With international renown, and patients, one Nicosia doctor offers contentious treatment to sufferers of Lyme disease and many other problems. Dismissing detractors as being in the pockets of Big Pharma, he tells THEO PANAYIDES of the importance of keeping up

Dr Yuri Nikolenko looks like he must be a character, a plain-spoken, paunchy Ukrainian with a waddle in his walk and green eyes in a pale, pouchy face. The 59-year-old head of the Medinstitute Clinic in Nicosia has – or cultivates – a languid, affable manner, slowly manoeuvring his big bulk around the three floors of the clinic. “Give me one minute,” he calls apologetically, gazing across with a mournful bloodhound expression. “For the beautiful, it’s fourth floor,” he jokes faux-flirtatiously when a group of ladies in the lift seem unsure which button to press (they’re looking for Dermatology, run by Yuri’s daughter Valentina). He has a touch of the concierge or the bus driver, one of those professions that depend on being stolid and ingratiating – but in fact he’s a scientist and a chess master (a game he’s been playing since the age of four), a judo adept and former deep-sea diver; and he also runs this clinic which he founded in 1989, drawing patients from all over the world.

All that said, there’s an ethical dimension in publishing a profile of Yuri, indeed it’s not just ethical but also inescapable. We talk a lot about ozone therapy, sitting in his office at the Medinstitute – it’s a central part of what the clinic offers, albeit not the only thing – and anyone reading will presumably want to do some further research. Google ‘ozone therapy’, however, and the first thing that comes up – literally the first thing – is the Wikipedia article on the subject, which begins as follows:

“Ozone therapy is a form of alternative medicine that purports to increase the amount of oxygen in the body through the introduction of ozone. It is based on pseudoscience and is considered dangerous to health, with no verifiable benefits.”

Yuri seems unconcerned when I read the article out to him. “There are people [who] fight us, pharmaceutical companies,” he shrugs, his Greek still rather fractured after 30 years on the island. It may seem an inadequate response, given how unambiguous the article is (Wikipedia’s source, incidentally, is the Code of Federal Regulations of the US Food and Drug Administration) – but by that time I’ve already had a tour of the clinic, and heard enough to at least give me pause.

The ozone-therapy room is down the corridor from his own office. I’m not sure exactly what the procedure involves – but he shows me a machine whereby ozone (a gas) is liquefied, after which the liquid ozone is introduced into the patient’s bloodstream. (Ozone is indeed dangerous to breathe, explains Yuri – it causes hyperoxygenation – but this liquefied form is quite safe, bypassing the lungs and going straight to the veins.) All three beds in the room are occupied, two of them by Helena and her son Adam who hail from Sweden by way of Britain. “I got bitten in Sweden in 2008, and Adam in 2010,” she explains – referring to Lyme disease, “an infectious disease caused by a bacteria named Borrelia spread by ticks” (Wikipedia again) which accounts for many of the overseas patients.

Lyme disease is increasingly in the news (pop star Avril Lavigne recently spoke of her battle against the illness, which is life-threatening) – yet healthcare systems in most places still haven’t caught up. In Australia, the disease isn’t even officially recognised; the Medinstitute gets around 500 patients from that country every year. In Sweden, according to Helena, a Dr Sandström was struck off for treating it, in contravention of official guidelines – which is partly why she and Adam have had to turn to “amazing people like Dr Yuri” in search of a cure. The third bed is taken by Patricia who’s come all the way from Wisconsin, having learned about the clinic through a Facebook page run by a former patient. She’s had Lyme for three and a half years; her friend Mary – also from Wisconsin – says she’s had it for 49 years, since the age of eight! Insurance won’t cover it in the US, and the treatment is “so expensive” there. They’re in Cyprus on a three-month visa, staying in an Airbnb and trying to heal their lives at the hands of this affable Ukrainian.

It’s all so perfect, I wonder for a moment if Yuri may have stage-managed these encounters (he is a chess master, after all) – but it’s not like he indicates who I should talk to. “You saw for yourself,” he notes. “I didn’t bring you the chosen ones.” Nor is it just Lyme disease. Jamal, from Dubai, has a condition where his liver and pancreas are unable to filter cholesterol; his cholesterol count is 5,000 (it should be under 200). He’s here getting his arteries cleaned, and – like the others – speaks warmly of the doctor. Also in the mix is a local lad, a 13-year-old boy suffering with a rare virus and howling piteously on a hospital bed – though his howls are apparently because he’s afraid to give blood (I see him later, looking considerably more cheerful). Yuri also tells me of other patients, one from Dubai who had stomach cancer (the tumor was 17cm in diameter), another – a Cypriot – who was stung by dozens of spiders which emerged from a nest in a hollow tree. We’ve even had our first local cases of Lyme, both in Paphos, though it’s unclear if they were bitten here.

Then there’s the Russian billionaire, a business partner of Roman Abramovich’s, whose once-shattered health has been restored by two years of therapy – and who apparently showed his gratitude by donating one of the expensive machines I see on my tour, possibly the ‘magnetoturbotron’ festooned with Cyrillic writing (it looks like an MRI, but is used for magnetic stimulation of the whole body) or the ‘barocamera’ for breathing problems and bronchitis. Dr Yuri is big on hardware, pointing out this or that bit of high-tech equipment as he waddles through the clinic. “I’ll send it to Herman at the factory, they can talk to Wikipedia,” is his final word on That Article, ‘the factory’ being the company in Germany which produces the ozone equipment. “We’re tired of fighting them,” he adds, speaking of the pharmaceutical companies. “They’re always putting something crazy”.

Is that it, then? Should we just dismiss the official line on ozone therapy as more crazy talk by Big Pharma (presumably in league with their cronies in the US government)? What to make of this miracle cure? On the one hand, meeting patients who’ve come halfway-round the world and truly believe they’re getting better doesn’t mean they are getting better. On the other, Yuri claims to have personal experience of the efficacy of his treatment – not just because he’s tried ozone on himself (it works as prevention as well as cure), but also because it saved the life of his wife Chrystalla.

When the clinic opened in 1989, soon after the couple arrived from Ukraine – they met in college, at the University of Kharkiv, and married soon after – it was much more conventional, with an emphasis on physical rehabilitation (that department still exists, run by their other daughter Nikoletta). Everything changed 23 years ago, when Chrystalla was struck down with severe neuropathy; doctors offered only a bleak prospect of slow deterioration and early death (all her fellow patients in the neurological ward have long since died, notes Yuri grimly) – so he did some research and found ozone therapy, which saved his wife as it’s saved many others. Fidel Castro’s doctors kept him alive for 17 years, through three types of cancer, using ozone, claims Yuri. The Germans discovered it first and used it during WWII, healing their wounded (and sending them back into battle) twice as fast as the Allies. “The greatest ozone therapist was Adolf Hitler!” he declares; I told you he was plain-spoken.

He’s also a character, that initial impression turning out to be accurate. He tears up a tissue to denote cancerous mutation, and extracts a string of worry beads from a desk drawer to illustrate what a virus looks like. He doesn’t have a doctor’s silky manners, coming off more as a rough-hewn savant or eccentric inventor – and indeed he’s an “accidental doctor”, having studied maths and physics (he was accepted to the prestigious Moscow Institute of Physics) before switching to medicine due to a mix-up with his papers. He’s good with his hands, hailing from a family of engineers. “I can build a house, I can do welding, anything”. One of his best friends in Cyprus (now deceased) was a simple shepherd named Socrates, a man who’d never finished primary school but could match his Athenian namesake for keenness of intellect: “If he’d gone to university, he’d have been a Nobel Prize winner!”. There’s no mention of friends who are doctors, or society types.

Patients, I assume, must be slightly nonplussed by this bulky figure with his quirky, un-medical phrasing: ozone has a third oxygen atom, he tells me (its chemical formula is O3, as opposed to O2) – but the third atom is “a boyfriend”, it can’t live with the other two. Employees, too (the clinic has a staff of about 20 people), won’t always agree with the way he does business. “I’m strict,” admits Yuri; the languid manner is just a façade, and he talks more than once of wanting things to be “like in the army”. (He himself had military training while at college – male students doubled as reservist officers in the Soviet Union – including brief experience of war zones in Africa.) All staff are tested on all new machines, and he’ll interview patients to get their feedback on nurses. Working hours at the Medinstitute are 8.30am to 8pm, with a two-and-a-half-hour break in the middle when (he says) almost everyone settles down for a power nap in a specially-designed environment. The nap is optional, he adds, then again you have to wonder.

Science is approached with the same systematic dedication. “I read 60 pages every day. Medical literature,” he tells me gravely. “I don’t read 59 pages. 60!” He’ll sit for hours if he finds something interesting, speed-reading pages in Russian or Greek then emailing questions to the authors. “Because science moves on,” he adds pointedly, thinking perhaps of his own situation. “Anyone who stands still and says ‘Oh, I don’t accept that’ – well, once upon a time people didn’t accept that the Earth was round”. New discoveries are made all the time – “then immediately killed by the pharmaceutical companies,” he adds grimly.

We should note that the Medinstitute Clinic isn’t entirely ‘alternative’, whatever that much-maligned word even means. It’s not that Yuri won’t prescribe antibiotics as needed; it’s just that ozone – he says – goes even further, and that’s not even mentioning the other wonders he claims to have on hand, like the brain stimulator (it produces endorphins) that’s ideal for minor troubles. “Let’s say you had a fight with your wife, you scratched your car, you spilled coffee on yourself, you got told off at work – so now your day is shit! OK?” he explains with his usual straightforwardness. That kind of hassle can get under your skin, you might be losing sleep and unable to shake yourself free, “the needle is stuck, like I say” – but then “you come to us, we put you under a machine, just 20 minutes,” raves Yuri, growing visibly excited: “Like the Terminator, chhhhhh, you get up – let’s go party!”

In the end, Yuri Nikolenko’s idiosyncratic style helps his cause, in a way that a standard bedside manner probably wouldn’t. It’s easy to believe – despite the bad publicity on Wikipedia – that there’s something more to medicine which this mad-scientist type might appreciate, and the greedy capitalists probably don’t. The weirdest tale he tells is of the North Korean doctoral student (and friend) who once saved his life in the USSR, when Yuri fell in a river after a parachute jump and developed pneumonia. His own hospital colleagues couldn’t help – but the North Korean did, by buying a black hen at market (!), cooking it for 12 hours with special mushrooms and herbs, and creating a kind of gelatinous broth which was “the greatest bio-stimulator I’ve seen in my life,” he marvels. “That’s why I say, ‘Never say never’. These people know things we don’t.” There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your pharmaceuticals.

Don’t some people call him a charlatan, though?

He shrugs, his bulk shifting and his eyes growing glassy, as if with boredom. “It’s their right,” says Yuri, the languid manner returning. “We have a licence to practice. I had about 30 Cypriots with me [at university], we all graduated together, so who can say that…?” He trails off, meaning ‘that I’m not properly qualified?’. “Let them take care of their own business. Let them work 16 hours like we do, and read up and so on, and maybe they’ll change their minds”. At the end of the day, he’s not too bothered – and not just because he seems to be doing well, earning plaudits from Russian oligarchs and ladies from Wisconsin alike. “There’s an old Arabic proverb,” opines Yuri mischievously: “‘The dogs bark, the caravan goes on’.” Let them bark; his mind is on bigger things.

In a climate change scientist, THEO PANAYIDES finds a woman who grew up treated like a foreigner in the land of her birth and won’t reduce science to soundbite

Funny how things turn out. I thought we’d be talking with Jonilda Kushta about all the dust in the atmosphere, but in fact we end up talking just as much about breastfeeding (a topic on which my input is limited). The language changes accordingly as we sit in her small office at the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia, shared with a colleague from the Computational Science department. When she talks about dust she speaks in English, the lingua franca of science, reflecting her position as Associate Research Scientist at the Institute; when she talks about breastfeeding – and her life in general, working in ‘regional modelling’ while trying to raise an eight-year-old boy as a quasi-single mum – she switches instinctively to her native Greek.

Is it actually native? Some might say not, since she actually comes from Albania, born in 1977 in the southern town of Gjirokaster – but Gjirokaster (aka Argyrokastro) is also the centre of the country’s sizeable Greek community, not to mention that Jonilda moved to Athens at the age of 16. The only non-Greek thing about her is perhaps her name, mandated by Albania’s then-Communist government (she was going to be called ‘Sophia’, after her grandmother); the family never abandoned their Greek – and Greek Orthodox – roots, and she has stories of secretly cracking the traditional red eggs at Easter then disposing of the shells (she doesn’t say how) rather than throwing them in the trash, where they might be spotted. In a way, they were foreigners in the land of their birth – then moved to Greece, and were foreigners there too. “We feel like we belong everywhere and nowhere.”

The whole family moved, even though it meant a reduction in circumstances. In Albania, Jonilda’s mum was a teacher and her dad an agronomist; in Athens, Mum became a maid and nanny, Dad a carpenter and furniture-maker. They moved partly because they could – this was 1993, just after the end of Communism – but mostly they moved because of her, Jonilda, because “I was the good daughter who studies, who looks like she has potential”.

From an early age, her academic prowess had been obvious. She liked writing poetry and prose, “as an escape” – but her real strengths were in so-called STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), impressing teachers and winning national maths Olympiads, hence the move away from rural Albania to a BSc in Physics at the University of Athens. After that, she worked for a while – a girl from a migrant family was always going to think about making a living – before being tempted back to academia, culminating in a PhD where she did more or less what she’s doing now, ‘atmospheric modelling’ based around simulations and the study of atmospheric patterns. Why did she focus on the environment? Why not apply her BSc to, say, astrophysics? Jonilda shrugs: “Because the environment is our daily life”.

She’s right, of course. That’s why she’s so easy to chat to, not just because she’s very personable but because we chat about the subject absolutely everyone is interested in: the weather. What about that big storm in early December? Wasn’t that something? What about all this dust in the atmosphere? Then again, she’s also quite a tough interview, because she’s responsible. She won’t dumb it down. She’s a scientist, not a tabloid headline. Jonilda is still, in many ways, the studious ‘good daughter’ of her youth, impressing with her seriousness of purpose and especially adept at mathematics, that incredible world where there really is a right and wrong answer. Maths is a discipline, and I use that word advisedly.

She does offer some juicy tidbits. The storm in December was probably a “Medicane”, a Mediterranean hurricane – an event that’s now become ‘a thing’, as they say, and likely to become even more frequent. Global warming isn’t just a threat, it’s already here: the Eastern Mediterranean “is a region that’s already living through the famous ‘climate change’ we keep hearing about” – indeed, our region’s status as an acknowledged “hot spot” is part of why the Institute (especially its Energy, Environment and Water Research Center, which includes Jonilda) has so much potential. When it comes to quick diagnoses, however, she tends to demur, as if unwilling to reduce science to sound-bites. Take the fabled dust, for instance. Is it really increasing? “Everything you ask, I should talk about in metrics,” she replies. “‘It’s increasing’ – what do you mean? The frequency? The duration? The intensity?”

Well, let’s say the frequency.

She pauses, even that criterion being too simplistic. There’s a gap between fact and perception, explains Jonilda. Let’s say dust storms become less frequent “but three of them have a duration of five days. What’s the [public’s] perception then? ‘We’re choking on dust!’.” Or what if most dust ‘events’ are in the 100-200µg/cubic metre range (i.e. elevated but not too alarming) but then, on one occasion, the dust shoots up to a life-threatening 7,000µg/cubic metre? At the moment, “the observations do not say that there is an increase” in the annual mean amount of dust, she concedes – but we still might be shifting to a new model of “very intense peaks”, leading gradually to desertification.

Then you have the changes in where the dust comes from. The urban legend about the war in Syria having made a difference is true, it turns out – though not because falling bombs have raised clouds of dust, simply because millions of fleeing farmers have left land uncultivated (satellite photos show a marked change in land use) and dry, un-irrigated land quickly becomes a “dust source”. In 2015, nearly half of our dust events – a significant increase – came from the Middle East, as opposed to North Africa. Even that, however, isn’t as alarming as the “new sources of pollution” in recent years: every third building in Lebanon now employs a generator (due to power cuts) and that country is also home to refugee camps, adding the equivalent of a new city whose inhabitants tend to burn a lot of wood for warmth. Worst of all, we don’t even know the extent of the problem. Cyprus, being an EU country, monitors air pollution, but our neighbours in every direction but west are more laissez-faire. Jonilda shows me a map on the wall, with red flags marking the locations of monitoring stations. Europe is packed to the gills, an unbroken corrugated sea of red; go east of Greece, however, and the map is almost barren.

One might surmise that it’s not looking good; but it’s not her job to surmise, her job is to model and investigate. The office is businesslike, its one quirky touch a Dilbert cartoon taped to the door. The fixtures include a whiteboard covered in arcane equations, like in a movie: ‘Ceej = Cecj + emis_anth (e – bc) x f’ reads one equation, ‘emis_anth’ being anthropogenic emissions and ‘f’ being “a factor”, says Jonilda vaguely (what she means is that it would take an even longer equation to define it). Her colleague uses a PC, but her own desk is bare except for a laptop – which is by design, because she’s very firm about not being tethered to a workstation; Jonilda’s hours have been slightly tweaked to accommodate the rest of her life. Thereby hangs a tale, incidentally switching our interview from English to Greek.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a serious-minded scientist approached motherhood seriously and scientifically. She read up on it – not just magazines but peer-reviewed scientific journals, “because that’s me” – even if she ended up embarking on the adventure a few years earlier than planned. (She’d hoped to finish her PhD first, but her body clock was ticking too loudly.) One conclusion she reached was that breastfeeding “according to World Health Organisation guidelines” is hugely beneficial for mother and child – an unpopular conclusion in Greece (it’s much the same in Cyprus), where new mothers are instructed what milk to buy even as they leave the hospital. Another, more general, conclusion was that kids need bonding time – which is why she now leaves the office around 3pm, stays with her son till bedtime then goes back to work on her laptop, even though by then “I’m usually so exhausted that, after about an hour, I’m in bed too”.

Much of this is down to circumstances, of course. Jonilda’s husband – aka “Skype dad” – stayed behind in Greece, though they meet up as often as possible (he has a good job as a sales manager), making her something of a single parent and adding to the burden of childcare. Still, she could’ve made other arrangements. Her very focused life at the moment – focused entirely on work and child; she’s barely gone out with friends during the three years she’s been here – actually seems quite consistent with the rest of her life so far, fitting in with the steady, studious journey from small-town Albania to a PhD and a scientist’s authority. ‘Did you go through a wild phase in your 20s?’ I ask, and she pauses uncertainly. “Not ‘wild’. Um…” stammers Jonilda, then laughs: “It wasn’t wild at all, actually!… Yeah, I think I didn’t really live that period, because everything was profession- or study-oriented”. She pauses again, thinking about it: “Though I don’t think, if I had the opportunity, that I would be wild. Because of my character, also”.

The smile is easy, the demeanour friendly – but there’s still a solid core to the inner person, something orderly and the opposite of sloppy. She’s focused, and perhaps a bit severe. Her husband tells a story about their first meeting, during her corporate stint after the BSc (it was at the same company where he still works now). “He calls me a snob,” she reports in mock-horror. “He says that nobody dared to speak to me, because I was so snobby-looking. Me?” gasps Jonilda indignantly. “I’m the sweetest girl in the world!” We laugh, of course – but you have to wonder (and she does wonder) if she might come off as a bit aloof without realising it. It ties in with something else, her memories of having faced discrimination at her Athens high school – though it wasn’t insults or violence, just a hurtful isolation. Was it perhaps a distance in herself which made others distant? What was she like as a person? “Sensitive,” she replies at once. “As dynamic as I was in my studies and career, I was sensitive in personal matters.” She smiles ruefully: “I’ve learned to camouflage it a little, but I still am”.

Maybe maths was another escape, along with the poems she wrote as a teen – a rational bubble-world where sensitive souls could always arrive at the right answer. Maybe that’s part of the reason why Jonilda Kushta persevered as a scientist, in a field where so many don’t. It’s a truism that not enough women enter the STEM fields, and not enough stay once they do; “In all the teams I’ve ever worked in,” sighs Jonilda, “women have been under-represented”. The hours are too long, the deadlines too tight, the projects too time-consuming for women who also want children – especially in an economy where both parents have to work, and taking a year’s sabbatical is almost impossible. It hasn’t been easy; it’s not easy now, trying to do right by her son and advance her career at the same time. Still, she keeps at it.

Take, as a final example, the aforementioned breastfeeding. Even five years later she’d weep, says Jonilda, just weep at the memory of the hassles she endured at the hands of the system (it may be a factor in why she hasn’t had another child). Paediatricians guilt-tripped her each time the baby was sick, making her feel it was her fault for being so stubborn; she found no support, only impatient sighs and raised eyebrows – yet she went on breastfeeding her son for almost two years (in parallel with bottled milk after the first year) and knows she did the right thing, and not just because she read it in the WHO guidelines.

“It wasn’t just food,” she recalls fondly. It was bonding, especially when the baby hadn’t seen her in a while. It was even medicine, when he felt a cold coming on and instinctively tried to bolster his immune system. “I won’t give up my child to you unless you persuade me,” was her dogged response to the naysayers – just as she now brings a scientist’s rigour to a world assailed by pollution and climate change. It’s a good story. The one about all the dust in the atmosphere isn’t bad, either.

After a traffic accident 32 years ago one woman has been in a wheelchair for more than half her life. But that has not stopped he being a mother and pushing for better treatment of those unable to walk. NADIA SAWYER meets a woman with admirable determination

The American actor Christopher Reeve was famed for two reasons: his award-winning portrayal of comic book superhero Superman and the fact that, before his death in 2004, he was probably the most prominent person on the planet in a wheelchair. Whenever I see him in a film or in a documentary, I am reminded of a woman I first interviewed some 18 years ago, Toula Karatzia, whose parting words were “I’m still me”, taking her quote from Reeve’s best-selling autobiography, Still Me.

