THEO PANAYIDES meets a globalised technocrat who has managed to stay calm despite taking on a number of roles around the world in the aftermath of atrocities

Margareta Wahlström shouldn’t be confused with Margot Wallström, even though both are high-powered Swedish women of a similar age. Ms Wallström is the Swedish foreign minister; Ms Wahlström – who was briefly in Cyprus last week, as the keynote speaker at a ‘Wikipedia edit-a-thon’ on International Women’s Day – is a prominent diplomat, former UN Special Representative, and current president of the Swedish Red Cross.

Despite spelling their surnames differently, the two women are sometimes confused, she tells me. When Margot became foreign minister she, Margareta, received congratulatory texts from all over the world. Then there was the time, during her days at the UN, when she was given a nice gift (a book) which – as became apparent while the presenter was making his speech – was actually intended for Margot, or probably the man just mixed them up. “The guy said, ‘Oh, I remember when you were the European Commissioner for the Environment, fantastic work’,” recalls Margareta, chuckling dryly. “I said [to myself], I will not tell him, I’ll just take the book. What’s the point of disappointing him?”

Two observations might be made about that story. The first relates to her personal style, which is indeed rather low-key and soft-spoken. One could easily imagine her staying silent through such a mix-up, her dry, almost soundless chuckle – which recurs often throughout our conversation – being the only trace of some private mirth. The second observation is more speculative: Wahlström and Wallström are completely different people, of course – yet it’s not entirely absurd that they should be conflated. Both women belong to that generation which was shaped by the Vietnam war and the events of 1968. They undoubtedly have values in common, and would surely see eye-to-eye on many things. Above all, both are part of a globalist, social-democratic elite, working proactively to change the world, with an emphasis on NGOs and supra-national organisations.

Margareta’s own vehicles were the International Red Cross and the United Nations, the latter for six years (2009-15) when she lived in New York and headed UNISDR, the United Nations’ Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (its aim was to persuade the world of “the need to manage and reduce risk”, rather than pay for the damage caused by natural disasters) – though her first real job was also UN-related, in Cambodia just after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. She was in her early 30s (she’ll be 68 in a couple of weeks), working in Vietnam at the time, and joined a small UNHCR team travelling around Cambodia trying to determine if conditions were ripe for a major repatriation of refugees from the Thai border. The country was “dazed”, she recalls, numbed by the horrors it had witnessed; people were traumatised. She sat and listened, a young woman from the small town of Boden in the far north of Sweden, offering only the promise of a kinder, more stable world.

That’s a fact to keep in mind, as she sits across from me in the breakfast room of the Hilton Park in Nicosia (we meet ‘over breakfast’, due to her hectic schedule, though we both end up foregoing actual food): much of Margareta’s work has been palliative and advisory – to help, to counsel, to listen. She’s seen a lot, but mostly the aftermath of atrocities rather than atrocities themselves. After Cambodia, she spent time in Angola, leading an orthopaedic workshop supplying artificial limbs to amputees from the civil war: “All these young men without arms and legs, and no future”. Later, from 2002-04, she was in Afghanistan, working on the “state-building exercise” which the West attempted (without much success) after 9/11. Her job, at all times, has been to fix obvious problems and try to suggest a better way – not as a local actor, but a studiously impartial technocrat.

Her energy doesn’t seem pushy. She sits across the table, Nordic-blue eyes gazing out from behind blue-rimmed glasses; her expression is a little anxious, her body language tentative. I explain that a profile may include some personal questions, prompting a wary “Hmm…” She does seem like a very calm person, I note. Is that accurate?

“It’s true, yes.”

Does she not get emotional? Especially doing what she does?

“Ja, I can get emotional, but probably not that often. Except about kids and animals.” The dry chuckle again. “Because they need protection and defence by adults. But I’m calm, and even when I get angry – or upset – I have been told that I get upset in a calm way.”

One must always be calm, in her line of work. Getting angry would only cause offence, and jeopardise a project. There’s also the issue that the work is, to some extent, inherently frustrating. The toughest thing about Angola, she recalls, wasn’t the depressing daily spectacle of limbless, hopeless people (some of them children), it was making sense of her own role: “You become like – I was going to say a king, but maybe I should say a queen. You become like the central person upon which they place a lot of their hope, particularly in the beginning… But some of these guys – no arms, no legs…” Margareta shakes her head: “You don’t have that much to offer”. The only recourse is to stay calm and focus on specifics, whatever can be done to make their lives a little better. “I cannot judge if their life is good enough or not. That’s for them to judge.”

Did she bond with the amputees? Did they become friends?

A pause. “Ye-e-es,” she replies tentatively. “It’s mostly work, you know. But you are friends in the time you are there.”

taking part in the Fiacolatta walk as president of the Swedish red cross

Thereby hangs a tale – because her calmness is also a distance, and distance is perceptible in Margareta Wahlström’s makeup. At one point I ask if the work ever got lonely – always an outsider, moving from project to project – and elicit another long pause. “It depends on your personality,” she replies at last. “But I am the type of person who needs to be lonely, at least every now and then!”

She is, after all, a lifelong technocrat in the age of globalisation; ‘going local’ would only impede her ability to do her work. It’s not that she doesn’t care where she lives; she resisted living in New York, for instance, her small-town childhood making her suspicious of big cities. But it’s also true that she hasn’t lived in Sweden for 30 years, and has no home base as such – just a flat in Stockholm which she mostly treats as a storeroom for the papers and other detritus from her various assignments (“It’s like archaeological layers of my life,” she explains with another dry chuckle). People like her – diplomats, do-gooders, call them what you will – have their own way of life. Her friends are mostly from the same milieu, plucked from all over the world – and of course the hours are brutal, not so much these days (she’s semi-retired) but certainly in the past, when 80-hour weeks were quite common. It doesn’t leave much time for a personal life, I point out.

“Well, that becomes your life,” agrees Margareta. “Yeah, I don’t have any dog or cat, or whatever. You can’t have that if you travel all the time, and you don’t have a family to leave the dog to.”

Was she ever married?

“I was,” she replies, looking slightly abashed, “but – it didn’t work.”

Because of her work?

“Probably, yes.”

How long did it last?

“Five years.” She smiles, rather tightly: “I tried.”

Has she come close in the years since? Has she had any serious relationships?

She looks a bit startled, then gives me a deadpan look. “I am always serious,” she replies, and chuckles again.

It’s true, she is quite serious. There are no outside passions, no mindless hours in front of the telly (“I’m a bit impatient these days”), nor any vices to speak of. “Actually, I don’t know if you call it a vice, but I can offer it to you: I like crime novels and thrillers, and science fiction,” she replies at last, noting my surprise that she doesn’t have a way to let off steam, given how intense her life used to be. (Sorry, we couldn’t really call that a vice.) “How do I have fun? I take a very long walk in the forest! That’s what we do,” laughs Margareta, leaving it unclear if ‘we’ are globalised technocrats or Swedes in general.

Her secret, I suspect, is that she doesn’t dwell; not on people or places, and certainly not on the past. Does she regret not having kids, for instance? – but she shakes her head: “Maybe that’s my characteristic, that I don’t regret. I just try to change the future… Otherwise you spend a lot of time mulling over tiny things”. There was always something forthright, forward-looking, even reckless about her. “If an opportunity comes my way, I say ‘That’s interesting’ and I go for it”. Even before university, the girl from Boden spent a gap year in Patagonia (!) as tutor to the child of a Swedish family; later on, she upped and moved to Vietnam, working on the post-war rebuilding project. Throughout her life, despite her low-key style – or precisely because of it – she’s just ‘gone for it’, gotten on with things. What about being a woman in the 70s? Did she ever suffer discrimination? “Probably did,” she replies airily. “But I didn’t realise until I started thinking about it, frankly.”

That’s a whole new discussion, of course, gender equality being the buzzword du jour and directly related to what she’s doing in Cyprus. The ‘Wikipedia edit-a-thon’ was one of 50 such events taking place in parallel in various countries, aimed at redressing the gender imbalance on Wikipedia by writing articles on women. Sweden is officially committed to a ‘feminist foreign policy’ (overseen by her alter ego, Margot Wallström!) and Margareta is happy to help. She’s now past the age of retirement, but has no plans to retire – what would she do with herself? – so instead “what I’m doing, which is full-time, are lots of things which are remunerated, but not as employment”.

Feminism was never really ‘her’ cause, she admits (she always had “a rather straightforward perspective on the opportunities [for women]”, probably meaning that she got on with life and didn’t stop to think about the obstacles), but she’s been paying more attention in recent years – and gives me a fair-minded overview of the problem, including the kind of complex questions you’d expect from a lifelong administrator: “Are women different managers than men?” “Do women always want to be in those [managerial] positions?”. Women’s rights have always been on the agenda, of course: 15 years ago in Afghanistan, the new modern state being built by the West didn’t just give women the vote but reserved 25 per cent of parliamentary seats for them. Alas, it soon became clear – or maybe there wasn’t the political will to prevent it? – that a new constitution wouldn’t be enough to silence the guns of the Taliban. The law changed; society didn’t.

That’s the way it goes in the real world. Life unravels, people are weak. Afghan women remain oppressed, Cambodia’s ghosts remain un-exorcised. Those crippled war vets in Angola never did get back to their old lives, in all probability, despite being fitted with artificial limbs. Margareta Wahlström isn’t sentimental, nor especially optimistic (she thinks we’re moving far too slowly to prevent climate change, for one thing); maybe it’s age – but I reckon she was never the starry-eyed activist, even as a younger woman. There’s a chill to her, despite the dry chuckle.

“I just try to change the future, I can’t change the past,” she explains sensibly. The past isn’t just a foreign country, it’s something of a failed state: even when we learn from it, she says – which is by no means every time – the vast majority of those lessons are ignored or forgotten. Instead she inches forward one project, one cause, one concerted effort to help at a time, on the basis that action is better than inaction, reducing risk (as in her recent UN job) better than dealing with the fallout, and being present – for as long as she has the energy – better than throwing in the towel. She’s even relished the politics, of member states and trying to build consensus. “For me it’s been extremely rewarding, and it’s given me many times that sense of optimism that you’re asking for, when I worked with countries in the UN.” Give this woman a foreign ministry, or something.

One woman not only runs a dog shelter but also keeps around 20 animals in her own home. THEO PANAYIDES meets a woman so deep into looking after them there is no way out

I park outside the sun-bleached, rather neglected-looking house on the road into Tseri, just outside Nicosia, and walk to the gate. The front yard is cluttered and dusty, the outside wall topped by a thin, foot-high wire fence; a sign above the gate reads ‘Beware of the Dog’. This is something of an understatement (to put it mildly), then again a sign saying ‘Beware of the 25 Dogs’ might be too conspicuous. I pause at the gate and call Constantina Constantinou’s number, as instructed. She prefers to come and meet me at the gate, then sit outside on plastic chairs; a stranger walking in on so many dogs might cause pandemonium.

There are indeed (approximately) 25 dogs here, almost all of them inside the house – in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, and two rooms downstairs leading out to the garden. “The living room doesn’t have a sofa, or a table or anything!” she reports gleefully. Much of the house looks deserted. The only TV is in the bedroom, though it doesn’t get much use; Constantina watches the occasional show – “just to relax, and not think about dogs” – but generally falls asleep within minutes.

The number of dogs is approximate because it varies: 14 are permanent residents – 10 are hers, the others she fosters – then the rest come and go. The high-water mark was 42 dogs in total; it’s now (perhaps) 23, though she loses track when she tries to list them all. Two left the house a couple of days ago, adopted by new owners in the UK, then two more arrived last night – one found abandoned, the other a six-week-old puppy whom she cradles inside her jacket as we talk. Most of the temporary guests come from Saving Pound Dogs Cyprus (SPDC), the shelter she co-founded with Elena Papaleontiou four years ago: most are either puppies awaiting vaccination or else dogs with health problems, staying at her place till they’re cured “so that the child – I mean the dog – can be put up for adoption again”.

That child/dog slip of the tongue may seem significant. There’s a stereotype here, and not a very nice one: the lonely, embittered ‘dog lady’, lavishing attention on her mutts to compensate for having no life of her own. This is not the case with Constantina. For one thing, she has actual children – a son and a daughter, both now in their 20s – as well as dogs. For another, she has a partner, a brave man named Andreas who doesn’t mind sharing her life (and home) with two dozen animals. She also had an excellent job, having been an advanced instructor in Thai therapeutic massage – she even gave college seminars – before packing it in to concentrate on strays. Above all, she doesn’t seem angry or embittered, an effusive 47-year-old with sharp green eyes, a loud clear voice (a useful tool when talking to animals), and dog hairs all over her black top.

Activists often come across as frustrated, lashing out at the world – but the most attractive thing about Constantina is her positivity, seeking solutions instead of bemoaning the problems. She’s assertive, to be sure. She’s no shrinking violet. One example: her street is wrongly marked on Google Maps – it says ‘Tseriou’ when it should say ‘Strovolou’ – and she pestered Google for ages, trying to get them to change it (only stopping when she realised, regretfully, that Google are too big to care about some street name in Cyprus). Another example: her dog was stolen four years ago, and she went all-out trying to get him back. “I put paid ads on Facebook. I notified the UN, all the vets, all the police stations”. It’s not wholly clear why she got the UN involved – but the incident of the lost dog still turned out to be life-changing. Searching for her pet made her aware, for the first time, of the chaotic, ever-increasing number of stray dogs in Cyprus; shocked by the extent of the problem, she co-founded SPDC in order to help, and the rest followed naturally. “I got in so deep,” she recalls with a shrug, “that I couldn’t get out”.

It’s not just a question of housing unwanted dogs (though some 35 dogs are indeed housed at the organisation’s shelter in Psimolofou); SPDC, which is registered in the UK as well as Cyprus, also arranges the transport of dogs for adoption, working with British charities to find likely owners. Many strays are saved in this way, maybe 100 a week from all over the island – yet “the dogs keep coming,” she marvels, shaking her head. “They just keep on coming”. Whether abused or abandoned, escapees from hunters’ cages or puppies left to fend for themselves, our population of lost canine souls continues to grow – which is all the more depressing since it could be contained, and quite easily.

Constantina isn’t dogmatic (no pun intended!) about this; the steps which could be taken “might not be as simple as I make them out to be,” she concedes – yet she’s convinced the problem could be straightened out within five years, if the authorities would just get their act together. The basic solution is simple enough: an island-wide neutering programme, financed either through municipal dog-licence fees or a small contribution (five euros, say) from each of the 50,000 or so hunters’ licences. Compulsory neutering is apparently unconstitutional – but there’s surely a simple solution in viewing owners who refuse to sterilise their dogs as breeders, the much higher fee being a powerful disincentive.

That would take some political will, I point out.

“There’s no will,” she agrees gloomily. “They’re not interested.” She shrugs, with an air of having heard it all before: “You’ll say to me, there’s so much unemployment, so many illnesses. So many social problems. I agree with you! There are, and they’ll never disappear. But this problem, the problem of the stray dogs, can be solved!… I mean, do we have to fix all the other problems first, and ignore this one? If it can be solved, take action. Do it!”. So much money could be saved, all the money now being spent on ferrying animals and importing food and medicines; so much suffering could be avoided, too. “No-one listens,” she admits. “The [draft] law on animal welfare just keeps going around like a ping-pong ball, from Parliament to the Attorney-General’s office to public consultations to the Ministry of Agriculture to the Ministry of the Interior to Veterinary Services…” Constantina shakes her head, stymied – at least for now – by our infamous bureaucracy.

She doesn’t seem too downhearted, though; her energy is too buoyant for that. She doesn’t even seem especially fazed by living in a house with two dozen dogs – even though her career change four years ago has completely upended her life (and you can’t even call it a career change, since she doesn’t get paid; her only salary from SPDC is a stipend for the dogs she fosters). “We don’t go anywhere,” she admits. She and Andreas don’t even go to the beach, let alone on holiday. She did briefly visit her daughter in England three years ago, but those few days took a month of preparation. Her replacements – volunteers from the shelter – had to note down everything: which dogs eat when, how much they eat, who takes what medicine, who goes out (to the garden) with whom. “Because when you have more than two dogs, it becomes a pack. So you have to be careful”.

Constantina takes precautions. The dogs eat in groups, not all together. Toys are only handed out in her presence, to avoid fights; food is removed as soon as her charges have eaten. Still, her life sounds insane. “Everything is done on a schedule. I usually wake up between 5.45 and 6.15 – and I’m not a morning person, not at all. I hate waking up early.” (Her phone goes off every night at 11, to remind her to go to bed.) The dogs go outside and she starts preparing food for them, only then making a cup of coffee for herself to drink while she watches them eat, two dozen yapping mutts having to be coaxed and corralled first thing in the morning – then it’s off to the vet’s, or the shelter, or the airport, spiced with a daily assortment of life-or-death crises.

The phone keeps ringing throughout our conversation, two emergencies going on at once: “We’ve lost a cat,” she explains (dogs have to be certified cat-friendly for adoption purposes, so the shelter has a number of cats to accustom them), and meanwhile an adoption’s gone wrong in the UK, a dog hasn’t gelled with his new family and a new home must be found asap. A volunteer calls, seeking advice; “It’s a Thomson flight, and you’ll need two copies of each trace,” she explains, a ‘trace’ being a dog’s official document. Two more dogs have been rescued. A beagle is poorly.

The house, when I venture inside, is spacious but dark and inevitably smelly, with some equally inevitable puddles on the floor. (Keeping it clean is a constant battle.) The dogs, on the other hand, are incredibly quiet – we barely hear them bark from outside, which presumably explains why the neighbours accept this unusual arrangement – and seem calm and happy. Constantina lets them out briefly and two of them cluster around me, a pointer named Leda and a little-bit-of-everything named Toni; Leda sniffs at me trustingly, putting her face next to mine, while Toni puts her head in my lap, swooning as I stroke her and tapping me with her paw – as if to say ‘No, don’t stop now!’ – every time I try to move on.

Animal lovers will call Constantina a hero; others may wonder why anyone would inflict such a complicated life on themselves, for no obvious reward. Her childhood offers possible clues, having been unusual and rather solitary. Her mother was twice divorced, and had her at 44 (she has two much older siblings, from her mum’s first marriage). Mother and daughter were uprooted from Famagusta and settled in Limassol, where Mum worked as a cleaner – but the neighbourhood (around Heroes’ Square) was disreputable so the girl was confined to the house, reading voraciously, her only company being three cats named Shakespeare, Moliere and Psathas (after the Greek comic writer). She and her mother appear to have clashed often. She worked for two summers picking grapes then used the money to buy a motorbike, at 14; “I was not an easy child”. She already knew, based on all the history books she’d read, that the world was an ugly place and she didn’t want to bring children into it – but her mum had the last word, marrying her off at 18, an arranged marriage that limped on for a decade, produced two kids, and led to her “losing the plot” in her early 20s.

All this serves as preface to her current chapter, and may go some way towards ‘explaining’ her. She’s always been a bit unconventional. She’s always – despite her bubbly, extrovert nature – been a little withdrawn. She’s always stood up for animals. When Shakespeare and Co. turned out to be females (with kittens), her angry mother issued an ultimatum: “Either those cats go, or you go!”. The teen’s response was to stalk out, cats in tow, and move to the carob tree at the bottom of the garden, refusing to come down till her mum (who’d come after her with a broomstick) relented, and allowed her to keep the kittens.

It’s a cute story – but in fact there’s no greater arc to her life, no inevitable dotted line from A to B to C. Things just happen. She and Elena were merely volunteering at the dog pound four years ago, recalls Constantina, “it was never in our dreams, or our goals, to launch our own shelter and get into debt – because right now we have a debt of some €70,000 to pay”. The plan is to buy the current place in Psimolofou, and a loan’s been taken out for half the price (the other half was met through donations, mostly from the UK though they have some Cypriot patrons too). Money is tight in general, adding to the stress of constant canine emergencies. Time is even tighter. Everyday chores like cooking and laundry often get neglected; she once had to go out and buy Andreas some new socks and underwear, just so the man would have something to wear. “You’ll tell me, ‘It’s your choice’,” she shrugs, once again pre-empting criticism. “Fine, my choice. But someone has to care. I don’t care, you don’t care, he doesn’t care… Who’s going to care?”

That’s the point, in the end: it’s not (just) about dogs, it’s about compassion. Constantina notes that the animal lovers she knows tend to be charitable in general, helping those in need whether two- or four-legged. After all, “doing an act of kindness, for an animal who needs you or for a human being, is also what makes you human. We all complain about other people’s behaviour – that they’re rude, they’re demanding and I don’t know what else. But change starts with us, not with other people”. She doesn’t come across as self-righteous – more a kindly, feisty, cheerful, impulsive woman who got in so deep, as she says, that she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get out. I leave her to it, brushing Toni’s fur off my shirt as I head back to the car.

THEO PANAYIDES meets the latest rising star of the government who is on a quest for excellence

Looking back, I should’ve probed a bit more for a vulnerable side. ‘Do you ever get depressed?’ I should’ve asked, or perhaps ‘Have you suffered any great personal crisis?’. But I guess she doesn’t, and she probably hasn’t. Sitting in her Nicosia office, Natasa Pilides – our newly appointed, and indeed first-ever, Deputy Minister of Shipping – looks every inch the poised, successful 37-year-old, a rising star of business and (now also) government.

The CV speaks for itself: a First with Distinction in Modern Languages and Literature (French and Italian) from Oxford University, then 12 years in the private sector as a chartered accountant – she was at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Baker Tilly – a couple as Director-General of the Cyprus Investment Promotion Agency (CIPA), and now this new job, to which she was appointed a month ago. Three different deputy ministries were actually going to be created (for Shipping, Tourism and Growth) but only the first ended up being approved by Parliament, which just goes to show how increasingly vital the sector is.

People may not realise what a monster shipping has become, especially in the five years since the haircut. “I think the important thing to communicate, even locally, is that Cyprus is a very small place but, in international maritime affairs, we have a voice that is much, much louder than what our size would imply,” she tells me. “We have the links at IMO level” – the IMO is the International Maritime Organisation – “and we have the links at EU level to actually be a major player”. Indeed, we already are a major player: Cyprus has the 11th-largest merchant fleet worldwide, and the third-largest in the EU.

More importantly, we now have what is known as a “full cluster” – not just ship ownership, but also ancillary services like ship insurance, management and chartering. (The turning point came in 2010 when we became the only EU country with a “fully EU-endorsed tonnage tax system”; no-one else has this, at least to the extent that we do.) The Turkish embargo is a problem, admits Natasa: shipowners are sometimes reluctant to take the Cyprus flag, just in case they ever have to sail to a Turkish port. Malta, for instance, has a much larger fleet than we do, for precisely this reason – “but we have a lot of the ship management companies that they don’t. For us, it’s a great advantage to have these companies, because we have substance. You know, if you go down Limassol there’s 200 companies, fully-fledged, with a lot of people working for them. I mean, some of the larger ones have 700-800 staff”. Thousands of people are employed “onshore” by the shipping industry, most of them Cypriots – not to mention some 50,000 seafarers on board our ships, who admittedly tend not to be Cypriots.

Limassol is also where her deputy ministry is based, with its 150 staff; the office in Nicosia is literally just an empty room in a government building that’s been set aside for when she has meetings. The plan is to decorate the walls with some maritime pictures eventually – but it’s still early days, very early in fact, and the room is entirely empty, the only personal touch being a small metal artwork in the shape of a ship, a parting gift from her colleagues at CIPA. Natasa is still a new face here, and the staff obviously dote on her. “You look beautiful, beautiful!” clucks the older woman from downstairs as the Deputy Minister poses for photos; I assume she feels a kind of vicarious pride in this confident young woman with the brown hair, broad toothy smile and smoothly articulate style. (Natasa’s English is fluent, with no trace of a Cypriot accent.) Later, Natasa’s personal assistant – another middle-aged civil servant – brings coffee and discreetly mentions some ongoing problem: copies have been made of a document but more are required, or perhaps there’s been a misunderstanding. He listens as she issues instructions, nodding solemnly.

