Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

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Commandaria - Κουμανδαρία. Cypriot wine. Sweet, quite different from all the other things you've been hearing about Cyprus lately. Lovely stuff, similar raisiny flavor profile to a PX sherry, but less syrupy and cloying--you can drink this without fear of developing type-2 diabetes. People in Bitter Lemons are always slipping off for a glass of the stuff on some terrace or another. I had to try it. The process of him buying a house there is one of the most entertaining passages that I have read in a while. He first charms the local rogue, Sabri, in the village into helping him. Between them, they agree on a budget and a few days later he is informed that there is a property that may be suitable in the village Bellapix. They visit on a rare wet day but the property is sound and dry but does require some work. Negotiations begin between Sabri and the feisty owner of the property and they are protracted and heated. After moving a few times among other Mediterranean islands, he comes to Cyprus, which was a British colony from 1925. He takes work teaching English in a gymnasium and later as a public relations officer for the British government. The book covers a few years leading up to the Cypriot freedom movement. It captured the life and changing political mindset of the people well, from which I felt was an unbiased point of view. It became a bit dry somewhere along the way, but that can't be helped considering it had to delve into history. The writing reminded me of Ruskin Bond from time to time, which I liked. This book also awakened me to the difficulty of an outside power (in Crypus' case, the United Kingdom) trying to impose peace on a population who would really rather fight among themselves--or, at least, have animosity. And when religion is mixed into the clash, the results are all the more volatile. It was sad then; it's sad now. But wishing it was otherwise does not make peace any easier.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell – review, 30/11 Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell – review, 30/11

We had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time-- those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.” (p.19) beautifully written, this book helps you understand Cyprus and more broadly how people go from somehow getting along to civil war, sort of... Here is a citation from the opening of the book about the value of travel, that I love: He views the increasingly violent campaign for Enosis from a different perspective, perhaps, than would most Americans today. His love for the Cypriot people is clear, but he firmly views them as a rural, somewhat childlike people who are far happier under British rule than they would be under union with an increasingly dynamic and urban Greek nation. Cypriot self-government apart from Greece does not even occur to him as an option. He perceives the Cypriot desire for Enosis as a vague goal the residents love to ponder and discuss, but one stirred into violent ferver only by agitation and arms from political zealots in Greece. He notes, in addition, the strong opposition to Enosis by the island's significant Turkish minority population -- a fault line between the ethnic Greeks and Turks that continues to this day. This book also awakened me to the diffi It would have been easy to write a very different, more stereotypical book. As he discovered when working as a school teacher in Nicosia, the young Greeks were already writing that book. And in that act of national story telling was seeded an invasive weed which would eventually strangle the Tree of Idleness: the Cyprus tragedy. That other story was written under the drugged influence of Lord Byron, hero of Greek nationalism. Durrell tells of young students in his class reciting (badly) tales of Byron, with tears in their eyes. Byron the liberator, Byron the unifier. Throughout Durrell’s story, a paradoxical attitude amongst the Greek Cypriots is observed: they love and respect their British masters, and at the same time they want them off the island. Britain, personified by Byron (who helped to raise a navy to depose the Ottomans), signifies freedom, national unity, racial integrity, and most of all modernity. Greek nationalism, craving ‘enosis’ (unity), was jealous of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. No longer wanting to be treated as children of the Empire, ready to stand alone. In return, the colonial masters behaved with the usual incompetence and misunderstanding, imagining the Cypriots to be an eternally childish people, perhaps even noble island savages. Anthony Eden had more global and devious intentions (Cyprus being not far from Suez, Palestine, Syria), and in secret tensions between Turkey and Greece were being deliberately inflamed. But the colonial administration made a more basic error. Cyprus was part of a Europe that had changed, matured even. But the administration simply could not see that truth. It was no longer an island of farmers, but rather a homeland to a highly mobile international workforce, dispersed across Europe and America. The island that they thought they were governing, the island of the Tree of Idleness, was disappearing fast. And as Durrell smartly observes, by simply ignoring the issue for so long, an extremist result only became more likely – after all, there’s plenty of time to sit around under the tree, or in the café, continually exaggerating the nationalist story; the Cypriots being great story tellers.

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What is travel writing? Consider a book in which the narrative and characters pivot around a single tree, rooted to the centre of a lonely cliff-top village on an island almost forgotten to the world. The tree is more than a totem or a metaphor: rather it is a geocosmic force around which the entire Earth rotates. Younger villagers feel it’s centrifugal effects, spinning them out to sea to be caught up in strong currents and carried off to other lands. The old have learnt to get close to the centre of the force, where all is stillness, willingly embracing the inertia beneath its shady branches. The most successful in the art of doing very little have enjoyed its peace for so long that their olive-coloured wrinkled skins are indistinguishable from its roots and its branches. It is then the ‘Tree of Idleness’ around which the book pivots. Then, British troops shoot three youths "under severe provocation" in Limassol, a "trivial" incident. No greater detail provided. His greatest recommendation? More police.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell | Goodreads Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell | Goodreads

And so, the second half of the book becomes increasingly political, as he observes the rise in influence of EOKA, a local terrorist organization whose tactics and goals were similar to those of the IRA in Northern Ireland. Step by step, the people become radicalized in their opposition to the colonial government of Cyprus -- first the students and urban residents, and then the general population, including, ultimately, the friends Durrell had formed in Bellapaix. The real position of Lawrence Durrell? "As a conservative, I fully understand, namely; 'If you have an Empire, you just can't give away bits of it as soon as asked.'