Karatzia and Reeve had much in common. They both had accidents that rendered them tetraplegic – paralysed in the torso and all four limbs – yet went on to live full lives, campaigning and working for others in a similar position. So, as I approach Toula’s flat in Strovolos, Nicosia, on a cold and miserable day in 2019, I do so with a mixture of excitement and trepidation – happy to catch up after so many years, but worried that she may not still be the brave and tenacious woman I remember.

My fears are alleviated as soon as I see her. The years seem to have been kinder to Toula than they have been to me. Both in our fifties, I have piled on a kilo for every year that has passed since our last meeting, while Toula has remained slim and trim. I am greying at the temples, while Toula’s hair is a darkish brown, courtesy, she admits, to a hairdresser. Her eyes still sparkle when she talks about what is important to her and her determination is clear.

In 1986, Toula was a 20-year old aspiring model and the front-seat passenger in a car being driven by her former boyfriend. I use this term loosely. Instead, imagine two cars racing against each other in downtown Nicosia with little room for manoeuvre. One car swerves to avoid bumping the other, and hits a telegraph pole head on. No-one is killed, but Toula breaks her neck instantly.

“If I had not been wearing a seatbelt, I would have died,” she said previously.

Despite the similarities of their stories, there is one very obvious difference between Toula and Reeve: she is a woman, and more remarkably, she was the first Cypriot tetraplegic woman to have a baby, and remains, to this day, the only Cypriot tetraplegic woman to have given birth naturally, some 26 years ago. In fact, since I last spoke to Toula, only two other paralysed Cypriot women have gone on to have children, one tetraplegic and one paraplegic (paralysed from the waist down), but both by elective Caesarean section.

Anyone who has ever looked after a child will marvel that these women have chosen to be mothers. For those who are paraplegic, Toula believes it is a little easier because they can use their arms and hands to feed, wash and change the baby, but for a tetraplegic it is a lot harder because they have to rely on hired help or family members to do much of the work, as Toula did. So what could she do for her baby, Kyriakos? “I could only rest him in my lap,” she recalls. She was also always the one that made the important decisions, set boundaries, encouraged him to do the right thing and loved him.

As he grew, and while each physical action was carried out by another person, Toula always made sure she told Kyriakos she wanted to do all these things for him but could not due to her disabilities. “The psychologist told me that it is was very important to do this,” she explains.

Despite the difficulties involved, Toula now says her only regret in life is that she did not have another baby. “At that time, I didn’t want to have another child. It was very difficult for me to watch someone else taking care of my baby. It bothered me a lot. But after a few years, I realised that this was a big mistake,” she admits.

As Kyriakos grew older, Toula’s ability to have more input increased, helping him with his school work and encouraging him with his extra-curricular activities such as learning to play the piano. “He stopped when he was fourteen though… when he got a girlfriend,” laughs Toula.

Though she admits that managing his teenage years was quite difficult, after he completed his national service she saw a change in him and now he is a qualified lawyer and living happily with another girlfriend. Is she looking forward to having grandchildren? “Yes, I love kids,” she says enthusiastically.

Barely an adult herself when she was operated on in the Nicosia General Hospital to stabilise her condition after that fateful accident, she was eventually transferred to Stoke Mandeville Hospital in the UK, a centre that specialises in treating spinal cord injuries, where she underwent a further operation to fuse her neck bones together and where she would remain for seven months for extensive physiotherapy and rehabilitation. It was also where she was finally told the truth by pioneering consultant, Isaac Nuseibeh.

“Toula, you will never walk again”, he said, explaining that nothing could be done to repair the damaged spinal cord.
This act of blatant honesty signalled the start of a special friendship between the doctor and his patient and Toula is still touch with him, though he is now in his eighties and retired. Her on-going care was taken over by another expert from Stoke Mandeville, who now comes to Cyprus twice a year to see her and other patients in the spinal cord unit at the Nicosia General.

“This is very good because it means we do not have to travel to England for a check-up or for some special treatment,” says Toula, who is also quick to praise the staff and facilities now available in the unit.

Although Toula believes her condition has remained pretty much the same since we last spoke, I detect some subtle improvement, probably because she now has the use of a mobile phone and an iPad (which rest in her lap) and which she can touch with the sides of her wrists and fingers on her left hand, allowing her to answer calls, send emails and make use of the internet. The iPad’s on screen keyboard has been enlarged which facilitates in this regard. “Technology is very important to disabled people,” she says, explaining how applications like Skype and Viber help with their communication and socialisation.
Technology would also allow her to follow international developments in spinal cord injury research, perhaps leading her to hope for a ‘cure’ one day? She shakes her head emphatically. “No, I have stopped. I have been in a wheelchair for 32 years. It would be impossible for me. I have a high injury – C4. Another half centimetre up, and I would not be able to breathe naturally and so I am not going to take the risk and open up my neck again”.

Though confined to a wheelchair for more than half her life, Toula has certainly not rested on her laurels. In the early years she helped the Radiomarathon Foundation (a non-governmental voluntary organisation) to raise money for children with disabilities and she was part of a citizen’s initiative for road safety, visiting schools and army camps and warning youngsters about the potential consequences of poor driving habits, including driving too fast. For the last ten years, she has been Vice President of the Organisation for Paraplegics in Cyprus (Opak) and still assists with road safety campaigns. “I now believe that when we go into high schools and the army it is probably too late. We should start in kindergardens and junior schools”.

Toula is also impressed by some of the island’s bus companies which have purchased vehicles that are capable of handling wheelchairs and who have called upon Toula and her organisation to help train their drivers on how to deal with wheelchair passengers. Furthermore, she cites some London cab style taxis on the island which can also handle wheelchair users. Regarding transport and the general treatment of disabled persons in Cyprus she believes that, although there is room for improvement, “we are in a good way”.

With funding from the EU, and the support of the ministry of labour, Opak has also been training the unemployed to provide supportive care services to the disabled, offering direct employment after evaluation. So far, 59 trainees have passed through Opak’s course, and 35 of these, in the Nicosia, Larnaca and Famagusta regions, are under Toula’s supervision.

“I am not a person that likes to sit in the house,” states Toula, as I am reminded of an occasion many years ago when I saw her on her own negotiating her wheelchair up the steeply inclined dual carriageway on Athalassa Avenue. In fact, she invites me to have coffee at Gloria Jeans, which is half a kilometre from her flat, assuring me she can get there on her own, using the side of her left wrist to control a touch-sensitive joystick on her wheelchair.

Toula’s efforts over the years to knock let her injury hold her back have been rightly acknowledged and rewarded. In May 1992 she went to the White House where she met Vice-President Al Gore and received a special commendation. The Victory Award, sponsored by the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington DC, was in recognition of her “exceptional depth of inner strength, tenacity of purpose, integrity of effort, and courage in the face of adversity” and was signed by Cyprus’ late President Glafcos Clerides. Other awards followed, including a Woman of the Year Award in 2012 from the magazine Madame Figaro, and a Women’s Day Award in 2013 from the Municipality of Engomi. It was at this latter event that she was approached by local author, Yiola Damianou-Papadopoulou to write a fictional book based on her life story. Entitled Life is Love, the paperback was published in 2014 and is still available to purchase online.

“I always wanted my story to be in a book, but I am not a good writer,” laughs Toula, grateful that someone else took up the mantle.
And what of another important character in her story, Kyriakos’ father, Tassos, who she met three years after her accident? “He was my rock for so many years,” she says, but at this point becomes despondent, explaining that he is now dealing with his own health issues.

Keen not to end the interview on a sad note, I ask Toula if she has time to do anything else apart from all of her crusading work and I am surprised to discover that she also helps foreign children with their Greek homework and, from time to time, works as a Tupperware lady! “I’m very happy with what I did and what I am still doing with my life,” she concludes.

For further information on Opak, or to make a donation, visit www.opak.org.cy

With the looming introduction of a National Health Scheme, THEO PANAYIDES meets a doctor who revolutionised medicine on the island in the late 70s by introducing private services. He now looks back and rues how it has become so tied up with money

Dr Lakis Anastassiades winds up our interview with a brief tour of the Cardiovascular Diagnostic Centre in Nicosia, which he co-founded with two other cardiologists in 1977. In the corridor we run into another doctor, one of his colleagues at the Centre, and Lakis mentions that we’ve been talking (partly) about Gesy, the national health scheme that’s due to be implemented in a few weeks. The response is immediate and heated, the other doctor railing against the proposed scheme’s “Soviet-style” provisions – a sign of the controversy Gesy is igniting among the medical community. Lakis himself offers only a mild rejoinder, keeping things civil – though in fact he’s very pro-Gesy, and has come out on Facebook to chide the Cyprus Medical Association (CyMA) for being against it.

It’s a moment that typifies the man, holding – though not necessarily masking – his strong beliefs behind a pleasant demeanour. Lakis is 75 and decidedly twinkly, his bedside manner seemingly extending to life in general. He’s compact, rather “overweight” by his own admission, and very jolly. He laughs more than once during the interview, and not just laughs but laughs uproariously, literally throwing his head back – not just when something is funny but especially when it’s not, as if consciously to lighten the mood. ‘How did you find the money to open this clinic, back in the 70s?’ I ask, prompting wild merriment. “It’s funny,” he gasps between chuckles: “The government, or the Medical Association, does not give any help to the young doctors! You come, and you’re on your own.”

Simply put, he found his own money – and made quite a splash, along with his two colleagues. “Yes, we made a splash,” he affirms. “Three doctors, American doctors, it was unheard-of in those days… And three cardiologists together, it made an impact, yes”. At the time, there were only eight (!) cardiologists in the whole of Cyprus, and the few private doctors on the island almost always worked alone, never in clinics. Lakis knows this because his CV includes a magnum opus called Kyprion Iatron Erga (‘The Works of Cypriot Doctors’), a history of medicine in Cyprus from 1950-2015 – an insanely detailed, 888-page doorstop that took five years to write, a period (from 2010 to 2015) during which he also ran his practice and taught at the University of Nicosia medical school. He’s also, at various times, co-written a book on nutrition, stood (unsuccessfully) as a member of Parliament, and helped create the first proper hospital in the National Guard. The manner may be jolly, but the life was (and remains) very active; he’s involved in public affairs – including, inevitably, Gesy – and talks, more than once, of making “a contribution”.

This is all a bit old-fashioned nowadays. We speak, coincidentally, on the same day that high-school students staged a two-period walkout, refusing to go to class in protest against the education ministry’s plans to implement twice-yearly exams. These exam-shy students faced no sanctions – unlike 13-year-old Lakis and his English School classmates who staged a similar protest in a very different Cyprus, on the day of Eoka fighter Michalis Karaolis’ execution in 1956. The headmaster and PE master corralled some 50 young patriots and gave them “two sticks, we used to call it ‘sticks’, you had to bend over a chair and they struck you two times”. Lakis didn’t tell his dad – a teacher at the English School – about the incident, but his mum (also a teacher) was helping the boy take his shower that night and “saw two black [lines] on my buttocks,” he recalls, laughing uproariously. “She said ‘Goodness, what happened to you?’,” goes on Lakis, rocking with laughter.

The contrast is instructive, students now protesting over too much work and students then protesting in the service of a higher ideal – and medicine, too, has changed in the decades since young Lakis tagged along behind his dentist uncle (“He was my idol, I would say”) on the uncle’s trips to far-flung villages, and even in the (slightly fewer) decades since he first started practising himself. “Medicine has become more mechanised, because of the modern equipment,” he relates, “and of course this has also changed the character of the doctor… Everything becomes mechanical, ‘Oh you come, you do this test’ – and I can tell you that a doctor now may manage a patient without even touching him!” No surprise that a man with his fulsome manner should fixate on that touchy-feely detail, the fact that his own generation always began with a physical examination whereas now “you do an electrocardiogram, you do a chest X-ray, you do an echo; you know everything about him, so you don’t have to touch him”. Nothing has been lost per se (if anything, it’s much more efficient now) – yet something, perhaps, has been lost, that sense of intimacy which helped doctors in perceiving their job as more than just a job.

The word we’re looking for is ‘vocation’ – and Lakis doesn’t use that word himself, too diplomatic to imply that young doctors lack dedication, but it does sound like he sacrificed a lot in pursuit of medicine. “Family time,” he says by way of example. “My two kids grew up, and I don’t remember anything from their childhood.” (Both are now in their 40s, his son a gastroenterologist in Singapore, his daughter in Human Resources.) “I used to leave at six in the morning, come back at midnight”.

Why so many hours?

“Because we had to take care of our patients. We had a lot of work! Finishing the office, then you go to the clinics to see the patients. Your patient had a heart attack, you have to stay with him. Long hours.” He was used to it, having worked 100-hour weeks during his training at the prestigious Baylor College of Medicine in Houston – he’d previously studied in Israel, under a WHO scholarship – including one memorable stint when he didn’t go home for three days. All told, Lakis lived abroad for 14 years, incidentally missing the Turkish invasion (he followed it on TV in the States, heart-in-mouth since his family actually come from Kyrenia). When he returned, in 1976, he felt “completely cut off from Cyprus” and wasn’t really planning to stay – “but when I came and saw this disaster here, people living in camps, my whole family displaced, I had second thoughts. I thought ‘What am I going to do in the US, just sit there and work and make money? Here, people need help’.” It was, as he says, “a contribution”.

We shouldn’t oversell the idealism. For one thing, meeting his wife (also a doctor, in the state sector) was a big factor in deciding to stay. For another, it’s not like Lakis wasn’t making money in Cyprus too, as a US-trained cardiologist – and it wasn’t just the money, it was also a case of presiding over “a new era”, overseeing the transformation from public to private medicine. At the Centre, he and his colleagues introduced now-familiar tools like ultrasound examinations and exercise (a.k.a. stress) tests, importing the equipment themselves; on the island as a whole, a system was built up from scratch. “It was an exciting era, from the medical aspect. We had to do things for the first time in Cyprus. Organise seminars, invite foreign guests, foreign doctors”. He was president of the Cyprus Cardiology Society, liaising with colleagues from all over Europe. Medical associations were set up for various specialties – the same associations which are now lining up against Gesy.

Was there already talk of starting a national health service in the 80s?

“Oh yes!” replies Lakis, reaching for a copy of his book – and there, on page 781, is a press clipping from 1982, lamenting that “political interests, in the run-up to Presidential elections” were impeding the progress of a national scheme, which had been due to come into effect at the end of 1981! Plus ça change, it appears.

Everyone was against a scheme in those days, he recalls, politicians siding with the pharmaceutical and insurance companies which stood (and stand) to lose money. “So the doctors were fighting alone for Gesy. And now, 40 years later, the only ones against Gesy are the doctors! This is unheard-of”. He shakes his head: “I’m mad at my colleagues for one thing. They have been pushing for a national health system for 40 years. They were the pioneers, the doctors. They managed to get it through Parliament, to make a law for Gesy” – but now, in the wake of that triumph, the current CyMA leadership has turned against the scheme. “This is not serious… You cannot go back and say ‘No, I don’t play now because I didn’t get what I want’.”

The main stumbling-block is the government’s insistence that doctors won’t be able to practise privately, on the side, after joining Gesy – and we talk about that, though none of Lakis’ arguments are entirely conclusive. First, he points out that negotiations were always conducted on the basis of no private practice – “All the studies throughout the years were without private, because all government and private doctors would be the same. This is a philosophy. You accepted it” – so doctors can hardly demand it now. (Then again, it may be that those doing the negotiating were more ideologically pure than the bulk of their colleagues.) Then he calls for the system to be implemented anyway – if only to avoid another 40 years of bickering – and corrections to be made as needed. But surely it’d be quite hard to change such a central component, once the parts were up and running?

Other countries offer only limited guidance. In the UK, for instance, ordinary GPs must abide by the system but consultants “can have a few hours of private,” says Lakis – but most private doctors are indeed consultants (i.e. specialists) in Cyprus, so that doesn’t solve the main dispute. The crux of the matter lies perhaps in Lakis’ explanation of why we can’t have it both ways: “If you tell everybody ‘You are free to do private practice’, am I stupid to come and work for the system for peanuts, and not close my office and open it later, private?”.

‘Peanuts’? But doctors in Gesy will apparently be getting some €135,000 a year, probably more. That doesn’t sound so bad.

“It doesn’t sound to you, and it doesn’t sound to any European doctor,” he replies, chuckling grimly. “That’s why we’ll have many Greek nationals coming to Cyprus to work. But we’ve learned to live with much more”. A surgeon now may earn €3-4,000 per operation, often operating twice a day, three times a week: that’s €24,000 a week, just for surgeries – never mind the patients he sees at €50 a pop, and MRIs and CT scans and so on. Doctors have become businessmen, laments Lakis. You can’t always blame them, since they’ve had to invest in building clinics and need to recoup that investment. “It’s the ugly side of medicine – which shouldn’t really be like that. I don’t know, do I look socialist?” he adds playfully – and does another of his head-thrown-back roars of laughter, breaking the tension.

I don’t know. Are you?

“No!” he protests, still laughing hard. In fact, when he stood for Parliament (in 1981) it was with centre-right Disy, one of the two youngest candidates on the party ballot: the other was another Anastasiades, that one from Limassol rather than Kyrenia. “The one from Kyrenia flopped, the one from Limassol continued and became president,” jokes Lakis. “We are close friends,” he adds, “we are good friends. But Anastasiades was born a politician. I was not!”

Is that true? You have to wonder, given the very political talents of this rather smooth operator: his ability to cultivate a convivial atmosphere (the laugh helps), his sociable nature, his dynamism. He’s still active now, in his 70s; in April he’s off to Accra, capital of Ghana, for a meeting of “authorised physicians”, a position he holds in Cyprus for several countries including Canada, the US and Australia. (Basically, he’s the doctor who gives the medical all-clear for those seeking visas to those countries.) Then again, he may be a touch too wide-eyed for a politician. It’s unlikely that a politician would’ve spent five years on such a quixotic project as his history of medicine in Cyprus.

His true position – speaking of the history of medicine – may be slightly more ironic. Lakis is a part (indeed, an important part) of a generation of doctors who revolutionised private medicine on the island, did so with enthusiasm and the best intentions – but may also have created a monster, making the practice more mechanical and vastly more lucrative. The result is a system that’s become alienated from patients, and far too attached to money – and has now turned against the scheme he himself once championed, as a CyMA member in the 90s.

‘Does being a doctor change the way you view life?’ I ask Dr Lakis Anastassiades, and he nods fervently, thinking back to his 50 years of virtuously inserting himself in the lives of others, checking and examining and trying to save patients – especially, perhaps, to those hard, inevitable moments when he failed to save them. “Throughout your life, you philosophise,” he tells me. “You become a philosopher, gradually. Yes. Seeing the patient dying in front of you, watching him dying – because you give up, you tried everything to resuscitate him, he doesn’t respond, and then you watch him and see all the process of death. How he opens up his mouth, and you imagine –” he sighs – “How many times I thought: ‘Oh, now the soul is coming out of the body!’.” Lakis shakes his head in wonder: “It’s a feeling that cannot be described. You have to feel it as a doctor”. So much for medicine being just a business.

Vigorous and volatile like his art, THEO PANAYIDES meets an artist who, although a long way from his hippy revolutionary days in London, has never worn a watch or a tie

Kikos Lanitis sits, dressed in black, surrounded by his paintings. All the art on the walls is his own, here a recent political work with words like ‘Crisis’ and ‘Measures’ scrawled collage-like over a portrait of a young girl, there a striking rendition of an old village wedding, based on a photo. The photo amused him, he explains, because not a single person in it was smiling (at the time, smiling for no reason – as in a photo – was viewed as a sign of simple-mindedness), and also perhaps because his own relationship with weddings has been rather erratic. He has three sons by three different marriages, though admittedly he and his third wife Anita – London-raised, and looking considerably younger than her husband – have been together since 1992.

Kikos is tall, with a touch of the bull-like frame he must’ve sported in his youth as a judo champion – he fought for England at junior level, and coached the Cyprus team at the 1980 Moscow Olympics – though also with inevitable wear and tear left by his 70 years on the planet. He has wrinkles under his eyes, and burst blood vessels in his nose; his index finger looks mangled and torn, in what may be an old or a new injury – but his hands are massive, the hands he’s used to daub canvases in the studio and upend opponents in the judo ring, and the eyes are sharp behind round little glasses. Like his art, he gives off a vigorous, volatile energy. His favourite painters are Van Gogh and Caravaggio, he says, and it may or may not be coincidence (I mention the fact, and he laughs indulgently) that one of them went mad and the other was a convicted murderer.

It’s rare to find him here, in this Nicosia townhouse (actually two joined-up flats, taking up an entire floor of a nondescript block in the centre of town). It was even rarer before the economic crisis, when he lived primarily in Athens – but it’s also rare now, when he spends almost all his time in Cyprus at his studio in Pera Pedi, just below Platres. (He’s only in Nicosia for a few days, mostly because he’s just finished an exhibition at Gloria Gallery.) Up in the mountains, he’ll take a two-kilometre walk every day before breakfast, have his coffee beside a little stream, then shut himself off in the studio “and I might not come out till it gets dark, or until 4am, whatever”. It’s much the same in Athens – where he still spends a few months a year – except that he hangs out with other artists and they’ll go down to Kolonaki for an early-morning natter, before it gets busy. “By 10 o’clock we’re done,” he reports briskly, “and we’re all in our studios, working”.

The work is everything; that’s why so many artists fail, because they try to succeed through networking and schmoozing and self-promotion. Art is “for worker bees,” as he puts it, “you have to work all the time, and produce all the time, so you’ll start to learn from the work itself, not from books anymore”. Then again, it’s also a free life. “I’ve never worked a day in my life,” he says paradoxically – meaning office work, clock-watching work. “I’ve never worn a watch, or worn a tie.” His usual spiel, which he likes to recount in interviews, is that he always did badly in school, his only good grades being in Art and PE – so, having concluded that he must be good at those subjects, he became an artist and an athlete, and succeeded in both. “It was only later,” he adds humorously, going for the punchline, “that I discovered that everyone got a 20 in Art, and a 20 in PE!”.