She’s become more outgoing with age, Natasa tells me. What’s she like in a group of friends? “Oh, everyone thinks I have loads of news, they ask me what’s going on in my soap opera,” she replies airily. “Just because I’m always doing different things.” One can easily imagine her holding forth, filling in her friends on the latest; I suspect she talks more than she listens, though it’s not because she doesn’t listen – more because she likes to talk, and is obviously good at it. She may have been shyer as a child (young girls of a literary bent quite often are) – but it seems like the smoothness must always have been there, the natural poise of a clever girl from a prominent family. Her mum is curator of museums at the Department of Antiquities, a “very sort of academic person” who writes and lectures; her dad is a chartered accountant, and presumably part of the reason why Natasa did a job interview with PwC while in her penultimate year of college. She went to work straight after graduation.

Growing up was lovely, she recalls: “I’m very grateful. I think I’m a very lucky person, in that I had a lot of encouragement to do what I liked and pursue my objectives”. Part of that had to do with being a woman, and always being assured that her gender shouldn’t make any difference. As a teen, she made careful note of what times her younger brother came home after a night out, using statistics to protest the injustice if it turned out he was being allowed to stay out later than she was. Years later, she did feel the sting of sexism, though only briefly: “I think, when I was hired at CIPA there was a lot of – um, apprehension whether I’d be able to do a good job, as a woman,” she admits, shaking her head almost indulgently. “I think that’s bollocks, sorry for the term.”

“Marriage and all that” wasn’t really in her plans as a younger woman – she was too busy making presentations and learning about business finance – but, as it turns out, being appointed Deputy Minister is only the second most exciting thing that’s happened to her recently. She got married in 2016 (her husband is a maritime lawyer) and had a baby girl in the same year, motherhood having taken her slightly by surprise: five years ago, she was largely indifferent to having kids – but “I never expected it to be as rewarding,” she admits now, and in fact wouldn’t mind having more of the little blighters. Sounds like a lot to juggle, I point out. “Well, last time I had one, I had her on a Friday and I thought ‘That’s good, because I’ve got the weekend to stay in the clinic’!” she replies, laughing – and was back at work, albeit mostly from home, on Monday. You see what I mean about having to probe for a vulnerable side.

The baby is now being raised partly by her 80-year-old great-grandmother, Natasa’s grandma (what with people living longer and having kids later, octogenarians may end up being the child minders of the future). That’s in Nicosia, where Natasa lives – and she doesn’t plan to move, despite her new job, which is likely to prove rather hectic; not only are the working hours crazy, but she’ll also undoubtedly be called upon to attend social events in Limassol as part of the job, not getting home till very late. After all, she’s not just a civil servant: she’s the public face of Cyprus shipping, the lynchpin holding together all the various bits of our “cluster”.

There’s a larger question here, though it’s hard to phrase with precision. The main actors in Natasa’s new milieu – shipowners, management companies – are mostly non-Cypriots. So, one assumes, were many of the big companies she advised and audited as a chartered accountant; so were the investors she tried to attract at CIPA. Here, in other words, is one of our brightest and best – a top scholar, a highly intelligent and dynamic woman – who’s spent her entire career courting foreigners, in much the same way that Cyprus itself has pulled out of recession largely by attracting foreign capital (the ‘citizenship scheme’ being another good example), as opposed to supporting our own entrepreneurs or reforming the public sector. Shouldn’t we be doing more than just providing services? And what about her? Shouldn’t she be using all this ingenuity to improve local problems? She could be saving the Sea Caves or something.

She chuckles, sounding slightly nonplussed: “I think different people are good at different things,” she notes mildly. She does answer the question, however – pointing out that, while promoting entrepreneurship is indeed important (she ran various schemes in support of that while at CIPA), the “traditional route” only gets you so far. “You know, if you asked young people what they would do to be more entrepreneurial, probably a lot of them would say ‘Oh, I’d open a restaurant or a café’.” Bringing expertise from abroad in the shape of large, multicultural companies – not just shell companies with a lawyer and accountant, but “investments of substance” that’ll give Cypriots jobs and expose them to new ideas – is a much stronger way to “mobilise the local community” and create something world-class. It takes me a while to realise just how big shipping could potentially be for us, and how high a bar Natasa is aiming for. “I think Cyprus needs to be thinking about not doing everything, uh, mediocrely,” she cautions, “but doing a few things very, very well”.

Mediocrity is all but endemic here, of course – and the quest for excellence is a frequent motif for this pleasant but driven woman, whose path has run smoothly enough from an excellent degree to an excellent resumé. “If everyone tried to excel at what they do, there would be a completely different picture,” sighs Natasa Pilides at one point – ‘everyone’ being everyone in the civil service, though of course she can’t be too specific (she has nothing but praise for her own Department of Merchant Shipping). Her move from private to public sector has been slightly jarring – even with CIPA acting as a sort of halfway step – just because the rhythm is slower now, with more procedures to follow and sluggards to hurry along: “You have to keep pushing people to do things at a faster pace, if that’s what you want”. The party line about government departments being understaffed is duly trotted out – but she also adds, to her credit, that the understaffing is “because we don’t tackle the problems of underperformance”, i.e. some people work and others sit around. It must be frustrating for a high-achieving type like herself.

What about the future? Might she go into politics someday? “I’m not the sort of person who plans out their life,” she replies, perhaps ingenuously. “I don’t know. I’d quite like to go back to the private sector at some point, I think”. Meanwhile, there are challenges. The Turkish embargo is a thorn in the side of our shipping sector – and we also have to shake off some lingering doubts from the old days, when Cyprus had less “substance” and was more of a flag of convenience. “I mean, it’s more difficult [now] to open a bank account in Cyprus than in any other EU country, pretty much,” she protests (maybe not Britain, “but France and Germany for sure”): we’ve made major strides in becoming more heavily regulated, but the old reputation dies hard – and of course that’s the tightrope to be walked, playing by the rules while keeping our competitive advantage. It’s no easy task.

‘What’s your greatest strength as a person?’ I wonder. “I think I’m very optimistic,” replies Natasa after some thought, “and it makes life easier, more positive”. She does come across as quite sanguine and open – and there’s even a vulnerable side, even if I don’t really probe for it. That literature degree was no fluke; she’s written three novels in her free time (such as it is), albeit unpublished ones and “not very good ones, I think” – and she also plays the piano, speaking of things artistic, though that whole side of herself is somewhat concealed. “It’s weird, because I’m not shy at all about giving presentations and public speaking and stuff – but I get complete stage fright playing the piano, and I’m also very shy about showing people the things I write,” she admits rather ruefully. “So it’s weird. I have split personality, I guess.” Just as long as one of them makes a hit of our shipping sector.

After contentious posts on Facebook, THEO PANAYIDES meets an easy-going psychology professor who turns into a zealous activist against issues such as bullying and racism

The post on Facebook – the reason why I’m here, in this small bare office at the University of Cyprus, though not the only reason – went up on March 23 on the personal page of Panayiotis Stavrinides, Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology. That was the day when elections were held for the university’s student union and far-right party Elam won a seat on the governing committee for the first time, prompting Panayiotis’ response: “If one of my students declares themselves to be an admirer or supporter of Hitler, I will fail them for their political beliefs regardless of how well they do on the course,” he wrote firmly, adding: “Zero tolerance for neo-Nazis”.

The post currently has 593 likes and 31 shares, which is impressive though hardly earth-shattering. No-one at the university – whether student or staff – has even mentioned it, shrugs Panayiotis, and the comments on his page are mostly positive. Still, it’s sparked some discussion and “there was also intimidation,” he says, though not to his face; social-media discourse being what it is, those enraged by the post have mostly seethed among themselves, egging each other on and posting humiliating things about him. A right-wing former MP impugned his masculinity, “calling me a lady, then someone said ‘Someone should go and break his face’ and he agreed”. Such reactions are sadly inevitable – but the case also raises interesting questions for neutrals, especially on the limits (if any) on freedom of speech. Simply put, is it ever right to fail a student (or fire an employee, for instance) because of their political beliefs, no matter how repugnant one finds those beliefs?

Panayiotis seems an unlikely vessel for such strongly-held views – a thin, bespectacled, almost birdlike, rather sad-eyed man with a mild, amiable manner. He’s as old as the Cyprus problem, having been born in 1974 (albeit in January, a few months before the invasion), and mentions that fact with a kind of wry gallows humour, as if weighed down by its symbolic significance. His style doesn’t seem that of a provocateur. “I honestly do not enjoy confrontation,” he says. “I enjoy debating”. Online debates tend to turn ugly nowadays, I point out. Yes, he agrees, but he tries to avoid escalation, “and when I see that it gets out of control, I’m the one who will eventually withdraw. I’m not here for ‘red meat’, as they say in the United States. I’m here for advocating, debating, discussing”.

He has a tendency to play things down – or perhaps they really are so unremarkable, who knows. He’s twice run for high public office, for MEP in 2014 and mayor of Nicosia in 2016, both times backed by Akel (he won a respectable 31 per cent in the mayoral elections, and 10,000 votes for his EU ambitions), but makes it sound like an interesting experiment he conducted as a sideline, with no realistic hope of succeeding: “At least I provided an alternative voice”. Our conversation isn’t frustrating per se – he’s too amiable for that – but it is rather anti-climactic, with me pointing out all the dots one could plausibly connect in dissecting his personality, and Panayiotis gently insisting that there’s nothing to connect.

Here’s one dot: he lost his mother (to cancer) at the age of five, the kind of trauma that could lead – at least conceivably – to a lifelong yearning for the sense of security that comes with a mother’s unconditional love (and might be channelled, for instance, into strongly-held political views without many shades of grey). Another dot: his published work specialises in childhood bullying, especially as it relates to parenting – he and his colleagues have published papers with titles like ‘Parenting at home and bullying at school’ and ‘Authoritarian parenting, power distance and bullying propensity’ – which seems clearly linked to his years of “advocating” against forms of social bullying like racism and homophobia, and possibly related to his own childhood.

I lay out the dots, but he stubbornly denies the existence of a bigger picture. “You know, some things happen coincidentally in life, we don’t have to find deep explanations”. His professional focus on bullying is just a useful way of exploring the topic of childhood aggression, without any personal resonance. He himself wasn’t bullied at school, nor were his parents authoritarian. “Trust me, I’m 1,000 per cent honest! I had wonderful parenting. Dad was – just an idol to us”. His dad remarried soon after the death of his first wife, and Panayiotis had (and has) a fine relationship with his stepmother and two half-siblings. Losing his mother was devastating, of course, but “there is resilience”; overall, he has happy memories of childhood in a now-vanished Cyprus – not just before social media but even before colour TV, with the post-invasion scars of refugees and soup kitchens but also, for instance, playing in the fields with the neighbourhood kids and his grandma throwing down a treat of bread with margarine and sugar from the window of their flat, wrapped in a plastic bag so he could eat while playing. The family weren’t rich, and he later worked in diners to make ends meet – 12-hour shifts, 7pm to 7am, three nights a week – while doing his first degree in New York; his dad was a psychiatric nurse at the Nicosia mental hospital, another dot Panayiotis refuses to connect. “I think I was curious. I was curious about human nature,” he says vaguely, trying to pinpoint what pushed him into Psychology.

I’m not getting many traumatic experiences out of you, I observe good-humouredly.

“I would lie if I said anything else. Mostly my life has been a normal, smooth life of an average person fulfilling some of his aspirations.”

Maybe. Then again, the average person doesn’t usually run for a seat in the European Parliament, or write articles on social issues (much of his public writing appears on a platform called cyprusnews.eu), or get invited on TV talk-shows to argue for the separation of Church and State. That’s “my, let’s say, activistic side,” sighs Panayiotis, quickly adding that he’s by no means a major figure in the activist community – but that’s one dot he grudgingly agrees to connect, the link between his interest in individual bullying and societal bullying, oppression, call it what you will. “I’ve been advocating about gender equality, gay rights, and of course against bullying in schools or in the workplace. When you’re a social scientist, at some point, whether you like it or not, you become somewhat of a – I don’t know, social activist, or a ‘public intellectual’ if I may use this term,” he admits, his pained demeanour suggesting that he’d really rather not use the term, if at all possible.

Panayiotis with other Akel candidates for MEPs

Strangely enough, the fact that he is (or appears) so moderate only adds to the certitude of his beliefs. Someone who rants and raves, after all, could potentially be moved – passion is changeable – but someone so calm and unexcitable is settled in his mind; he’s just noting things as they are. Take his Facebook post, for instance. “You know that I train psychologists, right?” he begins by way of explanation. “Can you imagine someone practising psychology and believing in superior races? Believing in the usefulness of eugenics? Believing that gays are basically mentally and physically ill?… This is total absence of basic psychological knowledge”. Panayiotis’ point is that someone with neo-Nazi views could never be allowed to be a scientist, simply because those views go against science. It would be “like giving a medical degree to a serial killer,” as he wrote in a follow-up post – or perhaps, to give a more sensational example, like giving a teaching degree to someone who admits to a sexual interest in children. It would be unethical.

There’s a big debate to be had here – and I must admit I don’t wade into it, partly because I don’t feel qualified to do so. Is the science really as settled as he claims? (Maybe it is; then again, it’d take a very brave university to fund new research into such incendiary topics, even if it wasn’t.) There are also practical issues with the statement he made on Facebook. Can’t a psychologist hold his private beliefs, yet still be professional in his work? What if the hypothetical Hitler-admiring student passed his exams by giving the ‘right’ answers, as opposed to what he believed? (“Then this person is not a true believer,” smiles Panayiotis, slightly ingenuously.) Above all, what about freedom of speech? Isn’t a person allowed to believe what they want, in a democratic society?

“Democracy has limits, right?” he replies, quoting Karl Popper’s aphorism that the only way to maintain a tolerant society is to be intolerant of intolerance. He rejects the notion of a polarised world pitting extreme Left against extreme Right: “There is one side that talks about racism, about hate, against the rights of gay people and the LGBTI community, against basic human rights – and then all the rest do not talk about this. That’s the distinction, in my mind… Whether the Left can debate with the Right about privatisation, how we should govern, public services – all that is good, and I’m not sure many times which [side] is better to follow. But all these are part of the democratic debate. Hate ideology is not.”

Panayiotis Stavrinides is surely a ‘true believer’, to use his own phrase – though not an angry one, at least not overtly. His style is affable, but his ideas are uncompromising. I mention one of my current bugbears, the way the definition of ‘hate ideology’ seems to have expanded to include even jokes – but he sees nothing wrong with that. “I don’t know, I think sexist jokes, or racist jokes, should always be bad,” he replies with his usual mildness. He even seems to approve of the recent fuss (mostly on Twitter) where jokes from 90s sitcoms like Friends and Seinfeld were filtered through today’s sensitivities and proclaimed ‘problematic’: “Societies change, and I think it’s a good thing that we develop resistance against things we used to do in a bad way in the past. Does this mean that we have to lose our humour? No, I don’t feel I lost my sense of humour. But there’s humour, and then there is – being an asshole.”

Maybe that’s the key, in the end. Maybe that’s what really upsets him about bullies, whether in the playground or the public sphere, not so much their politics but simply the ‘asshole’ behaviour of picking on others. His biggest frustration, he says – rather surprisingly, for someone so fond of debate – is “rudeness [and] lack of manners”; he can’t abide people being nasty. The affable manner isn’t a façade, it seems, it’s the actual person. How can he be so easy-going, I wonder, yet still such a zealous activist?

“You can advocate,” shrugs Panayiotis, “but at the same time you can be very – down-to-earth? I don’t know, introverted? Laid-back?” He himself is quite understated, when not appearing on talk-shows and making controversial Facebook posts. “I enjoy the relaxed life. I’m not much of an adventurer or anything. I like to travel, but – as I say to my fiancée, I wouldn’t go bungee-jumping”. He likes quiet pastimes: books, movies, long walks, going out to dinner. Then of course there’s the fiancée – they’ve been together for two years; he proposed last Christmas – the start of a hoped-for new chapter in his life. At 44, he’s finally looking forward to becoming a dad. “I think I’m ready”.

Family life may make him more circumspect. Even if threats of violence are mostly idle bluster on social media, he’s very conscious of the fact that he’s not alone anymore; he needs to think of his loved ones. Nor is he likely to stand for public office again anytime soon; “I think I’m done with elections”. It’s even possible that Panayiotis’ political views will eventually take on a convivial mildness to match his demeanour, as he grows older.

Possible, but not very likely. One could take issue – and comments on Facebook have done so – with the assistant professor’s zero-tolerance tactics, pointing out that ostracising an 18-year-old for neo-Nazi views is only going to make those views seem more potent, and drive him (or her) further into their embrace; much better to engage with the student, and argue the case against their beliefs. I might also add – though I realise it’s kind of a side-issue – that any political agenda which ends up policing humour, or upbraiding Friends and Seinfeld for simply being made in the past, has lost all sense of measure or historical perspective. All this, however, is by the way when it comes to Panayiotis Stavrinides – because his left-wing politics is deep-seated, mixed up in his mind with good manners, with the post-invasion solidarity of the Cyprus he remembers from childhood, and of course with the empathy he feels for the weak, the bullied, and people in general. “Freud used to say, ‘A healthy adult is someone who can love and work’,” notes Panayiotis. For him, the two are identical.

As environmental consciousness gathers pace on the island THEO PANAYIDES meets an activist on a mission to promote rational democratic debate and wipe out procedural sloppiness

The setting is a house in Kaimakli, one of the few remaining parts of Nicosia where you can live quite well – or at least spaciously – for a reasonable rent. It’s an old house, the kind with a front porch and a scrubby little garden, on a narrow side-street with no casual traffic. I sit in the living room with Klitos Papastylianou, chatting idly while his partner Maria makes us Cyprus coffee.

The room has its share of quirky décor – there’s a vintage gramophone record player, like in the old His Master’s Voice logo – but is notable mainly for its books, shelf upon shelf of them. They appear to be mostly non-fiction, a quick perusal throwing up many of the usual suspects. Introducing Marx and The Greenpeace Reader. 100 Years of Socialism (two volumes). Eric Hobsbawm and Noam Chomsky. Klitos is currently reading a book by the late Argentinian anarchist theoretician Eduardo Colombo titled La volonté du peuple, ‘The Will of the People’. What’s it about? It’s about “the relationship between political power and democratic forms of governance,” he explains soberly.

Books are important, being his main form of relaxation: “If I want to have some rest, and just stay away from things for a couple of days, the usual solution is ‘Let’s find a good book’”. The reasonable rent is also important, since he hasn’t held a full-time job since the end of 2015 (he takes on occasional projects, and Maria works as a researcher at the University of Cyprus); this was a personal choice, made so he could focus on protecting – ‘saving’, some would say – the Akamas peninsula. Klitos has been an environmental activist since university in Greece (he’s now 35), having worked at Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, as a policy advisor to the Committee Against Bird Slaughter and the Foundation Pro Biodiversity, plus a few months at Birdlife Cyprus. He’s now a leading light of the Cyprus Initiative for the Protection of the Natural Coastline, calling on Cypriots to ‘reclaim the sea’ in the face of marinas, bulldozed beaches and the recent fracas over villas being built near the Peyia sea caves, one of a handful of nesting-grounds for our tiny population of Mediterranean monk seals.

We’re here to talk about him, but we end up talking mostly about ecological disasters (or near-disasters). This is probably inevitable. Environmentalism in Cyprus is a many-headed hydra; no sooner have you lopped off one head, than another appears. It’s also true that Klitos’ personal life has been largely subsumed in his work, leaving little to talk about. His look is memorable, certainly: sharp chin and nose, very narrow – almost slit-like – green eyes, receding hairline, bushy goatee. He looks like a hippy but talks like a technocrat, rattling off the title of this or that EU directive. “One of the main problems of the Green movement in Cyprus,” he complains at one point, sounding rather schoolmarmish, “is that, in some cases, there is not the appropriate documentation and argumentation.”

He speaks slowly and a little long-windedly, counting arguments off on his fingers, pausing only to roll himself a cigarette. Smoking is his only real vice, that and beer (he stopped drinking spirits in his 20s, after having overdone it as a teenager; “Just a single shot of zivania can knock me out” nowadays). His hobbies are simple enough: reading, swimming, hiking, hanging out with friends. What’s he like in company? Does he tend to be the centre of attention?

Not at all, he chuckles, shaking his head.

Does he make people laugh?

“They say that my sense of humour is really bad!” he replies ruefully. “I don’t want to believe that – but unfortunately, that is what they say.”

I’m sure it can’t be that bad – but Klitos does come off as a serious character. His trademark phrase (he mentions it a half-dozen times in the course of our conversation) is “a rational democratic debate”, which is what he’d like to see happen in Cyprus. In the past, it may sometimes have seemed like such debate was impossible, simply because only one side – ‘his’ side – was eager to talk; the vast majority of Cypriot society, especially those in positions of authority, seemed happy to stick with what he calls the “tourist monoculture model” of relentless development. In the past couple of years, however, a number of high-profile cases have made him a little more hopeful – or at least more convinced that people like himself and Maria aren’t necessarily misfits, and “something, at least underground”, may be gathering pace.

“A quad bike in Limni beach destroys 19 nests of turtles,” he says, listing the cases. “Then a concert and a wedding ceremony in Asprokremos beach” (this was last year’s Russian wedding at the Anassa, with Christina Aguilera flown in to sing for the couple), “then illegal bars in Lara Bay, then the villas and the hotel in the sea caves. Then you have the mayor of Paralimni destroying with a bulldozer anything natural left in the coastline, from Cape Greco to Kapparis! Then you have the case of Ammos tou Kambouri near Cape Greco, one of the worst environmental crimes in terms of Nature conservation that took place in Cyprus”. This was a case of a private bulldozer cutting up the coastline to create an artificial marina, all in a ‘Natura 2000’ (i.e. protected) zone; the case is now in court.

“Through these cases, and the discussion taking place, I think a lot of people are now – at least hopefully – understanding that these people [i.e. himself and his fellow environmentalists] are not crazy, hippy-yippy ecologists who say ‘Let’s return back to Nature’,” he concludes earnestly. “You can have the development – but you have to do it in a right way.”

There are two sides to this equation. The first is that, whether because land is running out or because years of indulgence have pushed us down a slippery slope, infringements are becoming more outrageous. Much like the issue of illegal bird trapping, which used to be relatively small-scale but has swelled in recent years, the issue of unchecked development is becoming harder to ignore. Images like the villas being built literally on top of the sea caves are so obviously, surreally wrong they’ve made even neutrals (who never previously cared much for the environment) sit up and pay attention. The other side, however, as implied in what Klitos is saying, is that – contrary to popular belief – most eco-activists aren’t actually calling for a ban on building. They just want the law to be respected.

He himself isn’t “hippy-yippy’. He’s not looking for the whole of Akamas to remain virgin territory. When it comes to the sea caves, for instance, he doesn’t even think a “white zone” (ie a halt to development) is necessary to protect the monk seals; a buffer zone of 200m should be enough. He understands the fears of Peyia locals worried about losing their land, and regrets that “a lot of stakeholders – political parties, MPs – proposed a white zone without defining it” (this may be a dig at Green party MP George Perdikis, who’s divisive in local eco-circles). Klitos isn’t an extremist, or especially militant; he’s the activist you can talk to, even if ‘you’ are the crusty old community leader of a Paphos village. His trump card, he explains, is that he has roots in the area – his grandparents were from Tsada and Milikouri – and indeed owns property in Akamas, most of it within protection zones, so they see him as a fellow landowner. His trump card with civil servants and government departments, on the other hand, is that he reads – not just books, but laws and directives – and knows when the rules aren’t being followed.