He settles into a dilapidated villa, and with his poet’s eye for beauty – and passable Greek – vividly captures the moods and atmospheres of island life in a changing world. Whether collecting folklore or wild flowers, describing the brewing revolution or eccentric local characters, Durrell is a magician with words: and the result is not only a classic travel memoir, but an intimate portrait of a community lost forever. One of the first schools in Cyprus open in 1812 (under Ottoman rule) in the capital, Nicosia, the Pancyprian Gymnasium.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell | Goodreads

Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Born in 1912 in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to school in England and later moved to Corfu with his family - a period which his brother Gerald fictionalised in My Family and Other Animals- later filmed as ITV's The Durrells in Corfu - and which he himself described in Prospero's Cell. The first of Durrell's island books, this was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus on Rhodes; Bitter Lemons, on Cyprus, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; and, later, The Greek Islands. This book has taken me an extraordinarily long time to complete, part of that is the fact that it felt to me as though it had separate sections that did not always tie together. Published just after the time Lawrence Durrell spent in Cyprus first as a school teacher and then as a press agent for the British government (Cyprus then under British colonial rule). He spent about three years there in the mid 1950s. Durrell was looking for a congenial Mediterranean lifestyle and a place to spend time writing the first novel in his famous Alexandria Quartet. The British underestimated Cypriots because most of them knew Cypriots as lethargic subhuman beings, and Durrell has for chapter's 11 epigraph a very racist and vile paragraph taken from W. Hepworth Dixon's book British Cyprus

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I have never seen Pentadactylos' castles as Gothic before reading this book. In addition all the chapters that didn't have to do with the bitter struggle were the ones I loved. Buffavento, Saint Hilarion, Kantara, all these castles were built one after the other along the narrow Pentadaktylos mountains, but sadly when you search for them on Google you see them as castles in Northern Cyprus. A little tip for you: If I grind my teeth while reading, it's usually a bad sign - believe it or not. This was the case with The Bitter Lemons of Cyprus. At some point, I started to grind my teeth and hell broke after that. This was my first read by Lawrence Durrell who is most famous for the Alexandria Quartet. This is just a little memoir of the three years he spent on the island of Cyprus. While the book starts out a light-hearted memoir not unlike Under the Tuscan sun--expat moves in and begins renovating a house surrounded by local colorful characters--the book eventually turns a bit darker. Cyprus was rapidly ending its relationship with the British empire and terrorism and nationalism was taking hold. Lodging with a friend, Panos, he can begin to get a measure of the people and culture. It is idyllic sitting on the terrace drinking wine before heading down to the harbour to watch the ‘sunset melt’. It was with this friend that he truly came to understand the meaning of the word ‘kopiaste’, or Cypriot hospitality. It was also the best way to see if he could really afford to buy a small place to live in. It would be.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus - Listening Books Bitter Lemons of Cyprus - Listening Books

Bitter Lemons is a passionate plea for "enosis" (i.e. the unity of Greece and Cyprus) written in the 1950s when Turkish and Greek Cypriots were at war. Lawrence Durrell loved Western Civilization with a passion and believed fervently that the great Greek genius of classical era was still alive in the 20 th century. As a teenager, I was utterly convinced. Bitter Lemons is a most extraordinary book. As the work of a lyrical travel writer, we first see beauty. And then horror, as the revolt starts to grow. By 1956, when Durrell finally abandoned the island, murder and destruction was everywhere. A true tragedy. But one documented incrementally by a master of lyrical difference, of the slow and imperceptible transformation of things. As a record of normality slipping uncontrollably into chaos, and the failure of politics and administration to even perceive its fate, it is a vital story, a text book even, the crisis being in many ways a precursor to Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, Palestine. Sadly it seems that it’s lesson has been largely ignored by the politicians who might just have made a difference to those terrible developments. Being optimistic, one could imagine that an ‘enosis’ is now inevitable. Not union with Greece, but rather the union of the whole of Cyprus with the new Europe, the early undercurrent of whose formation was in reality the force that stirred the crisis of ’55. But undoubtedly the politicians will still rabble-rouse and play off minorities so as to get their snouts closer to the trough. I am at rather a loss as to where to start with this review. I finished the book, which was in my opinion, superbly written, very poignant and at times witty, with tears in my eyes. Why, well as i have said above, I have a great love of anything Greek, as I think did Lawrence Durrell, and so I found the stupidity of mainly the British Government, unbelievably sad in that it negatively affected so many lives over the next 3 years, 20 years, 40 years, and some would say even to today in Cyprus. The loss of life (as ever such a waste), the resigned fate of the Cypriots, both Greek and Turkish, was heart rending, as even the most peaceful and English loving of them, could see no solution. FROM MY BLOG) Israel is again accused of killing and otherwise abusing innocent civilians in its attempt to control the Gaza strip. Israeli commanders, according to today's New York Times, admit that people have been shot and houses destroyed unjustifiably, but claim that overall they have been judicious in their use of force. Lose yourself in this classic prize-winning memoir of life in 1950s Cyprus on the brink of revolution by the legendary king of travel writing and real-life family member of The Durrells in Corfu.

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Meanwhile, the colonial government dreams on, the dreamy inertia of bureaucracy, throwing away its opportunities to defuse the crisis politically by promising to hold an eventual plebiscite on the question ... at some vague future date. The government instead persists in treating the movement as merely the obsession of a few isolated hotheads -- first to be ignored and then, to be put down with force. Gasp! Oh! Greeks were let to keep their own religion and freedom and language and even local government! How can that be? It must be only because Turks did not have a superior culture to enforce upon others. Seriously, Mr. Durrell? This is how you read the political situation at the Mediterranean or at any place? Turks didn't impose their culture, language and religion upon others forcibly –unlike British- just because they'd assumed what they had was not worthy of imposing? Your friends must find your firm faith in human modesty quite refreshing, I am sure. The nerve of the clueless imperialist who readily accepts the first explanation that comes to his mind, off the top of his head.)