That’s the funny story. The truth is a lot less amusing – though his childhood doesn’t sound abusive per se, just unstable. His parents divorced when Kikos was a baby, leaving him to be raised mostly by his grandparents. His dad had a good job as a company manager, but seems to have been quite an awkward type; his relationship with his in-laws was strained, the one with his son was “perfunctory”. Kikos’ mum moved to England and remarried, playing no part in his life for about 12 years – but then decided that she wanted him there after all, so the ageing grandparents agreed to pass him on. The boy moved from Limassol to London, but never meshed with his new family. At 15, he left home and never went back, working instead as a petrol-pump attendant and restaurant dishwasher – and also becoming part of a hippy commune, joining the 60s revolution with London as its epicentre. “Wherever there was revolution, I was up for it. So, for instance, having a sit-in and blocking traffic at Trafalgar Square, and the cops riding in on horses to break it up – against Vietnam, or whatever. Up for it! It wasn’t like ‘Go to the commune, have lots of sex and that’s it’.”

Kikos was already an athlete, a government grant for his judo training helping him to survive financially (it also helped him to survive in another way: being an athlete, he couldn’t sink as deeply into drink and drugs as most of his fellow rebels) – but he had no thought of becoming an artist, at least professionally. The hippies dabbled in art to make ends meet: the girls in the commune made beads, while Kikos himself gathered cast-off clothes from chic neighbourhoods, dyed them in psychedelic colours then sold them back to trendy shops on Carnaby Street. Slowly, a plan may have formed – he set grocery bags on fire then chucked them in the Thames, the patterns made by the fire before it was extinguished being a form of artistic expression – but his dreams were limited, due to the way he’d grown up. “I was never supposed to come this far in life,” he admits. “No-one had ever set goals for me. Therefore, I had no goals.”

It’s an interesting question, how far – especially for a creative person – a chaotic start is a help or a hindrance. One of Kikos’ many stories is of having mentored (or befriended) Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek film director who’s up for an Oscar this month for The Favourite. Lanthimos, like him, is another artist with a turbulent early life: his parents divorced, his dad left, then his mother died when Yorgos was in his teens. (Kikos was friends with the family, and helped out while the mum was in hospital.) The result was that Lanthimos, like Kikos, “had nothing to lose” when embarking on his film career (he has also, like Kikos, worked very hard since becoming successful, making five films in less than a decade, as if refusing to take success for granted). “I find, with people who happened not to grow up in a ‘normal’ home, that they’re better at surviving,” he muses. “They’re better at facing life calmly, and more mature at a younger age than the others.”

Doesn’t it create a distance, though? Doesn’t it make for a certain detachment in relationships, having had to harden oneself against life at an early age?

He pauses, thinking about it. “I think you have a more correct approach,” he replies. “You don’t do that thing where you fall on the other person and end up smothering them, or getting smothered – or end up having to compromise, or in situations where, at the end of the day, I’m happy on the outside but unhappy, or trapped, on the inside. You’re more free, and more honest. You don’t have this need for social status, which makes you behave so you’ll be accepted by society.”

Isn’t it human nature, though, to want to be loved and accepted?

“Not especially,” replies Kikos. People come and go in this life, he shrugs; often you’ll lose touch with someone and realise you never even said goodbye, because you didn’t know the relationship was ending. The best we can hope for is probably “a closer relationship with some people, for a period of time… So, speaking for myself at least, I don’t get so emotionally attached that I suppress myself in a relationship, or a friendship. It’s ‘Take it or leave it’, as they say.

“And my work is the same way. I don’t think about the viewer, or the commercial aspect – I’m only interested in having a good exhibition. Even if no-one else turned up, I’d take a little stroll through it myself and be happy, because I made a good exhibition… It all comes, basically, from the way you grew up.”

There’s a hardness, to be sure, in Kikos Lanitis. He’s not humourless; asked for the book that changed his life, he cites A Spaniard in the Works, John Lennon’s pun-infested volume of nonsense comedy. (Kikos wrote a weekly current-affairs column in Simerini for many years, trying for the same general tone.) He doesn’t seem cruel, or malicious – but he’s hard, with an athlete’s iron discipline and competitive edge. When he says he’s going to paint, he paints, “it doesn’t matter if 100 people call me saying ‘Come over, we’re having a party’”. He doesn’t look to others for his happiness, nor does he care what people say about his work. I offer an amateurish take on his style – an impression of occluded light, as though light were emanating from behind the painting and being fragmented by the thick, busy surface – but he has little time for analysis: “I believe that, the more an art historian writes about a work, the more it’s a bad work”.

Besides, his style of the past 20 years isn’t all he’s ever done, not by a long shot. He runs through a partial list: abstract art, installations, “arte povera using whatever I happened to find on the street, boilers nailed to the canvas and painted, entire radiators, body performance, painting kids from head to toe – then I wrapped them in a sheet, unwrapped them, and that was the print! – video art, with myself surrounded by glass and getting cut and so on…” He became known in his late 20s (having meanwhile come back to Cyprus, fought in 1974, returned to England and thence to France, where he found his first acclaim), but it wasn’t till his early 40s – his years in Athens – that he really became “indispensable to the society where I lived,” as he puts it, i.e. a leading light of the artistic community, no longer having to hustle for shows and stress about selling his work in the way of an up-and-coming artist.

And now? That’s another interesting question. Kikos mentions some of the critics and artists who championed his work in Greece – but soon finds himself adding footnotes: this one died last year, that one is now in hospital. He no longer writes his column for Simerini; “You have to know when to stop,” he says ruefully. He’s in no way close to retirement – an artist can’t retire; what would he do without the work? – but growing older has undoubtedly mellowed him. “I try to stay on the outside and be an observer now. I used to be on the inside, but now, at my age, I observe. I notice that I’m no longer – not just me, the same is true of others – I’m no longer so fanatical. I notice I’ve become better at listening now… I used to be more aggressive, more opinionated. Now, even if I’m right, I’ll say something one time – maybe one and a half times – then there’s no point saying it again. Take it or leave it.”

The world has changed too – and, unlike many former hippies, he finds little echo of the 60s in today’s rebellious youth. “What can you change today? Today, there isn’t an enemy… They talk about dropping bombs in Syria – but who’s dropping bombs? They’re all dropping bombs!” It was different in his day, so much simpler to protest against Vietnam and the older generation – and of course there was human contact, unlike today’s social-media-driven protests. “Today they don’t have relationships. I don’t understand it. But the previous generation didn’t understand us, either, so I’m not going to sit here and judge them”. So what’s left of the youthful revolution that shaped his own turbulent youth? Maybe just “the feeling that ‘We failed’,” he replies soberly.

Don’t look to Kikos Lanitis for sentimentality. He started restless, and never really settled down. He’s the enemy of all settled things – whether it’s an office routine or a happy ending, or the reductive satisfaction of a work of art being ‘explained’ by a critic. He’s never worn a watch, as he says, or a tie. He could wake up tomorrow and fly off to Greece, if he wanted; he could work all night, or not work at all – but of course he does work because the work is everything, even (or especially) when it drives him to distraction. He was chatting to a friend who was feeling stressed out once, he says, “and I said to him, ‘You’re stressed out? Can you imagine picking up a brush every morning, and saying to yourself: “With this brush I have to buy a house, I have to send kids through college, I have to do this and that”? And you’re stressed out, working in a bank?’.” It sounds like an exhausting way to live – but of course he doesn’t need my approval, or anyone else’s, to live as he pleases. Take it or leave it.

The owner of a small vegetarian restaurant in Nicosia comes across as a real Earth mother, nurturing and keen to see men and women stick to traditional roles. THEO PANAYIDES meets a woman happiest when reading the Bible

An Icelandic vegan: that description ticks so many boxes, most of them virtuous and politically correct. Iceland is the most gender-equal country in the world, and the first to have made any wage gap between men and women explicitly illegal. Icelanders are a secular bunch; around 40 per cent of under-25s identify as atheist. Veganism, meanwhile, is fast becoming a creed in itself, not just in Iceland but all over the world. Vegans are militant, and often self-righteous; if you eat animal products, they imply (and often say), you must be a bad person. The combination of the two sounds intimidating, and I brace myself for improving lectures on the state of the world.

Inga Hadjipanayi (née Karlsdottir), however – owner and proprietor of Inga’s Veggie Heaven in old Nicosia – avoids such stereotypes, and upends my expectations. She is indeed an Icelander but comes from an older generation, from a time before the island got rich and trendy (she also hasn’t lived there in 40 years). Her memories are of growing up in a village of around 2,000 people, roaming freely in a barren, spectacular landscape of rocks and moss, living by the classic Icelandic motto ‘Thetta reddast’ (roughly translated as ‘Everything will be fine’). She’s religious, and a strong believer. When it comes to gender, she’s all for fairness but warns against losing sight of traditional roles. She’s a creationist, and believes evolution is “just a theory”. She’s not even a vegan.

Inga’s Veggie Heaven is mostly vegan, however, though a few of the dishes are vegetarian: they don’t use eggs, but do include cheese in their lasagna and feta in the (gluten-free) burgers. The place is minuscule, especially on a wet winter’s day when sitting outside is unappetising; I arrive at 10am, settling down opposite Inga with a cup of nettle tea, and by midday all six tables are occupied. We’re interrupted by customers, some of whom seem to be regulars – and also by a phone call from ‘Tommy’, who turns out to be Inga’s son-in-law. He’s actually her prospective son-in-law, due to marry her daughter next year – but meanwhile the daughter is pregnant (“This was a surprise!” says Inga cheerfully), making her mum the joyful promise of a first grandchild but also interfering slightly with her birthday plans. Inga turns 60 in September and had planned a big party in Iceland, tying in with a local celebration in her hometown, but of course it’ll be impossible to organise a party in Iceland with a newborn to take care of in Cyprus. Oh well; thetta reddast.

She was 21 when she first arrived, coming down from Sweden – she’d been working in the Volvo factory for a year and a half – for a couple of weeks’ winter holiday. “It was my last trip,” she recalls, “because I was working in Sweden and I was moving back to Iceland… I thought ‘I’ll go to Cyprus, I’ll never go there again’ – it was so far!”.

Had she gone to university?

“No,” she replies, then playfully adds: “I’m a Viking!”

Don’t they go to university?

“No. They travel.”

Inga laughs, a wide-open toothy laugh; her mouth, when she laughs, goes almost triangular, raucous mirth offset by soft, grey-blue eyes. She arrived in Larnaca, all those years ago, and met a boy her own age, a soldier who was DJing at one of the local discos: “So we met there, in the discotheque. The classic thing”. 38 years later they have four kids, two of each (Inga also comes from a family with two sons and two daughters) – and they’ve also avoided the fate of so many ‘mixed’ marriages that end in divorce, felled by the inevitable culture clash. “It’s a bit difficult,” she admits. “Maybe it helped because I come from an island.”

Did she ever think of leaving, once the honeymoon period was over?

“Oh, often!” she laughs. “Yes, yes. It’s normal.”

So what did she do?

“Well, I tried to – mend things, you know? Because, in the family, you have to give and you have to take… But maybe one [spouse] is always the one that – kind of, gives more.”

And would that be her?

“I think so. You have to ask my husband about that!”

It takes two, of course: as Inga puts it, “my husband always spoke well of me” – meaning he stuck by her, especially during disagreements with the family. Cypriots were nice enough, she recalls of her early days on the island, but “they were very close with one another, and they had this attitude of interfering all the time – like, everybody had an opinion and everybody had to tell their opinion, and everybody thought they were right. You know, it was like that at the beginning. But we sat down with my husband and we discussed, and I said: ‘Look, if you stick with me, they’ll stop’.”

Did she seem un-Cypriot in some things? How she raised her kids, for instance?

“Yes. I didn’t mind if they got dirty. If it was raining, I didn’t mind them going out to splash in the water – because I remember I did that too. And I wasn’t always on top of them, you know? I didn’t shout at them, I would try to discuss things with them. I might pull their ear, if they didn’t give me their attention!” She laughs again, looking very good-natured. There’s something quite nurturing and Earth-mother-like about Inga – as there is, perhaps, in many women who feed random strangers for a living. One can easily imagine the neighbourhood kids feeling that “my door was always open” back in the day, treating her house as their own and often popping in – even when her own kids weren’t home – to have a drink or use the toilet.

Her religious faith is a constant, though she doesn’t like to advertise it. ‘When are you happiest?’ I ask at one point – and she hems and haws for a while, then decides to share: “Actually, the happiest moment is when I’m reading the Bible”. She’s no longer Protestant, feeling like they’re “making a soup out of the religion” (I presume she’s thinking of the way many Protestant churches have toned down their teachings in an effort to appear more ‘inclusive’), and calls herself “just a Christian”. Her lifestyle, too, is straightforward. She and her husband don’t go out much, having always preferred to invite people over (more nurturing!). One of her sons is a professional graffiti artist, now working in Norway, but Inga herself doesn’t seem to have much of an arty side. Any hobbies? “Hobbies? What shall I say, hobbies?” She thinks about it: “I’m always cooking. I think that’s like my hobby as well”.

That brings us to the restaurant, tucked away in the old town and never, she admits, remotely profitable; it pays the bills, but that’s about it. She goes shopping for ingredients every morning, partly for freshness and partly because “I can’t buy quantity”: she doesn’t get enough customers to need extra food, and doesn’t have enough space to store it. “So it’s like, every day you go out and get a few things, and put them on the few shelves we have… It’s small-scale”. The genesis behind Inga’s Veggie Heaven – the only business she’s ever run – is complicated. Her kids were growing up (this was 12 years ago), so she took over what used to be a traditional coffee shop in a rather forgotten part of town. She wasn’t planning to make it vegetarian – but she tried it as a coffee shop, tried adding soups and sandwiches and nothing seemed to work, “so I just decided ‘I’ll go home’,” she recalls. “Like in the movie Gone With the Wind, where Scarlett O’Hara, every time she had troubles she had to go home, to Tara!”. She laughs again, her mouth stretching into its little triangle.

I assume she means ‘home’ as in ‘home from the restaurant’ – but ‘home’ is actually Iceland, where she went to “ease my mind” and decide, after some thought, on a vegan/vegetarian place. It’s a poignant detail, the elusive sense of home for a person who’s been uprooted from her birthplace (though you’re never entirely uprooted; Inga tells me of a friend who lived in Sweden for 60 years, raised a family, then went back to Iceland alone to retire). It’s enough to unsettle a more anxious person – but Inga isn’t anxious, which may also explain why she’s managed to make a go of her mixed marriage. “I don’t panic easily,” she smiles. When she describes the Icelandic character as hard-working and “quite down-to-earth”, I suspect she’s thinking of herself.

What defines her down-to-earth quality? Paying little heed to ideology, for a start – including the one you’d associate with Icelandic vegans. She herself, as already mentioned, is not vegan; “I’m not even 100 per cent vegetarian”. Did she used to be? “Never!” she replies firmly. “I love this kind of food, but – there are times when I crave meat. And I might just have meat. But it’s, like, once a month”.

Militant vegans do sometimes turn up as customers, and some of them do get upset – or perhaps feel betrayed, given the name of the place – that she owns a veggie restaurant without being veggie, though Inga herself can’t see why: “I mean, I could own an Italian restaurant and not be an Italian”. That’s a bit disingenuous, given that veganism (unlike Italian cuisine) is increasingly an ideology – then again, it’s clear she doesn’t share the more extreme aspects of that ideology. “I think you should be kind to everybody,” she says by way of preface, “[but] I don’t think you should put animals as equal to a human being.” A dog will always be a dog, after all – though of course “I’m not saying ‘Go eat the dog’, no!” She sighs, trying to find the crux of the matter: “Don’t eat meat, if you don’t want it. But don’t accuse everybody else, you know?”.

Moderation, common sense, decency: these are the traits – small-town traits, or perhaps small-country traits from a time before globalisation – one might discern in Inga Hadjipanayi. Others may find her conservative, or overly placid, though in fact it’s a fine line. When her son first started dating, for instance, she warned him to respect women and “don’t ever use anybody”. She believes a woman should earn the same as a man for doing the same job, and was quick to note that men were “kind of higher” in the pecking order when she first arrived in Cyprus. A young Icelander of 2019 might actually find much common ground with her – but she’s not ready to abandon traditional values in the name of a brave new world. She’s too down-to-earth for that.

Take gender equality, for instance. “OK, you say ‘equal’, but equal in which way?” pleads Inga. “Because a mother is a mother, you know? She usually is softer than the father. The father is more of a strength in the family, he will take care of things, he’s more – maybe more stable. A woman is more sentimental. So what do you mean by ‘equal’?

“I think we need to be, like, together – this strength and this softness, to complete each other,” she goes on. “But most of the time we can’t. Because we have too much ego!” Women today try awfully hard to seem strong, maybe because they feel it’s expected or necessary – but “then you forget a lot, maybe, about your role. How you should be a mother, how you should nurture”. So are people forgetting their natural roles nowadays? “In my opinion, yes,” replies Inga. Equal pay, yes, by all means – “but it doesn’t mean that a man is going to give birth. You understand? You can’t change the roles.”

Her philosophy matches the menu – old-school, stolid veggie standbys like ‘Lentil shepherd’s pie’ and ‘Nut-roast with chutney sauce’, scrawled on a board beside the small counter. The food at Inga’s is simple: no gourmet dishes here, “more like ‘Let’s go to Mum’s and have lunch’,” she explains, flashing another glimpse of her Earth-mother side. The woman behind the food is equally unpretentious, a hardy, even-tempered Icelander who approaches life with robust good sense, and even welcomes her restaurant’s precarious financial situation: “I want to need God,” she tells me earnestly. “I don’t want to become comfortable, no.” Her husband is more the angst-ridden type, but “I kind of get on with it, you know?” shrugs Inga, showing off the positive outlook that’s gotten her through 38 years in a foreign land. “I just lay my head, and I go to sleep. Tomorrow is another day”. Thetta reddast.

In a woman who was crowned the best teacher in the world last year, THEO PANAYIDES finds it is a tag that fits, as he meets a strong-minded woman who’s all about empowerment

Andria Zafirakou anxiously eyes the dark clouds from the window of the small conference room in the Cleopatra Hotel in Nicosia. She’s flying out in a few hours and hoping to avoid a repeat of what happened yesterday, when strong tailwinds forced her incoming flight into an aborted landing (the plane all but touched down, then took off again), freaking her out: “I thought ‘This is it!’,” she laughs, clutching her heart in mock-terror. It would surely have been ironic if, after a year of constant travelling all over the world, she’d suffered a mishap while arriving at the place she calls “my ultimate home”.

It is indeed a flying visit, organised by the Youth Board of Cyprus, and the media are out in force. I arrive at 11.40am and she’s been doing 20-minute interviews since 9 o’clock, answering questions for TV, print and radio journalists who are obviously thrilled to be in her presence (when I arrive, she’s posing for selfies with a camera crew). The reason for all the excitement is, of course, that 40-year-old Andria is last year’s winner of the Global Teacher Prize awarded by the Varkey Foundation – making her, at least in theory, the ‘best teacher in the world’ – though one may still wonder why exactly this should provoke such a feeding frenzy. Partly it’s patriotic, insofar as she’s ‘one of us’, a Londoner raised by a Greek father and Greek Cypriot mother. Partly it’s romantic, calling up the much-beloved figure of the Inspirational Teacher (and perhaps distracting from the sad state of actual education in Cyprus). And partly, no doubt, it’s the same venal thrill that draws local papers to lottery winners, since the Prize also comes with – gasp! – $1 million in prize money.

The night before, I attend Andria’s lecture at the Pallas Theatre – an event titled ‘Art at the Heart of Education’, aimed mostly at teachers though also with a smattering of politicians and other VIPs – during which she describes how she won the prize, playing down her own contribution at every turn (and modestly omitting the fact that she won out of 30,000 applicants). A colleague put her name forward and the Foundation invited her to apply, but “the problem was, the deadline was the night before my wedding! So, as I was sewing my husband’s trousers – obviously! – the night before my wedding, I remembered that I have a midnight deadline to quickly fill out an application form, which I did”.

She made the top 50 – much to her surprise – then the top 10, jetting off to Dubai for the ceremony and finding herself in the company of some pedagogical all-stars. “I knew [the other nominees] before I met them, because they’re famous.” One had made a viral video of himself teaching maths so that one of his pupils, who was sick, could learn at home. Another raises money so kids in developing countries can have access to computers and devices. “And then you have me. A teacher from north London, a teacher who has spent her whole life in one school… And, for some miraculous reason, I won.”

It does seem a bit unlikely that an Arts and Textiles teacher at Alperton Community School – home to about 1,350 students in the London borough of Brent – should be crowned ‘best in the world’; still, the decision isn’t so inexplicable. It’s not just that Andria and her school stand for diversity and multiculturalism, not just the fact that she’s taught herself phrases in all 35 languages spoken by her pupils – the better to connect with them – or that she’ll walk them to the bus at the end of each day to shield them from gang violence; there’s something else too. The prize is “a statement”, as she puts it, aimed at raising the profile of teachers worldwide (the $1 million makes it even more of a statement). The winner doesn’t just thank the Foundation and go back to work, he or she has to be an ambassador. “I’ve spent the past 11 months gallivanting,” she tells her audience: “Travelling, meeting teachers, meeting ministers, meeting presidents from all over the world”. (She’s also used part of the $1 million to found a charity called Artists in Residence, getting established artists to visit schools.) Personality, I suspect, is just as important as achievement in picking a winner – and Andria makes an excellent ambassador, blending bubbly enthusiasm with a hint of activist’s steel.

Her father – a Greek Orthodox priest – would be proud of the way she works the room at the Pallas, preaching the gospel of tireless, idealistic, unappreciated teachers. “You are doing an amazing job,” she tells the crowd – then, faced with a tepid response, cries out: “You are doing an amazing job!”, nudging them into wild applause. “Kalisperaaaaa! Hello everyone!” she trills as she gets onstage, showing off her fluent (if accented) Greek; her persona is brash, extroverted, designed to perk up bored teenagers – though also to impose her authority. The energy is warm, but not squishy. We talk of her husband, the man she married the day after sending in her application, and she mentions that he’s actually an African, from Zimbabwe. Mixed-race marriages are “very much typical of the generation that I live in, in the UK”.

And what about her parents’ generation? Were they okay with it?

