopped, because we had spotted a large, marvelously horned mouflon grazing uphill from the road. While Mikhailis was still getting his camera out, it darted up the scree out of sight behind a bush.
From there on, it was not a very long drive to our destination. Mikhailis knew the road to Frodisia, and was not going to take us on any detours.

Few things are more incongruous than me flying to a Mediterranean island. From the moment I set foot on Cyprus, I felt not in my right place. In front of Paphos airport, palm tree leaves rustled gently in the wind. The glistening sea daintily threw up waves in the sun.

From home that day, pictures had reached me of two cars that slithered off-road nose-diving into a nearby waterway and a train that had derailed because of the day's frost and ice (it was skilfully photo-shopped by a satire magazine). Heightened risk of accident notwithstanding, winter is my favourite season, and oh the pang of missing out on the year's first proper snows! The bright daylight softly caressed my skin, but I longed for the bite of more appropriate December degrees on my skin. Anyway, there was little I could do about it now, so I had better go and start hitch-hiking away. Plus, as I had to remind myself, there was a reason I was here - to meet my old time friends, Lena and the Joker, and I was looking forward to that.
Soon, a first car took me along.

I let myself be under the illusion that the lifts I got that day provided me with some sort of measured representation of population distribution on the island. First an English expat married to a Russian took me on, then a Russian father and daughter who live on the island, and in the end a few cars with Greek people with very limited, but existing English.





Apart from the clement weather and the beaches which attract all those foreigners, many Russians register their businesses in Southern Cyprus. Although their companies are operating in their homeland, they do this for the usual purpose of tax evasion.
As my drivers took the fastest road leading to the next city Limassol, "exit" signs for leaving the motorway started flashing past us. However haltingly, I can read the Greek alphabet, and the Greek word appears to be "exodos". Insert some sort of joke about the Biblical significance of motorway exits here, but
anyway, I was reminded of the "Le Grec Sans Peine" self-teaching Greek course of which I had once, a long time ago, perused a few chapters. It had been a very instructive experience. After all, the ancient form of this language underlies so much of our specializing terminology in all European languages today. And modern Greek still continues to have much of the same vocabulary.  To name just a couple of obvious exponents most of us will recognize, "khronos" (from which we have 'chronology') still means 'time'; "gluko", which gave us 'glucose'), means 'sweet' or 'sweets'.
The juxtaposition of a high-brow lexeme of European languages with the simple meaning of the original Greek frequently leaves a funny impression. Think of "thalamos", which means "chamber, booth". Speakers of modern English may know this word from designations given to parts of the brain in neurology. There is for example the "hypothalamus", a Latinized form which as we know now literally translates to "the chamber below". The usage of the Greek cognate is a bit more prosaic: "Telephone booth" for example becomes " telephonikos thalamos". Next, take the word "atomo"; originally it has nothing to do with complicated physics, in modern Greek it applies to humans and simply means "individual". "Apostolee" is a verb that means "to send", so think of the apostles as the "sent ones". "Protos", as in 'prototype', is the translation of the ordinal number "first". The list goes on and on.

In the end I got sick of waiting by the road side and gave up on my project hitch-hiking to the seaside city of Larnaka, my destination.
    Nothing so incongruous as me with a handful of other tourists  on a bus shaking along on a road parallel to the sea with popular Greek music as the soundtrack.

But I met Lena and the Joker that night!