“A major problem, which we are facing for at least a decade now, is called Article 6, paragraph 3 of the Habitats Directive,” he explains with his usual precision. That’s the EU directive calling for projects which could impact a ‘Natura 2000’ protected area to undergo an assessment study – but this doesn’t always happen, and indeed there are dozens of cases of projects in Cyprus being approved without any proper assessment. It’s a sore point with Klitos, who often seems outraged by procedural sloppiness and illegality more than anything. When we talk about the towers, for instance, as we do a little later – meaning the two dozen towers due to be built on the seafront in Limassol, including all around the ancient city of Amathus – he makes clear that he’s not against towers per se, but the policy in question was launched in 2013 “with a single decision of the Ministerial Council, without even a plan!… So anyone can build anything anywhere!” He shakes his head, looking aghast: “I could be extremist and say ‘no’ to high towers. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying [to the authorities] that you’re not even following the main provisions of the environmental acquis.”

A demo against building in the Akamas

At this point, some may wonder if they’re talking to an activist or a legal advisor (the ‘acquis’ is the ‘acquis communautaire’, or EU law); then again, part of the paradox in Cyprus is that the law exists, it’s just not being implemented. The EU is the great unspoken here, and indeed Klitos is being a little sneaky in insisting that he ‘only’ wants the law to be followed; any real assessment based on the Habitats Directive would surely lead to projects being stymied, in the majority of cases. One might even wonder if the presence of the EU makes things worse, like an authoritarian father whose prying makes his children less independent: it’s almost as if our authorities – who might otherwise have solved the problem on their own – wash their hands of decision-making, chafing at the rules and secretly pretending that all is well until the EU complains.

It does annoy him to be running off to Brussels all the time, admits Klitos, “but unfortunately in Cyprus you feel that, most of the time, you have to get to that point. I mean, nobody listens! It’s like throwing eggs at the wall”. One idea is to become more militant, going “from demonstrative to disruptive” as he puts it – blocking highways, occupying premises – but he doesn’t think “the political culture in Cyprus” would welcome that kind of protest. He’s so measured, so reasonable; yet his life can’t be easy, even beyond financial worries. “It can be lonely being an environmental activist in Cyprus,” wrote Politico (politico.eu) on its recent list of the ‘Politico 28’, naming Klitos – at No. 28 – among “the 28 people who are shaping, shaking and stirring Europe”. That was for his work against bird trapping, though in fact such perilous fieldwork – tracking illegal activities, dismantling nets, sometimes tangling with poachers – isn’t really his forte, at least not anymore. Nowadays he’s more of a strategist and an intellectual, seeking the rational democratic debate that could change our mentality.

Meanwhile that mentality persists, making his work an uphill struggle. He lists a few of the many absurdities. Out of 6,500 buildings in Peyia, 3,000 are empty (either for sale or derelict) and another 1,500 are holiday homes – yet developers want to build even more, despite the obvious surplus. Over in Khapotami, the largest wind farm in Cyprus sits right in the middle of “one of the most important special-protection areas” for birds of prey on the island – and now a new project is being mooted, adding 350 villas adjacent to the wind farm. Up in Limni, a well-known businessman won a permit for two golf courses, 792 villas and 50 bungalows, all in a ‘Natura 2000’ area and next to the Polis-Yialis turtle beach (the permit was eventually revoked, much to Klitos’ amazement, when the EU threatened to take us to court). Over on the east coast, above the din of bulldozers, the coastline has been wrecked to build a marina plus two towers in Ayia Thekla, prompting Sotira municipality to demand its own marina (this ‘Me too’ mindset is a big part of the problem). Further west, Paramali village – an old Turkish Cypriot village – was expropriated then partly demolished to make way for a road that leads only to a golf course, which was then handed over to the private company building the golf course.

There’s more; more infringements, more absurdities. We talk for two hours, and barely scratch the surface. Simply put, the work never ends. “We are a bit eco-holics,” jokes Klitos, of himself and his comrades; “We are always talking about sustainability, but we don’t have sustainability in our own lives.” He and Maria want kids, he says (they met, unsurprisingly, through work, at an eco-event where he was on the panel and she in the audience), and he also needs to get back into full-time employment soon. The current lifestyle just isn’t sustainable.

Klitos could – maybe even should – have been an academic; he left a PhD at the last moment, drifting instead into activism. Research and theory may have suited this bookish fellow better, but he doesn’t regret it. “In the classic dilemma of political science and philosophy,” he opines rather grandly, “I think that the optimism of action is better than the pessimism of thought!”. I say goodbye and drive off, down the narrow side-street and back to the main road. Still in Kaimakli, I suddenly notice the graffiti, spray-painted green on a yellow brick wall down the road from the Zampelas Art Museum: “SAVE AKAMAS”.

With their most high-profile building to be inaugurated this week by the president, THEO PANAYIDES meets an architect couple with one foot in art and the other in life

Next Thursday, May 3, a long-awaited ceremony is due to take place in Limassol: the inauguration of the New Limassol Port Passenger Terminal, a wildly distinctive building – it looks like six huge, oval steel pipes plonked down in the middle of the port, or six plump cannelloni on a plate if you want to be irreverent about it – with a design that was first approved in 2004. The official opening marks the end of a chapter for Irwin Kritioti, the Nicosia-based architectural office which designed the terminal (getting nominated for the EU’s Mies van der Rohe Award in the process) as well as another public building, the new Nicosia town hall which is now – 21 years after they first won the project – in the final stages of completion.

Irwin Kritioti are Dickon Irwin and Margarita Kritioti – and that’s about it, their open-plan office (in the centre of Nicosia, in a building full of architects) housing a total of just four or five people, including themselves. It used to be three times that number, but architecture was among the worst-affected sectors after our economy hit the rocks five years ago. It’s been quite a stressful time for Dickon and Margarita – made even more (or less?) stressful by the fact that they happen to be a married couple as well as business partners.

This is actually not so uncommon, she tells me. Architects often marry other architects – and admittedly get divorced quite often too, but then they “marry architects again”! It’s “because of the funny hours, and because of the obsession part,” adds Dickon. Their hours are indeed very long; they’ve even had to work through the night on occasion, especially as deadlines loomed for this or that competition. “We pulled an all-nighter while you were pregnant,” he reminds her, with the joshing air of old friends recalling a youthful prank; “In fact, both times you were pregnant.” Their younger child is around the same age as the design for the passenger terminal. “You learn at college to be able to run two or three days non-stop,” he explains, noting my surprise.

“Not at this age!” demurs Margarita. “You don’t bounce back so easily.” She’s now 53, Dickon 52. He likes to put up something every year representing the number of his age, he tells me, as a kind of reminder; last year it was a ‘Pastis 51’ fridge magnet, this year it might be a calendar (52 weeks in a year, get it?). The implication is that age is an irrelevance, easily forgotten unless you make an effort to remember it – the couple make a point of being casual about precise dates; we never quite pinpoint the year when they married, though we know it was sometime in the late 90s – the larger implication, especially for Dickon, being that one mustn’t get bogged down in banal things like getting older; all that matters is the work. His designs are meticulously detailed, notes his wife admiringly – but, despite being so diligent at work, he’ll happily let things slide outside of it. “I’d probably let my car run into the ground by not phoning the garage. She will get the cars to the garage.”

Why the difference?

I don’t have time for cars, he shrugs. “If I’ve got spare time, I’m trying to back up on the philosophy side [of architecture], the theoretical side… So the car can just fall apart, far as I’m concerned!”. He tends to be the couple’s ideas man, while Margarita is often better at execution. “And I’m aware of that. I’m aware of that difference.”

Dickon is round-faced, talkative, intense, Margarita more twinkly and deliberate. He leaps at questions like a hunting dog, she approaches them more in the way of a little girl faced with a six-foot-high birthday cake, delight mixed with a slight apprehension. He’s the son of art historians, her people were mostly engineers. He was born in Glasgow, growing up there and in Aberdeen – though in fact the family travelled widely (his parents loved Greece; their cottage in Scotland was painted white with blue windows), mixing with other artistic types. “I felt that we were part of a bigger world, and that world was art and creativity,” he recalls of his childhood. “That’s always been the point!” Margarita, meanwhile, grew up in Cyprus, only really finding herself after going off to MIT – initially to study Marine Biology, switching to Architecture in her second year.

They met in London while doing a Master’s in Advanced Architectural Studies at UCL. “I remember the first time I heard Dickon talk, I thought he sounded so English!” she recalls with a chuckle, not really meaning it as a compliment. He was UCL and Cambridge; she was thoroughly Americanised, down to the strong accent (which she’s now shed). “We didn’t really like each other when we first met.”

“You should also mention that we were the two students who asked the most questions,” he puts in. I suspect they were similar people – similarly active and engaged – with different personalities and backgrounds. An assistant professor inadvertently played matchmaker, putting them to work on a joint project, and the rest is history. (They met this man again years later, when he came to Cyprus for a lecture; he was mildly stunned to see them still together.) That said, it’s significant that work – and the realisation that they worked well together – was what made them a couple in the first place. “I think we’re together, probably, because of architecture,” muses Margarita, meaning that they may be too different to have survived without it.

“We share some children now as well,” he adds mischievously.

Work and kids aside, they have different interests. He loves skiing, “I like the space and the light”. She loves deep-sea diving, which he finds claustrophobic. Once again, he’s more about freedom, she’s more about controlled execution; one goes up, the other down. (They both love hill-walking, so I guess they meet in the middle.) Mostly, however, their life together revolves around work, not just during office hours but even when they travel together: to Venice for the Biennale every two years, or else visiting cities for research. When they designed the Cyprus State Archive in 1999 – a competition they won, but the funding never materialised – they studied archives in London, Paris and Edinburgh; for the Limassol passenger terminal, they checked out terminals in Rotterdam and Barcelona (as well as a famous one in Yokohama, but without actually going there). Travel used to be all-important, says Dickon, “we’d drag our babies around architecture all over the world – but that’s not unusual for architects, they’re terrible at that!”.

“We still do that,” points out Margarita.

“We still do that,” he agrees.

“It sounds like it was in the past.”

“It feels like it was in the past. But no, we still do that. Not as much, we’ve relaxed a bit from that – because you also realise that what’s really important is how people live,” he muses, “and how they assemble, and life itself. You know, architecture starts becoming a container for life… rather than the thing itself.”

There’s a sharp distinction there, getting down to the slight schizophrenia at the heart of their profession. Buildings, after all – or just spaces in general – have to be beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, yet they also need to be functional. Architecture is an art, to be sure, yet it’s also “a container for life” – a side that Dickon, in particular, may have been less attuned to, especially as a younger man. He comes across as a full-on aesthete, with a faith in unfettered self-expression and perhaps a hint of snobbery in his makeup. His eye is painterly; he can (and does) go on at length about the light in the Aegean vs. the light on the west coast of Scotland. He raves about the Limassol terminal being an “ocular building”, like an eye that guides our own eye to the workings of the port, whereas Margarita has a more mundane explanation for its design: the six cylinders originated in their realisation that the building has six discrete units – Arrivals, Departures, etc – with different functions.

The practice of architecture is itself slightly schizophrenic. The c-word – ‘creativity’ – crops up again and again in our interview. (Even when I ask if they like a drink, for instance: “Is there anyone in the creative environment who doesn’t drink?”) There’s a slight sense of protesting too much here, as if architects – more than, say, painters – need to keep reminding themselves of the creative side of their job, precisely because it so often gets smothered in signing contracts and organising builders. For Dickon there’s another, related duality, the fact that he’s lived in Cyprus for 23 years but isn’t really part of the place: “I’ve always felt that I was living here and somewhere else”. For one thing, he still only has “builder’s Greek”, as he puts it – but it’s not just the language, it’s also that he’s spent his whole life, from childhood onwards, living internationally. “It’s the same with Cyprus. If I took it too seriously I might think ‘Oh my goodness’ – I mean, it’s a very small place! But you don’t, because you meet people who are also thinking larger than the island, and connected outside, and travelling”. Another way of putting it is that – much like architecture itself – he has one foot in art and the other in life. He lives in the world of his own creativity.

Margarita is a kind of local guide in this scenario (she’s the one who brought him here, having popped back in 1995 to try for a local competition: “I called Dickon [who was working in London], I said ‘Dickon, I need help. I can’t find anyone on this island who understands what I’m talking about!’”), guiding the foreigner just as she guides his ideas to fruition – though it certainly wouldn’t be true to imply that she has no ideas of her own. Their working relationship is an ongoing dialogue “based on contesting what the other one said”, their only rule (which comes naturally, out of mutual respect) being to listen to the other, and be open to what they’re saying. “What we won’t do,” he says, “is pick an idea and then fight for that regardless”.

Still, he adds soberly, creative dialogue doesn’t always – or often – go smoothly; “It’s very jumpy, and can be quite argumentative”. Do they lose their tempers? “Yes,” replies Margarita instantly. “Oh yeah,” confirms her husband.

So then, is it wise to be married on top of that?

“No, no, it’s a very difficult thing.”

“Definitely not!”

“You know,” muses Margarita when the chuckles have subsided, “the most difficult thing is that you cannot dissociate from your work – and being an architect anyway, you are doing architecture 24 hours a day. So the good thing is you have someone to discuss everything with, which is fantastic. But the bad thing – the difficult thing – is you don’t have anybody to just, you know, let off steam to, or to tell them something they don’t already know… Now the kids are older, it’s easier,” she allows with a smile.

Take all of the above, then add one final twist: the changing milieu of the past 20 years – especially for a company, like Irwin Kritioti, specialising in large public projects. They’ve won four competitions in that vein; two of those buildings (Engomi town hall and the State Archive) fell through, the other two (Nicosia town hall and the Limassol terminal) have taken years, complicated by endless re-designs – the town hall has been comprehensively revised about 12 times – and the economic crisis. Meanwhile, the post-crash environment has no room for creativity; decisions are based on cost, fees have plummeted “to a point where it’s starting to become ridiculous”, the government now tends to prefer BOT (Build, Operate, Transfer) projects which are purely about the lowest tender, as opposed to the best design. They’ve thought more than once about shutting up shop and moving back to the UK – and may yet end up doing that, if Plan A (trying for competitions abroad while based in Cyprus) doesn’t pan out.

Meanwhile there’s the inauguration on Thursday, with President Anastasiades cutting the ribbon and no end of speeches praising the couple’s good work – a full-stop of sorts (or perhaps a semi-colon, waiting for the town hall to receive its last tranche of funding and finish the chapter) on two decades of a personal and professional relationship. Dickon and Margarita seem a bit like the couple in The 39 Steps, who get handcuffed together and end up falling in love: their bond – their work – seems to be almost too close, as if asking for trouble, yet it’s also what’s kept them going.

“We’re so passionate about what we do,” she laughs, “that we don’t leave enough time to –”

“Argue,” completes Dickon.

“The times we really feel like a family are when we go on holiday with the kids.”

“And then, like any holiday, you start arguing for two days non-stop – then, after you’ve got over that problem, it’s really nice!”. He laughs, sitting in the open-plan office with files stacked on shelves and windows all around, thinking of those rare occasions when their marriage is just another marriage. A few fleeting glimpses of life without architecture.

In one of the world’s great film directors THEO PANAYIDES meets a man with surging energy and compassion for all, ever since giving up wild living to thank God for a ‘low-key boring life’

Abel Ferrara doesn’t really make eye contact. Sitting in the lobby of the Mediterranean Beach Hotel in Limassol (he’s here for a week, as president of the jury at the Cyprus Film Days festival), he answers all my questions but gazes at a spot just above my right shoulder, as if seeking inspiration in the ebb and flow of tourists behind me. Talking to him – at least in interview mode – is a little like feeding a slot machine. You put in your coins, there’s a flurry of excitement, then you end up with some odd, sometimes brilliant permutation – the fact that you don’t know in advance what you’re going to get being, of course, part of the deal.

He rants, lobbing out words in the kind of Noo Yawk accent that requires a tightly-clenched jaw. He shambles, hunched over like a man with a sack of potatoes. His chin juts out, his teeth are crooked, his hair a silver-grey crown perched atop a long, egg-shaped head. His energy is restless and impatient, even when he’s trying to be nice – which he is almost all the time these days, since converting to Buddhism in the late 00s (more on this later). His replies pick up steam, sometimes petering out, finding his way as he goes, peppered with constant ‘y’know’s, bits of antiquated hipster slang and casual f-bombs – speaking of which, note that this profile will contain some colourful language. It seems a shame to dilute the man.

“Could I have some water, please?” he calls at one point. A waitress apologises for not having come to us earlier, explaining that she wasn’t sure whether to interrupt (like I said, his energy is combustible). “The usual?” she asks, and he nods. ‘The usual’ turns out to be a large bottle of Perrier which he startles me by sticking in his mouth, still unopened – then he grips the top with his teeth and twists it off lustily before knocking the bottle back for a big gulp, ignoring the proffered glass.

10 years ago, this would’ve been a very different interview – if only because he certainly wouldn’t have been knocking back Perrier. Ferrara is one of the world’s great film directors but was also, for many years, notorious for his wild living, where ‘wild living’ is a euphemism for alcohol-and-drug addiction. “We never stopped,” he explains, ‘we’ being presumably a nod to himself and his crew of friends (or just the royal ‘we’, who knows). “From the day I smoked my first joint, we never stopped. We were like rock’n rollers, rebels, that was our – y’know, badge of honour, man.”

Could he function enough to make films while wasted?

“Obviously!” he barks with a dry laugh. “I mean, we made them all. We made all those films while we were users. But I was under the illusion that I couldn’t do it without it. You understand? I couldn’t shoot, I couldn’t edit, I couldn’t have a relationship with a woman, I couldn’t be interviewed by you unless I had – a couple of beers, couple of lines of blow, whatever bullshit. You understand?”

His films, especially in the 80s and 90s, reflect who he was at the time, adding fuel to his legend. Addiction courses through almost all of them, even the one actually named The Addiction (made in 1995); there’s drugged-out Harvey Keitel as the Bad Lieutenant (1992) – but also, for instance, 18-year-old Zoe Lund in one of his earliest films, Ms. 45 (1981), taking revenge on the men who raped her only to find herself becoming addicted to punishing sex in general (by the end, she’s trying to kill some random guy for kissing his girlfriend). That’s another strand, especially in the early films – most of them written by Ferrara’s childhood friend Nicholas St. John – the presence of guilt and punishment, harking back to his background as a “very heavy Catholic”.

He was born in The Bronx, staunchly Italian-American (though with an Irish mother). “My father was a blue-collar worker, basically. Some of his life he was a bookmaker, he was kind of a bar owner… Yeah, he was an interesting character”. The legend works best with the young Abel cast as a rebel and a street-brawler – but in fact he came “from a very supportive, loving family”, went to film school in upstate New York and generally grew up in the idyllic early 60s, “the quote-unquote real America” when the sky was the limit. Catholic schooling was imbibed as part of the culture. “Y’know, I’m a Buddhist now, but I didn’t become a Buddhist till I was 60 years old,” he raps out a little ruefully. (He’ll be 67 in July.) “So, at the time, we went through the whole process, y’know we had the Catholic shit beaten into us. It was the only game in town – and we kinda lived it, then we rebelled against it, then we denied it”. Catholic school meant nuns, few of whom spared the rod – but he bears them no ill-will. “As I think back, some of them were beautiful,” he muses, suddenly wistful. “Young, beautiful women – caught up in a fuckin’ sad game…”

This is the new Abel Ferrara, with compassion for everyone (it’s a word he invokes more than once). He quit drinking eight years ago, and stopped doing drugs six years ago. Did something tip the balance, or he just decided that enough was enough? “That’s a good question,” he shrugs, and quotes a line from his 1996 movie The Funeral, spoken by a priest to a family of gangsters: “I don’t think any of you are broken enough to believe in God”. Maybe that’s it, he offers, “when you get broken enough, then you get to that point. I was finally broken enough to – surrender to the different reality. It’s strange, because when you’re under the grip of the drugs and the alcohol you’re totally delusional, thinking these things are cool, everything’s cool… So how, at that point, you decide to give it up is really a miracle”.

Belief in a new kind of God was one thing, going from Catholic guilt to what he calls “the real Word of Jesus” – one of his lesser-known films, the 2005 Mary with Juliette Binoche as Mary Magdalene, was apparently instrumental in that life-change – to the teachings of Buddha. But his life also changed in more practical ways. The lifelong New Yorker crossed the Atlantic, and has lived in Rome for the past five years; his most recent film is a documentary called Piazza Vittorio, made for a mere €75,000, observing his neighbours on the multicultural square where he lives. One of those neighbours is the actor Willem Dafoe, who’s also godfather to Abel’s child – because that’s the other big change: Ferrara is now married, to Christina (a Moldavian actress, considerably younger than himself, whom he met on his 2014 film Pasolini), and the father of a three-year-old daughter.

What’s his lifestyle like nowadays?

“We take care of the baby,” he replies with a touch of impatience. “We hang out. We live a boring life, thank God. We work on trying to raise money for projects.” He hasn’t stopped making films, and indeed has a major one due to start shooting next year. “Y’know, I live a low-key, boring life. And like I say, thank fuckin’ God.”

What does he do for fun, though? Now that his old vices are safely in the past?

“Play the guitar. Just be with my friends. Be with Christina and the baby. And read, that’s my thing now. Well, I always used to read, reading is my thing”. He takes out his phone and shows me his recent purchases: Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, Marx, Solzhenitzyn, Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, a book on the siege of Leningrad during WWII, the letters of Osama bin Laden “that they found in that bunker”.

Does he miss New York?

“I think I do, but when I go back I realise that I don’t.” The 9/11 aftermath was New York at its best, he recalls; after that, however, it quickly deteriorated to become “a playground for fuckin’ very wealthy people”. He shakes his head grimly: “Even if I was rich, it’s like ‘I don’t get it, what the fuck is going on here?’. Ya know what I mean? You want a bottle of water and you gotta pay $8 for a fuckin’ Pellegrino in a designer fuckin’ – ya know what I’m saying? You gotta walk nine blocks to get it, I mean what the fuck is happening? The subways don’t run, because if you can’t afford an Uber – if you can’t afford an Uber, fuck you. Die. Yeah, it sucks, man”. Ferrara has never been overtly political (at least in his films) but I suspect that might change, especially as an American abroad looking back on his country and its businessman president.

“It’s like New York,” he says of the whole Trump mentality. “Unless you’re a multi-millionaire – die! Go fuckin’ someplace, and fuckin’ die. ’Cause no-one gives a fuck. Is that really what capitalism was, is that why these guys drove [sic] over on the fuckin’ Mayflower? These are spiritual people, that discovered my country. OK, not all of them, on the Mayflower half of them were spiritual, half were fuckin’ hustlers like this fuckin’ president”. Not that Europe is perfect, admittedly (Rome is “a fuckin’ fascist city”, as implied in Piazza Vittorio), but there’s something more on this side of the pond, a little more culture, a bit more “respect for the art”. Ferrara is something of a prophet without honour in the US – unlike his status in Europe, which surely played a role in his decision to relocate. There was even a year (2012) when revered French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma placed not one but two of his films – Go Go Tales and 4:44 Last Day on Earth – on its annual Top 10 list.