Her parents were totally supportive, she assures me. As for other older folk, uncles and aunts and so forth, “I’ve always said to my parents, ‘It’s a decision that I’m making. And if anyone doesn’t agree with it, then they must come and speak to me’.” She laughs wryly: “And nobody, I think, is ever confident enough to come and speak to me directly!”.

Why is that? Is she scary?

“I think – well, I think I’ve got strong opinions. And I’m strong-minded”.

She is, too. She tells the story of a pupil named Raf (more on this later) and recalls that she had to fight for Raf to be allowed to do A-Level Art. “I had to fight with my head teacher. I always fight!” She follows the conventions she approves of – she’s religious and attends church every Sunday, which must be quite rare in London – and ignores the ones that tie her down: she and her husband got married last year but in fact they have two daughters, aged nine and seven, having deliberately delayed getting married so that the kids could be part of it (the girls joined the wedding as bridesmaids, and had a great time). She does have an artistic streak in addition to being an art teacher – but her field is textiles design, which is much more practical than fine art. Asked for her favourite film, she replies that “my go-to would normally be something quite inspiring. So I like Marvel. I love Marvel characters”.

Really? Superheroes? I thought she meant stuff like Love, Actually.

“Oh god, no! I love action.”

The prize changed her life, but it’s also transformed her into an icon. Everyone latches on to what she represents, often using it for their own agenda. A lengthy profile in The Guardian last March (by Decca Aitkenhead) used her partly as a stick with which to beat former education secretary Michael Gove (Andria Zafirakou has been praised by Theresa May – “but she is exactly the kind of teacher this government actively discourages,” scolded the sub-head). Our local teachers implicitly claim her as one of their own, even though her headlong passion has little in common with the cynical state sector; “Teaching does not stop when the lesson finishes… It does not stop at 3.30,” Andria tells her audience – which is true in Cyprus too, but only because that’s when most teachers embark on their lucrative private lessons! Theresa May, as already mentioned, praised her, and tried to make her the official face of a teacher recruitment drive – but that was one agenda she refused to be part of. Her reply to the government was no, “because you are not doing enough to support the arts in education,” she recalls, sparking loud applause.

That’s a whole other question, of course – and not an easy one. What exactly is the purpose of the arts in education? They’re not necessary, at least in a narrow professional sense. Few of her ex-students become artists, admits Andria, they become bankers and lawyers and doctors – “loads of doctors” – and sometimes even teachers themselves. But that’s the point, she adds fervently, that the arts empower disadvantaged kids in a rough, multicultural neighbourhood to pursue all these other professions. “They may not be artists – who cares! – but they will have the confidence, the resilience and the power to stand up and say: ‘I can do whatever I can do, because I’m just as good as everyone else’.”

Andria Zafirakou is all about empowerment. That, for her, is the purpose of being a teacher, raising self-esteem and creativity, striving to be inspirational. “There is not one person in this room who has not been inspired by a teacher,” she declares, and invites the audience to speak out loud – “on three, 1-2-3!” – the name of the teacher who made that difference, who essentially made them feel better about themselves. Is that really the most useful approach, though? Is it better to teach kids self-esteem and boundless confidence – or should we instead be teaching them realism and managing expectations, which is what they’ll be doing in life anyway? It sounds heretical, given the enduring appeal of the Inspirational Teacher – but why make kids feel like the world is their oyster, when it probably won’t be? Why set them up for a lifetime of disappointment?

She frowns, as my question sinks in. “That’s a really sad way of looking at the future,” replies Andria, “and I’d like to think we’re a bit more optimistic, and that we create opportunities for our children to be optimistic. Because if we say to them ‘Give up, don’t bother’ –”

Not ‘don’t bother’. Just let them know it’s going to be tough.

“But the thing is that their lives are tough! Their lives are tough now already… So what are we doing? We’re trying to give them hope. And d’you know what? I think that’s a good thing, giving them hope, because I have seen how, by supporting a child – by being there for them, getting them on the right track, by literally picking them up – they will achieve. And they have achieved.”

That’s the point, of course, the part we’ve neglected to mention – the troubled, deprived lives she sees on a daily basis, the stories she witnesses. Stories like the aforementioned Raf, who came to the school at 14 with selective mutism (i.e. refusing to talk), ADHD and autism. Stories like Jorika, who – it turned out – was being forced by her family into child marriage. Stories like the refugee from Serbia whose traumatic journey to the UK “gives me goosebumps every time I hear about it”. These, as she says, are “my children”, the children she fights for and tries to help by releasing their creativity – and it’s easy to call her naïve or belittle her idealism but, as she tells the audience at Pallas: “Our kids, if they haven’t got us, who do they have? Who do they have?”

One thing’s for sure: they don’t leave much time for anything else – though of course the hectic pace of the past 11 months, since winning the prize, has been excessive. “This is not sustainable, the way that I’m living now is not sustainable,” she admits. “I get that, I know that – and it will calm down, I’m hoping, after the magnitude of the Global Teacher Prize settles down and the next person takes over. But I think, for me, what heals me is being in my classroom and being at home with my family, watching movies, cooking, going out with my girlfriends… I like to keep people very close to me”. Her “support mechanisms” are strong, which is also how she’s able to immerse herself in the lives of unhappy children without sinking into depression. “You just do what you can to help,” explains Andria, “and then you go home and you give your kids a massive hug. Or your husband a massive hug. And just say ‘How lucky are we’, you know? ‘How lucky am I’…”

Andria Zafirakou doesn’t come across as especially analytical; like the Marvel superheroes she adores, she’s a person of action. Teaching, in the end, comes from love, not analysis – a love that bursts out of this livewire, big-hearted woman; the ‘best teacher in the world’ tag may be something of a gimmick, but it seems to fit. “My personality is that I’m kind, I like to help others, and I’m a problem solver,” she tells me, still waiting anxiously for the dark clouds to part. “And I love life. And I love people. And I’m hoping that, if there was a job description for being a teacher – the best teacher – that’s what it would be”. She has a point.

Primed for a life as a suit and tie man, Yiorgos Bellapaisiotis has worked with Alexander McQueen and seen his art presented at MoMa. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man who dived into the unknown to follow his passion to create

The house is “pure 60s” as Yiorgos Bellapaisiotis puts it, a zig-zaggy concrete pancake set back a little from the road, with a paved garden area in front. It’s wedged between a pub and a car wash, on a rather forgotten main road in the deeply unglamorous area of Kaimakli, near the Green Line. Anyone driving by, on this grey and sleepy Saturday afternoon, would be hard-pressed to guess that the occupant of this house wrote the theme for Piers Morgan’s show on CNN, or created work for seminal fashion designer Alexander McQueen, or had two of his “metallic sculptural designs” presented at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, or once walked a red carpet wedged between, not a pub and a car wash, but Claudia Schiffer and Donatella Versace.

Admittedly Yiorgos isn’t a permanent resident, having lived in New York since 1995. This is his parents’ home, the house where he grew up – the study, where we sit for the interview, features old childhood photos of himself, his twin brother and older sister; at one point his mum appears with homemade pies, and a tumbler of fresh grape juice – nor does he even usually stay here on his once-a-year visits to the island. In the past, “I would come for two-three weeks during the summer, and I would be a tourist” in Ayia Napa or Pyrgos, he tells me; “It’s the first time that I will spend two and a half months here”. The reason for this year’s extended stay is an exhibition of his paintings – his first-ever solo exhibition – titled ‘Beyond Gender & Sexual Orientation: Travels from New York to Nicosia’, opening next Wednesday, March 6, at the Baker Tilly offices in Nicosia.

A few obvious questions come to mind. Why would a successful artist living abroad choose to present his art for the first time in Nicosia, as opposed to New York or Athens? And why in a conference room at a corporate headquarters, as opposed to an art gallery? But exposure, says Yiorgos – a companionable man with a trim beard, greying sideburns, black-rimmed glasses, and a passing resemblance to the actor F Murray Abraham – isn’t as important as the sentimental value of exhibiting in Cyprus, “with the people that basically shaped the first part of me”. He’s now 47 so he’s spent exactly half his life here, the other half abroad, making the exhibition a form of closure. As for the venue, even though the CEO of Baker Tilly, Marios Klitou, is a personal friend who was instrumental in extending the invitation, there’s also another nice symmetry – and a form of closure – in being hosted by a firm of accountants and consultants, given how close Yiorgos once came to joining their number.

His life is fascinating, and completely atypical. What usually happens, if you’re a fine artist or composer or fashion designer – he is, or has been, all three – is that you become hooked at an early age and, if the family don’t support your ambitions, you strike out on your own, or at least develop your art while working a day-job. Yiorgos, on the other hand, spent his first 23 years being almost entirely oblivious of his talent – even though he spent the next 23 becoming the first Cypriot to enter the super-prestigious Parsons School of Design, then beating out hundreds of established names to become McQueen’s assistant designer in New York, then making a sideways move into music and composing for Lara Fabian (a pop diva who’s sold over 20 million records worldwide), and so on and so forth.

Yiorgos aged 4 with a notebook

Can we really say he was ‘oblivious’? Maybe not; he shows me a photo of himself as a four-year-old, already toting a sketch pad. “I was drawing from the age of four, I did my first oil painting when I was 11… But they never said to me ‘You’re talented’, they thought ‘OK, that’s [his] hobby’.” He was secretly Manhattan, but the family were pure Kaimakli. His dad was an accountant for the government, which is also what his sister does now (his brother is a clerk at the Law Courts). The plan was for Yiorgos to be an accountant too – “a suit-and-tie man,” as he puts it – bolstered by the fact that the boy was (a) good in school, and (b) unusually amenable. “I never complained,” he recalls. Throughout his mid-teens – every day, for about four years – he’d go to Greek school in the morning then do another six hours of English school, preparing him for ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels. “I’d finish from Pallouriotissa high school. My mum would wait for me outside, with a sandwich, at two o’clock, she would drive me to GC School of Careers, and then I would finish at 8.30!… So, at some point, I thought this was normal.”

It’s incredible that he never rebelled – then again he was never encouraged to think of himself as an artist, whether at home or at school, Besides, it’s easy to forget how isolated one could feel, growing up in Cyprus in the 80s. Yiorgos’ sole rebellion came in following fashion trends he saw on Top of the Pops, or in teen magazine Smash Hits; he recalls going to a birthday party in burgundy velvet pants – as worn by the lead singer of Depeche Mode – and white shoes (“They almost threw me out!”), and generally being bullied at school for his weird appearance. “So that was my escape, Smash Hits and Top of the Pops – with Steve Wright, do you remember Steve Wright? He’s now a BBC Radio 2 DJ. And listen, how funny: I used to watch Steve Wright – and now, 20 years later, I compose music for Steve Wright at the BBC.”

That’s a recurring motif in our conversation. Listening to Lara Fabian as the plane took off for New York – “the voice that made me compose myself” on the most emotional day of his life – then writing a song for her 10 years later, actually a duet with Turkish artist Mustafa Ceceli (‘Make Me Yours Tonight’) that spent 27 weeks at the top of the Turkish pop charts. Worshipping Alexander McQueen from afar – then meeting him face-to-face in the final stage of a gruelling selection process, McQueen interviewing the final five applicants himself (from a starting pool of about 1,000), to choose only two. Yiorgos was fresh out of college, and had never worked as a fashion designer in his life, but refused to be intimidated. “At the end of the interview he goes to me: ‘What’s your name? – he knew, but he goes to me: ‘Greek yoghurt, right?’ Because he couldn’t say ‘Yiorgos’. I said: ‘Yes, Greek yoghurt’. And he said: ‘Well, Greek yoghurt, you did something’. So I knew I was going to get the job.”

How to explain the bifurcated life of Yiorgos Bellapaisiotis, a life of two halves? The second half emerged in stages: at 19, he decided he could never be a “suit-and-tie man” – but instead joined Cyprus Airways, and spent nearly five years as a flight attendant (making around three times a banker’s salary, in those halcyon days). Only after a chance meeting with someone who “believed in my talent” – filmmaker Haris Mavromichalis, who told him he was wasting his time in Cyprus – did he finally apply to Parsons, spending a year amassing the work required in support of the application (even then, he says, the first year was a nightmare, surrounded by people who’d been honing their art since childhood). What if they’d rejected him? Would he have tried for a less prestigious school – or just continued on his well-paid, un-creative path here in Cyprus?

Yiorgos is a fluent, expansive talker – but here for the first time he pauses, sighing and clicking his tongue. “I wouldn’t know, Theo,” he replies at last, “because I always deal with things when they are in front of me. It’s the same thing I do with my paintings – I don’t plan, I don’t sketch. I know my concept, I just start and then I let my mood, my feeling, even my subject guide me… So I just dive in, into the unknown, and I create.”

Here, perhaps, is the missing piece of the puzzle – this organic, intuitive link he has to his creativity, whether as painter, composer or fashion designer. It’s the method of a person who creates not as a career, not as a structured process, but more as an extension (almost, you might say, a celebration) of himself – and another clue is surely contained in the title of his exhibition, because there’s a very important fact we haven’t yet mentioned about Yiorgos. It wasn’t just his talent of which he was unaware (or in denial?) for the first 20 years of his life. It was also his sexual orientation.

He had girlfriends in his teens, and hung out with a group where most of the boys had girlfriends; “Even when I was in the army, I had no idea that I was gay” – but in fact he is gay, which must’ve been another cross to bear in the Kaimakli section of his life. His sexuality was eventually accepted, he says – and makes it sound quite straightforward, then again he also gives me a tour of the paintings in the upcoming exhibition, including a couple he’s made during the past few weeks in Cyprus, and it’s clear that his creativity works differently here. The recent work seems (from the outside, at least) more tormented, almost grotesque; if the New York paintings sometimes recall the Klimt of ‘The Kiss’, the Nicosia ones, with their emphasis on bodies, are closer to the Goya of ‘Saturn’. I suspect there’s a few bad memories sparked by this extended sojourn in the old house, gnawing away at his subconscious. He came out to his parents just a few days before leaving, he recalls, but it was only when he’d already been in NYC for a couple of years that they finally accepted “that Yiorgo is not the typical guy from Kaimakli who’s going to get married and have children and go to church every Sunday… and live his life for others. They realised that Yiorgo is going to live his own life, for himself.”

Here’s my Unified Theory of Yiorgos, admittedly based on no more than a couple of hours’ acquaintance: once he admitted – to himself, and others – who he really was, artistically and sexually, his creative juices started flowing, in the organic way that he describes, and haven’t stopped since. “The moment I felt the acceptance of who I am as a person,” he affirms, “this is where I felt stronger, I felt more free, I felt that I am untouchable – and I felt that I can be honest, I have nothing to hide”. When he follows his muse, plunging into whatever field takes his fancy, he does so with the unselfconscious joy of a man communing with his true self after years in the wilderness. He doesn’t really care what he creates; even 23 years ago, when he set his mind on becoming an artist, “I was thinking ‘Shall I become an architect, shall I become a jewellery designer? Shall I become a fashion designer?’. I [just] knew that I wanted to create.”

So here we are 23 years later, following a decade in fashion among the glitterati – his stories include fielding a phone call from Elizabeth Taylor while working for Koos Van Den Akker, shamefacedly lying to La Liz that grumpy Koos wasn’t in the office and could he please take a message – then a second career in music, helped by the fact that his partner of 18 years, Anthony James, is a musician (it was Anthony who translated self-taught Yiorgos’ melodies into actual scores that musicians could play), and meanwhile also painting all the time, knocking out a few pieces each year and giving them as gifts. This week’s exhibition is going to be “a journey”: he’s composed a special soundtrack to accompany the work, and his materials also include spices like curry and cloves (as well as acrylic, pastels and gold leaf) so “the paintings have a smell”. It’ll be a case of synaesthesia. More importantly, it’ll be a case of a life coming full-circle.

If you had to associate one word with Yiorgos, that word might be ‘freedom’ – the freedom to create in a natural, unstructured way, the freedom to be who he is and say what he wants. His openness gets him in trouble sometimes: he’s the ‘crazy guy’ who’ll jump in when he sees, say, a clerk being rude to a customer – “I catch fire when I see unfairness!” – and will also tell you to your face if he thinks your jokes are offensive. It’s a wonder he managed to repress himself for so many years – though in fact his lifestyle in Manhattan sounds positively bourgeois: “Wake up in the morning, go to the gym, do cardio. Go back home, work 10 hours, then back to the gym again, lift weights, come back, cook dinner. I cook fine dining for Anthony every single night, unless we go out”. Things have calmed down since his red-carpet days, though he’ll still get invited to some glitzy event two or three times a month. Otherwise he paints, composes, takes care of “the children” (five kittens, one of them slightly asthmatic) – and perhaps he also thinks back, now and then, to the old house in Kaimakli, and shakes his head wryly at how far he’s come.

How famous can somebody involved in outsider art be? THEO PANAYIDES meets a Japanese maker of films that touch the soul, and emotional practitioner of a local dance form

How famous is Masaki Iwana? There is, I suppose, a presumption that when a venerable Japanese film director comes all the way to our little island with one of his films – even if it’s showing in the Images & Views of Alternative Cinema festival, specialising in the strange and experimental – he must be quite famous. Yet in fact Masaki is much better-known as a butoh dancer (more on this later) than a filmmaker – and even there, his performances tend to get just a few thousand views on YouTube, that ruthless arbiter of our digital age. As for his films – well, they’re “a bit special”, as he puts it. The new one, Charlotte-Susabi, has been well-received by Japanese critics, but has only played commercially (not counting one-off screenings like the one in Nicosia) for two weeks apiece in Osaka and Tokyo; it’s fair to say we’re not talking Avengers numbers. “I have fabricated four long films,” he tells me simply, borrowing the French ‘fabriquer’, “all independent”.

Fair enough; but listen to this. I trawled social-media site Letterboxd, looking for reactions to Masaki’s work, and came across a user called Justine (letterboxd.com/justineluna/) who watched his Vermilion Souls, from 2007. I know nothing of Justine, but she – if they are indeed a ‘she’ – doesn’t seem to be a professional critic. Her profile photo (which may not be her actual photo) shows a teen or 20-something girl with rainbow-flag sleeves and pink hair; she describes herself as a filmmaker making “queer punk-rock films for the kids that got picked last in recess”. She watches a lot of movies (she’s watched 90 already this year, and it’s barely March). Here’s part of what she says about Masaki’s film:

“This might be one of the greatest films ever made, and almost no-one will ever know because of how obscure it is. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t just see something truly transcendent in its pursuit of artistic perfection. Vermilion Souls is a film that begs to be seen, and experienced for all its deep and rich command of both the visual and emotional layers of the language of film…

“Even [with] me praising this film, and getting others to see it, it’s not an easy film to consume. It’s sexually explicit, brutally violent, depressing, bleak, surreal, and sad, but it is the work of someone with a vision of the world, and of the human condition, deeply in tune with every single feeling one can experience. I’ve never seen a film like this.”

The moral of the story? Being ‘famous’ is a relative term, and the world is full of surprising connections. The slightly-built, ponytailed Japanese gentleman sitting next to me in the Weaving Mill in Nicosia forged a deep connection with this pink-haired young woman somewhere on the internet – surely much deeper than the average blockbuster has with the millions of viewers who munch their popcorn and cheer at the end – even though she (unlike me) has presumably never met him in person, and he (unlike me) is presumably unaware of her existence. Indeed, part of me wishes I’d checked out Letterboxd before our meeting, so I could’ve told him about Justine; it might’ve cheered him up a bit. The abiding impression of Masaki – filtered through his charmingly fractured English, with the ‘l’s often coming out as ‘r’s and vice versa – is of a rail-thin, soft-spoken, self-effacing figure, humble almost to a fault, who tends to greet any personal question with a dry, startled chuckle, as if surprised that anyone would find his inner life interesting enough to ask about it.

“Are you a happy person?” I ask at one point. “Are you an optimist?”

The chuckle, rising briefly to a sheepish laugh: “Optimistic? No, no, no, no! Pessimistic.”

In what way?

“I have not so much confidence in myself. If I had had very strong confidence in myself, probably my appearance” – he actually looks quite natty, in a brick-red shirt set off by a light-brown muffler – “and my life would be changed, very much. I am very modest person. Always I am hesitating.”

Really?

“I think so,” he replies, and laughs at how hesitant he’s being even to call himself hesitant.

But you make all those films, I point out – and not within the system but self-financed, independent. You’ve been performing as a butoh dancer since 1975. You do so much!

“Yes,” he agrees. “Externally. Externally, yes – but actually I am struggling, always.” Masaki gives it a beat: “But everybody is the same, I think.”

Is he beset by doubt all the time?

“Not doubt,” he shrugs, “but I am – sometimes I feel disappointment. For my ability.”

Justine, for one, might be shocked by that admission – yet it’s also true that Vermilion Souls, the first of Masaki’s four films, was made when he was already in his 60s (he turned 74 a few days ago). He appears to have been a late bloomer – though also, it seems, a strong finisher. “What were you like as a young man?” I ask, prompting another sheepish chuckle.

“I always think that my – how to say, young days, were always 10 years delayed compared to other ordinary young men. For instance, when I was 20 years old, I was really a kid… I was very – sad, maybe.”

Why sad?

“Because I couldn’t find any direction in my life.”

His background was middle-class, the youngest of five kids born to the family of an office worker, a so-called ‘salaryman’. He trained at TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System) as a film director, but by the time he graduated, in 1967, the industry was already in decline and no-one was hiring. He spent seven years as a theatre actor – then turned to his own form of butoh, which sounds like a very traditional art but in fact is quite modern, having sprung up in the post-war ferment of the late 50s. Butoh is counter-cultural, with elements of taboo-breaking and anarchy. It’s like the Earth and the Sun, explains Masaki, picking up a glass of water from the table to represent the former: the part where the Sun hits is bright, but the underside is “dark and dusky. Butoh dance treated this dusky part”.

