I realize it on this trip, and in what way, how life has passed, and it’s hard for me to say it: I’ve aged. A long time ago, in the summer of 1966, I traveled to Cyprus with my friends Francesc Artigau and Ramon Comellas in my junked Dos Cavalls, they landed it by crane in the humble little port of Limassol, coming from Piraeus.
The capital, Nicosia, was already divided between the Greek and Turkish sectors. Going down its Ledra street, in the walled enclosure built by the Venetians, the old cathedral, converted into a mosque, stood out in the background, beyond the green line guarded by soldiers from both sides, and UN soldiers. The access was closed and barred. Then I tried to convey the emotion of this stricken city (Nicosia is still the last divided capital in Europe) in reports that I published in our newspaper.
In 1974 he returned to Cyprus, already as a correspondent, to write about the failure of the coup d’état against the president, Archbishop Makarios, who, directed from Athens by the junta of colonels in power, intended to unite the island with Greece, the dream of enosis, which provoked the military intervention of Turkey. Kerinia, the Greek enclave in the north, was occupied by the Turkish army. The road that connects the beautiful city to the capital was a battlefield. This is how he described it in 1974: “It was a delightful town that before the war, at the foot of the Pentadactylos mountains – the second mountain range of the island -, surrounded by olive groves and old abbeys built by Franks and Venetians such as San Hilarió and Bellalapaís, where the British writer Lawrence Durrell bought his house. He enjoyed a very good reputation among foreigners. Many Britons, artists, civil servants and retired soldiers had chosen it to live”.
In the summer of 1974 the Turkish governor of the square allowed a group of foreign correspondents to visit several hundred Greeks who had taken refuge in fear in the Done hotel, on the shores of the Mediterranean, who told us that before they had always lived in peace with the Turks of the town.
I’m back in Kerínia, Girne in Turkish, on the same road, now crossing Greek and Turkish police checkpoints, I visited the hotel restaurant, where you can pay with Turkish Lira or the longed-for Euros of the area Greek The very isolated Turkish Cypriot republic is only recognized by Turkey. The living standards of the two areas are very different. The Turkish area, less vibrant, is warmer and more welcoming. Around El Roja, in which the sharp white crescent stands out, orthodox churches converted into museums or disused, corners of old houses with bougainvillea and balladres. He did not want to leave Kerínia without visiting Bellapaís, near the Gothic abbey where Lawrence Durrell had his house: in his splendid Bitter lemons he narrated the vicissitudes of acquiring it. I went down and up the hill without finding her. No need to ask anyone, it was nap time in the east and the alleys were deserted. About to give up, I read about the facade of an Aci limon Sodak house. It was, without a doubt, where the writer lived when he worked in the British Information Office before independence, and where he wrote the first book of the Alexandria Quartet. I was able to return to my hotel despite the fact that no one in the beautiful town of Bellapaís could tell me where it was. The glory of the writers!