Abel Ferrara Portrait in his house in Rome, Italia

4:44 may also be his most Buddhist work, its premise being that the world is ending tomorrow morning (at 4:44am, to be precise). The film seems oddly undramatic, insofar as none of its characters do anything very memorable to mark their final hours – but that’s the point, that we live in the shadow of Death anyway (even if we don’t know when exactly it’s coming) and all we can do, in true Buddhist fashion, is to live in the moment. “One breath at a time,” affirms Ferrara, preferring not to dwell on the past – and meanwhile he forgives everyone, even the money-men/swindlers whom he railed against in the old days (working on the relative margins often brought him in contact with the sleazier end of the film-financing spectrum). “I heard this quote the other day,” he offers wryly: “‘When money comes in the room, God walks out’. But those films exist,” he adds pointedly, speaking of the ones that got buried in feuds and rights issues. “Whether three people seen [them], 300,000, three million – who knows what the future of those films is gonna be. But we stand by those films. And I’m grateful that we made them.”

His magnanimous mood is no accident. If you’re a former addict, now embarked on a clean-and-sober second life, then you have to forgive everyone – because it’s the only way you can also forgive yourself. Looking back, did he try to do good overall? Or was he just a nightmare?

He scoffs at the question. “Forget it,” he snaps. “When you’re using, you’re – you’re mad, a delusional ego-fuckin’-maniac chasing your own… y’know, it’s a disaster. You’re like a fuckin’ tsunami, ya know what I mean? And yeah, sometimes somebody’s in the eye of your storm, and it’s cool for very little [time], and then – y’know, the worst is gonna happen. I lived a very un-spiritual, fucked-up life. Y’know? And I did it for a long time. I’m trying to make amends for that”. He shakes his head: “Now at least I’m out. Believe me, I’m still far from – Buddha-hood. Far, far, far! But at least I’m making progress.”

Does he ever reconnect with people from the past, and try to apologise?

“I do it all the time. Absolutely. That’s part of it.” Most accept his contrition, but “some people, it’s never gonna be cool. And some you just can’t do it, because opening that door is gonna be even more painful than the way it is”. One of those in the third category may be his old friend Nicholas St. John, who has no writing credits after The Funeral in 1996. “He just had enough, man,” says Ferrara sadly. “He didn’t have a drug problem, didn’t have an alcohol problem, and I’m sure he was not overjoyed where everybody was going with that, you dig? He was a true spiritual person, a true talent”. (The two are no longer in touch.) Then there’s a fourth category, those who are no longer here to connect with, or apologise to. Zoe Lund, the star of Ms. 45, died at 37, a heroin addict. Chris Penn, whose performance in The Funeral won a prize at Venice, died at 40. ‘You really got something great out of him,’ I say, but Ferrara shakes his head: “It’s all him. He was a great actor… He felt good, man, he was in a good spot. But y’know, him and I were fuckin’ drinking and drugging, and it wasn’t good. I wish I could’ve been there for him, but I wasn’t. Not the directing and acting, he didn’t need me then, as much as he needed me when we said ‘Cut’. I was, like, in worse shape than him, so I wasn’t in any position to help him.”

In the end, the one thing I really wanted to learn from Abel Ferrara – how he’s managed to elicit so many no-holds-barred performances from alpha-male actors, not just Penn but also Harvey Keitel, or Gerard Depardieu in Welcome to New York (2014) – is the one thing we barely talk about. “I don’t think I got anything out of them that they don’t have in them,” he shrugs, making it sound like he pointed the camera and let them get on with it. I suspect the legend helped, the director’s notoriety giving them licence to go out on a limb – but they also surely responded to Ferrara’s own surging energy, his impatience and fearlessness and personal candour. There’s just something that draws you along with the man. We’ve been talking for an hour, and I find myself out of questions; we say goodbye but I can’t quite detach, still a bit dazed by his volatile presence. “Lemme go, bro,” he says with sudden, surprising benevolence, claps me on the shoulder, and shambles away into the lobby.

After starting gymnastics at the age of three, Marios Georgiou is one of Cyprus’ leading lights in the sport, but THEO PANAYIDES meets an athlete for whom the sport has been the anchor in his turbulent life

I keep waiting for someone to recognise Marios Georgiou, but nobody does. This is surprising, for three reasons. First, we’re sitting in a crowded coffee-and-croissant place in his native Limassol. Second, he gets recognised in public all the time, his sporting exploits having been beamed out to a huge TV audience. And third, it’s pretty clear he’s being interviewed – I’m making notes, and holding a tape recorder – and how many teenagers get interviewed in coffee shops unless they’re some kind of celebrity? OK, he’s not strictly speaking a teenager, having turned 20 in November; still, the point stands.

There’s another reason why Marios is especially recognisable: despite sounding – and, he says, feeling – entirely Cypriot, he appears distinctly Asian, being the son of a Cypriot father and a Filipina mother. ‘Well, he doesn’t look very Cypriot!’ went some of the more graceless comments last month, when he competed with our Gymnastics team at the Commonwealth Games – though most naysayers were happy enough to accept him as ‘one of us’ when he led the charge in the island’s best showing ever, winning three medals (only Diamanto Evripidou won more): a Gold in the Men’s Floor, another Gold in the Men’s Parallel Bars and a Bronze in the Men’s Artistic All-around, the last of those being perhaps the most special since it requires consistent excellence in all six events.

You can watch a clip on YouTube of Marios’ triumph on the parallel bars, with the Australian commentators waxing euphoric (the Games took place in Gold Coast, Queensland). “He’s got a little quality about him that maybe you can’t coach too easily, and that’s a natural timing,” reckons one pundit after Marios swivels and rotates his body effortlessly, ending on a perfect handstand. “Yes definitely, that’s something you either have or you don’t have,” agrees the other, reflecting the general consensus on the young gymnast; the Beeb dubbed him ‘Super Marios’.

The man himself also agrees, in between taking sips of a caramel latte and fielding a phone call from his girlfriend (she, like him, is a half-and-half, being Russian-Cypriot; they’ve been together nearly two and a half years). Like Lady Gaga, he was born this way. He’s been doing gymnastics since the age of three, when a coach from a nearby gym visited his kindergarten, looking for likely prospects, and saw a certain three-year-old dangling from a tree branch. He looks and acts fairly ordinary, a soft-spoken kid with his hair sticking up, five-foot-six and 63 kilos. There’s a slight stammer and an easy grin, and when he tells of having once beaten up a school bully who was hassling him – knocking him to the floor when the bully wasn’t expecting it – he pauses for a nervous little chuckle every few seconds, half-proud, half-embarrassed. Yet he knows he has something special, and he knows other people know it too. “I inspire people,” he affirms without arrogance.

What’s inspiring isn’t just his talent, but the circumstances in which it’s had to flourish. More than most people, athletes need settled lives; they thrive on a strict routine, indeed they can’t do without it – yet Marios’ personal life (girlfriend aside) has been “a mess,” he admits, especially in the past few years when he’s been competing at the Olympics and Commonwealth Games. ‘How did your parents meet?’ I ask at one point – but he admits he doesn’t know, or can’t remember. “About my relationship with my parents generally, I don’t have a very good relationship,” he explains hesitantly. “Basically I was kind of on my own, let’s say. I didn’t have a lot of support”.

Things were better with his late father, especially towards the end. On his right arm Marios sports a shoulder-to-wrist Maori tattoo, its lines and shapes telling the story of his life so far; one design – a kind of semi-circle filled with petals – represents the death of his dad, and the hope that he’s still somehow present. On his left wrist is another tattoo, making it even plainer: ‘Georgios Georgiou’ and a date – March 27, 2017 – which is when his father died of a heart attack at 65, after years of long unhealthy hours as a taxi driver (he’d been transferred to the front office, answering phones, in his last years, but still worked 6pm to 6am). “I’m very proud of my dad, basically, because – at the end of the day, he was the only one who stuck by me,” explains his son, albeit making clear that they had a turbulent relationship. The parents divorced when Marios was 10, and he lived with his mum for a while – at least till she took off two years ago, and he had to move in with his father. Mum had mostly left him alone (he’d have been running wild, if not for gymnastics), Dad was older and more hands-on. “It was weird for me,” he recalls, implying that they clashed often.

At the end, when his dad had been admitted to hospital after feeling dizzy and unwell, Marios was busy training and couldn’t visit, then his godfather suddenly called and told him he’d passed away. There’s a tinge of guilt in those twin tattoos, the guilt of every son who knows it’s too late to make amends for not having shown his love better. “The thing is, you’re busy,” he explains, “and you’re concentrating on the things you have to do, and there were so many times when he called me and I was – very abrupt with him. And I regret that now, because [I know] he only did it because he cared about me”.

It’s a little early for so much soul-searching. 20 isn’t old, it’s still on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, but Marios has grown up fast; in the past few years, especially, his successes have been those of an adult – his work, his romantic relationship – while the last few remains of his childhood have disintegrated. His mother used to work at the Four Seasons; when that job folded, she ran out of money – so she left the island and left him too, abandoning him to be with her other family. (Marios’ situation is complicated; he has two half-siblings in Cyprus from his father’s side, and two more abroad – in Belgium and the Philippines – from his mother.) That was two years ago, just before the Olympics. Do they ever talk nowadays, on Skype and so on? “Whatever,” he shrugs. “We say hello.”

Doesn’t he miss her? It’s good to have a parent, especially at 20.

“To be honest,” he replies, “I’ve done so many things without anyone’s help – except my dad’s – that I wouldn’t care now if… I mean yeah, I know she’s my mother and all, but…” He fidgets in his seat, trying to pin it down. “Let me put it this way. What mother would leave her son, when she knows he has a chance of going to the Olympics, and instead of supporting him she leaves him?… I feel some anger about that”. Yes, she’d lost her job, but they could’ve moved to a smaller apartment or something. “She had a choice. Just like I have a choice now. If she tells me she wants to be together again, I have a choice to say ‘Yes’ – but I’m going to say ‘No’. She’s come back to see me a couple of times, we’ve talked, but that’s it. Actually my mum said I’ve changed,” he notes thoughtfully. “I mean, I used to be so friendly with everyone. She said I’ve become a bit colder.”

The events of the past few years – his mum’s departure and his dad’s passing, coupled with his own newfound success – may have hardened Marios Georgiou. As a boy, he seems to have been very amiable (indeed, he still is; I only spot glimmers of his tougher side), maybe as a kind of defence mechanism. He looked different to the other kids. He was small in stature. He suffered from dyslexia. He had his gymnastics, the only constant in his life – but even that was a problem, since he trained for five hours each day (till 9pm) and fell asleep when he tried to do his homework. ‘What was it like at school?’ I ask – and he smiles mischievously, looking like a schoolboy again. “Uh – hmm, basically I was their favourite student,” he replies with a giggle, “because I didn’t bother anyone and every morning, second period, I’d curl up and go to sleep in class”. Teachers let him get away with it, mostly because they knew he was an athlete – but also, I suspect, because he did it so amiably. “Basically, at school, everybody loved me.”

Things aren’t quite the same now, though he struggles to put his finger on it. “Basically, I’m not so emotional now… Like, if someone talks to me about their problems, I won’t – I mean yeah, I’ll care, but I’m like ‘Okay’,” he explains with a little shrug, as if placing distance between himself and another. He’s still friendly, and happy to talk to people – but anyone who crosses him is “screwed,” he declares with a little chuckle; “Like, really badly!”. Partly it’s bravado – but also a case of a boy who’s become slightly less amiable. “This thing changes you,” admits Marios sadly, speaking of his recent travails. “It changes you.”

It also makes you a better competitor. Marios made mistakes on Day 1 of the Commonwealth Games; he slipped and fell off the pommel horse then messed up on the horizontal bar, missing out on the finals. When he returned to his hotel, he was livid with rage – but then he pulled himself together, came back stronger on Day 2, and finished up with three medals. Part of his success is surely down to the fact that he thrives on performance, which is what gymnastics is – “a show”, as he puts it. Having an audience makes him nervous, but also brings out the best in him. It’s no surprise that he’s worked as a dancer, at Guaba in Limassol (his girlfriend is also a professional dancer), and may even end up studying choreography when being a gymnast is no longer possible – though “I hope that day never comes,” he adds earnestly, “because I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself”.

His sport isn’t just a sport: it’s the anchor in his turbulent life, the one blessed constant in a shifting emotional landscape. Marios has been with the same coach since he was five years old, and has had money coming in from sponsors (mostly OPAP) and government schemes since the Olympics. With the exception of a rebel phase in his mid-teens, when he dropped out for a few months and fell in with a bad crowd – they hung out, smoked a lot and “pretended to be gangsters”; he did backflips to entertain his new friends, and felt a pang in his heart for gymnastics – he’s been doing this all his life, training every day except Sunday, eating five boiled eggs for breakfast then spending six hours (two in the morning, four in the afternoon) swivelling and balancing and exerting total control over his body.

Maybe it’s his youth, but he seems an untypical athlete. He’s a sensitive soul, unexpectedly vulnerable. He’s afraid of the sea, and can’t stay in the water for more than a few minutes. He gets nervous in front of TV cameras. He takes strength from solitude and likes to stay in the gym after everyone has gone, completely alone, till he feels his spirit settling (his ideal holiday would be a week alone, just him and his girlfriend). A sensitive soul might be thrown by the kind of unstable personal life he’s had to negotiate – but Marios Georgiou isn’t fazed, having learned how to leave his problems behind or (even better) make them work for him, acting as motivation to excel in his sport and break through to a better life. It’s the same with those who claim he’s not ‘really’ Cypriot; “the doubts”, he says – i.e. the naysayers, those who refuse to believe in him – are just grist to his mill.

And now? The obvious next step is to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 – a realistic goal, the peak age for male gymnasts (he tells me) being from 22 to 25. Even in Rio 2016, when he suffered an ankle injury and was only 18 anyway, he narrowly missed out on a couple of finals, so Tokyo could hopefully be the big one – the only catch, I suppose, being that Tokyo has to be the big one. He’ll be past his peak when 2024 rolls around so it’s probably now or never, if we’re talking Olympic medals. I guess that’s true, says Marios, sipping at his latte and shrugging with youthful nonchalance. It’s a lot of pressure, I point out. “Yeah,” he agrees, then shrugs again: “But it is what it is”. Simply put, he’s been through worse.

In Cyprus, as with most of Europe, there is a growing number of people here not entirely because they want to be. THEO PANAYIDES meets two women who are trapped on the island but have found ways to make lives for themselves

Lives in limbo, people caught in-between; the reflection – and result – of a seismic shift in Cyprus in the past decade or so (it’s not just us, of course; it’s the whole of Europe). One shouldn’t wax nostalgic, or paint the past in too-idyllic colours – but it used to be the case, by and large, that people were here because they were born here or, failing that, because they’d made a free choice to be here. Now, on the other hand, there’s a growing substratum whose choice wasn’t free, or wasn’t a choice at all: refugees and migrants, victims of war or deception or human trafficking, those whose only choice was to go somewhere (not necessarily here), those who desperately long to leave but aren’t able to. Lives in limbo, lives on the margins; you can spot them, for instance, at the Mercy Centre in old Nicosia – which is also where I talk, in an upstairs room, to Mihaela Badiu and Joana Asia Andras.

The Centre (run by Stylianos ‘Lakis’ Georgiou and his wife Christine, though a handover to a new team is apparently imminent) is one of several charities trying to supplement a frankly overwhelmed government sector. They provide food, bedding, clothes and other necessary items. A young mother might, for instance, find a pram for her baby. “They also pray for people,” says Joana – the Centre is a Christian charity – and offer the intangible benefit of moral support.

“You know, to have someone to listen to you, it’s very important,” explains Joana. “Because all this time, the one year that was difficult for me, I could not cry. Because I had nobody to whom to cry. I have only my two kids, if I cry they will ask me ‘What’s wrong?’, and I didn’t want them to see me cry. So it was good to come to Mercy Centre and find somebody with who I can speak – and cry, finally.”

Mihaela and Joana, it should be noted, are part of the team at the Centre, helping out on a volunteer basis a few times a week – but they initially arrived seeking help, albeit not as lost as some of those they try to help now. Their lives weren’t entirely in limbo, even then; then again, their choices aren’t entirely free, even now. Joana, like many in this new class (or underclass), would actually prefer to leave Cyprus and return to Romania, but her hands are tied; Mihaela is theoretically freer – yet it’s fair to say she never dreamed of being here, or expected to spend eight years (and counting) on our fair isle. Neither is officially displaced – yet they’re both in-between, at least emotionally.

The two are very different, yet their stories are strikingly similar. Both are Romanians; both defy the stereotype that money is the ultimate force behind this mass movement of people, having come here for love (or the promise of love). Their backgrounds have little in common. Mihaela is 45, from the city of Galati near the border with Moldova; she spent 20 years as a teacher, making €1,000 a month – and still has a touch of the teacher, or perhaps librarian, with straight hair, glasses and a prim, soft-spoken manner. Joana is 33, a Gypsy (she doesn’t use the word ‘Roma’) and daughter of a pastor from the town of Sighisoara; she’s dark, voluptuous, wild-haired, with lively eyes, dangling silver earrings and a bit of a sniffle; she has better English, and does more of the talking.

Joana Asia Andras

Joana met a Nigerian man online, on a Christian website, and came to Cyprus to meet him personally. “I found a job,” she relates, “I stayed in Cyprus, eventually we married, we had two kids, and then he left me”. Mihaela met a Syrian (his daughter was one of her pupils) who told her of his friend, a fellow Syrian, who lived in Cyprus; she came for two weeks and is still here eight years later (she and her husband have a seven-year-old son). What’s it like in a marriage of two faiths? Religion can’t be allowed to take over, she says – though of course there are compromises: “I eat pork at the table, but I don’t give my son pork”. The boy was baptised, somewhat against her husband’s wishes, but has no official religion, the idea being that he’ll choose for himself when he turns 18. Still, adds Mihaela without cracking a smile, “to live together with a Muslim man – and me, I’m European, I’m Orthodox, two different religions – is impossible”.

Impossible? So how does she manage?

“Because I’m calm person,” she explains in her broken English. “You understand? And I grow up in a family with everything – with peace, with love. Not with shouting, not with fighting.”

Her happy childhood is a clue to her current situation. Some may wonder why a woman in her 30s, with a good job, should’ve chosen to leave her country – but the reason lies in the death of Mihaela’s beloved father, leaving her depressed and guilt-ridden. “My father one time told me, ‘Mihaela, I’m very upset for you and your brother, because you are not married and you don’t have children. I want to see grandchildren, and you don’t have’,” she recalls mournfully. “I didn’t give my father what he wanted. He gave us a good education, a good life. He wanted something simple.”

Coming to Cyprus to meet (and marry) her Syrian was a kind of tribute to her dad, a stab at redemption; yet it was also, inescapably, a step down. Her husband is now fully legal, being married to an EU citizen – but his life at the time was more sketchy, having lived in Cyprus (on and off) for 12 years without papers. He was one of those people in limbo – and the well-off teacher soon found herself working three jobs, “from five o’clock morning till two o’clock night”, cleaning, cooking and washing dishes at a well-known Nicosia restaurant. For six months, “I worked like a zombie”; then came pregnancy and the birth of her son – and now it was worse, because she couldn’t even work anymore. Going back to Romania wasn’t an option (“People look not nice at the mother”), and her husband wouldn’t have let her go alone with the child anyway. “They don’t allow their wives to travel with a boy,” explains Joana. “In Syria, the [male] is very important so they appreciate it, and they take care of it. They would separate it from the mother than have it grow up with the mother”. Inevitably, Mihaela found herself at the Mercy Centre.

Joana’s own story is equally sobering – not tragic, or especially depressing (there’s a happy ending), but somehow sordid, a tale of poor decisions and hand-to-mouth lives, a story of people in limbo. She came to Nicosia, met her online Nigerian, found a job (as a cook) and a house shared with several others. At first the relationship was good, but “after we married he started to change… And then, when we had our first child, he changed totally. He didn’t spend time with us. He was always finding an excuse to leave the house”. She went back to Romania; he came to visit, and they reconciled. “I came back, because I had a second baby with him. And when I came back for the second time, he beat me. Even though I was pregnant”.

The cops didn’t care, though she says he’d beaten her badly (just one time, for the record, though of course once was enough). Joana was afraid she’d lost the baby – her second daughter – and gave birth three weeks prematurely, by Caesarean; “That is when I left him. I could not go back”. She went to Immigration and asked to be deported (she couldn’t leave; her husband had taken her documents) but they couldn’t deport an EU citizen unless she’d committed a crime. She slept in a park, with the two kids, then made her way to a Catholic social centre. “I stayed there for 10 months, with 10 women in the same room, with a small baby. It was not easy. But the nuns there told me about the Mercy Centre.”

Mihaela Badiu

As with Mihaela, getting help was something of a turning point. Fast-forward a few years, and life for both women has improved dramatically – the only problem, for Joana, being that the court unaccountably awarded joint custody when she and her husband divorced, meaning that the kids (and, by extension, she) can’t leave the country, even for a holiday, without his consent, which he refuses to give. This can be bypassed by securing a court order, but that costs money – and money, unsurprisingly, is tight, though Joana (unlike most Cypriots) seems to have no trouble finding work. “I think, in Cyprus, if you want to work, you will find it. It depends what you expect from that job”.

She currently works as a cleaner, making €3.30 an hour. Not much, to be sure, but it’s better than nothing – and besides, her life isn’t just about work. Joana was previously a missionary back in Romania, travelling to nearby countries to help the homeless and “tell people about God” – and helping others is clearly important to her. Every Saturday she runs a kind of home-school along with a Cypriot woman, teaching a multicultural class of neighbourhood kids how to get along irrespective of language and religion. (Have they themselves ever experienced discrimination in Cyprus? I ask the ladies. “No,” they reply in unison – but add that it’s probably easier for Europeans than for Asians and Africans.) She also translates for NGOs dealing with trafficked women – and of course also talks to the various lost souls washing up at the Centre. “The fact that I come to Mercy Centre and I serve, and the fact that I have the children’s class on Saturday, it makes me feel that yes, I can settle. There was a time –”

“A sense of life,” puts in Mihaela, trying to define what the volunteering gives to her.

“There was a time, for me, when I felt I’m in prison, because I cannot leave this country.” In theory, her plan is still to return to Romania – but meanwhile she’s ‘settling’, as she puts it. Her kids go to local state school, and define themselves as Cypriots; Joana is learning Greek, the better to help them with their homework. They’ve gone to parades, and celebrated national holidays; on Sundays they like to explore, visiting mountains and castles, using the internet or TV travel show San Tin Kypron En Eshi to find far-off villages. Mihaela’s hobbies are more sedate, mostly reading and Sudoku – but she’s also doing a course in Hotel Administration, part of a scholarship scheme arranged with the Centre. The scheme was designed for victims of human trafficking but few of the girls took it up, their lives being presumably too hamstrung and traumatised to think about going to college.

That’s the catch, the hidden factor in our conversation – the presence of those other lives, the displaced and deceived and unable-to-function. Joana and Mihaela are a kind of halfway house in this debate, women who’ve been touched by the fear of being in limbo (Mihaela’s husband was initially illegal; Joana’s kids can’t leave the country without a court order) but largely overcome it to construct a decent life – but they also convey all the other stories (“My story’s small compared to what they went through,” says Joana), the ones on the margins, the ones still trying to find a way through.

I hear of Eastern European women tricked into marriage (mostly with South Asian men), thinking they’re coming to Cyprus to work, signing a form without being aware what they’re signing; “Then she finds herself married to this guy, and the guy takes her passport and locks her inside the house”. I hear of crooked bosses working new arrivals for a month, then refusing to pay them any salary and throwing them out on their ear. I hear of underage boys trying to get to uncles and aunts in Germany, only to be brought here instead by unscrupulous ship’s captains. I hear of mothers in Somalia selling their land so their son can leave in search of a better life – “and now he’s in Cyprus, on the streets”. I hear of refugees in Kofinou, waiting months for papers to be processed. I hear of the mess that results, all these idle, frustrated people living precariously in Cyprus but not really of it – and their lives going on, their kids growing up, their distance from mainstream society an obvious time-bomb allowed to tick on.