We talk a bit about technique – but dance isn’t easy to describe, you have to watch it. One of his clips on YouTube (a performance in Berlin in 2014) is especially striking: Masaki’s hair, released from its ponytail, falls halfway down his back, the androgynous aspect sealed by the fact that he’s wearing a woman’s black dress, billowing up to his loins as he writhes on the floor. He wears a mask, giving him the air of a celebrant at some pagan ceremony. His work employs slowness and stillness – though of course “standing still doesn’t mean immobility, the inside is moving” – bringing an intense laser-focus to every small shift of his body that seems alien to the slight, modest figure in front of me, then suddenly he sways like an angry drunk, clutches at the dress, storms out of the room and comes back again with a blood-curdling howl. It is, to put it mildly, emotional.

“Some – uh, how can I say, impulse, phenomena, should come out very precisely,” he tells me, trying to explain his process – which perhaps is a way of saying that his inner spirit, so racked by doubt in real life, roars into action when freed from its cage of uncertainty. Masaki points, again, to the glass and talks of “this border”, the border between the world outside and the precious water inside. That border, in dance, is his own body, his way of revealing the life within as transparently as the glass shows the water.

The body is his instrument, like a virtuoso’s violin – but a body, unlike a violin, is hard to control; it grows old, it starts failing. This fact cuts deeper for Masaki than it might for other dancers – simply because his lifelong habit of always being slightly ‘delayed’ has emerged in another way too: despite his advancing years, he’s the father of an eight-year-old son, his first child. “For a long time I was alone,” he sighs – but now he’s in a renovated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere (actually in rural Normandy, about seven miles from the village of Mortagne-au-Perche) with his much younger family. His wife is also Japanese (though raised in America), also a dancer and “a bit like my daughter”, he admits, in terms of their age difference. It must be hard, being a 70-something parent to such a young son. He laughs again, and dodges the question.

He moved to France in 1995, first Paris, then Normandy. The “vertical hierarchy” of Japanese society was stifling to him: “I am independent, always”. Masaki is part of a Japanese generation which enjoyed the “belle epoque” of the 50s and 60s, before the country sank into recession – though also a generation where a man was expected to be strong, and patriarchal. He’s not like that, and struggles inwardly with the old ways, especially given his delayed foray into fatherhood – “Before, I thought I should be very strong against my son. But now I am very soft to my son” – yet it would be wrong to think that his 24 years in France have made him European. “For other persons I don’t know – but I am, from the beginning till the end, I am Japanese,” he tells me earnestly. “I don’t like to speak French. English also, for our generation, very difficult,” he adds with a note of apology.

Maybe that explains a slight remoteness, the fact that we’re operating outside his true culture; he’s reading a Japanese novel when I arrive at the Weaving Mill and looks a bit awkward when I ask about it, as if I’d caught him in a private moment. But there’s also, I suspect, the simple fact that the Masaki Iwana I talk to – the diffident gentleman telling of a lifetime of doubt and uncertainty – is indeed remote from the Masaki who utters that blood-curdling shriek in the dance piece on YouTube, or the Masaki whose films have even pink-haired, punky admirer Justine warning potential viewers about the sex and violence.

When he creates he’s uncompromising, partly because he’s an outsider and doesn’t have to care what other people think. Right now, however, sitting in a foreign country and waiting for his workshop to begin (he’s giving a workshop on ‘Movement for Performance’, in collaboration with the Rooftop Theatre Group), he’s a different kind of outsider, an ageing Japanese gentleman looking back on his life – and perhaps also wondering the same thing I’m wondering: Just how famous is Masaki Iwana?

Hard to say exactly – but his professional life, at 74, seems to be thriving. He still dances a few times a year, training for an hour every day to regain the slight edge he’s losing with age – his next gig is a big music festival in Tokyo this summer – and his long-delayed film career is busier than ever: he’s now polishing a new script, just a year after Charlotte-Susabi, with the main shoot to come in summer 2020 (most of it will be shot at his house in Normandy, to save costs). Maybe that film, too, will end up connecting unprompted with some random Justine in another part of the world, in the magical way of outsider art.

And what of growing older? What of the ageing, failing body, the fading lustre of the dancer’s talisman? Masaki isn’t religious (few Japanese are) – but does he at least believe in life after death?

“No, nothing,” he replies. “For me, nothing.”

Does that make him sad?

“No. I…” He pauses, trying to find the right words: “Till the end of my life, I try to live. That’s all,” he replies simply – and, foregoing his usual chuckle, gets up to embark on the workshop.

From the moment he got chills down his spine singing a Scorpions song at school the current lead singer of Minus One knew it was his calling. NADIA SAWYER meets a man determined to make an impact beyond the shores of the island

If you Google the best male rock singers of all time, the top 20 are almost always of English and American descent, with one notable exception – Freddie Mercury. Born in Zanzibar to parents hailing from India, Farrokh Bulsara (his real name) was the lead singer of Queen and the biographical subject matter of last year’s award winning film Bohemian Rhapsody. Who would have thought that an unusual looking Persian chap with supernumerary teeth would become the greatest frontman the world has ever seen?

It is therefore not unreasonable for a Cypriot man, with an equally distinctive look and impressive vocal range, to dream of following in his rock idol’s footsteps. Bald of head, dark of brow, Andreas Kapatais also sports a ‘soul patch’ under his lower lip. This small tuft of facial hair is sometimes called a ‘jazz dot’ (a comfort mechanism favoured by brass instrument players) and, as we shake hands, I am very tempted to point it out and ask him whether he is aware of its musical significance but decide that it’s probably too personal for a first question.

While we sip on cups of tea, Andreas takes me back to the 1990s to identify what sparked his desire to become a singer. “I grew up listening to songs by George Dalaras, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson,” he recalls – an eclectic mix. “Then, on my sixteenth birthday, I was given an acoustic guitar.”

Spurred on by a neighbourhood friend who was already playing the instrument, he started practising and singing along to the songs he was learning, which by then were heavily influenced by rock music. While most teenage boys have gravelly or squeaky voices as they make the transition from boy to man, it was obvious to those around him that Andreas could do something a bit special with his. “People were saying: ‘how can you sing so high, how can you do that?’” he recalls. Did he inherit his vocal gift from his parents? “My Dad has a bit of a range in his voice, but he doesn’t know it. When I sang at home, he would make fun of me in a nice way but he was able to reach the notes that I could”.

Encouraged by his family, who started recording him on an old tape recorder, he found the confidence to sing in a school band, with one live performance being the catalyst to his future calling. The song, Wind of Change by German rock band Scorpions, is one of the best-selling singles of all time and is instantly recognisable by its opening whistle. “From the moment I hit the first note, everyone in the school stood up and started clapping and shouting. There were chills down my spine. It was a big feeling for me – I got a rush,” he admits.

On completing school and then his national service, Andreas enrolled at a college in Nicosia to study graphic design, but he soon dropped out. “I wanted to follow my dream of becoming a musician,” he explains. Together with his guitarist friend, and two others, a long-haired Andreas formed a band called Sulphur, playing heavy metal music. “At that time, I was experimenting,” he confirms when questioned about his choice of music genre.
But when his band mates took themselves off to Greece for studies, Andreas decided to follow suit and enrolled at the Philippos Nakas Conservatory in Athens to study music, with his main instrument being the voice. He followed this up with a two year stint at AKMI Metropolitan College where he graduated in sound engineering. To keep his vocal chords well-oiled during this period, he was singing at the Architectural Music Scene Greek music venue that, Andreas says, “is known for producing famous singers”.

Singing several nights a week, actually, several mornings a week – he started at 12pm at night and finished at 5am in the morning, took its toll on him. “I used to get tired just waiting to go on,” he recalls, as I wonder whether this stress and lack of sleep is the reason why he is follicly challenged at the relatively young age of 36. After a couple of years, he moved to another well-known live music venue, Cross of the South, and spent a further two years burning the midnight oil – a total of five years studying and singing in Greece. During this period, he maintained contact with his Sulphur band mates, playing gigs in Cyprus whenever the various members were all back on the island and garnering such local popularity that they were asked to support visiting international acts, including the gothic metal bands Anathema and Paradise Lost. But the band’s greatest claim to fame (with a revised name of Sulphur Generation and a newly released album) was opening for Whitesnake in 2009, which is the only time I can recall seeing Andreas sing in person.

“Did you get to meet David Coverdale?” I ask him, fangirling over the English rock singer. “No, we didn’t even see him, not even at the sound check,” says Andreas sadly, “he’s another one of my idols”.

Despite their local success, studying commitments of some of the band’s members meant that Andreas had to have a rethink about his musical future. Having decided to return to Cyprus, he set about forming a hybrid band, with two guitarists from Sulphur Generation and a bass player and drummer from another disbanding group, calling the new outfit Gnostoi Agnostoi (Known Unknowns). “We wanted to do something different… to play pop and rock. A lot of people came to the first gig. Then, by word of mouth, the crowds were getting bigger and bigger. They liked to come and dance. Usually, if you went to a live gig, you were sitting and drinking and talking to your friends”.

But success with the new band was short-lived. Unbeknown to him, Andreas’ mother and cousin had secretly entered him into The X Factor Greece and before he knew it he was back on a plane to Athens for the auditions, but failed to get through to the live shows. I can tell this is a bit of a sore subject as Andreas is an accomplished singer. His acoustic versions of Stairway to Heaven and Bed of Roses demonstrate his vocal range while his rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody is as good a cover as you will get of the song. Singing competitions have proven to be the death knell of many a true artist and I intimate that he had a lucky escape.

While back in Athens, Andreas had another think about his career. “It was in my mind that I still wanted to try and do something in Greece and I thought that if I left I might regret it,” he reflects. His old boss at the Architectural Music Scene welcomed him back to his much larger new venue and gave him the opportunity to sing alongside “a very talented guitarist”, Yiannis Papadopoulos, who is currently playing for Scott Stapp, the former lead singer of the American rock band Creed (remember the songs Arms Wide Open and My Sacrifice?).

Minus One Band

A further five years in Greece followed, during which time Andreas also formed another band, WhiteNoiz, playing main stream pop and rock music and releasing a couple of singles. He also worked with Goin’ Through, a famous Greek hip-hop band which culminated in a joint song, Καινούργια Ζωή (New Life), a really catchy number with a great video which I find myself replaying over and over again as I write this piece.

“We played at huge venues,” says Andreas, obviously proud of this particular collaboration and his achievements. “I was doing well, I was with two bands, I had a morning job too, I was ok”.

Meanwhile, back in Cyprus, Gnostoi Agnostoi (the band Andreas had left) had taken on a new lead singer and changed its name to Minus One, garnering international recognition when they reached the finals of Eurovision 2016 with their song Alter Ego, which was No 1 on iTunes in four countries.

Did Andreas feel that he had missed out on their success?

“No, although I would have liked to have represented Cyprus in Eurovision, I was happy for them,” he says honestly and philosophically.
But having found somebody to love, Andreas decided to return to Cyprus for good, bringing with him his Greek girlfriend and future wife. He soon formed another band, with the unusual name of Coindrop, and self-released a single called True Love, a track that sounds more electronic than rock. “Yes, actually it was all electronic, except the guitar and vocals,” he admits. “I produced it on my iPad”.

Despite its basic recording method, the track was Kiss FM’s song of the week. But Andreas and Coindrop did not stick to one genre of music, creating sets that included R&B, rock, pop and dance. “I always liked to experiment,” he says. “If you came to see Coindrop, you would have fun.”

So as a singer and performer his aim is to get the audience up and dancing. “That’s my main goal,” he confirms. “I have fun on stage and the crowd can see that”. But, I think it’s more than just fun. With his mesmerising appearance, some of Andreas’ performances remind me of a sorcerer casting a spell over his unsuspecting audience. Unfortunately, in 2017, Coindrop became a victim of its own inauspicious name when Andreas’ heard that Minus One’s lead singer was leaving and they were looking to replace him.

“We had a past together,” Andreas thought, “maybe we can have a future together?”

So he decided to reunite with his former band mates, accompanied by Coindrop’s bassist who replaced another band member leaving Minus One. Needing a new song to match the new line up, Minus One quickly wrote and released a track called The Other Side of Mind to ensure they had regular airplay on the radio before their first live performance together.

“When we played our first gig, people already knew the song,” he says, admitting that, although some of the old fans found it hard to accept the band’s new line up, they quickly gained new followers. Their second single was an unusual cover of an old 1960s classic You Don’t Own Me, featuring a 15-year old female singer from Limassol, Semeli, discovered by the band’s manager Giampiero Soncini. Last year was spent preparing their first album, now out, called Red Black White which was recorded at Medley Studios in Copenhagen and co-produced by Søren Andersen, a guitarist known for his live work with English rock bassist and vocalist Glenn Hughes, formally of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath.

And his personal hopes for the future?

“It would be a dream come true if I happened to be the rock singer from Cyprus who achieved worldwide fame,” declares a focused Andreas. “If you don’t have a dream, you’re nothing”. A bold statement maybe, but then Freddie Mercury once said “I won’t be a rock star, I’ll be a legend”, and he wasn’t wrong.
Currently, Minus One are playing gigs at home and planning concerts abroad. “In July, we might open for a very famous band, I’m sure you know them, but I can’t say anything now,” he concludes, keeping his cards firmly close to his chest. Whoever they are, I have no doubt that he will rock them with “one vision” and “a kind of magic!”

For gig information on Minus One go to https://minusoneband.com

THEO PANAYIDES meets a journalist who has had a varied and exciting career covering 16 wars – the first of them in Cyprus, while an injury sustained on the island put an end to his parallel drumming career – as well as LiveAid and Mandela. A restless soul, he is now writing a book about his life

I’m a bit concerned about Christopher Morris. He’s driving up from Paphos (where he’s staying for a week, on his first visit to Cyprus in 44 years) and it’s raining quite steadily, with more rain forecast. The roads can get slippery – and, after all, he’ll be 81 in a few days. Then I remember that he’s covered 16 wars in the course of a long career in broadcasting and journalism, and I’m not so worried. He can probably take care of himself.

That said, Cyprus looms large in his already-outsized life, being the war where he almost died – or perhaps we should say came closest to dying, since there have been other near-misses. He’s been in a plane that was almost shot down by anti-aircraft fire while coming in to land at Entebbe, Uganda (the pilot fortunately decided to abort the landing at the last minute), and was captured by trigger-happy soldiers in late-1970s Benin after his car ran a checkpoint. “We were all dragged out the car, guns to the head, all this sort of thing,” he recalls in his jolly way, grey eyes glinting with amusement in a round, slightly ruddy face. He and his TV crew finally managed to convince the officer in charge that they were guests of the Ghanaian government, but it was a risky ploy: “Apparently, two days earlier the Japanese had tried to do the same thing, in another part of the country, and they’d all been assassinated by the soldiers. The High Commissioner said, ‘You’re really lucky’.”

Still, Cyprus in 1974 was a bit special: his first war – though he already had a decade’s experience as a reporter – and a war he’d volunteered to cover for BBC Radio, wangling a seat on a charter plane that was coming to rescue stranded British tourists in the week between the coup and invasion. (It was one of the last-ever flights into Nicosia airport.) He covered everything, from a gun battle at the Ledra Palace to a solitary Englishwoman taking care of abandoned pets in a village where everyone else had fled. “That particular war had no control,” recalls Christopher. “In most modern wars now, if you’re with the Israelis or whoever, they’ll give you a guide to go up to various locations – but this one, no. It was the Wild West. So you could go anywhere, do anything”.

He has many stories from that time, but his life-changing story happened on August 8 – and it started right here, at the Cyprus Hilton in Nicosia where we’re sitting on this blustery morning. This was the place where foreign journos “used to assemble in the bar every night, and pick each other’s brains as to what was going on” – and a story emerged of British civilians who were stranded in Lapithos, near Kyrenia (the front line still fluctuated daily at that point), so a party of journalists decided to go check it out. Among them was Simon Dring of the BBC – and “Simon had a reputation for being a bit gung-ho”, so his car, also including a cameraman named Martin Fletcher and a sound recordist named Ted Stoddard, shot to the front of the convoy and drove off. There were four cars in all: AP photographer Paul Roque was in the second car, “on his own with a puppy they’d picked up” (the puppy is the kind of detail that marks this out as a true story), two Cypriot stringers for the New York Times were in the fourth. In between was Christopher with three other journalists, “Iain Walker of the Sun, Frank Thompson of the Daily Mail, and Gareth Parry of the Guardian”. He’s currently writing a book, he explains, which is why he recalls all the details so precisely.

The convoy went north, towards Lapithos; the road soon became “pretty spooky”. An armoured personnel carrier lay on its side, on fire, with two or three soldiers dead inside it (a list of all the horrible things Christopher has seen would fill a whole profile). Suddenly, Simon Dring in the first car realised he’d driven into an unmarked Turkish minefield. The mines were clearly visible, so-called ‘Bouncing Betty’ mines which threw up explosive in the air and spread out shrapnel over a 50-yard radius.

An injured Christopher in hospital in Akrotiri is visited by the High Commissioner

What happened next happened all at once, in about two minutes. Ted Stoddard, trying to warn the cars behind, gets out of the first car, recalls Christopher, “and immediately treads on a mine and kills himself – because the shrapnel went straight through his heart. But he didn’t just drop dead, he started running around saying ‘I’m dying, I’m dying, please remember my wife. Tell my wife I love her’, and all that”. Paul Roque, in the second car, got out to help, walking down the side of the road to avoid the mines – but instead activated a trip-wire mine, “so he disappears in a big explosion. He lost his right eye, and had eight fractures in his left arm”. Fletcher, the cameraman, did what cameramen reflexively do: he “detached himself from what was going on”, put the camera up to his eye, and filmed the whole thing. Meanwhile “I was sitting in the third car minding my own business, and a load of shrapnel came zooming in through the window of the car, caught me here” – he indicates his upper arm – “and I had a gusher [of blood] coming from my shoulder that was hitting the roof of the car. Must’ve hit an artery or something. So I thought ‘This is it’ – and everything started to go slow-motion… I lost all my strength, it just went”.

How did it feel?

“What was going through my head was ‘This is it’. You get flashbacks. You do get flashbacks”. Not regret per se, “it’s just a blur. It sort of goes through your head, then suddenly you get back to reality.”

The reality of 2019, of course, is that Christopher is sitting right in front of me, so he obviously survived the experience – but it took a year to get back to work (one of his first assignments was coming back to Cyprus for the one-year anniversary in 1975), three years of physiotherapy to get his left arm moving again, and a permanent disability in that arm. He shows me his hands, the left one noticeably shrunken and atrophied; “Keith Graves, one of the BBC reporters, used to call me ‘the one-armed bandit’!”. The one unequivocal casualty was his parallel career as “a very proficient, semi-professional drummer”; Christopher was actually a well-known jazz drummer in his 20s, with his own jazz club in his hometown of Luton. All that had to go after the accident – but his life as a journalist flourished, covering most of the big events of the 80s and 90s from Live Aid to Nelson Mandela, working as foreign correspondent, news presenter (for the BBC and, later on, Sky News, for which he was headhunted personally by Rupert Murdoch), and TV reporter. Not to mention those 15 further wars, after being nearly killed in his first one.

Why did he do it? Why would anyone do it? Seeing so much horror, taking all those risks. After all, he had a family. He got married in 1962 and has a daughter by that marriage, now middle-aged and “in design,” he says a little vaguely. (He’s now with his second wife Mary, who waits with infinite patience in the lobby of the Hilton.) “I mean, you often get on a plane, going to some war zone, and you think: ‘Oh God, what the hell am I doing this for?’,” admits Christopher, and laughs in his jocular manner.

One reason was certainly boredom; he seems to get bored rather easily. That was the attraction of journalism to begin with, “something different every day”. (He was quickly successful at the profession, becoming the youngest reporter on Fleet Street at the age of 21.) Later on, he got bored of being a newsreader and went “back on the road as a reporter, at my own request”; later still, he upped sticks at the age of 50 and moved to Australia, working for the Times and the Beeb. Christopher seems to have been born with a constant, low-level restlessness. (His dad may have been the same way, moving the family from Luton to Cumbria and then back to Luton.) Another reason was the lure of adventure, tying in with a certain machismo. He mentions a significant detail about that ill-fated trip to Lapithos: seeing the burning APC with the dead soldiers inside thoroughly spooked both himself and his colleagues, he admits – “but, being four men in a car together, none of us was going to say ‘Let’s go back’. So we carried on”.

That’s how it was, I suspect, a macho world where the wars a man had covered were like notches on his belt, or scalps he’d collected. Christopher’s Wikipedia page dutifully mentions his 16 wars; Simon Dring, the ‘gung-ho’ guy from the first car, has 22. Being a war-zone reporter meant something more in those pre-internet days. “Today, a lot of journalism is just conducted on a computer, whereas in my day – which is a different generation – you did have to go out and check it all out. And to get pictures, you had to physically be there.” (Most pictures from the current war in Syria are taken by locals.) This was a swashbuckling, pointedly reckless life, not least because being reckless – or lucky – was how you got the scoops in the days before digital omniscience: “All the best scoops are by accident”. Again and again, muses Christopher, he’d stumble onto big stories just by venturing out and being pushy, or fearless, and happening to be in the right place at the right time.

Take Sabra and Shatila, for instance, the Palestinian camps in Beirut where a Phalangist militia massacred hundreds of people with the connivance of Israeli troops in 1982; “Yeah, I was the first journalist on that”. He was actually showing John Simpson around, he tells me – it was Simpson’s first day in Beirut; Christopher was leaving that evening – when “we were met by about 200 women who were coming up the road, screaming and shouting and in tears”. The women told them of the attack, so they went down to Sabra and Shatila: “The camps had been flattened… and the road was covered in bits of bodies and all sorts of things. People that had been shot, or run over by tanks. Then we decided to get out, and of course” – he makes a whooshing sound – “a million flies take to the air, they’d been feasting on the bodies”. He didn’t find the story; it found him.

He and Simpson (now perhaps the best-known BBC reporter) filmed the carnage, but then “I did a stupid thing,” he says, allowing Simpson to write the story. The reason why this was a mistake is because “John didn’t know, at that stage, a great deal about the politics of Lebanon” – but I also suspect some professional rivalry, a suspicion later reinforced when Christopher gripes that his role in obtaining the scoop has been obscured. “I’m written out of that, I’m not even mentioned by Simpson in his book. Which I was quite annoyed about – so I’m going to put the record straight, in the one I’m doing”. He pauses thoughtfully. “But that’s the way it goes. I mean, I could be accused of the same thing. It’s a parade of egos, in a way, in television. There’s a lot of competition.”

