Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

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The timing of this is unfortunate though as this is just as there is growing civil unrest in Cyprus. Students are joining the rebellion and there are small acts of terror from grenades and homemade bombs. The British (as usual) misjudged the situation and made a bad situation much worse. 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) Costas Montis a renowned Cypriot poet wrote a book as an answer to Durrell's Bitter Lemons called Closed Doors: An Answer To Bitter Lemons By Lawrence Durrell Invited to write an essay on her favourite historical character, [Electra] never failed to delight me with something like this: 'I have no historical character but in the real life there is one I love. He is writer. I dote him and he dotes me. How pleasure is the moment when I see him came at the door. My glad is very big.' [2] 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.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus - Lawrence Durrell - Google Books Bitter Lemons of Cyprus - Lawrence Durrell - Google Books

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. Midway through, the dark clouds begin to roll in. Enosis has turned terrorist and the British leave. Durrell must leave too as well as other friends and family. One friend is murdered, he’s saddened at the state of things but gets out long before Cyprus was divided horizontally between the Turks and the Greeks. The area Durrell lived in was captured by the Turkish government in 1974, so that means his primarily Greek Cypriot neighbors would have been abruptly forced to leave their homes and flee south. It was violent but not as bad as the partition in India approximately 25 years earlier.

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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. Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures—and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.…"

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

Lawrence Durrell a poet/novelist comes to stay in Cyprus and chooses not a very ideal period and he buys a house near the beautiful abbey of Bellapaix ( meaning beautiful peace in French, ironic isn't it)... He arrives having already lived in Greece and speaking Greek. He says he didn't move to Athens instead because of the costs. He makes appeals directly to Greeks to honour their tradition of hospitality, then he hires a Turkish man (whom he describes as a reptile) to dissemble and shout at Greeks until they sell him a home with some magical balcony for practically nothing. As they depart, they are shadowed by a grey destroyer for a while before it turns abruptly and fades into the horizon. He opens the book that he had acquired from an overturned bookstall in Trieste, A Lady’s Impression of Cyprus by Mrs Lewis. It offered a splendid picture of the island and confirmed that he had made the right decision. and thank's to EOKA the Turkish Nationalism was rekindled and the Pogroms in Constantinople occurred in September 1955. Thanks to EOKA Cypriots were divided, thanks to EOKA Cyprus began a journey down to Hades. We got independence (1959/1960) but in 3 years' time (1963) we were divided (unofficially) waiting for the official division (1974) And we are still waiting, divided in discord;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.