Joana and Mihaela aren’t just inspiring in themselves; they’re also an example of what can be done, still on the margins but trying to fit in and forging a life for their families. Are they optimistic about their future? “Yeah, why not?” shrugs Mihaela. “Now it’s okay for me,” she adds. “I’m not – down anymore. I find my way.”

As for Joana, she claims that she never despaired. “No. Because I believe in God, and I know that God is always there for me. This was – I considered it a lesson in life,” she says of her marriage. “That I didn’t take enough time to think before I acted, and it was the consequences I had to go through. Because it was my choice. I did not blame anyone for that”. She’s dating a “good man” (an African Muslim, as it happens), trying to get by as best she can; and then there’s the Mercy Centre. “It’s not easy living in Cyprus as a foreigner,” she concludes, “but to have the opportunity to help others, this – at least for me – makes me happy”. They smile and escort me downstairs, past the piles of clothes and array of colourful children’s toys.

For the man bringing Cyprus onto the sport’s world stage success is a result of practice over talent. THEO PANAYIDES meets a player who says if you enjoy something, just do it

Here’s all you need to know about Michael Georgiou: “My daily routine is, I get to the snooker club where I practise in Leytonstone, in East London – a place called Legends Academy – I normally get there for about 10-10.30 in the morning, and I don’t leave there until 9pm.”

Does he do this every day?

“Six days a week. I’ll always have Sunday off.”

And, out of those eleven hours, how many are solid practice hours where he does nothing but pot balls and size up shots?

“A good nine.”

There you have it, Michael’s life in a nutshell. But of course it’s not so simple. For a start, that daily routine only applies when he’s back in London, between tournaments – which is increasingly rare nowadays, indeed he only spent six weeks at home during the whole of last season. (The snooker season ended in April, with the World Championship, and resumes in July.) Even now, though ostensibly on holiday, he keeps busy. He won a (non-ranking) tournament in Vienna the week before our interview, and will soon be heading – following a few days’ R&R in Cyprus – to a charity match in Antrim, Northern Ireland.

But there’s also a more important reason why that daily routine seems inadequate to describe him: because it makes him sound like a ruthless machine, and that’s not who he is. Yes, Michael is the No. 49 snooker player in the world – but he’s also, for instance, “very forgetful,” as he puts it; “I’ll always double-book myself, and have to cancel on someone”. His organisational skills could use some work – or perhaps it’s a case of being rather laid-back and unsystematic by temperament, snooker being the one thing that really drives him.

Even in snooker, he doesn’t have the monastic dedication that, say, Roger Federer brings to tennis. Hours of practice are one thing, but he’s not a sporting ascetic or fitness obsessive; he smokes, drinks in moderation, and could stand to use a few kilos (his words, not mine). Simply put, he enjoys life. When we meet, in a Larnaca coffee shop on a Friday morning, he actually looks so rough that I can’t help asking if he had a late night. (He was with some friends he hadn’t seen in a while, he explains with a chuckle.) He loves restaurants and trying new food, and is currently – when not playing snooker – working with some techie pals on creating a restaurant website where you’ll be able to search online menus and see a photo of each dish before you order it. He’s never been especially academic and, for instance, never went to Greek school on Saturdays as a London Cypriot kid (“I kind of preferred to stay in bed and watch cartoons”). Most strikingly of all, when he quit snooker in his early 20s, he didn’t do the obvious thing and go to university, drifting instead into office jobs that soon made him pine for the sport again.

That may be the best starting point in talking about his achievements – though of course the obvious starting point, chronologically at least, is Michael at the age of two or three, sitting on a parent’s lap and (so he’s been told) playing snooker with his veggies, using a cucumber as a cue and a tomato as a ball. He assumes he’d seen the game on TV and been charmed by the pretty colours – though he also, intriguingly, rejects any notion of natural ability. (He agrees with a recent book on the subject, Bounce by Matthew Syed, which also ascribes sporting success to practice over talent.) “I couldn’t hold a cue when I first started! There was nothing natural about me.”

He would always have been drawn to the game, believes Michael, would always have enjoyed watching on TV and maybe playing for fun – but his success as a player wasn’t down to any natural genius, it was down to practical factors. The fact, for instance, that a family friend was a former pro, and taught him some rudimentary technique, or the fact that his parents – working-class, British-born Cypriots – encouraged their son’s obsession with snooker, and accompanied him to snooker halls which were “intimidating places” in those days. Practice makes perfect and the boy practised hard, working his way up the junior circuit; he finished at No. 2 in the UK, at a time when the standard was especially high (enfant terrible Judd Trump is his contemporary) – then, at the age of 19, won the World Under-21 Snooker Championship, making him the world’s top junior player (at least in theory) and gaining him entry to the professional tour. Three years later he left abruptly, being unable to make ends meet just from snooker. “When I quit, I thought that was it,” he recalls. “Because I was having such a bad year, and I was being put off the game so much. But I didn’t know back then what I know now.”

Most of the change since then has been in snooker; but some of it has been in Michael himself. The structure of the sport has been modified (“Barry Hearn, absolute genius,” he raves, speaking of the British promoter who led the changes). There used to be just a handful of tournaments, and about £3 million in prize money; now there are close to 30 (which explains his constant travelling) and about £20 million in prize money. The sport has been cleaned up; snooker halls are no longer intimidating. A system is in place – the so-called ‘Q School’ – which allows amateurs to turn pro, churning out a dozen new professionals a year. Above all, you’ve got China, a gigantic market that’s crazy for snooker (it’s their fastest-growing sport, in terms of viewing figures). Money’s being sunk into the game; one Chinese sponsor bought every player on the tour an Apple watch as a gift, 70 watches in all. “Ding Junhui in China,” says Michael, speaking of the Chinese champion who’s now No. 6 in the world – “how can I put it? – is probably similar to how David Beckham would be in England, or Dwayne Johnson in America. He’s that big! I’ve been there, and people just lose their minds when they see him.”

In short, it’s now possible to earn a living – and an excellent one – out of playing snooker; Michael’s career earnings, according to Wikipedia, are over £100,000, almost all of which has come in the past year. His timing is fortunate, though admittedly “I wish I was 20 years old now, you know?”. (He’s actually 30.) He himself has also grown, however, in the years since he first tried and failed to go pro. “I probably appreciate snooker a lot more now. Because I’ve seen the other side.”

As already mentioned, he didn’t try for a college degree when he found himself at a loose end. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he explains. “Literally had no idea… And it was such a weird feeling – knowing your whole life what you want to do, then all of a sudden you can’t do it. So I was jumping from job to job.” Snooker had been his life, and now it was gone; as a working-class boy of no great pretensions – his dad is a chauffeur, having previously been in catering; his mum is a hairdresser – he joined the rat-race, ending up at a recruitment company working with banks (basically acting as a middleman between banks and short-term contractors). It sounds awful, and indeed it was: “Sitting behind a computer for eight hours, hating your boss, looking forward to your Fridays, hating your Mondays…” He vividly recalls being about to go on holiday, scouring the internet on his lunch-break for good deals to exotic places, only to be brought back to earth by the realisation that he’d be back behind the computer, sitting in the exact same spot, once the holiday was over. “So that kind of hit home. I was like ‘You just need to get out of here’.”

Now, on the other hand, he’s walking down red carpets and watching himself on jumbo-sized screens (at least in China). Even a small tournament, like last week’s in Austria, offers €2,500 in prize money – not bad for a weekend’s work – and a chance to “see a bit of Vienna as well”. People are forever finding excuses not to do what makes them happy, muses Michael, “but I’m always encouraging people: if you’ve got, like, a dream or something, go for it! If you want to start a business, or take up a sport, or start writing or do photography, whatever – just do it. If you enjoy something, do it. It doesn’t make sense to do something you don’t enjoy, just to earn money to carry on doing things you don’t enjoy. It’s crazy.”

His own dream is clear enough: keep playing, keep practising – nine hours a day, six days a week, if possible – keep getting better. His target last year was to climb into the top 64, so he’d be seeded when playing tournaments; this year, the target is to end the season in the top 32. Snooker is a game one can play into middle age; last month’s world championship final was between two players (Mark Williams and John Higgins) in their early 40s. As you might expect, however, Michael isn’t planning to play himself into the ground. Ideally, he’d like to “get a really, really good 10 years under my belt, get things set up in life, then just enjoy the sport and maybe enjoy life a bit more. But I need to put in the work before I can do that.”

Somewhat surprisingly, the dream also includes Cyprus. You wouldn’t think a London Cypriot, born and raised there by parents who were themselves born and raised there, would have such a strong connection with the mother country, but there you go. He now lives in Forest Hill, but “at my earliest opportunity, I’m going to live out here,” he affirms; last year, despite all the globe-trotting, he visited Cyprus five times. “I also got Cyprus into the World Cup of Snooker,” says Michael proudly, having changed his nationality in order to represent us – and he also dreams of promoting the game here, maybe opening his own snooker club, training players and watching them turn pro. Anything’s possible.

It’s actually quite touching just how Cypriot he is. Unlike most Brits, for instance – who cling to romantic notions of ‘authentic’ Cyprus – he loves that the island’s becoming more developed, “catching up with the rest of the world”, and talks excitedly of the massive Radisson being built in Larnaca and the skyscrapers being planned for Limassol. “When’s it going to stop? Hopefully it doesn’t!” Not only does he like his food, he likes it in big portions: his website idea (the one that allows you to check out photos of the dishes) was inspired by fancy restaurants in London where the menu looked good but the portions turned out to be pitiful. His values are traditional too. He’s currently single, because “I want to be [financially] secure before I think about starting a family”. He wears a cross around his neck, not because he’s religious – he seems too down-to-earth to be very spiritual – but because he’s sentimental: the cross and chain were gifts from his mum and dad when he was a child. “I haven’t taken them off ever since.”

Michael Georgiou seems like a nice guy: friendly, unpretentious, family-minded, maybe a bit old-fashioned if the talk turned to politics (it doesn’t). It’s unclear where he’d be without snooker – but the point is moot because snooker exists, the one thing in his life ruled by an all-consuming determination to “be outstanding”. It may be significant that the only tournament he’s won (so far) is the so-called Shoot-Out, an unusual event where matches last 10 minutes, are decided by a single frame, and reward fast, instinctive play (you only have 15 seconds per shot, decreasing to 10 seconds as the match goes on). One could even hazard – despite Michael’s own theories on the subject – that winning the Shoot-Out is the sign of a player of great natural ability; but maybe nine hours of practice, six days a week, will do just as well.

“I still laugh to myself when someone asks for an autograph. ’Cause it feels surreal,” he admits, sipping his espresso. “Five years ago, I was working in an office!” Michael shakes his head in honest wonder: “Half the time I don’t even know what day it is, because I’m out of that office mentality of Mondays and Fridays. It’s so weird. Like, if it wasn’t for my phone, I wouldn’t know what day it was!… It’s a nice way to live. I recommend it.”

Meanwhile “the serious stuff” commences on July 2 with the Riga Masters, the first of the season (offering prize money and the chance to see a bit of Latvia, if nothing else) – and then come nine months of hectic (but glorious) travel, probably interspersed with gruelling practice sessions in London and a few days of lying on the beach in Cyprus. There’s even a wild-card idea he mentions briefly, a Turkish Cypriot friend in London who might also be turning pro this year; wouldn’t it be great if the two of them entered the World Cup as a bicommunal Cyprus team? Wouldn’t it blaze a trail, cause a stir, raise the profile of the sport on the island? For Michael Georgiou, the dream continues.

AGNIESZKA RAKOCZY meets a chef who is keen to evolve his own style of cuisine and who has his eye on a Michelin star being given in Cyprus

It is difficult to figure out someone so concentrated and focussed on realising his aspirations and achieving his future goals that he views any discussion of his past as an unnecessary diversion, one that might slow him down from reaching his destination and fulfilling his life’s quest. Yet how to comprehend, much less appreciate, so determined and driven a figure without stopping along the route he has travelled to savour the stories and better appreciate the experiences, the very dreams, his vision and accomplishments are built upon?

I am talking here about Petros Andrianou, the 38-year-old, Paris-trained professional chef, and founder of 3 Forks Lab. Hailed as one of the most creative cooks in Cyprus, knowing enthusiasts who might otherwise turn up their noses at being called foodies regard him as the new hope, a breath of fresh air on the tired scene of local gastronomy.

My encounter with Petros takes place at the Daily Coffee Roast, for which Petros has designed a special menu including artichoke tarts, Portuguese buns, and burgers with pulled pork, espresso-chili BBQ sauce, apple ginger slow salad and vanilla caramelised onions. Is it any wonder then that I arrive at the coffee shop savouring the prospect of more than just a long chat with Petros about French haute cuisine and the Michelin starred celebrity chefs he worked with during his years in Paris?

It doesn’t quite work out that way. Petros is so immersed in his new project that he appears almost reluctant to devote time to discussing his background and how he reached this latest, and in his view, most significant launch pad of a creative career.

When finally he agrees to tell me a little about his background, it is with a kind of bemused modesty, as though it is all incidental to the moment now that the next stage is at hand. The sense I get is that he is patiently telling me, “this was then and here I am now and where I am now it is much more important”.

Later, when I get the chance to consult his website, things fall into place and it all becomes clearer. He calls it Manifesto – an unapologetic artistic declaration of principle not unlike some of the rebellious futurists of the early 20^th century.

He states by way of introduction: “In 2008, I came to a realisation that I have to evolve my own style of cuisine. To achieve this, I made a decision to withdraw from the kitchen and find new ways of approaching creativity and adapting it in cuisine. I had to get out of the shadow of the chefs who I dreamed of becoming or who I worked with, to get out of their philosophy and try to find my own and place my own DNA in gastronomy.”

Sipping a latte in a Nicosia coffee shop, Petros indulged my curiosity and filled in some of the details of what lay at the back of his future and the concept of his long-planned 3 Forks Lab.

We start with the image of a five-year-old boy whose father, an international leather import/export trader, took him all over the world. These proved to be the inaugural travels that exposed an appreciative youngster to “very good and very different restaurants”. That exposure combined with an appreciative palate that in the ensuing years grew more sophisticated and demanding were the trigger for further wanderings and multiple apprenticeships, all of which culminated in the decision several years ago to come back to Cyprus “because this is my island and I have a dream of putting it on the world’s gastronomic map”.

Despite that eye firmly fixed on the future, Nicosia-born Petros admits fondly that it was those trips with his father (“always pushing me to eat new things”) that helped him realise very early on that he wanted to be a cook.

“I don’t know too many other kids who by the age of six or seven would taste foie gras in Paris, raw lamb in Syria and real Asian food in China, and actually love all of this. I became fascinated by all these different tastes and flavours. Somehow, all of them became part of my DNA and very early on I discovered that I had a very good palate. So very early on I told my father that I wanted to be a cook. A cook because at that time we just didn’t know this term ‘a chef’. And my father just said: ‘ok’”.

But ideal as that start may have been, he still had a long way to go before his dream could be fulfilled. First was the need to complete his schooling and military service in Cyprus. It wasn’t until 2000 that Petros was finally free to go Paris to study at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts.

Was it difficult? I ask and he concedes it was. “At that time, to become a chef was still a lot of hard work,” he recalls, remembering the myriad of tests he had to pass. Nor, he readily admits, did he have any real idea about what it was he was getting himself into.

“Of course, I knew how to cook but it was just cooking for the family and at that level nobody will ever tell you if they don’t like it. But it was only in Paris and really only after I finished my training and joined my first Michelin restaurant as an apprentice that I truly realised just how hard and stressful this profession is.”

Accepted as a trainee at the well-known, two-star Les Elysees Restaurant at Hotel Vernet in Paris, Petros wasn’t too happy at first. It had not been his first choice. He aspired to the legendary three-star Le Taillevent. “My mentor told me I was not ready and I couldn’t argue with it,” he says. He didn’t have to wait long, however. “Six months after I started at Les Elysees, my boss there Alain Soliveres was invited to work at Le Taillevent and he took me with him,” he explains.

What difference does a star make, I wondered aloud. Does Le Taillevent differ all that much from Les Elysee? Petros nods his head vigorously. “Yes, of course, but the work ethos in both places was very similar. Why? Simply because on this level you just have to work 15-16 hours a day without a break. That’s a lot of hours of pure commitment and pressure and stress. And you have to be physically and mentally prepared to take it.”

And did he focus on any one particular aspect of cooking? Was he training as a patissier, a saucier, a poissonier or a rotisseur? His answer is a firm and dismissive no. He explains with the patience of the professional addressing a novice: “In a restaurant of this level, you don’t do any dishes by yourself. You are part of a team, minimally 12 in number, sometimes as many as 20 or 40. Whatever you work on, it is only a part of a dish, which, before it is ready, will have passed through the hands of at least eight people.”

But how do all these great chefs learn that there is this new Cypriot kid on the block? “Well, I don’t know if I am really good,” Petros answers. “But the way it works is that everything depends on where you worked before. If your CV includes some of these [listed] restaurants, they know you can do things and this helps you to get next job.

“I have been fortunate enough to work with some great chefs,” he says quietly. “These guys are titans of gastronomy. If you work with such names, it gives you a very strong background.”

So what was it that actually made Petros decide to abandon the beckoning stars of the ‘gastrosphere’, to call it quits and come back to the Cyprus? He smiles and points out that it didn’t happen that way exactly. First he moved to Spain, then to Japan, and, finally, back again to Europe, a three-year odyssey devoted to searching out the culinary secrets in all these places.

“The most amazing place was Japan because so many of the elements of my philosophy of food preparation are very close to those of the Japanese,” he says. “The Japanese are very strict in their working code. I respect the way they prepare everything. Do you know that they have a special ritual to prepare a knife for slicing the fish? They respect life which is a very important element of my beliefs as well.”

So did he go to a Japanese cooking school? “I wanted to but they didn’t accept me because it was only for Japanese people,” he says. “But my friend’s father was well connected so he arranged an apprenticeship for me in some of the top sushi bars. For a year I would stand in these bars, just watching how they were making sushi. I was not allowed to touch anything but I saw a lot and it was unbelievable…”

So why come back to the island when clearly by now he could have been cooking up a storm in one or other of Paris’ most exclusive restaurants, perhaps even earning one of those highly coveted Michelin stars for himself.

“I came back here because I love my country and because I want to put it at the top of the gastronomical field,” he says with conviction and passion. “I am from Cyprus. Not from Spain or France or Japan. My roots are here and I have a dream to do something spectacular for my country and to let it shine. This island has very good products, herbs and plants, and we also have very good recipes, influenced by French, Italian and Arab cuisines. So this is what I ultimately want to do in Cyprus – to open our local Michelin star restaurant and remind Cypriots of what they have in their own country. And yes, I know it is a difficult task, like climbing Mount Everest. Perhaps, it is even worse, because people lack knowledge and understanding of what I am talking about. People are usually afraid of things they don’t understand, but I enjoy this challenge and I have been fighting for years now to achieve my goal.”

Petros sees his 3 Forks Lab workshop and laboratory, the place where he develops his new philosophical concepts, techniques and, finally, his dishes, as the foundation for his future plans. “Since I came back I have been working on documenting Cypriot culture and the old recipes in order to develop them further. This research is very important to me because a lot of the things our grandparents knew are fast disappearing. So if we don’t record them now, we will lose them forever. This is why I learn how people prepared certain dishes in the old times and then I redo these processes to make something different with them. Because the basic principle of haute cuisine is to create food that tricks people’s minds and plays with their emotions. It is not about feeding your belly but your mind and senses. It is about taking old ideas and creating something entirely new that yet will remind people of their childhood. It is about encouraging people to experience food in new and unexpected ways. This is what I am planning to do in my restaurant.”

All is dishes, he explains, have something unique. He cites his stifado which features onions cooked in three ways, steamed in Japanese tea, cooked sous vide with beef stock, herbs and plants, and blanched in onion broth to boost the flavour. Then he makes a cream of it so that “my stifado is a small bomb of flavour that you can eat with one single bite.” His Sheftalia owe as much to Japan as to Cyprus and have nothing to do with tradition. The meat is top grade Japanese wagyu beef and he uses chervil, not parsley and serves the dish with one of his creations, strawberry katsuobushi sauce.

In his Manifesto, Petros the chef and idealist warns of the need to “tie ourselves to the mast of reason and logic, not being lured to demise by the sirens of money, fashion or fame”, yet he is pragmatic and realistic enough to admit that money is the biggest obstacle to this plan. “Ninety nine per cent of my project is here and at the same time the same 99 per cent of my project is missing. To achieve what I want I will need an investor who understands what this project means for Cyprus.”

Meanwhile, he continues his research, provides his consultancy services to local and foreign restaurants – three of the latter having been awarded Michelin stars – and, on a select clientele basis, prepares private dinners. And in a few weeks time he plans to launch a series of mini videos, shot and edited by a team of professionals “who understand my eccentricities”. With a mischievous glint in his eye, he explains why the series is called Cypriot Cuisine On the Edge.

“They will show how we are on the edge of losing it but that we can also push it over the edge to a completely new level of culinary art.”

In short: 3 Forks Lab coming your way – watch this space!

www.petrosandrianou.com

https://vimeo.com/3forkslab

Petros’ Philosophy of Tecto-Sensory Cuisine

In 2008 Petros chose to evolve his own style of cuisine and vowed to leave the kitchens of others and find new ways to be creatively engaged with an evolving cuisine.

This marked the beginning of the long gestation process that led to the creation of the 3 Forks Lab. Why, you may well ask, Lab? The choice of name was deliberate because Petros envisages a culinary laboratory with the experimental aim of fusing the creativity of architects, designers, thinkers, dreamers, farmers, fishermen, any and all visionaries happy to collaborate and help create a contemporary and breakthrough cuisine that draws on island traditions and local roots.

3 Forks Lab seeks to create original crafted cuisine or food, that emphasises texture, flavours and ensures a balance of the senses on the plate. The inspiration stems from nature’s amazing diversity – from what Petros calls the equilibrium of nature’s architecture and nature’s harmony. He aims to arrive at a new gastronomical philosophy, a new tecto-ecosystem, respectful of life in all its meanings.

He firmly believes that a qualified chef needs to be open to other creative fields whether it be sculpture, scriptwriting, product design, or human studies etc. In his view, one discipline neither detracts nor distracts from another. “Whatever man creates finds itself on the same level with everything else. Expression is a continuous and unending journey on the same route.”

THEO PANAYIDES meets an LGBTI activist who says there is still a long way to go to promote people’s rights in Cyprus, a country that lacks a gay public figure

Talking with John Zacharias Theophanous – the Paphos representative of Accept-LGBT Cyprus, among other things – we end up talking mostly about his parents. This is not so surprising. Even now, with society more accepting of LGBTI issues (maybe even especially now, when living as a gay man isn’t the nightmare it might once have been for Zacharias), coming out to one’s family and friends is perhaps the most fraught and scary part of making one’s way in the world. “Coming out is a very lonely process,” he admits, “you are going to walk the road alone”. There are no rules, except that one should never be forcibly ‘outed’. “People need to come out on their own.”