Is ego what ultimately drives Christopher Morris? Hard to say, of course – but I don’t really think so. One of his most endearing early stories is of the time when, barely out of his teens, he convinced the Duke of Bedford to play the washboard in his skiffle band (this was at a debutante’s ball, which he knew the Duke would be attending), having first phoned the BBC and ITN to invite them to cover it; he was always, he says, “propaganda-minded”. One might say he’s a showman with an eye for the big gesture, a roving jazzman who enjoys the daily drama of a journalist’s life. Almost uniquely, he has none of the usual professional vices: “I’m an enigma – very boring, really. I don’t drink, and I don’t smoke. Never have”. Maybe it’s because most reporters need those things to unwind and forget what they’ve seen, whereas Christopher doesn’t need to forget it; he thrives on it.

Not everyone could do what he did. I ask if it feels emotional for him, coming back to Cyprus after all these years, but he pauses uncertainly: “I’ve never had – emotion,” he replies, “or get too excited about things”. He doesn’t get depressed (he’s not the type), nor does he try to pin down the flaw in human nature that produces all those wartime atrocities. There’s a slight coldness there, whether innate or deliberately cultivated to survive all the bad things he’s seen. You have to be slightly emotionless to almost lose your life in one war, then go on to cover 15 more.

Cyprus, in the end, isn’t that special: “It’s just another place that I came to, in a fairly exciting career,” shrugs Christopher with affable understatement. Still, there’s a postscript of sorts: he calls me a few days later to report that an officer of the Scots Guards kindly let him into the Ledra Palace – probably the one place in Cyprus that’s essentially unchanged since the invasion – and he did feel a surge of emotion at the sight of the old chandeliers, the patched-up damage from the shell that struck his old room, a copy of the hotel menu from the day of the invasion: 44 years and 16 wars, momentarily plucked out of time. “It’s a mad life, but it’s good fun,” he tells me earlier at the Hilton, speaking of those busy years – then I say goodbye, silently hoping he’ll be careful on the road back to Paphos.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a priest from Kenya, now in charge of a small flock near Pyrgos, who had a lifetime ambition to become a member of the clergy and wanted to live in a monastery to concentrate on God, both of which he has realised on the island

The Dependency of Kykkos Monastery in Nicosia is a tranquil, birdsong-enchanted place; the cop at the gate doesn’t look like he sees many visitors. This was once on the outskirts of town, and the scale of the place reflects that freedom to build (not that the Church ever needed much of an excuse to go big): a handsome quadrangle of arched, sandstone buildings, elegantly perched around a courtyard with a chapel in the middle. I pass a storeroom full of icons, neatly stacked on shelves running the whole length of the room. An old man in priestly robes walks unhurriedly towards a staircase in the distance, then laboriously starts climbing the stairs.

Despite its size, the Dependency is mostly offices, housing only a handful of people (five priests, three monks and two bishops), so it takes a while to find the room belonging to Father Panaretos; even as I knock, I’m not sure I’ve got the right door – but at least I’ll know straight away if I’ve made a mistake. He’s not the only Kenyan-born Orthodox priest in Cyprus (there’s apparently another one in Lakatamia), but he’s surely the only African in this quiet quadrangle. Even the cop at the gate referred to him – with the slightly hushed respect due a priest – as “o ksenos”, ‘the foreigner’.

The young man who answers my knock is pleasant and bespectacled, with close-cropped hair and a thin beard. He’s been in Cyprus for 10 years, the first two at Machairas Monastery where he was ordained on May 1, 2010 – the feast day of St Panaretos, hence the ecclesiastical name chosen by the bishop who ordained him. He was actually born Samuel Kimani in Nairobi 34 years ago, and graduated from the Makarios III Seminary there. Is it quite unusual, for a Kenyan to become Greek Orthodox? “It is very usual,” he replies, surprised by my question. “In Kenya now, there is about one million Orthodox Christians.” It all stems from the friendship between Archbishop Makarios and Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta, which in turn stemmed from the two countries’ parallel wars of independence in the mid-50s. The Mau Mau – Kenya’s version of Eoka – rejected the Protestant churches which supported the colonial government, looked around for a more acceptable alternative, and here we are.

‘Here’, in this case, is a rather spartan room, its bareness accentuated by the fact that the windows are closed, shutting out the daylight which might’ve softened it. There’s a desk, a small chandelier, stuffed armchairs in a green-yellow chequered pattern, an unseen bedroom and bathroom down a short corridor. This is where Father Panaretos (we’ll call him that, rather than ‘Samuel’) spends his time – though, crucially, not all his time. Every weekend he performs church services at Mosfileri, also known as Mosfili, a tiny village near Kato Pyrgos with around 20 permanent residents – and almost every weekday he goes to university, the European University just down the road, where he’s doing a Master’s in Business, currently writing a dissertation on the wellbeing of employees in the Church of Cyprus. It’s his second Master’s degree; the first was in Theology (from the University of Nicosia), which in turn was preceded by a Bachelor’s in Psychology. “I like to explore things,” he replies when I ask about his studies, then thinks about it: “It’s not just that. You learn when you study. Education helps you to think… Actually, I want to do many things – because it’s interesting how things connect to each other”.

He’s not just another priest. That’s the temptation, given his particular circumstances – to think of him as ‘the priest from Kenya’, defined by his birthplace – but in fact he’s an unusual person in his own right. “I don’t like to settle for average,” he tells me, his strong accent sometimes swallowing the words so he has to repeat himself. His ambition is to someday become a professor at a university, and possibly also a clinical psychologist. All without quitting the priesthood, of course.

Panaretos has a touch of those long-ago priests who joined the Church because they were intellectuals looking to study, back when the clergy were the fount of all knowledge. One could say he’s more monk than priest – and indeed that’s why he came to Cyprus in the first place, “because in Kenya there is no monastery”. Why did he want to join a monastery? “I admired the life of the monks. I just wanted to be there, concentrate on God.” It’s not that he wanted to escape his early life – he had a very happy childhood – but the family were poor, and “struggling all the time”; his dad works in a butcher’s shop, his mum runs a farm just outside Nairobi, raising pigs and chickens. He’s the fourth of seven children, and the first one to go to university (though his younger sister is now preparing to follow in his footsteps). His parents – especially his father’s side – weren’t too religious, yet young Samuel didn’t take long to find his vocation: “Since I was in primary school, I wanted to become a priest.” One gets a sense of a youngster who, much as he loved his family, always knew he was made for other things – and he also makes it clear that his ambitions don’t include ever starting his own family. “I chose to stay alone,” he says simply. “This is why I became a monk.”

There’s a slight contradiction in Father Panaretos. On the one hand, he studied psychology, the science of understanding people; his personal style is humble, serene, approachable, very friendly. On the other hand, he keeps a certain distance. His hobbies are mostly solitary, reading non-fiction (currently Life Without Limits by Nick Vujicic, the bestselling memoir of a man who was born without limbs) and being in Nature. “I like somewhere quiet,” he tells me, “this is why I loved the monasteries. I like socialising with people but I’m very, very careful. Because people are a bit selfish sometimes, they’ll take advantage of you.” His credo, he says, is “Be friends, but with boundaries… You cannot have people just taking and taking. They’ll take, and then they leave you empty.”

But priests have to be there for people. It’s their job.

Yes, he agrees, “you have to show people love – but don’t give them your heart. If you give them your heart, they’ll take it and tear it away, they don’t care!”

His tone, I should note, is light-hearted – yet his dilemma seems genuine, the dilemma of a studious, cerebral man in a noisy profession. “As the Bible says, in the Book of John: ‘Whoever does not love, does not know God’,” he quotes. “‘Because God is love’.” Yet how much love can a person give? Did he realise what it meant to be a priest, I wonder, back in primary school? “I thought just, you know, preaching to people, being nice to people,” he shrugs. Yet in fact there are so many challenges, above all the fact that “no matter what happens, you have to keep on giving to people. You must have something [inside] to keep on giving, giving, giving… People see a priest as next to God, and [think that he] doesn’t have feelings of emptiness, or feeling down. And it’s not all the case. Sometimes you feel down, sometimes you feel” – he hesitates – “temptation here and there”.

Does praying help?

“Of course. The prayer is the only thing that makes you keep on going, and going, and going.”

It may sound like Father Panaretos is a bit of a wobbly priest – yet in fact it’s the opposite; his honesty about the struggles the job entails only makes his faith seem more real. With Easter just around the corner it’s easy to wonder what it all means, this religion lark – and his statement of belief, I admit, quite moved me, delivered with amiable serenity and the flat intonations of the African accent:

“People, they work so much. Getting money. You know, buying things. And trying to find happiness from material things, from vacations and all this. And then, after, they are sad. Because all of these, they do not bring any happiness. It has to begin from you, from inside, it has to come from inside. People, they form relationships, and they get into marriages. They think they are going to be, you know, filled up. They’ll be happy. Then they find” – his voice rises, as if in wonderment – “that they’re still sad. And that is why they keep on divorcing, breaking up, all these kind of things. Because they have not found themselves. And no-one can find themselves from other people. You need to concentrate on yourself.”

Do you need God in order to do that, though?

“A man cannot live without God,” he replies. “That is true. Even if you don’t want God in your life, God is there indirectly.”

How would he define God? As a kind of energy in the universe?

Father Panaretos laughs, whether at my neo-hippy phrasing or with delight at the prospect of an intellectual conversation. “I’ll not define Him as an energy in the universe. I will define Him as ‘everything’. You breathe, God is there.”

This is where we leave the atheists behind, of course – though he’s quick to note that he loves science too, “because it helps us to understand the world”, seeing no apparent contradiction with his own worldview. The Orthodox church in Kenya may be more relaxed in general, or at least more accessible – indeed, says Panaretos, “I was shocked when I came to Cyprus to see that most of the people in the church are old people”. Things are different in Nairobi, where churches have programmes and activities aimed at the young and organise special Youth Days just for them. The service there is in modern Swahili, not incomprehensible ancient Greek like it is here, and Byzantine chants alternate with African music so the whole congregation is singing, at least in some parts; no wonder the church is thriving. “Our African culture is different, you know,” he points out. “We like singing, we like dancing, we like to be happy. We like getting involved.”

That’s a whole other question, of course: how has this transplanted African found life in Cyprus? It took some getting used to, he admits. Kenya is “more social than here”, presumably a nice way of saying that we’re more uptight; strangers greet you in the street in Nairobi, kids play outside – as he and his siblings once did – without waiting for their parents to organise play dates. Initially he found it slightly boring on our little island – but then “I said to myself: ‘If you want to survive in Cyprus, if you want to enjoy life in Cyprus, start liking whatever is there’.” (He’s now developed a taste for local music, citing Giorgos Kalogirou as a favourite.) On the plus side, he’s never encountered any racism – even when people don’t know he’s a priest, which they often don’t. “People get confused,” he says wryly; at least some of his fellow students – and a few professors – have assumed that his black cassock must be some kind of traditional African costume.

It does seem odd, an Orthodox priest from Kenya. Hands up if you even knew that Makarios built a seminary there, let alone that our Church now funds it, let alone that one of its graduates is the priest in Mosfili, of all places – a village so small it didn’t even have a priest for many years (the village church was infested with mice when he first went there, says Father Panaretos). He recalls going to Pyrgos for the first time, on a Palm Sunday with the vicar-general of the monastery, and “all the villagers, when they saw me, they were asking Father Agathonikos: ‘How did you get him?’. They were shocked!” – and this was in Pyrgos, not the much smaller village whose local priest he was going to be.

It was all quite unusual – yet it’s worked out, and beautifully. “Everybody knows me there,” he says of his tiny congregation. “I’m like a fly in the milk!” adds Panaretos, translating a Greek phrase he may have heard in the village (making playful reference to his skin colour, but whatever). The village church will be packed over Easter – but usually it’s just his two dozen regulars, forever inviting him to dinner and welcoming him when he arrives every Friday or Saturday (depending on his studies). “Most of them, they are old,” he muses, “and when I arrived last Friday for hairetismous, they were all waiting there – then they came over and were standing around me: ‘Oh! Papa, papa…’”

He laughs delightedly, this rather shy, scholarly man who doesn’t always have the energy for people. “They put joy in my heart,” says Samuel Kimani, aka Father Panaretos – speaking of that same heart which he earlier warned against giving to others, lest they tear it away. I walk back to my car, strangely elated at the thought of the joyful bond between the elderly inhabitants of a small Cypriot village and a mild-mannered Kenyan young enough to be their son, walking in the shadow of grand sandstone buildings with my ears full of birdsong.

In a cardiologist who splits his time between London and Cyprus, THEO PANAYIDES finds a man who is impressive, intense and articulate. And who sees a lot of patients

Professor Dinos (Constantinos) Missouris has a touch of the royal ‘we’. It’s not overly apparent when he talks – I only notice when I play the tape back in order to transcribe it – but it’s definitely there, weaving in and out of his conversation. “The system does not welcome us, as well as it could’ve done – even though we love this island 100 per cent, we would die for it,” he says, speaking in the plural but actually speaking of himself. “They don’t approach us in a nice way… Even now, we find colleagues behave to us in a much more elegant and sensitive way in the UK than they do here.”

What does it mean, this no-doubt-unconscious affectation? Some might say it points to arrogance and vanity, but I’m not so sure. It’s true that Dinos has no false modesty about his many accomplishments – but I don’t think the way he talks is a sign of being big-headed, if only because he seems so aware of that danger. “In medicine, there is a problem,” he tells me bluntly, speaking extremely fast as he does throughout our hour together: “There is a confusion between arrogance and brilliance. And this is the thing that essentially needs to change. We are all doctors, we all make mistakes. We have to admit our mistakes”. If anything, his royal ‘we’ may be a sign of the opposite – the fact that he’s so empathetic (it’s perhaps his greatest gift in treating patients) that he unconsciously tries to foster a sense of unity and togetherness, even when it’s really just himself he’s talking about.

He is indeed a doctor, and a high-flying one – senior cardiologist at Frimley Health NHS Trust in Berkshire (its catchment area includes affluent places like Ascot and Windsor) with his own private practice in Harley Street and additionally, for the past two years, a visiting professor at the University of Cyprus medical school. His background includes five years as senior registrar at St. George’s Hospital in Tooting, an establishment so eminent that one of its consultants was the Queen’s own cardiologist (Dinos is now a consultant himself, meaning a specialist with many years’ training), plus three years doing cardiovascular research with Professor Graham MacGregor, a world expert on hypertension. Dinos isn’t shy about acknowledging the world-class people he’s worked with – and, for instance, recalls being helped along in his career by “a very famous professor called Brian Robinson, I was his prodigy student”.

To that rich CV we can now add Medoclinic in Nicosia: “I am opening my own practice as we speak,” he confirms – though in fact this is something of a transitional period, even without the additional wrinkle of Gesy, our national health system (which he plans to support as much as possible), due to launch in a couple of months. It’s not clear if his plan was ever to leave the UK altogether – he does a lot of research, which is easier in Britain – but, in any event, he still has a foot in both camps. “My heart beats for Cyprus. 100 per cent,” affirms Dinos earnestly. “But I always knew that there are problems.”

Right now he’s in Cyprus five days a week, with two days in Berkshire. He’ll teach Monday through Wednesday – he plans to transition more into academia as he grows older – then catch the flight to England, working flat-out Thursday and Friday; “I finish at about eight, and run to the airport”. Meanwhile his wife and daughter live here full-time, the family having relocated four years ago. “I’ve got quite a unique family,” he tells me proudly: “I’ve got a very intelligent wife – a child psychiatrist, the most talented physician on the island – and a talented young daughter”. His daughter, almost 17, is a cellist and pianist who wants to be a musician. “She was at the Royal Academy of Music, that sort of level”, so bringing her to Cyprus may potentially have been a mistake – “but I believe in destiny,” says Dinos, “and I think it’s going to work for her. My gut feeling says that it’s going to work for her”.

St George’s Hospital, Tooring

The adjectives he naturally uses to extol his family are perhaps significant: not ‘a beautiful wife and the sweetest young daughter’ (which presumably would also be true), but ‘intelligent’ and ‘talented’. There’s no doubt he’s impressive to talk to, intense and articulate, and there’s no doubt he values brains and achievement. He talks very fast, as already mentioned, sitting in a coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon, a balding 58-year-old with a somewhat mournful expression; he questions the barista on the tea selection, asking specifically for Cypriot teas – then, having sniffed the various options, orders a cappuccino with no further comment. My first impression is that he doesn’t suffer fools gladly – yet I also suspect that he doesn’t blow up at those who disappoint him, just accepts the slight and channels it into further achievement. You strike me as a person who doesn’t get depressed very easily, I venture at one point – but Dinos just chuckles: “No, no, I get depressed easily. My other half thinks I’m hopeless when it comes to emotions!”. He shrugs bravely: “But we have to be strong, to survive the suffering of the patients.”

To be honest, I don’t get very much on him as a person; maybe there isn’t very much, once you take medicine out of the equation. He likes to read, though not fiction – mostly “relevant”, i.e. medical books – and doesn’t have time to relax at the moment anyway; he never smokes, and very seldom drinks. He sleeps on the flight back and forth, being too exhausted to do much else. He wakes up at five (not just now; this was always his schedule), does an hour of research, clinical NHS work from eight till six, then private practice, home at 10, in bed by midnight. “I don’t have time to think about tiredness,” he tells me flatly. “I think we have a big drive. Because medicine gives you a lot of drive, in a way.”

Doesn’t he know, as a cardiologist, that too much work is bad for a person? “I know, but – some people are built to last, as it were. The stock is good, the genetics are very strong.” He himself is of fine village stock, born in Zodia to a teacher of metalwork who was also a farmer and landowner; he had “a fantastic childhood, growing up in the fields”, then came the invasion, a change in circumstances, and medical school in the UK financed by scholarships and working in restaurants. His heart “beats for Cyprus,” as he says – but which Cyprus? Maybe not the venal and corrupt 21^st-century Cyprus, where (for instance) civil servants always get top marks when being evaluated, so no-one ever gets fired.

That example is relevant – because quality control, says Dinos, is primarily what’s missing in the medical profession here: “If a doctor makes a mistake, how does it appear? It cannot appear”. It’s entirely different in the UK, where all doctors get an annual appraisal and must also be “re-validated” by the General Medical Council every five years. The money is also very different: a consultant’s salary in London – in London! – ranges from £4-6,000 a month, he says (a junior doctor’s will be £2-3,000); a private physician here can make many times that in a single week. That’s a big stumbling block for Gesy – though Dinos seems convinced it’ll work, mostly on the reasoning that patients “will prefer to be seen by Gesy doctors” since they’re paying for it anyway, thus creating a virtuous circle that’ll force more and more doctors into the system.

Maybe; but only if Gesy is viewed as equivalent to going private – which isn’t guaranteed when GPs (“the core” of the service, the first port of call) are such an iffy proposition. In the UK, to be a General Practitioner you need three years of training, “six months in obstetrics and gynaecology, six months in paediatrics, six months in general surgery, six months in medicine, six months in psychiatry, and six months out in the community”; in Cyprus at the moment, due to a shortage of candidates, retired hospital doctors with no extra training are signing up as GPs, and being accepted. (They think they can do it, shrugs Dinos: “As I said before, there is something called arrogance, confused with brilliance: ‘I’m good enough. Why shouldn’t I?’”.) It’s entirely possible that these ageing medics will find themselves out of their depth, sending almost all patients to a specialist and clogging up the system – yet, as we know, the unions are resisting the solution of importing doctors from abroad.

Prof. Missouris sighs heavily, bristling with weary irritation. “I know I’m not going to be liked by my colleagues for saying all this,” he admits, but “we cannot have a group of doctors blocking the development of the national health system of Cyprus… To be honest, if I was the Minister of Health, I would have broken a few bones. A long time ago.

“I think we have the unions, which is the biggest cancer Cyprus has ever faced. There is no change – there can be no change – unless you break the unions. They are not interested about the patients, they are interested about their own small community, their few members, that pay them money to be there. So, unless we break the unions – and, if I was there, I would’ve broken them a long time ago…” He pauses, his expression more troubled than ever. “We cannot leave a bunch of people who are abusing situations to determine the destiny of the nation. We are becoming a laughing-stock of Europe.”

I know, I agree reassuringly. It’s what everyone’s saying.

“But I am saying it loudly! I say we need the political will, we need to break some bones of the unions. The political parties have done enough damage to Cyprus, now is the time [for them] to get out and let the system work. Because what are we going to give to the new generation? More politicians? More corruption?… I’m saying this because I don’t need them, in a way,” admits Dinos, then adds: “Even if I needed them, I wouldn’t care”.

Partly, I suppose, it’s because of his UK experience. I didn’t really know how the NHS works, and I’m stunned to discover just how marginalised private medicine is in Britain. Consultants, i.e. those at the top of the ladder, are allowed “a session or two” per week (a session is four hours) – but even that, even his own Harley Street practice, requires a referral from a GP; patients almost never come directly, bypassing the system. (It’s not illegal to do so, but insurance may not cover it and many private hospitals have regulations forbidding it.) “In the UK, private practice is done in a more elegant and discreet way,” chuckles Dinos. “Here, it’s done in a more vulgar way”. What’s more, UK hospitals are heavily regulated: ‘they’ know everything about Dr. Dinos, from what time he comes in to whether he washes his hands in between patients. “They’ve got people essentially delivering to the management, day in day out, what the doctor is doing.”

Spies, in other words?

“They’re not spies, I think this is called management. Because the doctors, if you leave them on their own, they will do a bad job. They have to be controlled.”

