Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

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His early chapter about buying a house in Cyprus is easily one of the funniest things I've ever read. It was only in the hours after reading it that I had to reflect that, hang on, this guy sounds like a real jerk. 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. Without this armed struggled against the British, Cyprus would have gained her independence probably 10-20 years later during the rise of decolonisation in Africa. But we were impatient and as a Greek proverb says Whoever rushes stumbles and we did. and we are still in the ditch. Bellapais is in northern Cyprus, and so, as a result of the ''population exchange'' that followed the ethnic division of the island in 1974, it is populated only by Turks today. Not a soul here remains who remembers Durrell.

Bitter Lemons - Wikipedia

Some of his knowledge of Greece doesn't seem without merit, such as the fact that Europeans somehow forget that modern Greece's greatest historical influence is probably the Byzantine era. Or his confirmation that a few "lunatics" in Crete or Rhodes could start a struggle for Greek independence almost anywhere. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus is Lawrence Durrell’s unique account of his time in Cyprus, during the 1950s Enosis movement for freedom of the island from British colonial rule. Winner of the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, it is a document at once personal, poetic and subtly political – a masterly combination of travelogue, memoir and treatise. 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. 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.And what of the book’s author? He’s pretty adept at this kind of life – island life. He has a reputation as an island poet. Corfu was his family home, along with other animals. Cyprus seems to be a familiar habitat. But his great achievement is this: he gets close enough to the pull of the Tree of Idleness so as to know it like a native, he speaks it’s Greek, he adopts its Byzantine mannerisms and customs; and yet he can pull away when necessary, both physically (making small but intense journeys around the island) and intellectually (seeing the tides of history, politics and empire washing around its mangrove roots). And that then qualifies this not only as travel writing, but genuinely great travel writing – which is never measured in terms of miles traveled on the map. Travel writing as an intensive journey through differences, in time. 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. 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. I still haven’t finished the book, I don’t believe I can muster enough patience at any time soon to do so, but here are some examples for your immediate pleasure:

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus - Lawrence Durrell - Google Books

In his book on problems faced by international organisations, the political scientist and international relations expert the late Inis L Claude insightfully observes that in some cases a permanent settlement of a dispute is not possible; the parties are, however, prepared to settle down permanently with their dispute, content with its peaceful perpetuation. If you survive through the house renovations and teenage girls fawning over a scrubby git namely their English teacher (who by the way gives a spookily detailed account of their adoration), you are rewarded with the worse part the book or what I choose to name as `How We Rule Imperially`. At this point, I was doggedly making further allowances for Durrell, reminding myself that the book was written on the second half of the 20th century, that men were then permitted, hell, even expected to think and act like they knew everything about everything even or especially when they were clueless, that that was the way cookie crumbled then, that Durrell was trying his best to be fair and understanding in his own snobbish way; but I am not going to play it down, Bitter Lemons is one of the most frustrating, ignorant and equivalently arrogant piece of work written by a member of an occupying power about the place they had occupied I have ever had the misfortune of laying my eyes upon. And this is quite telling, because I am from Turkey and when it comes to fascism in text, being objected to horrible instances of it since I was quite young, I lamentably know my stuff. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus is Lawrence Durrell's unique account of his time in Cyprus, during the 1950s Enosis movement for freedom of the island from British colonial rule. Winner of the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, it is a document at once personal, poetic and subtly political - a masterly combination of travelogue, memoir and treatise. The causes are too complex to go into here, suffice it to say that an ill-judged statement lit the fuse that exploded into the armed struggle for Enosis on April 1, 1955. A more nuanced statement like, for example, self-determination is a right possessed by colonial peoples everywhere and that Britain was in the process of reviewing its strategic needs in the region, might have averted an armed struggle but alas junior Tory ministers at the time were not very clever. At the risk of becoming an anti two-state bore I am against cutting the Gordian knot for two reasons. First because the Turkish side promised by treaty it would not promote separatist independence in the same way the Greek side promised to not promote enosis. And second because it will not succeed: the US, the EU, the UK and Russia are all against a two-state solution as is probably most of the Middle East and Israel.

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He writes as an artist, as well as a poet; he remembers colour and landscape and the nuances of peasant conversation . . . Eschewing politics, it says more about them than all our leading articles . . . In describing a political tragedy it often has great poetic beauty.' Kingsley Martin, New Statesman Embedded so deeply in the medieval compost of religious hatreds,'' he wrote, ''the villagers floundered in the muddy stream of undifferentiated hate like drowning men.'' The slender chain of trust upon which all human relations are based is broken -- and this the terrorist knows and sharpens his claws precisely here; for his primary objective is not battle. It is to bring down upon the community in general a reprisal for his wrongs, in the hope that the fury and resentment roused by punishment meted out to the innocent will gradually swell the ranks of those from whom he will draw further recruits."

The Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: mixing memory and desire

Both Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Pascalis Island were made into successful films. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus was not, although the television series The Durrells, a fictional take of the Durrell family’s life on Corfu in the 1930s, does feature Lawrence Durrell as the older brother. Perhaps a book about a colonial civil servant during the struggle for enosis in Cyprus does not lend itself to film. Durrell was an English writer who spoke Greek and taught English at the Pancyprian Gymnasium and later became director of public information during the first year of the emergency in Cyprus, after a Greek Cypriot fighters’ organisation called Eoka began an armed struggle on April 1,1955 led by Colonel George Grivas to unite Cyprus with Greece. Edmund Keeley discusses this theme in the novel. Keeley, Edmund. "Byron, Durrell, and Modern Philhellenism." Lawrence Durrell: Comprehending the Whole. Eds. Julius Rowan Raper, Melody Enscore, and Paige Matthey Bynum. St. Louis: U of Missouri P, 1994. 111-117. Become a Faber Member for free and receive curated book recommendations, special competitions and exclusive discounts. Lawrence Durrell left his house and village behind -- and his book ends -- in 1956. In 1960, Britain surrendered sovereignty over Cyprus. Fighting between Greeks and Turks broke out in 1974, when a military junta tried to force union with Greece, and the island was effectively partitioned between the two groups. The government to this day has no control over the Turkish area. Enosis never occurred. Instead, Cyprus eventually joined Greece as another EC member, and adopted the Euro as its currency.This is not a travel book per se, although the first half fits that description to a degree. Initially he discusses his desire to own a traditional Cypriot house and ends up in a village (Bellapaix/Bellapais today), uphill from the northern port of Kyrenia. He speaks of his neighbors in a somewhat paternalistic but not dismissive way but because he speaks Greek they are hospitable and friendly, at least at first. Enosis (independence from Britain movement) is heating up. Durrell is an excellent writer and his descriptions are not only beautiful but often hilarious. For instance, the story of how his Turkish “real estate agent” and the Cypriot Greek family who own the house that catches his fancy come to an agreement is vivid and so funny. I also love the stories of the travails of getting remodeling done. Certainly a universal problem. Above the door of this house is a small yellow plate bearing the inscription, ''Bitter Lemons: Lawrence Durrell Lived Here 1953-56.'' It is a magnet for tourists, especially those who love literature and remember their emotions reading ''The Alexandria Quartet'' or Durrell's other lyrical and quasi-mystic works. and for almost three years we see the people of Cyprus and the struggle through his eyes. The descriptions of nature are beautiful, but his views on Cypriots a bit biased. Although he claims to hate politics, he takes a job as an Information Minister with the British government of Cyprus. True, it appears to have been an inopportune time, with, according to Durrell, Athens radio whipping up the stupid peasants with ideas of independence.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus : Life on a Mediterranean Island

He writes as an artist, as well as a poet; he remembers colour and landscape and the nuances of peasant conversation . . . Eschewing politics, it says more about them than all our leading articles . . . In describing a political tragedy it often has great poetic beauty.’ Kingsley Martin, New Statesman Much as we Greeks have made a horrible mess of things in Cyprus and in many other places besides, you come to realize that the love the author has for Cypriots is the love a slave owner can truly and honestly sometimes feel for his slave. The language itself descends to one of loyal “subjects” of the Empire and “terrorists.”TuCy VS GrCy, right-wing GrCy VS left-wing GrCy, divided like cancerous cells, 2 multiplied by 2 equals 4. and 4 by 2 =8 and so on. Bitter Lemons is an autobiographical work by writer Lawrence Durrell, describing the three years (1953–1956) he spent on the island of Cyprus. The book was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for 1957, the second year the prize was awarded. Durrel had been five years in Serbia and really wasn’t sure if he wanted to live in the Mediterranean anymore. He couldn’t afford to live in Athens so the next best thing after that was Cyprus. Decision made he makes his way to Venice to get the boat there. Falling into conversation with a man there, he questions why Durrell wants to go there at all: ‘It is not much of a place’, the man says, ‘Arid and without water. The people drink to excess.’ To Durrell, it sounded perfect. Although the first paragraphs of the book are quite purple, it seemed to promise to deliver the goods on stereotyping Cypriot Greeks, if only, it turns out, because Lawrence Durrell is so British. His descriptions of the Pentadaktylos mountains are eerie and romantic (with romantic I don't mean romantic as in St. Valentine's and shite like that but in the sense of aesthetic experience with feelings of awe, and apprehension while experiencing the sublimity of nature).