We meet two days before the fifth annual Pride parade, sitting down at the Home for Co-operation in Nicosia where he once attended a pioneering conference against homophobia in 2012, in his early days with Accept. Going in, I’m a little wary. Talking to an activist isn’t always much fun; they tend to harangue you. He does a bit of that, but mostly he’s good company: chatty, lively, candid about everything, peppering his speech with charming South African-isms (“I beg yours?” for ‘I beg your pardon?’) and Cypriot village sayings. He doesn’t seem angry, I note. “I’m not,” he replies; “I’m not angry.” His Facebook page, in addition to his two names (John is what Anglophones tend to call him; Zacharias, or Zac – which he prefers overall – is what Greek-speakers do), includes a nickname, ‘Zacharoyiannos’ or ‘Sugar John’, given to him by his grandmother. The nickname says a lot about his sweet, ingratiating nature; that he’s not embarrassed to put it on Facebook says even more.

He’s shaven-headed, not very tall, a few months shy of 40; his glasses have heavy black rims, his beard has stray flecks of grey. He’s a ‘ZBC’ (Zimbabwe-born Cypriot), though raised in South Africa. He speaks eight languages, and works as a software engineer. It’s quickly noticeable that his left eye wanders, as if the eyeball’s been loosened (he’s on a waiting list for a cornea transplant), a reminder of having been carjacked in Pretoria while stopped at a traffic light. “In South Africa you don’t stop at red traffic lights. You look, and if nobody’s coming you just go, you do not stop,” he explains. He made the mistake of stopping, and “they came, they threw me out of the car, they bashed me to a million pieces”; the attackers kicked him so many times, they permanently damaged his eye. ‘Why not just take the car?’ I wonder. Why all the violence? “It’s mostly – um, a retaliation against the ex-white regime. So they see every white person as an enemy, if you like”. Thuggish robbers fancying themselves as race warriors; a reminder – speaking of LGBTI rights, and rights in general – of the toxic legacy of oppression.

That was in 2004 and proved to be the final straw, prompting the family to move back to Cyprus. It was just the three of them, Zacharias and his parents, both of whom have since passed away (his dad died at 60, of kidney failure; his mum at 65, of a heart attack). Mum and Dad hailed from villages in Paphos, and both worked as costume designers at the South African State Theatre – an unusually bohemian profession, and indeed it was an unusually liberal household. His parents had black and Asian friends, long before the end of apartheid, and were never homophobic – but of course there were limits. “My parents suffered from what I like to call NIMBY,” he notes wryly. “Not in My Backyard. Which means everybody’s okay to be gay, except for their own son.”

Here, in a nutshell, was the situation. Zacharias went to an all-boys school, “a macho, rugby-and-cricket-playing kind of school” in the not just homophobic but “incrrrrredibly homophobic” South Africa of the early 90s. The school liked to mix the oldest and youngest boys, to promote school spirit, so it was that, in PE class, 12-year-old Zacharias found himself surrounded by 18-year-olds: “I saw a guy in a Speedo,” he recalls, “well, a couple of guys in Speedos, and I was like ‘Oh wow, cool. I like this. Whoa, what’s happening here?’.” That was his first vivid sexual feeling, and the explicit recognition of himself as gay – “as Niles Crane would say: I had an epiphany!” – but in fact he’d always known something was different. “Even in my primary school, which was co-ed, I wasn’t really interested in girls. I used to play with girls – but for some reason, maybe instinctively, they used to treat me as part of the crowd. They never used to treat me as, you know, ‘You’re one of the boys’. They were like ‘OK, come on over, let’s play”. Later, as an older boy, he’d rifle through his mum’s gossip mags and peek at the centrefolds – nothing sexual, just celebs in expensive fashions. When the picture was a woman, “I’d flip past,” but when it was a guy he’d tear out the page and put it in his drawer. “The nice ones that I liked, I used to stack them,” he recalls with a chuckle. “Hoping that my mother wouldn’t look.”

On the one hand, the dawning realisation of his sexual and emotional identity; on the other, the fact that – as he earnestly puts it – “I grew up in a family”. His parents never ate without him at the table; Saturday was movie night, Sunday was family day. The three were close-knit, and very affectionate; the family dynamic was also unusual. Zacharias is very clear on the Nature vs. Nurture debate – “I was born like this,” he affirms. “I didn’t ‘become’. I am, because that’s how I was born!” – but it’s still intriguing that he grew up with a quiet, sensitive father and a strong-willed, domineering mother.

“You know, I’d say the roles had been reversed,” he muses: “My mother was my father, and my father was my mother.” His dad always suspected that his son was gay – but Zacharias only came out to him on his deathbed (“He looked at me. He was, like, really ill, and he says to me [whispering]: ‘I know. It’s okay’”) just because his dad was so very sensitive, and he’d always been afraid of hurting his feelings. “I played two roles in my father’s life,” he notes astutely: “I was his son, but I was also the daughter he never had”. His dad always wanted Zacharias to hug him as he left home and give him a kiss when they met, and was deeply hurt if he didn’t; in the evenings, when they sat and watched TV, “I’d sort of cuddle into my dad’s arms, I would go into ‘daughter mode’ and he’d stroke my head and just sit there with me”.

His mum, on the other hand, was tough: “I call my mother ‘Hitler’. You know? She had an iron fist,” he recalls with a laugh. “Even as a child, if anyone did anything to me I’d never say anything to my mother, because if I did she’d go after them with a machete!” Needless to say, she was tough on him too: “Discipline was first. I mean, for a while – OK, she was also very affectionate, but she was married to the slipper for a while! You know, ‘You’re gonna get it’.” It was to his mother that the young man came out, towards the end of their time in South Africa – by which time he was at university in Pretoria, doing Computer Engineering and increasingly open about who he was.

It was only in his 20s that he first became sexually active; adolescence – that notoriously hormonal time – was frustratingly repressed. “I actually threw myself into my studies, that was my crutch if you like.” At school, he was bullied by the rugby-playing types (was he openly gay? “Um, no. But people could tell”), somewhat ironically since they were – and remain – precisely the type of guys he found attractive. He wasn’t beaten up, being good with his fists, but was mocked, felt up, called a “fag”. Coming out to friends was impossible (he and the other obviously-gay boys at school studiously avoided each other, so as not to attract attention); coming out to his loving, close-knit family was even more impossible. The only upside was that his sense of self-worth remained strong. “I never said to myself ‘This is wrong’. You know, never went down that road. I was like ‘Yeah okay, I like guys and that’s it’… The only difference was, I never expressed it, which came later. I never voiced it. I wasn’t the activist that I am now, if you like”.

That particular turning-point is a story in itself. Zacharias’ hands are covered in white splotches, as though the skin has been burned in a fire. This is vitiligo, an auto-immune disorder that began just a few days after his mother died. Not only was her death traumatic in itself (“I went home and found her dead on the floor”), they also had “unfinished business”, as he puts it. Coming clean about his sexual orientation had been only partly successful: his mum had burst into tears right away – like his dad, she’d always suspected; “She was waiting for me to tell her” – then spent many years ignoring the subject. When they moved to Cyprus, she told him “I’ll cover for you” (meaning she wouldn’t press him to get married), “just don’t tell anybody that you’re gay, especially the close family in the village”. By this time, of course, he was open with friends and employers, so “I had a dichotomy: different at home, different in social environments… So it was very exhausting.”

He was in Paphos, having moved from Nicosia when his father got sick. He and his mum were close, but bickered a lot; she pampered him, but also drove him nuts – and then she died, quite suddenly, in 2010. His skin broke out in vitiligo, the body’s way of expelling stress. One afternoon, while on bereavement leave from work, he attempted suicide: “I didn’t know what to do – because I’d had my parents, and then all of a sudden I was alone… And then I was like OK, I’m gonna end it. I don’t want to carry on anymore”. He grabbed two handfuls of pills, swallowed one handful, prepared to swallow the other – then, out of nowhere, “a very dear friend” came in through the unlocked kitchen door, having come by to check on him.

She pushed him, to make him drop the pills. He fell and hit his head, “and that made me unconscious. And then I saw visions of my mum and dad. My mum was talking, my dad wasn’t – as usual!… And she says to me: ‘I know that you’re gay, and I’m okay with it now. I wasn’t when I was alive, but now I am. I want you to carry on, and I want you to make a difference in someone else’s life. Educate people. I was wrong, I should’ve accepted you’… I woke up after two days and I just decided, you know what? I’m going to pick myself up, and I’m going to move forward”. This was divine intervention, he believes (Zacharias is religious, and laments the chasm that’s opened up between religion and the LGBTI community); if that lady hadn’t arrived, he’d be dead now. Soon after, he got involved with Accept and decided to work in Paphos “because it’s a small community, and people talk, and people feel uncomfortable – and I just decided, you know what? I’m gonna make a difference”.

LGBT pride parade Nicosia

For the past seven years, he’s tried to do exactly that: “I’m open. I’m loud. I’m there. I’m OK”. People have been supportive, barring one close relative who cut him off after he went public. Accept holds two “rainbow meetings” a month, aimed mostly at LGBTI youngsters (though not just youngsters; a middle-aged man came out recently) plus their allies and parents. He tries to give advice about coming out, trying to keep it realistic (he won’t push kids to tell their parents for the sake of activism; if the reaction is likely to be negative, it’s often better to wait till they leave home). He urges people – including heterosexuals – to get tested for HIV, and also answers their questions. “Are you ‘the man’ or ‘the woman’?” some want to know (“We’re both guys, we don’t always have roles,” he replies). One confused gentleman asked him “When’s the operation?”, having assumed that gay means trans. “But I’m glad they’re asking,” Zacharias adds fervently, “because the most important thing to me is education. And when people don’t ask questions, that gets to me. Ask! Learn! I will answer. As embarrassing as the questions are, just ask me.”

It’s easy, chatting so convivially two days before Pride, to assume that the fight is over. In fact, he says firmly, “there’s still a long way to go”. Civil unions are certainly an achievement, but adoption rights still require lobbying, and the situation with trans people (the ‘T’ in LGBTI) remains problematic: at the moment, in Cyprus, they can only obtain new documents after a complete sex-change, which many can’t afford or may not even want (Accept wants the criterion to be merely how they identify, as in many European countries). Above all, there’s an absence of gay people in public life – no openly gay MPs, or even local councillors. It’s as though the ‘problem’ only affects a sub-category of noisy but invisible misfits, hidden away in obscure homosexual lives, Them as opposed to Us.

How to make things better? Turns out there’s one final facet to John Zacharias Theophanous, this candid, voluble, sweet-natured man with the damaged eye and turbulent past. He works in Paphos but, unexpectedly, adores Nicosia, where he keeps a flat and spends every weekend; he loves its authenticity, the Levantine vibe of the old town. In fact, he has two websites: www.jztheophanous.lgbt/, where he talks about LGBTI activism – but also https://www.the-nicosian.org/, where he talks about his favourite capital! “I know it sounds like a very, very weird dream,” says Zacharias, “but I’ve got it as one of my goals: I want to be Nicosia’s first openly gay mayor.” He pauses, eyes aglow with the thought of this bold, supremely satisfying bit of public activism. “And I’ve even got my slogan,” he goes on, nodding happily: “‘A gay mayor with straight answers’!”. I wouldn’t put it past him.

For the man charged with promoting Italian culture in Cyprus, it has been a busy life. THEO PANAYIDES meets someone with enough energy to have known the leader of the Catholic church, canoed down the Amazon and write novels to fund charitable work in the third world

There’s a photo on a shelf in Umberto Mondini’s small flat in Larnaca. Actually he has lots of photos – his family, his sons, Umberto with Pope Francis, Umberto on a plane with Pope John Paul II – but one in particular shows him around the time he got married, at the age of 40 (he’s now 68), a beaming, ebullient-looking person in a pilot’s uniform, with luxurious black hair and beard. His wife was (and is) 14 years younger; he was an Alitalia pilot, she a cabin attendant. They already had a four-year-old son born out of wedlock, surely not so common in late-80s Italy. Above all, not only did he fly jumbo jets but he was also an anthropologist, going on perilous expeditions to remote places! His charisma and confidence – his personal energy – must’ve been off the charts.

28 years later, the hair and beard are no longer black – but the ebullience remains as we sit in the rather poky flat which he usually shares with two dachshunds named Cipria and Agenor (they’re back in Italy, for the summer). The walls are adorned with posters for academic seminars on Indian tribes – given, presumably, by Umberto himself – plus a garish painting of a Hindu babuji. On the table, a plate of carobs, more for decoration than nourishment. On the bookshelves, along with a few of his own books, the Holy Bible, more for reference than daily use; he was, after all, a professor of History of Religions at Rome’s Sapienza University. (Is he religious himself? “Uhh… In my way.”) On the landing outside his flat, quite unexpectedly, a flag stand holding the flags of Italy, Cyprus and the EU – not a patriotic gesture but a practical one, because the flags are needed for Dante Alighieri events and there’s nowhere else to put them.

Umberto is president of the Societa Dante Alighieri Cyprus, aiming to promote Italian culture on the island; something of an honorary post, but still a position of authority – then again, he’s used to positions of authority. He was a captain at Alitalia, flying MD-11s and Boeing 777s, and in fact only retired in 2010. Before that, in his youth, he spent 10 years in the Air Force, rising (again) to the rank of captain and becoming a wing commander: “I was 27,” he recalls. “I had 30 pilots and 50 engineers [under my command], and many of the engineers were the age of my father!”. He turns his phone off before we begin the interview; later, I happen to ask if he’s the kind of person friends will turn to for advice if they have a problem. “Yes!” he replies with a laugh. “Yes, very much – that’s why I turned the telephone off.” He shakes his head, looking very Italian: “All the time, all the time…”

That said, he doesn’t come across as the philosophical type; his advice, if you asked for it, would surely be practical, and delivered lightly. His usual response, when I ask a non-factual question, is to make a joke of it. Does he understand why many people have a fear of flying? “Ehh… It’s not fear of flying, it’s fear of the end of the flight!” he replies, laughing merrily (but does concede that yes, he understands that sense of helplessness, and indeed often feels it himself when he’s flying without also being the pilot). Umberto seems largely immune to the modern problem of over-thinking everything. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about him is perhaps that he pursued two wildly divergent careers – either one of which would seem very bold and exciting to the average person – and did it just by doing it, without any special dispensation or unusual circumstances.

From the start, flying and anthropology went side-by-side. He studied the latter at university, but switched to the Air Force at 20. (“Anthropology was my interest. The Air Force, and being a pilot, was my job,” he explains vaguely when I ask about this choice.) While flying, he began his thesis, on the Sami people of Lapland – but then moved to commercial airliners, put the thesis on hold so he could pass the exams, then had to abandon it altogether. Still, it didn’t take long to find a replacement. In 1979 he was flying to Montreal and met an academic from McGill University who told him of the Mistassini, a tribe of hunters in remote northern Quebec. “So I went there, just out of the blue! I went with an old Dakota from Montreal to Chibougamau, then I rented a car”. You know you’ve led an interesting life when it includes the line ‘I went with an old Dakota from Montreal to Chibougamau’.

There was no email at the time, of course; the tribesmen didn’t even have phones. Umberto just turned up, in the middle of winter, armed only with a handful of names supplied by his friend at McGill, explaining that he was an Italian anthropologist doing his thesis and could he please tag along while they hunted for beavers. Each family had its own winter hunting grounds, “in a land which is as big as Italy”; they travelled with dogs – which took weeks – but already, in 1979, many had switched to small, single-engine planes. They took off from a massive ice lake, he recalls, but the engine was inevitably frozen and the propeller couldn’t turn so “they lit a fire under the engine – my God!” he laughs, “with petrol, with gasoline!” –seven or eight Mistassini having piled into a plane built for four, with all their supplies. The land was completely flat – so he watched the planes taxiing and taxiing, burdened by all the extra weight, before finally lifting off and climbing painfully to about 1,000 feet, heading off to even more remote places.

That’s how he did all his fieldwork, in between the job as a pilot – not just the Mistassini in Quebec but later the Ese Eja in the Amazon (they live between Bolivia and Peru, along the Rio Madre de Dios), the Mocovi in Argentina, and assorted tribes in India. There’s a video on YouTube of Umberto trying “opium water” with a group of Raika elders in Rajasthan, though he cheerfully admits to having been more worried about the water than the traces of opium it contained. He also wrote books – one of them has a preface by Pope Francis (during his time as Cardinal Bergoglio), whom he got to know in Argentina – including a number of successful thrillers, using the profits to build schools and orphanages in places like India and Congo through the charitable NGO run by Alitalia.

How did he find time for all this? “Ask my wife!” he replies with another uproarious laugh. “She was quite cross!” He’d use up his annual leave on month-long expeditions, and flying long-haul flights (as he did after 1996) also allowed him to pursue a teaching career; typically, a pilot might fly to Mumbai or Buenos Aires, spend three or four days there – enough time to prepare a lecture – then three or four days back in Italy. It helped that he seems to have been a man of prodigious energy: often, he recalls, he’d come back from New York on the overnight flight, “change my tie”, and go directly to give a lecture at the university.

Umberto’s always been a doer, it appears, an adventurer-extrovert with a practical bent and a rogue academic streak. Problem-solving is in his genes, the family being full of engineers; his dad was an engineer – though also an academic, teaching History of Technology – while his older son, 31-year-old Simone, is an industrial engineer (the younger, 24-year-old Alberto, is studying international relations). As a child, he was sporty rather than bookish; “When I was 15, I was dreaming about horse riding!”. He still owns horses, at the family home in Italy, though his teenage dream was closer to a knight or musketeer (“A gentleman,” as he puts it) than a jockey per se. Flying, too, was something of an adolescent dream: “I thought it was very romantic being a pilot” – a youthful delusion, of course, though you do get the odd poetic moment, flying over Greenland or dazzled by the psychedelic beauty of the aurora borealis.

Flying a plane is also an assertion of will, not a million miles from riding a horse (alone in the skies, guiding a powerful beast), which was surely also part of the attraction. Umberto comes across as a born leader, one of Nature’s captains – not through any particular genius but mostly, I suspect, because he’ll do it, whatever ‘it’ happens to be. Other men may talk of writing thrillers or going to the Amazon, but he’ll do it. If you need someone to run Dante Alighieri, he’ll do it. He doesn’t get bogged down in needless soul-searching. When was he happiest in his life? “Always,” he replies with a sweet smile.

He’s been through some hairy situations, and come out the other side. He paddled a canoe for five days down a crocodile-infested river (actually caimans, this being South America) then, when the river became impassable, had to walk through the jungle carrying the canoe on his shoulder. He captained a 14-hour flight from Rome to Buenos Aires during which the left engine started losing oil, so “I declared a pan pan pan,” as he puts it (‘Pan pan pan’ is a step below ‘Mayday mayday’, signifying a crisis rather than an emergency) and diverted the Boeing 777 to Recife, where it transpired that the engine was actually out of oil and would’ve failed if the plane had continued. It’s no surprise that he also loved fatherhood – the ultimate adventure, you might say – calling it “the pleasure of my life”. Alberto phoned him just the other day, he reports proudly, to share news that he’d done especially well in an exam. Simone is even more like his father, having spent time in the military (as a paratrooper) and done charity work (as a Red Cross volunteer), just like him.

All that said, it’s quite possible that Umberto isn’t the easiest person to live with. He has a temper, and does explode on occasion (“I’m generally very calm – but, if there’s something wrong, I shout”), but the larger issue is that no-one could’ve lived the life he’s lived without being unusually strong-willed; I assume he likes things to be the way he likes them. His wife can’t have been thrilled by his constant departures to far-off places – though it seems she also does her own thing, having now retired from Alitalia and gone off to work at her father’s pharmacy in Palermo without any immediate plans to join him in Cyprus. Are they even together? “Oh yes!” he assures me. “Long-distance. But we have Skype!”

He arrived in 2012, initially just for a holiday – but he met local artist Andros Efstathiou and got involved in organising a seminar on art and religions, one thing led to another and he’s now happily ensconced in the small flat in Larnaca. Despite having travelled all over, the Mediterranean is “my world,” he admits. His days aren’t especially eventful: he jogs every morning for an hour, seven to eight – from his place in central Larnaca, down the beach to the airport and back again – then writes books, organises Dante Alighieri events, gives the occasional lecture or presentation. It’s no surprise that he’s a Rotarian, nor is it a surprise that he’s tried – in vain – to convince Rotaract members (the younger version of Rotary) to go into the field “and see how it works” instead of simply planning worthy projects over dinner. It’s not that Umberto doesn’t plan, but planning isn’t really his style. His style is to go ahead and do it, just like when he turned up – “out of the blue!” – at that Mistassini village in the frozen wilds of Canada 39 years ago.

He’s done a lot, with the stories to prove it. I almost forget that he’s also an academic – but in fact he talks rather fascinatingly of tribal myths, and how “one common element in many myths all over the world is the first woman”. (Short version: Woman is originally an animal, her vagina blocked with thorns so she can’t be penetrated; Man must change the woman from an animal into a woman, taming her forest nature into a ‘village’ nature; this is also why, in some tribes, women aren’t allowed to go into the forest without a man, lest the spirits restore their old identity.) He’s chatted equally amiably with dirt-poor Indians and the future head of the Catholic Church. He’s gone from hacking paths through the jungle to flying high-tech machines with a price-tag – a single engine of a 777 costs around €10 million – that could feed an Amazon village for a year.

Quite extreme, no? “That’s life,” shrugs Umberto when I point out the contrast – or at least that’s his own life, the one he chose, the one that fits his particular energy. Someone else might’ve done things differently – but it sounds like Umberto had more fun, and you have to say he’s been successful. “I had some targets, some goals in my life, and – well, not easily – but I’ve reached them all,” he affirms breezily. He walks me downstairs, a distinguished gentleman with luxurious white hair and beard, the big Italian flag on the landing making our meeting feel like a state occasion.

THEO PANAYIDES finds that the maths whiz charged with overseeing the facility in Limassol expected to draw in hundreds of thousands of extra tourists has had a successful life, built on rising to a series of challenges

Just beyond MyMall, right on the edge of the city, land is being cleared for City of Dreams Mediterranean, the casino resort that’s projected to lure an extra 300,000 tourists a year to Limassol. A few minutes and a couple of streets away, a temporary casino – a ‘mere’ 33 tables and 242 slot machines, though still a multi-million-Euro investment – is due to open in a few days, presumably to whet our appetites till the main event opens in 2021. And a few minutes down from that – at the intersection of two main roads, in a building with a security guard who takes my name and makes me sign in – is the second-floor office where Craig Ballantyne, the casino’s ‘property president’, ponders this massive project, chatting cheerfully and sipping a cappuccino.

Craig is beefy, shaven-headed, with unblinking grey-blue eyes and a Scottish accent that’s survived all these decades away from Dundee – and he loves to talk. “I love having an argument,” he tells me – but he also loves to talk about himself, and his life in casinos. The various adventures he’s had don’t go unrecorded; “I write all these things up, for posterity”. After 40 years in the business (he’s now 67), he’s writing his memoirs, though he still hasn’t settled on a title. “‘Casino Myths and Other Things’,” he offers vaguely, in the spirit of a work in progress – and the second half of that title could admittedly use some work. The first half, however, sounds like a winner.

Casino myths loom large in our conversation. “There are many myths about casinos,” he points out wryly. The myth of ‘dealer signature’, for instance. The myth of patterns, and good luck coming in waves. “I’ve lost five times in a row, this time I’m going to win so I’ll increase my bet,” he says, in the voice of the inveterate gambler. Roulette players will invariably bet on red after three consecutive blacks, or on 17 after 29 if it happened to come after 29 the last time. Gamblers consult the display boards in casinos, showing the last few numbers, like a seer consulting her runes – despite the obvious fact that probabilities don’t change, whatever you choose to bet.

“It could be birthdays. It could be all the 9s – 9, 19, 29 – because these are your favourite numbers.” Craig managed a casino in the early 00s where a player won €4.2 million over the course of a week – “and actually the guy’s game was so, so simple. He played nine numbers, maximum bet”. The player never varied his bet, regardless of whether he was winning or losing, and he played a section of the wheel, choosing nine numbers that were next to each other. Then he’d place his bet and leave the rest to Chance, or God or whoever. A casino is a place of magical thinking.