Anyone who’s worked in such a system all their life is bound to be more idealistic – or perhaps just more cowed – than a private doctor getting rich in Cyprus. But there’s also something more in Dinos Missouris: an emotional intensity, a fervour that might almost be a spiritual calling (or, who knows, an escape mechanism?). “I believe in philanthropy. I believe in the human soul,” he tells me. “When patients come to see me, I reach the soul very quickly” – meaning, again, that he empathises, feels their pain (which may often be psychological rather than cardiac pain) very quickly. “My clinics are usually very busy. I usually see twice the number of patients my colleagues see… I used to see three times more, but I’m getting a bit older these days and not as energetic!”. This profound connection means a lot to him, even more (it seems) than any remuneration he might get for it. He talks of doing “charity” during the last few years in Cyprus, meaning helping patients who’ve been badly treated, and also talks of wanting to provide “a high level of care… possibly even without money, at the end of the day”. His greatest satisfaction these days lies in academia, teaching students or seeing a line of young doctors queueing up outside his office, begging to help him with his research.

“We are essentially very fragile,” says this sad-eyed, high-achieving man, summing up the wisdom of a heart doctor who appears to have barely paused for breath in 35 years. “It’s a very fine balance. A man comes in, the next minute he’s dead, in his 30s or 40s – and you’re there on the receiving end, trying to save them. So life, essentially, is very fragile. And it makes us aware that we have to live every minute of it, we have to enjoy every minute of life”. His own life is packed, by design. “I may crash out when I’m 65 or whatever, but at the moment we have a number of years to essentially give it a good go, and create what we want to create,” says Dinos, lapsing back into royal ‘we’. “To leave a legacy, as it were.” He’s gone before I know it, cappuccino barely touched, shuffling off with surprising briskness as the afternoon turns to dusk.

In one of the organisers of next weekend’s Comic Con, THEO PANAYIDES finds an avid gamer and ‘comfy Goth’ who practically lives on the internet in a world that’s both narrower and broader than those of previous generations

The nerd in her natural habitat: a smallish flat on a quiet cul-de-sac, the fixtures including a rescue cat named Kiri, a framed collage with photos from Akihabara (“the nerd district of Tokyo”), and plastic spines on a shelf which look like DVDs but turn out to be video games. Helen Christofi is many things, of course – Sunday painter, graphic designer, front-end web developer – but she’s okay with being described as a nerd, she ‘owns it’ as they say. The Nicosia flat, its décor including a Pokemon poster and a stuffed-toy green creeper (from Minecraft), is important in her life: it’s where she sleeps, where she works and also where she games, often till one or two in the morning. It’s also, in the past few months, where she’s been performing a Herculean task, as one of only six organisers – and the only woman – for Cyprus Comic Con, a mammoth event whose previous iteration drew some 15,000 people.

The CCC team are all gamers and pop-culture junkies, of course; four of the six (including Helen) also work for a company called James Innes Group, and I imagined them meeting in a conference room on their lunch break to plan the event – which isn’t entirely off-base, but conference rooms and lunch breaks are so 20^th century. James Innes Group is an online company based in the UK (it provides career services, “we produce CVs and LinkedIn profiles”) with its IT department in Cyprus – though of course it could just as easily have been scattered all over the world; it’s purely for convenience that the people hunched over their computers happen to be in the same country.

Helen’s lifestyle couldn’t have existed 20 years ago. She wakes up around 10am and immediately sits down to work, at the PC on the desk just behind me as we chat in her living room. She works solidly till about six (no lunch break!), working on the company’s websites or designing new ones, then plays video games – except in recent weeks, “because Comic Con” – just as solidly for several hours before going to bed. The gaming isn’t just ‘to relax’, it’s serious business; Helen’s a connoisseur. She favours story-driven “puzzle games”, mostly old-school, her personal classic being an 80s game called Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis; she’ll play the occasional MOBA (Multi-player Online Battle Arena) game, but has never owned a console in her life. She also loves anime, and singles out an obscure early-00s series called Haibane Renmei. Nerd culture is highly specific.

Doesn’t it get lonely, being in the house all day?

“The cat helps,” she shrugs. Besides, it’s not such a solitary life: there are constant online voice calls with friends and colleagues (they use Discord, a gamer-related app) and also some in-the-flesh socialising. “I do leave my house at least once a week, we play board games at a friend’s. We play Dungeons & Dragons and other board games.” Does she ever go out, to a bar or a restaurant? “It’s not really my thing,” she replies apologetically. She prefers a day at the park, but even that doesn’t happen very often – nor is she really the type to head out to the beach in summer. Every two or three weeks she’ll go down to Limassol to see her parents (they also talk a few times a week); her dad is a baker – he owns an artisan bakery called Psomi kai Alati – her mum an English and French teacher with her own school. Dad “keeps begging me to be a baker,” laughs Helen. He’s probably kidding. “My mum keeps nagging me that I haven’t found a husband yet.” She probably isn’t.

What does Helen think of that idea?

“I’m not against the idea, but it just hasn’t happened.” It might be hard finding someone with a compatible lifestyle, I venture, especially given the size of the Cypriot nerd community. “We do our best to meet people, with Comic Con and the parties and all that,” she agrees – “but I feel like I’ve already met almost everyone!”

To be fair, she’s only 28, so there’s no big rush to ‘settle down’. She’s also excellent company – at least here, in her natural habitat where she feels comfortable – so it shouldn’t be too difficult when the right person comes along. Her skin is pale, her look “comfy Goth” as she puts it; she has narrow eyes in a long, oval face, a streak of blue in her hair (actually more than a streak; it’s a blue middle sandwiched between a black top and bottom, she explains, trying to show me), and a broad goofy smile that appears often. Some might ascribe her cloistered life to being bad with people, but I don’t get any sense of grumpiness or misanthropy. “I’m – shy?” she explains a little awkwardly. “I like being at home, as well. I’m OK with people, for example I have friends that come over, often. I’m not a recluse!” she protests. “I’m giving off that vibe…” admits Helen, and giggles goofily.

She must be good with people, or she’d never be able to organise the cosplay contest and Artists’ Alley (the 64 artists who’ll be putting up stalls to display their work) at this year’s Comic Con. Yet she’s also unusual, part of a new sub-culture enabled by the internet – and not just the internet but Internet 2.0, the past dozen years of smartphones, apps and social media. It wasn’t like that in her teens, going to the Grammar School in Limassol and looking in vain for people who shared her interests. These days she’s happier speaking English than Greek (“I don’t really use my Greek, unless I talk to my parents or – I dunno, Cyta or something”), yet she’s totally Cypriot and grew up with Greek-speaking friends. “We were kind of the geeks,” she recalls – but geeks are one thing, and nerds another. “Geeks are the ones that study and get good marks, and then there’s the nerds who like video games and stuff… It was still my crowd, kind of, but not fully. We were the good kids.”

Lord of the Rings was big at the time, so was Harry Potter (Helen’s the same age as the cinematic Harry, and grew up in sync with the films) – but it wasn’t like now, when fantasy and superhero movies have taken over the culture. Kids weren’t obsessed with Facebook and Instagram, neither of which existed yet; mostly they liked going to clubs, which she wasn’t into. Her best friend may have been her older brother, now a programmer in London, who passed on his passion for older games (last year, when she paid him a visit, he fixed up their first PC from 1997 and they played Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis together on the souped-up computer, which may well be the nerdiest thing ever); she’s always preferred hanging out with guys, somehow, maybe just because girls “are into other things”. Helen paints a picture of a young girl who was sociable enough growing up then “started becoming shy” when she hit her teens, dropping out of the choir (she’d been one of its star soloists) and developing a mild agoraphobia. So was there something of a dark period? “I don’t see it like that. It wasn’t dark. I just realised that I’m not like the others.”

It wasn’t till later that she found ‘her’ people, when she came back to Cyprus after a Bachelor’s in Architecture and got a job in an IT department (the plan had been two years of practice in an architect’s office then back to the UK for a Master’s, but the sector was dead due to the crisis; fortunately, “I liked to programme websites from the age of 12”). That was already an eye-opener, hanging out with fellow nerds – the company didn’t even mind her blue hair! – but meeting her current colleagues and moving to an online-only lifestyle was a whole other level, so much so that she doubts she could ever go back to an office job: “This is too good”.

First contact, as they say on Star Trek, came through a community called OtakuCy, a kind of precursor to Comic Con; ‘otaku’ is the Japanese word for ‘nerd’, and a Japanese influence is strong here. Helen loves the food, the anime, the place itself; she’s been once to Japan already, and is going again in a few weeks. Japan is also home to one million hikikomori, I note with a meaningful glance, meaning the recluses who’ve totally withdrawn from society. “Uh, yeah. And I understand them!” she replies, laughing merrily. “There’s so much stuff to do online. Like, there’s video games that are whole worlds that you can explore, that are beautiful… Why look outside at the grey world? Why face my own problems when I can be somebody else, you know?” That’s not who she is, she makes clear, she hasn’t withdrawn from the world – but yeah, she can see where they’re coming from.

There’s another aspect, though we don’t explicitly make the connection: Japan is a courteous, diffident culture, and – increasingly unlike the West – not an angry culture, at least not overtly. Helen tells me about the “maid cafés” in Akihabara, where girls are “dressed up like French maids and they act cutesy; it’s a thing”. Doesn’t it offend her, I ask, as a woman? After all, today’s under-30s are all so political and feminist. “I don’t like that stuff,” she replies at once, meaning the culture of wokeness and taking offence; “Everybody has a problem with everything. Just chill”. Helen practically lives on the internet – but it’s not the internet of righteous indignation and social media. She uses Facebook to post photos from her travels, “but I don’t Tweet, I’m not ‘an influencer’. It feels a bit like I’m yelling at the world if I post something, and I don’t feel like I have something to tell them”. It’s mostly younger people who do that, the ones who like to talk about their problems in public. “Why should everybody know that I’m experiencing something? Why should I project my problems to everybody that ever met me, with my name on it?”

Because you’re a narcissist who craves personal validation, perhaps?

“That’s it!” She shakes her head sadly. “I don’t like selfies, I don’t like… People are obsessed with getting Likes, and receiving feedback from the world. Does that make you feel good? I’m happy for you.”

Fine, she’s not that person. Couldn’t someone call her an escapist, though?

“I don’t see the problem in that,” replies Helen lightly, and laughs. “Why join in the narcissistic parade? I don’t see why.”

To have a say in society, perhaps?

“Does it make a difference?”

Well, sure. I mean, she’s part of society, right?

“Am I?”

I pause, not really sure what to say to that. “Don’t you and your friends ever talk about social issues?”

Of course, she replies. “We’re not – like, children playing video games. We’re adults, we have problems and we have opinions. But they’re usually not based on Cyprus, they’re not things to do with Cyprus. They’re things to do with the world. Because we’re constantly online, we don’t care a lot about what is” – she waves a hand, taking in the sunny afternoon outside the window – “around us”.

This, I suspect, is the bottom line: Helen Christofi’s life – and the life she represents, this new way of life ushered in by the 21^st century – is simultaneously narrower and broader than most people’s. Her world is the small Nicosia flat with the PC in the living room, but her world is also the entire planet, reflected in the likes of 4chan and the multi-player games where you always seem to get “some Russian guy screaming at you”. What she’s missing is the bit in between, the actual – but limited – world of the physical society around her.

Nerds are still somewhat separate, and all too aware of it. Helen is careful not to assume that I, as an older person, automatically know what she’s talking about: she explains what cosplay means (“the dress-up”), and asks if I know what memes are. “I feel like I have a hard time speaking to somebody who doesn’t know these things,” she admits – and it must be awkward sometimes, living in a bubble of sorts and having to engage with those outside it. At the same time, however, online culture has become totally mainstream – it’s just been turned into something else, the bluster and bustle of social media. Nerds are a bit like adventurous hikers who find some beautiful, isolated valley in the woods and set up an idyllic community, playing games and eating berries. Then the valley gets discovered by the masses, and is suddenly overrun by screaming kids and the stench of barbecued meat – but the nerds are too polite (or shy?) to go up and say, ‘Actually, we were here first’.

Comic Con has also been mainstreamed, which partly explains those 15,000 visitors. There’s “a core audience,” admits Helen, “and then there’s younger people who like video games and superhero movies”. (Her frequent mention of ‘younger people’ is a bit unnerving; has 28 become old now?) This year’s edition, next Saturday and Sunday, will of course offer something for everyone, from live music and a film festival to three gaming stages, the cosplay contest and several celebrity guests: three from Game of Thrones plus Anthony Daniels, aka C-3PO in Star Wars, who’ll be doing an open Q&A and another private Q&A for just 25 people (this hadn’t yet sold out on the day of our interview, though it probably has by now).

But there’s something else, too – because Comic Con is a celebration, an occasion for all those nerds who live in the shadows (or indeed their living rooms) to come out into the light, joyfully affirming how much has changed from the time, not so long ago, when they felt alone in the world. We’ve talked a lot about escapism, says Helen Christofi – but Comic Con is the opposite of that, a giant hug aimed at everyone, nerdy or not. “I might be trying to hide myself from the world,” she notes – “but I’m also trying to make the world into something that I’m more into”. All it needs is some Pokemon posters, and a creeper from Minecraft.

In one of Cyprus’ most recognisable actors, THEO PANAYIDES meets a man much like his most famous character: grumpy but dedicated to money and family

I meet George Zenios in the village of Nisou, just outside Nicosia; he’s working nearby, shooting a TV series called I Familia in an empty house in the middle of nowhere. (The house has been set up for zero distractions, so we can’t talk there.) We find each other with some difficulty, then find a random Coffee Island on the outskirts of the village to conduct the interview. As we cross the road – in this out-of-the-way place, less than five minutes after having met him – a young man leans out of a passing pick-up truck and lustily yells at George: “Eshi kou-ou-ou-ouspo!!!”.

That’s a reference to ‘Eshi kouspo sto Mitsero’ – a Cypriot-dialect exclamation literally meaning ‘There’s a hoe in the village of Mitsero’ but used to indicate irate refusal, as in ‘No way!’ or ‘Dream on!’ – which of course was George’s catch-phrase as Rikkos Mappouros, the tight-fisted paterfamilias in Vourate Geitonoi. It’s surely superfluous to say so – but Vourate Geitonoi is a landmark, the ultimate Cypriot family sitcom, our version of Till Death Us Do Part or All in the Family. The show didn’t run for very long (three seasons, 2001 to 2004) but it’s never been off the air in the 15 years since – and now of course there’s a big-screen version which came out last month, continues to play to packed houses, and has a real shot at unseating Titanic as the most successful film of all time at the local box office.

Oddly enough, the chronic problem of Cyprus TV – its perpetual lack of money, which makes it so hard to be an actor here – has also contributed to his celebrity, forcing cash-strapped channels to fill their schedules with endless repeats. George tells a story of shooting near Limassol last December and being mobbed by a bunch of excited nine-and-10-year-olds from the local school, who rushed to take photos with Rikkos Mappouros. “I asked the teacher, ‘Tell me, how do these kids know me? It’s been 15 years since the show ended’. She says, ‘But they watch you every Sunday!’. So this generation has also grown up – and we’ll see how many more will grow up – with Vourate Geitonoi.”

It doesn’t end with the guy in the pick-up truck. Our coffees, we’re informed, have been taken care of by Mr Theodoros, a local man sitting at a table with two of his cohorts. (“Are you working on something new?” asks Mr Theodoros, obviously hoping for a scoop in exchange for his generosity.) The barista bounces over to our table, begging for a selfie – and George obliges, but later seems slightly put out by all the attention. “People are showing their love,” he concedes. “That’s a good thing, that people love me” – but it’s annoying when, for instance, he goes to the beach with his grandkids in summer and ends up unable to play with them because he’s so swamped by well-wishers. It’s a little hard to discern what he really thinks, since his default expression – like Rikkos’ – is somewhat grumpy. His eyes are hooded, the face wrinkled as befits his 70-ish years, the voice deep and gravelly. He even has a little tic, his mouth twitching slightly in confusion now and then, faintly recalling his TV character’s trademark snort.

‘How much of George Zenios is in Rikkos Mappouros?’ I ask – but it’s not a question he especially wants to pursue, maybe because Vourate Geitonoi is by no means his only achievement. He’s had other local TV hits, to be sure (To Katothkio tis Madaris in the 70s, Manolis kai Katina in the mid-90s, Brousko in the past few years) – but he also studied at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, as a scholarship student, then spent a decade in the UK (where he grew up) acting alongside the likes of Sean Connery and Vanessa Redgrave. Admittedly, it’s not quite accurate to say that he acted ‘alongside’ those stars – he mostly played small roles, invariably as a swarthy foreigner, in British TV shows and occasional movies – but he did enjoy a thriving career on stage and screen; one of his plays, Hugh Williams’ The Irregular Verb to Love, ran in the West End for over a year. By the time he came to Cyprus in the early 70s (initially just to visit), his arrival was momentous enough to be noted in the local papers.

By that time he’d been away for about 15 years, since the age of nine. He’d also married young, to an Englishwoman, and divorced soon after; he met his second wife Aliki – now the mother of his three children – soon after coming to the island, which may be why he stayed on (they’re still together, nearly 50 years later). It certainly wasn’t because of the money, a recurring theme in our conversation. Rikkos Mappouros’ obsession with money in Vourate Geitonoi is extreme, even for a Cypriot; there’s a scene in the movie where he falls off a cliff and some loose change drops out of his pocket as he’s falling – and Rikkos instantly tries to grab the money, oblivious to the fact that he’s plummeting to his death. George isn’t quite so obsessed, but he certainly knows the value of a pound or euro – a worldview instilled by his father, a builder who took the family (including George, his brother and sister) to the UK for a better life and worked like a slave, including Saturdays and Sundays.

Actors don’t get paid properly here, he complains more than once. “In England, I could make a living from this profession. Because you get paid.” He always recalls what he got for a role, often more readily than details of the role itself. I see you made a softcore movie called Emmanuelle: Queen Bitch in 1980, I note, hoping for some sleazy details; “It was good money for the time,” he replies, £1,000 a day for four days’ work. (He played a politician, and had nothing to do with the sex scenes.) For the shot-in-Cyprus BBC series Sunburn in 1999 he ‘only’ got £3,000 a day – it should’ve been more but he’d been away from the UK too long, then again other local actors (in smaller roles) were on only £120 a day. In Woman of Straw he played a barman and also got £3,000 a day, straight out of RADA. “My dad said to me – because he knew I liked sports cars, nightlife, I loved all that! – he took the money and said to me: ‘I’ll buy you a house with it’.”

The money paid for a three-storey house in Muswell Hill. It cost £5,500; some years later, in 1972, George was opening Café Paris in Limassol and asked his dad to sell the house, which he did for £8,000; 12 years after that, in the booming 1980s, he was passing by the property, saw a ‘For Sale’ sign – and found out from the agent that the cash price for the house was now £1,300,000. “Biggest mistake I ever made,” he tells me gloomily.

Being made up for the camera

Some actors will talk to you of their motivation for this or that role, or share insights about their performance; this is not what you get with George Zenios. There’s no doubt he’s a serious actor. He has a reputation for always being on time (he turns up 20 minutes early for our interview, driving up from Limassol while I’m still on the highway) and always knowing his lines. He can’t get to sleep till he’s recited his lines for the next day, and not just recited them but assimilated them; he once called the writer of Brousko (in Athens) at 1am to ask why his character spoke a particular line in an episode, unable to retire till the writer explained that it had to do with another line in a previous episode. All this is true – but he’s also a businessman and, like Rikkos Mappouros, a paterfamilias. His two most cherished subjects, the ones he comes back to most often, are money and family.

Café Paris, for instance, was massive, a hugely successful music club (George also used to sing there; he has a parallel career as a singer) which could seat 800 people, and often did. He opened it in the 70s, rented it out in 1980 then reclaimed it in the 90s and sold it just a few years ago – just before the haircut, he notes with satisfaction. The reason why he rented it out was because he went back to England in 1980, raising his kids in London as he himself was raised. George’s relationship with the UK is a little complicated. His dad used to beat them, he recalls, if they spoke English at home when they were kids (“When you come into this house, you’re Cypriot, re!”), but he still goes back two or three times a year and “when I set foot in the airport, I feel like I’m home”. We talk in Greek but he sometimes slips into English – “I want you to help me,” he recalls having asked the actor Phaedros Stassinos, when he was trying to get into RADA – and the accent is pure London Cyp, ‘I wanchoo to hailp me’. His father, incidentally, threw him out of the house when he learned about the acting (he later relented) – not least because George was already studying Medicine, and dropped out to pursue his dream. “I brought you here to make men of you,” roared the fierce old man, “and now you want to become a clown!”

The dad was strict; George, by his own account, was also a strict dad. Even now, he says, with his older son – who has a wife and kids, a Master’s degree and a big house – “I go to his house and immediately he gets up: ‘Sit down, dad, I’ll get you a coffee’. There’s that respect,” notes George with approval. “When the respect is lost – as it has been lost, unfortunately, with our youth today…” He shakes his head, looking glummer than ever. (His default mode, as already mentioned, is rather grumpy.) His devotion to family runs deep – he’s talked at length of how devastated he was by his brother’s death last year – yet his concept of family is quite traditional. They married when his wife was 18, he recalls, and “we made a deal… I’m the man of the house – not in a dictatorial way, but I’ll provide for the home, for everything, and you take care of the children”.

He’s been lucky; showbiz marriages tend not to last very long. I know it, says George, nodding soberly in the anonymous coffee shop – and credits Aliki with everything. “She stood by me,” he admits. She put up with him, when others might’ve not been so tolerant – “because there were nights when I didn’t come home. You understand?”. He worked so much he barely had time to see his kids – but he also liked the nightlife and the parties, and (like other patriarchs before him) wasn’t above the occasional lapse.

“I hurt her, many times. I admit it,” he says mournfully. “I was a little bit frisky, I was a bit – as a magazine wrote recently – of a ‘handsome jeune premier’… It was the profession, as well. The profession plays a role. The temptation is huge,” adds George fervently (this is why he didn’t want his kids, or now his grandkids, to become actors). “I often say in interviews that I thank my wife, I should really build her a statue and worship her for putting up with me… Now that I’m old, I’ve finally realised it. I say to her, ‘I’m sorry, I should build you a statue’. She goes, ‘Yeah, whatever. Now that you’re old…’”

George Zenios is indeed getting on a bit. He had a heart attack eight years ago, after having been prescribed the wrong pills, and is going for a (purely preventive) Gamma scan a few days after our interview. Still, he’s not that old; he did all his own stunts for Vourate Geitonoi, including being suspended above that 85-metre cliff (down the road from Mitsero, of catch-phrase fame). He’s proud of the film, which was made under difficult conditions and has been such a massive hit, both in Cyprus and the diaspora, making him bigger – and more recognisable – than ever. Life, you might say, began at 50 or thereabouts, in the late 1990s when he stopped being a ‘jeune premier’ and started playing grumpy middle-aged men, at least the life of being mobbed by schoolkids and hailed by random fans in pick-up trucks. George was always well-known – but Rikkos is also beloved.