Craig himself is nothing like that. I take it you’re not very spiritual, I hazard near the end of the interview, when I’ve gotten to know him a little; “Nope!” he agrees, and laughs uproariously. His front teeth show when he laughs, his round, bobbing face giving him the look of a jovial rabbit – but it’s clear he’s nobody’s fool, and I’m guessing he’s not always amiable. (I do overhear him talking to subordinates later, and catch a glint of steel in his voice.) One of his many challenges, he recalls at one point, was the Mont Parnes casino in Athens, a case of a joint venture which was 51 per cent state-owned: “The union was very strong, but the performance of staff generally was very weak. So I had to change the mentality. And I believe I transformed it, in less than two years.” I assume he did that by firing people? “No, by doing the right things,” he retorts firmly. “I mean OK, there were some terminations, but only for the right reasons”. The union couldn’t protest, because he was always careful to follow the letter of the law. “Must – follow – the law!” says Craig, knocking on the table for emphasis.

That’s always been his style: firm, logical, above all methodical. One of his hobbies is cooking (he only has a handful of hobbies, the others being golf, snooker and classical piano), and his most successful dish is his beef bourguignon – “basically because it’s 49 steps,” he explains, and laughs again. “I know that sounds crazy, I suppose you could say I’m a little OCD when it comes to setting things out. I’m the same in business. I look at the KPIs [key performance indicators], I look at the analyses, I look at what every member of staff does, and I determine performance based on that”. Craig is the type of person who keeps a mental spreadsheet of his life so far: “When I was at school – the secondary school in Linlathen – we used to have positions in school, and from all the terms I can remember I was 3^rd, 1^st, 2^nd, 1^st, 1^st, 1^st, 1^st, 1^st, 1^st, 1^st. And then I was the dux of the school,” he concludes, ‘dux’ being a Scottish term for ‘top student’.

His record spoke for itself. “I was very good at maths when I was young,” he recalls, with fine understatement. The Royal Bank of Scotland offered him a job right out of high school, without a degree (he did attend Dundee Commercial College during his time in banking), then he joined Ladbrokes, the betting company, in his early 20s – a job that suited his flair for complex mental arithmetic. “You could have six horses winning or coming placed, so you were betting on winning and placing for six horse combinations. And then you multiply them up by doubles, trebles, quads, fives and sixes,” he rattles off, by way of example. Ladbrokes moved him to their new casino division a few years later, by which time he’d also shown himself to be an excellent manager: “So, from 1976 on, I was a manager”.

42 years later, that’s still what he does – though not in Britain; even now, “most of the casinos in the UK, you can fit inside your house,” he quips dismissively. So where has he worked? “I’ll try and do them in chronological order,” he says, pausing to lay down the sequence in his head: “So – Poland, Russia, Ukraine, then Romania, Kenya, Lebanon, Egypt, South Africa, Greece, Russia, Cyprus”. Poland was also where he met Gosia, his second wife; they’ve been married since 1998. (He also has a daughter, in her 30s, who lives in Canada.) His second stint in Russia was actually in Vladivostok, working for Hong Kong billionaire Lawrence Ho who needed an experienced veteran to spearhead his Russia operations. Ho is the chairman of Melco, the parent company behind the City of Dreams franchise – which explains why Craig is now here, tasked with setting up the first CoD casino outside the Far East.

Those countries all sound quite… challenging, I point out delicately. Never mind placid places like the UK, he’s never even worked in a gambling mecca like Las Vegas; would he have liked to? “Not necessarily. Not in the middle of a desert, thank you.” Macau – where Ho owns a number of casinos – is more his speed.

Maybe he could try it after Cyprus, I suggest.

“Oh no, that’s me finished!” he replies, and gives another of his great rabbit laughs. “This is definitely the last one!” He’s 67, after all, and has worked crazy hours, six days a week and often seven, for nearly 50 years; “I’ve never had my holidays, not really”. He’s retired twice already, and twice changed his mind. People ask why he keeps doing it, and they have a point. Note, however, that his hobbies – golf and snooker, both of which he plays to a high standard – are individual sports; he’s never been terribly keen on team sports like rugby and football. “I think I like being challenged as an individual – and I think that’s why I took the challenge of Cyprus from Lawrence… People say ‘Why aren’t you retired, Craig? You’re 67, you’ve made enough money’. But I like the challenge.”

The emphasis on unaided, individual success is significant. Craig Ballantyne, after all, is a man who’s been successful all his life. He never had that shimmer of self-doubt which afflicts most young people in their 20s; from school dux to maths whiz to casino manager, his path has been clearly defined. But there’s something else too. Craig was born with a talent for numbers, and numbers have their own special character. Numbers mean logic; numbers mean transparency; numbers – notoriously – don’t lie. His preference for personal challenges and a kind of stubborn individualism is reflected, indirectly, in his work, much of which has been spent standing apart from the crowd – protecting his casinos against corruption (the opposite of transparency) and relying on cold mathematical logic, as opposed to magical thinking.

His 40-plus years in casinos appear to have been a constant battle against crooked dealers, corrupt employees and larcenous customers. In Poland, he once made a citizen’s arrest of a man who’d stolen chips from a gaming table, having marked the chips with UV then traced the man from Warsaw to Poznan. In Kenya, “I woke up to a Kalashnikov in my face one morning, I was arrested by the immigration authorities because I’d fired the food and beverage director” (who happened to be friends with the son of then-president Daniel arap Moi). Also in Poland, he foiled a complicated blackjack scam “which was worth in excess of six million – and that was what we call an unshuffled slug of cards,” he explains, and laces his hands around an imaginary deck to show me how cards can be shuffled in a way that keeps one section of the deck the same.

Craig can do this, despite not being a professional cardsharp (he can also spin a ball better than most dealers; you pick up a lot after 40 years) – but his main weapon was always the numbers, indeed that’s how he first became suspicious of the scammers, “because I looked at the analytics and the game margins didn’t look right”. Craig is hard-nosed, and immune to casino myths. In a place where people believe that betting money on their son’s birthday will somehow invoke Lady Luck, this assertive, down-to-earth, even somewhat dour Scotsman is the last redoubt of rational thinking.

What’s he like as a person? Is he conservative? “I’d say yeah, I’m very conservative I think. I’m a great believer in ‘everything in moderation’.” He likes to drink, but stops after a couple of whiskies. He’ll light a cigar now and then, but that’s all. He used to bet but doesn’t anymore, partly due to having been burned by the stock market. He doesn’t enjoy a wild social life; “I want to be low-key… I’m not [casino mogul] Steve Wynn and all these guys”. He’s also, he insists, law-abiding, whether it’s rooting out corruption or following AML (anti-money laundering) regulations. If a customer changes €100,000 into chips then comes back to the cash desk and returns the chips, asking for an electronic transfer, Craig will decline; “I say no, you came in with cash, you get cash”. These days, legal guidelines for casinos are almost too robust, he notes – then goes off on a rant about double standards, and bookies being allowed to advertise while casinos aren’t. Like he says, he loves an argument.

What about the claim that casinos enable gambling addiction?

“I’ve been in this business for more than 40 years. How many times have I seen a serious addict in my life?” He holds up the fingers of both hands, though it’s unclear if he actually means ‘Ten’ or ‘Not many’.

Yeah, but you can’t really know, I point out. Maybe someone makes a relatively small bet, but that’s all the money they have in the world.

“I’m not in the business of – let’s say, creating social problems,” he replies smoothly, “I’m in the business of providing a legal service in the right way… I’m not interested in having people addicted to gaming, where they destroy their business, their family and everything else. In fact, I’m probably more moral than most people – certainly most governments! When I was in Poland, to give you a small example, I actually reduced the hours of gaming by six hours.”

He would say that, of course. Craig Ballantyne has been tempted to try other things over the years – open his own restaurant, most notably – but casinos have been his life, and he’ll always stand up for them. Meanwhile, City of Dreams Mediterranean looms large on the horizon, not just a resort but a “holistic” resort, not just a casino but also a 500-room hotel, 22 high-end villas, four restaurants, 11 bars, an amphitheatre, a wedding chapel, outside areas totalling 52,000 square metres, MICE facilities (Meetings, Incentives, Conventions, Exhibitions) totalling 9,600 square metres. It’s going to be huge, certainly by Cyprus standards if perhaps not by Macau ones – and this smart, veteran manager is here to set it up, putting the numbers to work one last time before retirement. “The reality is, my job’s very hard,” says Craig, and laughs again. “You want my job, come and get it!” Another casino myth exposed, obviously.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a man much like his art, where little details build a picture of a life that has included being a builder’s labourer and a member of a bikers’ gang

The best way to describe Peter Bird is perhaps to do what he does, i.e. work in miniature. Not that the artworks he produces are small, necessarily. Peter makes so-called ‘visionary art’, sizeable ornamented pieces which take weeks or months to complete – but most of that time is spent hunched over his worktable in the tiny, tiny Larnaca studio that doubles as his living quarters, using “a special curved brush that I cut down myself” to apply acrylic paint in fine, flawless lines, again and again till he gets it right. His paintings contain little panels, each one adorned with little arcs and curlicues of paint. The charm of the whole lies in the details, each one painstakingly honed; it can take an entire day to produce one panel.

The same approach should perhaps be used to describe his 63 years on the planet (so far), the past nine spent in Cyprus, the past seven months spent at Kitium Art Residencies in central Larnaca where he lives and works. It has, after all, been a life of small strokes. He hasn’t – touch wood – had to deal with any major crises or health problems. He’s never married, nor ever been tempted. (“Single guy, single guy!” he avers almost frantically when I broach the subject.) He’s lived – and continues to live – very simply. There’s no grand design to his life; just a steady agglomeration of details, building up (like his paintings) to a singular, highly unusual person.

“You’ll be asking me questions, right?” he double-checks at the start of our interview, clearly unnerved by the thought of having to speak without prompting. (His replies, when I do ask my questions, are as short and precise as his brushstrokes.) We’re on a side street, the silence broken only by the occasional roar of a passing motorcycle. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and very hot. Kitium Art Residencies – four artists’ studios, plus gallery space – is a converted warehouse, its corrugated-iron roof trapping the heat from outside, just as Peter’s own room is a converted storeroom.

His ‘home’ is perhaps four feet by 10 feet, an enclosed wagon-like space with a sofa bed and a handful of furnishings; a small, very steep wooden ladder leads to his studio – “That one’s a bit greasy,” he warns of the top rung, clambering up with practised ease – which is simply the roof of the narrow wagon, piled high with art and looking out over the warehouse. There are, of course, no windows. Isn’t he uncomfortable, living in such a small space? He shrugs: “It doesn’t really bother me”.

His life, you might say, is monastic, devoted to work. He’s dressed in olive pants and matching olive-grey T-shirt, torn at the armpit. “I’m not a big spender, lavish on clothes or anything like that. If I go to get clothes, it’s at a secondhand shop.” He’s gangly and floppy, thin as a rake, with rather odd posture – head hunched forward, arms at his sides – which presumably comes from all those hours huddled over his paintings. He’s shaven-headed, with big round glasses, expressive hand gestures and a slight, intermittent stammer. At first he seems painfully awkward, but in fact he’s quite pleasant, even sociable. It’s a slight surprise to learn that he worked as a builder’s labourer – for 20 years, until his early 40s – and was also part of a biker gang: “Proper bikes, really massive great big ones.” To be fair, they weren’t exactly Hell’s Angels; they just drove around England, 15 or 20 bikers, roaring down the backroads on their weekends and holidays. What was the attraction of motorbikes?

“I don’t know, good question. Just a thing when you’re younger, I suppose. I continued with it, till I got the aches and pains [and] didn’t want to do it anymore, y’know?” The ‘aches and pains’ are mostly arthritis, one reason why he appreciates the warm climate of Cyprus. ‘Good question’, I gradually realise, is his stock response to those questions – usually the more abstract ones – which he isn’t really sure how to answer. Unlike most artists, he’s not too keen on faux-philosophical waffle.

What makes him happy, apart from work?

“That’s a good question. Happy…” muses Peter, as if handling a nugget of kryptonite – then prefers to evade it altogether. “Maybe happy doing my work. You know? Even if you don’t sell work, something still drives you to create work all the time. Doesn’t make me off-put if I don’t sell any work, I’d still create work… So yeah, happy.”

Being happy, I suspect, isn’t something he thinks about; he just is, or he isn’t (and usually is). He left school at 15, with no qualifications – and the first job he found was as a gravedigger, which he did for two years. Rather a depressing job for a 15-year-old, surely? “You got used to it,” he shrugs, with the air of waving off a minor irrelevance, adding proudly that “it’s all done by hand”, or it was in those days; “Pickaxe, shovel, and you dug [the grave] by hand”. From there he went to a timber yard, stacking timber for a further three years – then came his time in the builder’s trade, which was both enjoyable and lucrative.

“I was on the price gang, I was earning £500 a week,” recalls Peter. “It’s called a price gang, and it’s literally running around – because the bricklayer gets paid for how many bricks he lays, so if the bricklayer’s going fast, the labourer’s got to go fast. I was running up and down ladders, running up and sliding down them all the time, all day. I was quite fit when I was younger”.

He’s always liked manual work – even now (or especially now), as an artist and craftsman. It’s a bit surprising that his education ended at 15, since the family weren’t poor; his dad was a civil servant doing something hush-hush (“He’d signed the Official Secrets Act, he was somewhere up in the mysterious places… He was an engineer, as far as I know”), not exactly the typical background for a teenage gravedigger and timber-stacker – but the boy simply wasn’t academic. “In them days, I didn’t really want to take any exams. I just wanted to leave school”. He was sporty, and a keen freshwater fisherman. He wasn’t – and still isn’t – much of a reader. Yet he’d always do some drawing on the side, keeping it a secret from his biker friends and fellow labourers – not because they’d laugh, they just wouldn’t be interested. He honed his skills copying album covers (not just tracing but copying by hand, in black and white) then, as he grew older, became more professional. “I was doing workshops, and having exhibitions here and there.”

All the little details, building up a picture of a very particular person. A physical – as opposed to cerebral – person, digging graves and sliding down ladders, butterfly-hunting as a boy in his grandpa’s allotment. A risk-averse person, having “pondered on the idea” for a whole year before taking the decision to move to Cyprus (his older brother lived here at the time, and told him of a job looking after student accommodation at the Cyprus College of Art, later the Cornaro Institute). A quiet person, musing that he’d like to buy a place “out of the hustle and bustle” if he won the lottery (does a side street in Larnaca really count as hustle and bustle?). An austere, quite ascetic person, who seldom drinks and has no interest in food; his only vices, he says, are coffee and cigarettes, which are what gets him through the day in that cramped little studio. Also, it seems, quite a private – or just free-spirited – person. Does he miss anything about England?

“England? Not much at the moment with what’s going on there, all the rules and regulations and stuff. You know? And people watching you”.

Rules about what?

“Everything, isn’t it? Everyone’s spying on you, aren’t they? – looking at what you do. If you put the dustbin out, you’ve got to keep it level… You have spies looking, round the corner”. Meaning neighbours? “Yeah. Or in the council, things like that.”

It all comes together in his life (and art) at the Kitium Art Residencies – a gloriously private life where few people even see him, let alone tell him what to do; an austere life, neither spacious nor especially comfortable but devoted to his work, like some mediaeval monk; a quiet life and a physical one, working with his hands all day. He takes care of the studio (which fetches a small monthly wage) and will also – unlike a mediaeval monk – teach the occasional workshop. ‘Quiet’ shouldn’t be confused with ‘misanthropic’: Peter has friends, and will often walk downtown for a chat or a bite to eat. He’s happy to talk if people “drift past” the studio, which they often do. Don’t forget he got along with builders and bikers for years – though it may be significant that he’s long since lost touch with his old biker pals, and has only been back in England once in the nine years since he left. He’s not, it seems, a very sentimental person.

His art isn’t really sentimental, either; it’s precise, influenced by a life-changing trip to Luxor where he marvelled at the ancient Egyptians’ architectural feats (“You can’t get a razor blade in between the joins, they’re that perfect”) and determined to bring that same accuracy to his own “line”. His art, like his life, is conducted on a low budget: almost all his materials are found objects, “discarded things” – shower heads, feathers, shells, light fittings, sequins, little stones, old CDs, a chain from a sink plug, a chipboard table he found in a skip – the main exception being the plastic masks in the centre of his compositions (which he either buys, or makes on a mould). His art, like his life, is single-minded; he takes his time, and won’t be distracted. “If I make a mistake, I put black over it, and start again,” explains Peter. One particular piece took an astonishing six months to finish.

The days fly by easily enough: up at six, coffee and a croissant, then paint for a few hours, quick break for coffee and a cigarette, back to painting, half-hour break for lunch, back in the studio till mid-afternoon, then he’ll do a few chores and maybe paint again in the evening, if he’s not going out. Now and then – once every three weeks, say – he’ll go scavenging for materials, checking out skips and secondhand shops. He lives on his meagre caretaker’s salary, and what’s left of his savings; for some reason – maybe because he’s not too handy with computers – he doesn’t really market his work, and has barely sold (or attempted to sell) anything since coming to Cyprus. Still, he’s not fussed. He’ll be 65 in two years, hence eligible for a pension – and he’s happy to keep living this life, as long as “my hands are good” and the work isn’t sub-standard.

What kind of person are we talking about here? Not, he insists, a spiritual person – “Not at all” – yet he’ll often “enter a different reality” when engrossed in his work. His art draws from all kinds of cultures (Indian, Egyptian, Celtic) and he’ll actually see these ancient people, very clearly, in his head, imagining their lives in a kind of vivid dream while assembling shower heads and sequins and CDs, or applying paint with his special curved brush. When he worked at Cornaro he was also in charge of the art shop, and had to keep pausing to hand out supplies to students – but “I’d just stop, serve, get back to my mindset, continue”. In the end, Peter’s greatest trait is perhaps his ability to focus so completely, on the life he’s chosen and the work that makes it worthwhile.

What would he do, if he couldn’t create?

“That’s a good question.” A pause. “I don’t know. This is all I know, I can’t really answer that… ’Cause when I’m doing my work, you get into a self-meditation state. You know, background doesn’t exist. You lose track of time. People walk in, [but] you’ve got no sense of anyone there”. Peter nods: “Yes, it’s very therapeutic, my kind of work”. A glimmer of some larger meaning, side-by-side with the miniature details. I leave him, a thin gangly figure in olive, and return to the muggy heat of the outside world.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a sentimental soul who has lived the good life, even if much of it was spent upstairs from the family museum

The first Pierides to arrive in Cyprus was also a Demetrios – and already, it seems, an important person. He came from Venice in 1753 (the family name was then Pieraki), with a decree from the Doge naming him as consul. “And ever since, 11 generations, we are here,” says his descendant, the current Demetrios, sitting in the drawing room of the 19th-century family home in Larnaca, upstairs from the museum which bears the family name.

The family looms large in his life; it always has. Demetrios Pierides’ great-grandfather was the first Greek mayor of Larnaca. His father Zenon was also mayor of Larnaca. Their social contribution may be glimpsed in every corner of the city: “The general hospital, the town hall, the municipal garden, the poorhouse, the old people’s home, the church, the theatre, the municipal market – all these are donations from the family”. Demetrios’ CV lists the businesses carried out by the family group of companies, though most of these are inactive (he estimates he lost around 85 per cent of his fortune in 1974, when the Turks took Famagusta): “Shipping, since 1860; Banking, since 1866; Insurance, since 1872; Hotels, since 1962; Airlines, since 1937; Tourism, Real Estate and Motor Car Imports, since 1958”.

The family informs who he is, and of course what he says. I’m under no illusions that I got him to drop his guard, or forget his status as spokesman for the House of Pierides – though he does have impeccable manners. He greets me in a navy-blue jacket (I’m in a T-shirt), which he then makes a show of taking off: “Since you’re ‘casual’, I will be too,” he offers magnanimously. It’s almost a performance, the grand old man in his 22-room mansion with the splendid garden – which he’s actually tried to make listed, he explains, to ensure it won’t succumb to anything as vulgar as development. “How many times have people told me, ‘Are you crazy, you have this huge garden and you did not build a hotel here?’.” Demetrios shakes his head: “The araucarias are 154 years old. To be cut, and made a boutique hotel? For God’s sake!”. He smiles, and leads me on a tour of the museum. We meet on June 29, a day before his 81st birthday.

The museum is fascinating, showcasing five generations of Pierides resourcefulness. “My father’s Roman-glass collection is among the most important in Europe,” he notes in passing, guiding me through the small rooms. There’s a slight DIY, amateur-enthusiast feel to the place – it’s literally just the ground floor of an old family home – without much in the way of detailed descriptions. It’s easy to miss treasures like the large terracotta idol found in Souskiou, near Paphos, dating from the Chalcolithic period, or what Demetrios calls “the astronaut” – a baffling bichrome jug from the Cypro-Archaic period (around 650 BC) adorned with a weird humanoid figure who wears what looks like a diving helmet, has four fingers on each hand, and appears to be sitting on a chair that’s either jet-powered or spring-loaded. A god? An artist’s flight of fancy? Or perhaps a memory of a visiting alien? Where’s Erich von Daniken when you need him?

The museum is fascinating – but the private residence upstairs is something else again. In a glass case, at the top of the stairs, are the nine medals which our host has been awarded over the years – this one by Chirac, that one by Papoulias or Berlusconi; Commander of the National Order of Merit, Gold Cross of the Order of Honour, the Royal Order of the Polar Star presented by King Carl Gustav of Sweden. Then you come to the drawing room and adjoining dining room, an enormous space once again festooned with photos.

One section is devoted to celebrities: Demetrios with Sean Connery (who’s twice been a guest at his home in Glyfada), with Telly Savalas, with Melina Mercouri. Another section he wryly describes as “Those who failed to solve the Cyprus problem”, meaning all the presidents of Cyprus from Makarios onwards. (They all posed with him happily enough, down to the current incumbent.) Yet another table is loaded with pictures of royalty: King Umberto I of Italy looking very athletic; a 1947 snap of Simeon II, the exiled boy king of Bulgaria. Demetrios Pierides seems a little obsessed with royalty – and of course the subtext is clear, viz. that he himself is a kind of royalty, or as close as we come to it in Cyprus. He’s the scion (and only son) of a grand and wealthy family: business people, patrons of the arts, and – as he tells it – almost too philanthropic for their own good.

“Would you say there’s a touch of ‘noblesse oblige’ in your makeup?”

“Could be, yes,” he replies, then looks at me anxiously: “Does it sound snobbish?”.

The response says much about the man – because Demetrios comes across as a sensitive, sentimental soul, a man who revels in his position but would much prefer to be loved than feared. To be called a snob would hurt him as deeply, I suspect, as being called vulgar (probably more, since he knows the latter charge to be baseless). At one point I ask if he has an artistic streak, given his love of the arts; “Thank God, no,” he replies with a laugh, “because I’ve never heard a living painter say a good word about another living painter!” – the implication being that life as an artist would’ve made him enemies, and caused him pain. He runs on feelings, and human relationships. He studied Psychology for a year, alongside his main degree (Economics and Law, in Lausanne), but dropped out of the course because he didn’t want to approach people scientifically; he preferred to go with his heart – even when it made for bad business.

All his life, he admits wryly, “I was expecting to get £1,000, but in my mind I had already spent £1,300. Because I always believed that, when you get, your hand is full – but when you give, your heart is full. And I was not, in the strict sense of a businessman, a good businessman.”