I suspect he secretly enjoys the attention, despite his protests, just as he once enjoyed the sports cars and nightlife as a younger man. George, after all, isn’t a precious, artist-in-the-garret type; he’s a canny entrepreneur, and surely knows the value of celebrity. It’s been, by any measure, a successful life, if only as the link between a poor immigrant father and a family who grew up in luxury – a definition of success he’d surely appreciate. We walk back to his car, getting a smile and a wave from the barista on the way out – and I wonder briefly if she’s already shared that selfie, showing off her unexpected meeting with Rikkos Mappouros.

In a cult actor extraordinaire THEO PANAYIDES meets a sleek professional whose sinister onscreen persona hardly reflects his real life, although details of that are kept thin on the ground

Udo Kier is toying with me. There’s something I wanted to ask you, I venture; “Well, ask me!” he drawls in his unreconstructed German accent, with ‘vell’ for ‘well’. He sits in the lobby of the Mediterranean Hotel in Limassol, in black top and mustard-yellow trousers, sipping a glass of white wine – “It’s the end of the festival for me, so I can relax,” he explains, a reference to his tenure as president of the jury at Cyprus Film Days – and answering questions he’s probably answered before. Your onscreen persona seems very sinister, I note politely; is it the way you talk? “Vell, I’m talking to you,” he points out. “You should make a decision.”

He’s not being hostile, just humorous – playing a role, as befits a famous star: the interviewee as diva, an hour with a male Norma Desmond (from his favourite film, Sunset Boulevard). It makes sense, I guess. For one thing, he’s just come out of the final meeting where he and his fellow jurors decided on the festival awards (Best Film went to Los Silencios by Brazilian director Beatriz Seigner), so he’s in a jaunty state of mind in general. For another, he’s been doing so many interviews lately – maybe because he’s been getting so many lifetime achievement awards, at a festival in Macau then again in Brussels and now in Cyprus. Just last week, he sat down to a long interview with The Guardian, he informs me. I find that piece (by Alex Godfrey) later, and note that he told them much the same stories he told me – but one quote seems to sum up the man, at least professionally: “When I have a part that isn’t the leading part, I want to act in a way that people remember. Otherwise, what is the point?”.

This is true, and also the reason why being (mildly) trolled by Udo Kier is an honour more than anything – not just because he’s famous but because he’s Udo Kier, cult actor extraordinaire, a man whose refined, sardonically creepy persona has graced over 200 films by some of the world’s finest filmmakers. If anything, it’d be a shock to find him chummy and forthcoming; a certain aloofness is part of his brand – a remoteness, coupled with his fathomless green eyes, that’s been used to suggest all kinds of evil and depravity. In Breaking the Waves (by Lars von Trier, with whom he’s made nine films), his character name is simply ‘Sadistic Sailor’. In this year’s Iron Sky: The Coming Race he plays a double role, Adolf Hitler and his brother, who lives on the Moon: “I played Adolf Hitler riding on a dinosaur on the Moon, and screaming ‘Hi, you motherfuckers!’ – but in German, ‘mutterficker’.”

Does he never play ordinary people? An accountant who lives in the suburbs, perhaps?

“Well, I would like to play an accountant who has a family,” he replies in his slow, measured way. “And my son is washing my car, and my wife is in the kitchen. But then at midnight I become a vampire, and I go out and kill some prostitute.”

Udo Kier knows what Udo Kier stands for – and the life story, as related in other interviews, is designed to burnish the brand, preserving an air of mystery and keeping our hero opaque, almost passive. The arc is simple enough. Born in Cologne in 1944, to a much-loved mother and a father he never met, a soldier who was already married with children (they spoke, once, on the phone when Udo was 40). Moved to England in the mid-1960s, with no thought of acting – his plan, he says, was to learn English so he could travel the world as a salesman for Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company – only to be approached by pop-star-turned-filmmaker Mike Sarne for the lead role in Road to Saint Tropez, a short film made in 1966. Instant stardom, a magazine article describing the striking-looking 22-year-old as “the most beautiful man in the world”, then a contract with the all-powerful William Morris agency. Then come those 50-plus years and 200-plus movies, everything from arthouse auteurs – not just Von Trier but Fassbinder, Herzog, Van Sant, Wenders – to the likes of Armageddon and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; his vivid, uncanny presence works on the popcorn crowd as readily as it does on serious cinephiles.

He works hard; according to the Internet Movie Database he made seven films in 2018, two already in 2019, and has eight more awaiting completion. Why so many? “Because they all were good,” he replies implacably. I assume it also fits his lifestyle – he lives alone, in Palm Springs, in a former library designed by Swiss-born architect Albert Frey; he’s never married, or wanted children – and also speaks to some inner need for being seen. “I liked the attention,” he tells me earlier, speaking of his instant celebrity in the 60s – and it’s true, he does. Despite his rarefied manner, he seems to get a kick out of being recognised in public, and may even try to provoke it. “I was shooting a movie in Brisbane,” he tells our waitress apropos of nothing, hawking his movie-star status; “I didn’t recognise you before,” she admits apologetically when she returns with our drinks (it’s unclear if she recognises him now, or is just acknowledging the air he exudes of a person one ought to recognise). Later, he startles some random stranger who sits down next to us by breaking off to greet him cordially; the stranger just stares in bewilderment, clearly more of a Game of Thrones fan.

What do people know him from, usually?

“The commercial ones, of course. Blade, Ace Ventura… I don’t expect that people know Lars von Trier’s films, or Wim Wenders or Herzog, because they’re very artistic.”

Why should ‘artistic’ be a dirty word?

Udo pauses, looking at me shrewdly. “Well, you said that. I didn’t say that. ‘Artistic’ is my life.”

Now we’re getting somewhere – and indeed, that appears to be a big part of why Udo Kier works so hard, using his celebrity as a force for good. He’s always ready (he says) to lend his talents to some up-and-coming filmmaker doing original work, often just on the strength of meeting at a festival and clicking creatively. His CV is wildly eclectic; he once spent a whole year in Budapest making Narcissus and Psyche (1980), a four-hour poetic masterpiece which he singles out as his most underrated movie. Despite his many roles in horror films – he’s forever being cast as a vampire or witch-hunter – his heart beats for art, and not just cinematic art; like another actor who specialised in villains, Dennis Hopper, he’s a serious collector. “I like modern art, I know more about modern art than movies. All my life I’ve collected – not only because of Andy Warhol, I collected before. Man Ray, Magritte, Giacometti.” Udo knew Warhol well, and made two films (playing Frankenstein and Dracula) for his close collaborator Paul Morrissey; he’s also been friendly with Robert Mapplethorpe – who took pictures of him – and David Hockney and Alekos Fassianos, both of whom painted his portrait.

Celebrity friends make frequent appearances. I ask if he’s worried about turning 75 this year, but he shrugs blithely. Benedikt Taschen of Taschen Books, one of his closest chums, will probably throw him a party, he muses: “For my birthday when I was 70, I got the Rolling Stones book signed by the four Rolling Stones. I don’t know what I’ll get at 75”. Names are dropped as a kind of shield, warding off tricky questions – yet the craving for art, and artists, isn’t just skin-deep; he clearly appreciates his ‘artistic’ directors and seeks out that kind of imaginative genius, even if the films are weird or uncommercial. Talent is easy to spot, says Udo, “because they do the unexpected… If I see somebody who wants to be an artist, and he sits in a corner with a little wooden car and he’s painting the little wooden car, I know there is talent. Because it’s not a normal thing”.

‘Normal’ is for accountants living in the suburbs. “Who cares about people who are good people?” he notes with a hint of mischief. “Who cares about these people, when making a movie?” The much-misunderstood Von Trier is a close friend (Udo is godfather to his first child) – and there may be a basic shyness to Udo Kier, as there is with the prickly Dane. He prides himself on never having approached a director for work (they come to him), yet his policy seems rooted in social anxiety more than anything: “Imagine if you say to David Lynch ‘I would like to work with you’ and he answers ‘Who doesn’t?’. I would go under the table [with embarrassment]!”. I get a sense that he thrives on creative relationships even more than ‘normal’ ones, and tries to treat the latter as the former whenever possible. “I gave you an hour of my life,” he mock-grumbles at the end of our interview, playing the diva again.

“It’s more than I deserve,” I reply, trying to play along.

“Well, that was the wrong answer!” chuckles Udo – and it’s all quite good-natured, but I see his point. He doesn’t want humility and deference, he wants to be challenged. For want of a better word, he wants art.

What about his life in Palm Springs? I suppose the house is very beautiful?

“How dare you ask me a question like that?” he exclaims, trolling again. “What do you think, I live in a barrack? Or in a container? My house is beautiful.”

It sounds like he appreciates beauty in general.

“Well, of course…” he shrugs. “That is a normal thing, because it gives you pleasure. Why should I depress myself with something horrible?”

The house is in the desert, a long way from Cologne both literally and metaphorically. (Despite the thick accent, he hasn’t lived in Germany for decades.) Udo lives alone, though he has “a very good friend who helps me,” he explains vaguely. “I’m a gardener. I have many properties in the desert. I plant trees with my own hands, without gloves, because I don’t care if my hands are bleeding. I rescue animals. I collect furniture from the mid-century.” He also has a life-sized plastic horse called ‘Max Von Sydow’, he adds with trademark irreverence, employing Max as a background prop “when I take pictures for magazines, as a cowboy”. Joking aside, though, this quiet outdoor life clearly speaks to him – albeit mostly as a brief respite from his many acting jobs. “I’m happy. Nobody can take that away from me. I’m happy and I do – what – I – want!” adds Udo Kier, stressing each word separately. “Nobody tells me what to do.”

Maybe that’s the key, in the end (also harking back to what he told me earlier about his mum, that she “let me do with my life what I wanted to do”). Maybe that’s the best description of the man, as a lifelong maverick going his own way – the equivalent of the artist sitting in a corner with a little wooden car – prizing beauty and originality and forever on the lookout for other mavericks, his slight remoteness and playful joshing air (like the creepy, cult-movie roles he likes to play) being the defence mechanisms of a private person with a sociable streak. The other Cyprus Film Days jurors seem to love him, and he surely couldn’t make so many films unless he was good with people – but it’s also true, despite the many interviews, that details of his private life are scarce, beyond what he himself keeps repeating. “I just came out with that, I’ve never said that in my life,” he remarks at one point – implicitly admitting that the rest of what he tells me is mostly recycled.

Almost time to go. I scan my notes quickly, and notice an unticked question: “One last thing,” I plead.

“Okay,” he replies – then goes back to playing: “Wait, wait. It better be a good one.”

I think it is.

“Vell, I decide!” he says sternly. “Tell me.”

He makes so many movies. He had one at the multiplex last month (Dragged Across Concrete) and has one in the Cannes line-up this month (Bacurau). How does he decide what to do?

“People find me,” he replies with a shrug. “It’s like – I’ll say something I’ve never said, new,” he offers, as if granting me an exclusive – “it’s like a magnet who goes around, and the magnet only attracts the things that he is interested in”. Udo nods, the green eyes amused. “People say: ‘He works with all these directors, what does he have? What’s so special about him?’. I say: ‘Nothing. You get what you see’.” Fortunately, what you see is – or was – the most beautiful man in the world.

In a video director, marketing consultant and mentor THEO PANAYIDES meets a confident and stubbornly independent woman with contagious energy who is well placed at a recent creative women conference

The place is the newly-opened Parklane Resort in Limassol, the occasion the fourth annual Creative Women conference (organised by Olga Balakleets, held under the patronage of First Lady Andri Anastasiades), bringing together “entrepreneurial women” from all over the world. The Parklane is luxurious indeed, part of ‘The Luxury Collection’ of around 120 hotels worldwide: there’s a diamond gallery by the front entrance (€11,900 for an 18-carat bracelet, €19,900 for a pair of earrings), then the lobby is all white marble and floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the beach. I give my name at the conference desk, an efficient Russian lady slips away for a few minutes – then Rebeca Riofrio emerges from the buzz of the auditorium, “very small” by her own admission, with a sharp little chin and enormous eyes in a round face pasted with makeup, crowned by a mass of jet-black hair.

Rebeca seems happy to take a break from the speeches; I suspect she gets bored rather easily. How would she describe her personal energy? “My energy is contagious,” she replies. “And abundant. It’s very abundant.” On her phone – which she shows me at the end of our interview – is a message from a fairly well-known actor, asking if she’s going to be in Cannes next week. “I have met kings, presidents,” she says. “I have met celebrities. I was last year working with John Travolta, the year before with Nicole Kidman.” Yet she also had to take a day off work to be in Cyprus, making use of her 20 days’ annual leave like any other employee; her main job, working 40 hours a week, isn’t in show business (though she runs a production company called Art in Fusion, making mostly adverts and fashion videos), it’s as a marketing manager at Anglia Ruskin University, a mid-table university based in East Anglia. Then again she also has a job at Westminster, her title (as of last Tuesday) being Chair of the Parliamentary Society of Arts, Fashion & Sports. Her energy, like she says, is abundant.

She appears to be one of those people who’ve never shied away from a challenge, dip their fingers into any available pie, and feel absolutely no shame in self-promotion. Our conversation is dotted with unexpected, casually-delivered bombshells. “I have opened colleges, and so on, in China,” she explains vaguely when I wonder why she used to be involved with the BCYF, the British Chinese Youth Federation (a charity engaged in cultural exchange, presumably backed by significant Chinese money). “I used to do the contracts for her, because I studied Law,” she says later, speaking of a friend who fell from a yacht and broke her arm while in Monte Carlo organising the Miss Cannes pageant. (Rebeca has also studied Finance and Information Technology, the latter as a teenager in Ecuador.) You seem like a people person, I suggest, and get this reply: “Always! I actually wrote a book, a long time ago, on how to become a people person”.

Her life is divided in two, the pivotal event being a move to London (to live with her mother) in the mid-90s – not so much because of her mum as because of another older woman, the redoubtable journalist and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. Rebeca was then 18 (she’s now in her mid-40s), and her childhood in Ecuador had been unusual. Her mum gave birth to her at the age of 14, having run off with an older man. Her maternal grandparents agreed to take care of the baby – the short-lived liaison having ended – and Mum moved to England to reboot her life, remaining in touch with her daughter but always long-distance.

The grandparents were very special people, fiercely religious and fierce in general: they ran an orphanage and a rehab centre for drug addicts, often ventured out into the jungle to preach the Word of God, and took little Rebeca along everywhere they went. “When I was about eight years old, I saw a man stabbed 50 times,” she recalls, though it doesn’t seem to have traumatised her. This was at a time when the rehab centre was located within the walls of a prison – a grim, violent place where the little girl hung out on a daily basis, “until I wasn’t allowed to, because it was too many inmates and I was growing up”, experiencing people at their lowest ebb and imbibing a message that the purpose of life was to help, not judge, others.

All this surely played a role in her relationship with Gellhorn, another fierce, eccentric older person who’d witnessed some of the worst excesses of the 20^th century. Rebeca wasn’t happy living with her mum – they’re close now, but her 18-year-old self bridled at being told what to do after so many years – and looked around for a job. Gellhorn, then in her 80s and losing her sight, needed a native speaker to read back the newspaper articles she wrote in Spanish (she’d sometimes miss a word when typing, and be unable to see it), and hired the teenager as a personal assistant. She’d been Hemingway’s third wife but also, much more pertinently, one of the century’s greatest war reporters: she’d covered everything from 1930s Spain to Vietnam, and was one of the first to report from Dachau concentration camp – writing vivid accounts of its lice-ridden “walking skeletons” – after it had been liberated. She was going blind, and suffering from cancer; she was angry, embittered, intellectually brilliant, and a difficult employer.

“She was very eccentric, and very rude, and she was all the time drinking whisky and having a cigarette,” recalls Rebeca. “Swearing all the time, telling people to f**k off all the time, and drinking a lot, and – and being strange!” Gellhorn was in near-constant pain, and very delicate (Rebeca remembers helping her out of the shower once, when she almost fell, and finding her hands covered with flakes of the old woman’s skin) – but appears to have found some solace in the younger woman’s natural energy, which was positive (and, like she says, abundant) but also explosive. “I don’t take bad things from people,” explains Rebeca. “I respect people, and I demand respect.”

After a few weeks of being demeaned and yelled at, the girl exploded. “I tell her: ‘That’s it, you cannot talk to nobody like that!’,” she recalls. “‘Everyone that comes here, they praise you that you’re amazing – but you’re not amazing, you’re shit! You’re shit, I hate you! And I need to go, because you make me feel horrible’.” Rebeca added more to the rant, including a few choice swear words; “And then she was coming towards me – I’m very small, and she was super-tall… And she’s like ‘You are not going anywhere. Nobody ever swore at me for 40 years – and I like it! You stay with me’.

At the Creative Women event with Elvis and organiser Olga Balakleets

“I came back to work the next day, and she was a different person. She was so good to me. Since that day, we had an amazing friendship. She was like a mother to me – she was the mum I needed at that time, and she was so loving… I met Mandela through her, I met the Clintons, I met so many amazing people, and she teach me about politics, she teach me about life and experience. I worked for her for four years, and I was the last person to see her alive. She killed herself”.

Gellhorn swallowed a cyanide capsule in February 1998; two days earlier, says Rebeca, she’d led her to a window and asked her to describe the street outside. “Yes. You are a witness,” said Martha when her young assistant had finished. “I’m not a witness anymore, I’m dying. And I’m a journalist, I write what I see. If I can’t see, I’d better not be here”. “And then she said, ‘You will understand if I’m not here on Monday’,” adds Rebeca sadly – though of course the sadness has faded after 20 years, and it’s a moot point whether such a dignified exit should be viewed with sadness anyway. ‘What did you learn from Martha Gellhorn?’ I ask, and she instantly replies: “Everything!” – and it’s easy to see similarities, in their confidence and stubborn independence (Rebeca doesn’t want to get married or have babies, even though – in a neat reversal of typical gender roles – she’s agreed to become engaged to her fiancé “to make him happy”), yet one also wonders if she’d ever end her own life that way. Her energy seems too indiscriminate, too vivacious for that.

Martha seems to have been quite a stern, judgmental woman, even in her youth; Rebeca is much more relaxed. Her mentor was a journalist and truth-teller – but she’s an entrepreneur and marketing person, with a marketing person’s tendency to hyperbole. She claims, for instance, that her fiancé – a Russian former actor and model named Elvis Plugis, considerably younger than herself – was in 300, James Bond and Star Trek, but in fact he has no credits for any of those movies (I assume he’s there, just in blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameo roles). She operates largely on networking, chance encounters and friends of friends. She impressed two government ministers from Dubai while in Monaco (where she’d gone to help the friend who fell from a yacht and broke her arm) and “they gave me a yacht, they gave me Bentleys, they gave me everything”, then they took her to Cannes where she parlayed her blog into official accreditation as a journalist. More recently, she met British politician Zac Goldsmith through a mutual friend – “I know a lot of politicians, loads of politicians” – and he’s now helping with an event she’s organising next month. I assume something similar led to her new job in Parliament, acting as a link between politicians and the outside world; “I’m not an official advisor, but I’m an official person inside the parliament,” is how she puts it – making clear, however, that she’s an unpaid consultant. “I get a lot of money from different people,” says Rebeca with a certain relish, “but not from them.”

There’s another difference from Martha Gellhorn (not that Rebeca claims to live her life based on her mentor’s; it’s just a convenient yardstick). Martha had a privileged childhood as the daughter of a doctor and a suffragette – but Rebeca’s childhood, as already mentioned, was a lot more turbulent. At 12, she determined to meet her father, even though “people told me not to, that he is horrible – and I found out that he was horrible”. She tried to forge a relationship, despite him saying he’d never wanted her and had urged her mother to have an abortion. “When I was 15 years old, was the last time I saw him – because he was becoming abusive towards me and wanted me to kiss him, and to touch me. And I said to him: ‘I want you to love me, but not like this. And I want you to die, I want you to leave. I don’t want nothing to do with you’. And I called the police on him, never saw him again in my life… But you know, I tried,” she adds equably. “Because if not, I will have the feeling ‘What if?’. And that’s very important, not to have a ‘What if?’ in your life… Unfinished business is no good business.”

Rebeca Riofrio appears to be game for anything – yet there’s also a cautious side to her personality, as if that early turbulence had left her with a certain insecurity. She clings to her job in education, with its steady salary. She likes to have her coffee at a certain time, and “close my door in a certain way” (what way is that? she’d rather not say). Above all, she admits – though she hesitates to say so, maybe because we are, after all, at a conference for independent women – that “I love empowering women, but I’m not a feminist. I believe 100 per cent in a man’s role, and I love a man’s role in society”.

It’s not one-sided, despite what the zealots will tell you. “I believe that I can be the breadwinner in my family. I can have much more money than my fiancé – which I do – but at the same time, I want him to protect me. It’s not necessarily how much money who has. But I like to be protected”. Protected in the sense of emotional support, or physically? “Both! I don’t want to fight with nobody. Noooo, you do that!” yelps Rebeca, and chuckles playfully. She is, after all, quite a small person.

“I do many things,” says this busy, complicated woman, and she does. She’s a film director, a marketing consultant and a trained youth counsellor. “I do paperwork for people. You tell me what your business is, and I will help you develop it”. She mentors youngsters (some of them models who she meets through her videos, as she did her fiancé) like she herself was mentored. Above all, perhaps, she puts her energy to work, abundantly. “If you feel good things will happen to you, they’ll really happen,” affirms Rebeca. “If you say it, they will manifest.” She smiles, as if noting our luxurious surroundings, then goes back inside with the other creative women.