Culture, of course, was the main beneficiary of these unprofitable numbers. He married briefly, in the late 1960s – but soon split up and instead “became married to culture”, which made much more sense. The museum in Larnaca pre-dates him, of course – but he also founded the Pierides Foundation, through which he expanded the family’s empire significantly: a museum of contemporary art in Athens (where he lived for “20 beautiful years” till the mid-90s), the Municipal Arts Centre in Nicosia, two marine-themed museums in Ayia Napa, an Ethnographic Museum in a country house belonging to his GP in the village of Avgorou. Seems a bit risky, building a museum in a small village, I point out; maybe not the best business decision. “You say ‘business’,” he shrugs in reply, “but the culture, and the museums, do not bring money… On the contrary, I spent a great deal of money, especially to collect those 600 beautiful artefacts of our prehistoric times”.

That’s a reference to perhaps his happiest decade: 1964-74, when business was booming in Famagusta, Demetrios was a dashing young man with a world-class collection of sports cars, and the newly-formed Turkish Cypriot enclaves provided a unique opportunity for the serious collector. The enclaves were protected by the UN, free to do what they liked – so “they were excavating every night in prehistoric necropolises, like in Kotsiatis, Marki and Souskiou, and bringing to light these beautiful pieces… And I doubled the prices, so everyone knew there’s a crazy man in Famagusta who, if you showed him what you had in a sketch –” he shrugs, as if to say ‘The rest is history’. He had Turkish Cypriot agents keeping an eye on things, contacting him straight away when new treasures were unearthed; in all, more than 600 pieces made their way into the Pierides vaults. It wasn’t just a passion for collecting, he muses: “It was also, if you like, a minimum of a social and family duty, to continue what five generations before me started”.

There it is again: duty, status, the burden of family. His path was set from childhood, the pressure enormous; the Pierides name had to be safeguarded. “I had no choice,” he shrugs. “I wanted to follow my uncle Zenon Rossides, who was for years ambassador to Washington and the United Nations. He had no children and he liked me very much, and I wanted to go and live with him in New York – but I had no choice. I had to come back and look after all the family businesses. With no regrets, of course,” he adds, almost as an afterthought.

Being born rich, it turns out, is almost as much of a trap as being born poor – though of course the fringe benefits are better. Take that collection of cars, for instance: three Aston Martins (including the DB5, which he bought after watching Goldfinger but before becoming mates with Sean Connery), two Ferraris (a Superamerica and a Testarossa), a Maserati, an Iso Rivolta. “I enjoyed the Lamborghini Espada for at least 20 years,” he recalls – but then foolishly switched to a Lamborghini Diablo which turned out to be a disaster, far too low and without any luggage space, so he sent it back after two months with a disapproving note. You know you’re living the good life when your new Lamborghini isn’t up to the standards of your old Lamborghini.

Demetrios did live the good life: not just the cars but yachts, skiing holidays, trips to Paris and the Riviera. But it wasn’t a wild life, he insists. There were plenty of parties, but “no nightlife” – and besides, “I have always been careful”. He’s never stayed up too late, even in Athens with its crazy rhythms, only smoked once in his life (a pipe, in Lausanne as a student; he hated it), will drink maybe “one glass of red wine in winter, now and then, and some beer in the summer”. Perhaps it’s his character – or perhaps it’s the family again, that dutiful repression of his wilder instincts that’s been second nature since childhood.

He recalls his frustration as an active little boy forced to “live in a museum”, and how he chafed against always being told to be careful. He recalls missing school trips because such-and-such a prince, or archbishop, or prime minister was coming to visit, and little Demetrios had to be there to shake hands. He also recalls an intriguing story, of driving from Bari to Rimini on a Sunday morning back in the day. “I knew that it was a straight road, not even a small bend – and I was alone.” There was no traffic at all, so he stepped on the gas – but suddenly, “when I reached 230km/h in my Ferrari Superamerica, I said to myself: ‘What are you doing? One small stone in the road – and finished! Don’t you have responsibilities to others? If you are killed, whom are you killing also? Your father, your mother’… And I never, ever went above a certain speed again.”

Some may call that repression, others civic duty. Demetrios Pierides has done his bit, to be sure; he hasn’t just posed for photos with the elite, he’s been one of them. He’s chaired 28 companies and was on the Bank of Cyprus board for 13 years, till 2006. (“Of course, to be on the board of Bank of Cyprus was also a family tradition – because the bank was created by my grandfather, amongst others.”) He was instrumental in founding the bank’s Greek network, and still can’t comprehend why Cypriot banks in Greece were sold for such a pittance around the time of the haircut. He’s twice declined offers of a ministry, and fended off entreaties to follow his father as mayor of Larnaca.

His worldview, it must be said, is quite hierarchical, with a healthy respect for authority and a faith in the rich and powerful getting it right. We talk a bit about politics, and I’m surprised to find that he welcomes America’s recent interventions in the Middle East, even the decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem. “They will meet with Putin,” he asserts confidently, “and find another Yalta”. And of course his hierarchical thinking goes all the way to the top: “I have a great belief in God, [and] I pray and ask for pardon every night”.

One small detail remains to be sorted. Demetrios has no children – so what happens to this priceless collection when others take over, and (more importantly) what happens to the great Pierides legacy? Hard to say, but he’s not without willing hands. His nephew Peter Ashdjian currently manages the museum and Foundation; another nephew, Zenon, lives in Limassol; a nine-year-old boy named Panayiotis also appears as I take my leave, introduced as Demetrios’ grandson though actually his godson (the two seem close, Pierides calling himself the boy’s “third grandfather”). One way or another, I suspect, the duty that’s dominated – and sometimes repressed – his life for eight decades won’t be forgotten. The family goes on.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a Cyprus based writer who grew up seeing things other people don’t and now uses writing to face her demons

It was the author’s bio that caught my eye. The email came from Austin Macauley – a British publisher with headquarters in London, New York and Sharjah – and concerned Nonsomnia, “a book of short stories of [sic] Cypriot writer Maria Raven”. So far, so familiar. Scrolling down to learn more about the author, however, I came across this: “Maria Raven is a Cypriot writer born in Russia. She had a difficult childhood, having medical and psychological treatment since the age of eight. Her parents insisted [that] their child take pills for seeing things that did not exist. Her dog was her only friend… She hopes that what she writes about will help her win her war with Darkness”.

‘What she writes about’ is horror, of course, Nonsomnia dealing in the kinds of subjects you’d expect to crop up in the exorcism of childhood demons: “Urban legends, zombie children, museum horrors and dark family secrets,” to quote the bio again. Not that the young woman sitting in the lobby of the St Raphael in Limassol a few days later seems especially demonic. Maria Raven is tall and slim, long-necked and willowy, with green eyes, pale skin and a fringe of jet-black hair, cut short. She laughs a lot, and poses for photos with the poise of the model she briefly was, as a university student in St Petersburg. She’s very pleasant, and we have a good chat – yet I don’t even know her real surname, ‘Raven’ being a nom de plume taken from her favourite poem, by Edgar Allan Poe.

Other aspects of her life are equally mysterious. The neutral hotel venue was her choice; she prefers not to meet in her home, or even close by. She works part-time, but prefers not to talk about it. Her private life is also out of bounds – “I will share, but later, if you don’t mind,” she explains, adding that she’s going through “a difficult period of my life now” – though we do establish that she used to be married, and is now divorced. She may (or may not) have kids, she evades with a laugh. Her book includes an introductory thank-you to “my genius dog, who literally saved my life!” – I assume it’s the same childhood friend mentioned in her bio – but she coyly declines to give the dog’s name. (It’s not like he’s ever going to read it, I point out.) She’s not quite as young as she looks – she’ll be 42 in a few months – nor has her life been as carefree as her happy demeanour suggests, though she’s happy to laugh about that as well.

“I mean, if I start talking now to someone sitting here,” she says at one point, indicating the empty chair next to us, “you will be surprised, or terrified?”

Somewhat freaked out, I admit.

“You will be freaked out,” she nods. “So I’d better not.” She gives it a beat, studying my wary expression. “I’m joking!”

She may joke, but it wasn’t a laughing matter. “If you tried to find a word for me as a child,” says Maria when I bring up the ‘difficult childhood’ mentioned in her bio, “it would be ‘strange’. People thought I was a strange girl. Because” – she laughs – “I saw things which other people didn’t see.”

By ‘things’, of course, she means spirits, visions, dead people. Again and again, mostly around the age of eight or nine – though the last time she saw an apparition she was 22, in the Metro in St Petersburg – Maria would be sleeping in her room, next to her little brother, and suddenly feel freezing cold. “It was very cold, I woke up,” she recalls – and, upon waking, saw people (often the same youngish man) sitting on her bed. “Normal people,” she makes clear, “not like from horror movie. People – I mean, human-like creatures”. At the time, she didn’t even know the word ‘ghost’, claims Maria. There were no horror movies in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s; all she’d ever read were fairytales. “I understood they were not from our world,” she says of the figures, who later began to appear in the daytime as well. “But I saw them. I talked to them, you know?”

What did they want?

“Just to talk.”

About what?

“Just to talk,” she repeats. “They knew they were dead. So it’s not like this movie – Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis, [where] they didn’t know. No, they knew. My ‘friends’,” she smiles, putting the word in quotation marks, “they knew. And they wanted to talk.”

Not that she ever had long conversations – or perhaps she did, it’s hard to say. Maria’s memory is rather fragmented on the subject, to the extent that she suspects her parents of having given her pills “to block my memory somehow” (she does remember sessions with a doctor, and being taken to see a specialist). The parents – both engineers, working in a factory in St Petersburg – were understandably distressed by their daughter’s talk of seeing visions, and shut her down when she tried to talk about it; “But I had an aunt,” adds Maria unexpectedly, “and she saw them too”. The aunt, a devout spinster, was “the only adult who understood me as a child,” she says – though they only met a handful of times before she passed away, and her parents forbade any further contact after Maria also saw what the aunt was seeing (“creatures”, rather than people) and fainted from terror.

“I can tell you one story, if you want, from my childhood,” she says calmly, as if the stories she’s already told weren’t enough. “I had a best friend, we studied together, she was my classmate. We were nine, I think – yes, nine – and once I went to her house, just for tea, and her granny offered me some pie or cake, I don’t remember. And I said thank you, and I was eating. And my friend was in the bedroom or somewhere, and she came to the kitchen and said, ‘What are you doing?’. I said, ‘I am eating a cake’. And she asked, ‘Where did you get it from?’. I said, ‘Your granny gave it to me’ – and she said, ‘My granny died a week ago!’.” Maria laughs ruefully: “After that, her mum went to my mum and asked that I never, ever come closer than one metre to her daughter again… [So] I lost my best friend, and we were not in contact anymore. Finally, my parents moved me to another school.”

What can you say to a story like that – or indeed all the other tales she tells of childhood visitations? The obvious response, at least from a modern perspective, is that she must’ve imagined it all – and Maria does admit that “children do these things, you know, they imagine things”. Even the most unequivocal sighting, the best friend’s granny who was solid enough to cut her a piece of cake, could’ve been all in her mind; young Maria may have heard vaguely of the old lady dying (it’s hard to believe she knew nothing; after all, “I knew the whole family”) and, as an imaginative nine-year-old, have channelled that half-knowledge into a story. The operative word here is ‘story’ – a point that also crops up when I ask if the kids at school ever made fun of her for her alleged psychic gifts.

“No,” she replies in her slightly fractured English. “I wasn’t popular girl – but I wasn’t, like, outcast. I was normal girl. I studied very well, I was best in my class, and I always had a good sense of humour, so my jokes were popular. I always told everyone funny stories – and, starting from the age of 15, I started to tell them horror stories, and I became very popular. My classmates, they liked them and they asked for more. Vampires were in fashion, zombies were in fashion, ghosts were in fashion in beginning-of-90s Russia.”

Writing stories is something she’s been doing since her mid-teens, precisely to rid herself of the fear brought on by her ghostly ‘friends’. (One of the stories in Nonsomnia, ‘The Paintings of Hans’, includes a character based on her auntie.) That said, it was never a crippling fear, even at the height of her troubles. “I was happy!” she insists. “I was happy child. But I was afraid of darkness, and I was afraid to go to sleep”. She firmly rejects my suggestion that the ghosts may have been reflections of real-life trauma: “No, no, no, my childhood was absolutely happy. I was very happy child, because I had everything – friends, school, fun time, loving parents… Maybe it was the flat,” she muses – and the ‘visits’ did indeed tail off after they moved to another flat.

Life went on, more or less as normal. The Soviet Union fell (a momentous event which appears to have made little impact on Maria’s life), she went to university and did two degrees, Russian followed by Child Psychology, graduated at a time – the late 90s – when Russia was in chaos, with no jobs and the economy in freefall. That was “a difficult time in St Petersburg, dangerous time, and I was very happy to move to Cyprus”, which she did in the early 00s. The move seems to have been occasioned by the marriage she’d rather not talk about – but the marriage is over now and “I love this country, it’s my second motherland”. She speaks Greek, has Cypriot as well as Russian friends (indeed, mostly Cypriot), loves the sun and the sea – and of course she writes, she writes all the time now.

In the last few months especially, “I feel the constant need to write,” she enthuses. Maria seems to be quite a solitary person anyway (“I’m very, very happy alone”) and now she barely goes out at all, instead “all my free time I write. I write, write, write”. She’s finished a children’s fairytale called Through the Mist, and is barrelling through a second collection of short stories (not necessarily horror; one is a sci-fi yarn about artificial intelligence). She’s planning a cyberpunk novel, fielding an offer to translate the current book into Spanish, and hoping to write about Lofou, her favourite village. The spur to all this creativity has been the recent publication of Nonsomnia – so recent, in fact, that she only received complimentary copies a few days before our interview.

The book has a rather unusual history. It came out in Russian two years ago, under the title We Are 16 (it contains 16 short stories) – but the book “was stolen,” she says, meaning the copyright wasn’t protected and Maria didn’t make any money, so she had it translated into English (omitting the poems which initially accompanied the stories) and looked around for a publisher. She sent it to a half-dozen companies in English-language markets and received a single positive reply from Austin Macauley, who she says have been very helpful. (They’ve also been surprisingly hands-off, changing nothing beyond a few typos; even the author bio that caught my eye was clearly written by Maria herself – hence the shaky grammar – rather than the publishers.)

Was she hopeful, given how notoriously hard it is for aspiring authors to find a home for their work?

“I was absolutely sure!” she replies triumphantly. “I knew it!” Maria is into Tarot cards and Chinese astrology (she’s a Dragon; her star sign is Libra) and also has a Russian friend who runs a website and YouTube channel called Conceptual.Fashion, based on astrology. “You will find a publisher,” declared this friend, even telling her in which month she’d receive the reply – a reminder that Maria Raven isn’t just a ‘normal girl’ unaccountably assailed by magical visitors, but a believer in magic herself. Tell me honestly, I say, following her account of her childhood: do you believe ghosts are real? “Oh yes. I believe yes. Well, not ‘ghosts’, I wouldn’t use this word – but there is something, absolutely.”

The raven isn’t just her favourite poem, it’s her favourite animal. She has pictures of ravens at home, she admits, and collects raven knick-knacks. (Looking back, I can see why she’d prefer to meet in a hotel lobby.) Maria is so poised and convivial – yet I actually wouldn’t be surprised if she started talking to an invisible someone in the empty chair next to us; there’s a dreamy, ethereal side to her too. She may indeed be a “strange girl”, as was said of her childhood self – yet she’s also “a strong person”, as she tells me again and again.

“I was never depressed, I never had depression. And when I say I’m strong, I mean it. Nothing can break me, and nothing can take the ground from under my feet!” Her book isn’t dedicated just to her “genius dog” but also her parents, her Swiss boyfriend (another aspect of her life she’d rather not talk about), and the friends who supported her: “You know I had difficult times,” she reminds them. Maybe so – but things are better now, Maria a happy divorcee and newly-published author. “I feel free, and I feel inspired, and I feel years and tons of pages in front of me, kilometres of pages,” she gushes, sitting in the lobby of the St Raphael. “I will write, I know it. And I’m absolutely sure I will get what I want”. Take that, demons!

The quite remarkable Achilleas Kentonis and his Artos Foundation is what happens when you meld art, science and an overwhelming curiosity, Agnieszka Rakoczy discovers

Engineer, inventor, innovator, multi-disciplinary contemporary artist, founder of one of Nicosia’s most unique cultural centres.

All of the above describe the Renaissance-like qualities of Achilleas Kentonis, but very few of his acquaintances could guess that the shining light of his driving curiosity first emerged in the dimness of a cave.

A 10-year-old boy slips out of the family home to explore a mysterious cave on a nearby beach overcoming his fears of the dark. The cave was about 400 metres from the sleeping household in Ayios Georgios in Kyrenia and it was there the young lad discovered some ancient coins.
“Actually it was an ancient tomb but at the time I had no idea about antiquities so I was convinced I had stumbled upon pirate treasure,” Kentonis, a youngish 55, looking back on this character-building, life-shaping episode, recalls as we sit in the airy comfort of his bright office at the Artos Foundation in Ayios Omologites in Nicosia.

“I was very excited about my find. I decided to move the treasure to another cave so pirates wouldn’t take it from me. Obviously, I had to do this in secret. So even though I was terrified of darkness I went there during night, alone, without telling anybody. Even now when I remember this night it gives me such strong feelings. This was the night when I conquered my fears. I gained my freedom. I discovered adventure.”

Years later, jolted into shocked awareness of the fleeting nature of mortality after the tragic 2005 Helios plane crash, Achilleas, himself a frequent flier and traveller, decided he should share something of his past by taking his kids to visit his old village.

“I thought since I travel so much, I’d better take them there now because you never know what can happen.”

The visit proved to be less comfortable familiarisation than disconcerting revelation as he sought to introduce his children to the landscape of his childhood. Where once he had overcome his fears in the magic pursuit of finding buried treasure now stood a huge hotel and a casino, the latter a neon shrine to the lure of a far more mundane and much less imaginative treasure trove.

“I felt almost castrated. I had this big stone on my chest. I couldn’t breath. I felt robbed of my childhood. The place I was closest to nature in had been taken away from me. When I returned home I was dumbstruck. For three days, I couldn’t talk to anybody, not even my kids,” he says.

Turning to another life-shaping story, Achilleas’ voice fills with tension as he recalls the events of July 20, 1974, which he experienced as an 11-year-old.

“We were in our house in Ayios Georgios. There was a Turkish warship on the sea. Then Turkish planes started bombing. My father took me aside and said: ‘Look we have to leave now, we will go to Nicosia, but I have to ask you that from now on you conduct yourself not as an 11-year-old but as though you are 25. You must watch the sky when we drive and if you see that planes are approaching you have to tell me so I can turn the car away from the main line of escaping vehicles and avoid being hit.’ So I said ‘OK, let’s do it’ and we started out. I kept my window open and whenever planes would start chasing us and bullets were coming down I would tell my father to turn aside.”

That must have been a very traumatic experience for a 11-year-old boy, I interrupt, and Achilleas responds with a terse laugh and says: “This was the easiest bit.”
The road from Kyrenia to Nicosia was crowded with cars and so exposed that there was nowhere to hide when the planes were approaching. Then came word from Nicosia that that fighting had started there as well so all the cars had to turn back to Kyrenia.

“Turning back we were in this long convoy made up of private cars and military vehicles full of young soldiers. I remember thinking how stupid it was, that if the planes show up again we are so close to each other we will all be killed. And finally they did appear and they destroyed the first car in the convoy bringing us to a halt. More planes came and bombed us. Many people were killed. There was blood everywhere. Thirty years later I saw a photo of this incident and all the civilian cars are burnt out. I think ours was the only civilian car that survived intact.”

Somehow Achilleas’ father managed to turn their car around once more and was heading away from the convoy when a plane dived after them. “It was so sudden I couldn’t warn him. I heard an explosion. We had a heavy car and it kept going but I had some injuries. Even 10 years later, when I was a student in the United States, I would be picking pieces of grit out of my scalp that had remained there from that day.”

The family finally managed to get to Nicosia but that was not the end to the drama. “Nicosia was hard too. We lost our house. We had nothing – just the clothes on our back. One loses one’s dignity this way…”

Achilleas kept on having flashbacks, reliving his war experiences. He couldn’t sleep at night. He kept on seeing blood and dead people.

“One day I decided to put an end to all of that. I made some sculptures of people with very distorted heads, put them into a big box and carried it as far away from home as I could, two or three kilometres at least. I dug a hole, placed the box in it, buried it, stamped down the loose soil and said: ‘that’s it, it will never bother me again’.”

The boy went on to find yet another innovative and creative way to deal with his traumas. He had always loved the challenge of taking apart machines of different types, the more intricate the more intriguing. His father, who worked for the Vassos Eliades trading company, knowing his son’s penchant, would bring home old typewriters or calculators that the office was planning to dispose of so that Achilleas could dismantle them and explore and their inner workings, the hidden treasures, as it were, of their mechanisms.

“He knew my hands were thirsty for action. He always said: ‘you have to learn how to destroy in order to build’, and I was always trying to build something with tools I was making on my own as well. This gave me the necessary confidence to proceed. I just knew that if I wanted to do something I could do it. It was OK to fail sometimes because I knew I could always readjust and adapt whatever I was doing and bring it to success.”

By this stage, Achilleas was eager to move beyond that of tinkering hobbyist. He embarked on a series of correspondence courses determined to broaden his knowledge and to learn everything he could about the workings of machinery and mechanisms.

“I wanted to keep my mind as busy as possible. They would send me books and exercises and I would send them back and they would grade them and send more.

It was very interesting. By the time I was 14, I had built my first radio. It was made of wood. I still have it.”

Not surprisingly, after graduating from his high school and serving two years in the army (“I was sent to the furthest possible place on the island – to Pyrgos – so it was hard”), Achilleas set off to study engineering at the University of South Alabama in the United States.

“It was a small university but with a very good department and received lots of funding for research from big companies,” he remembers.
Achilleas’ talents were quickly recognised. By the third year of his studies, his tuition fees were being covered by Nasa, and he joined the famed space agency after graduation.

However, despite being in a position literally to reach for the stars the young man opted to go back to Cyprus. “In the immediate years after the war, the family was still dealing with the fall out and side effects. Then I spent two years doing my military service in the most isolated place on the island before going straight to the States. So I just felt I needed to give Cyprus a chance. I thought I would come back for two years and then decide what my next steps should be. But I never managed to leave again. I started a family and that was that,” he says.

Achilleas has never regretted his decision to return. Yes, there was no comparison between the money he was offered on the island and what he had been earning at Nasa. Nor did he realise his hope that this might be offset by having more time to relax while in Cyprus. But he is philosophical about it.

“When you work in a place like Nasa, the higher you get up the ladder, the more you get focussed on just a small element of the whole problem. I always wanted to deal with the whole story, the big picture. Cyprus was able to offer me exactly that.”

Remaining on the island also offered plusses such as having his children grow up in a safer environment and being close by his parents as they advanced into old age. More surprisingly and humblingly, Achilleas found that being in Cyprus forced him to address some issues of ego. He quickly had to come to terms with matching his expectations with the reality of his environment.

I must have raised my eyebrows a bit on hearing him say this because he hurriedly seeks to clarify by explaining: “You must understand, I came from this place where, whatever I dreamt of, I could do it straightaway. So now, here I am back in Cyprus and it is the 90s and I see so many things I believe I can improve… I have all these ideas and solutions so I am going around and giving them to people for free, saying, here, this is a good practice, take it, implement, move on.”

Yet despite his rapid-fire take on ways to remedy aspects of the prevailing situation, the former Nasa staffer is forced to come down to earth with a bump, because “nothing was happening…”

After a few more bumpy landings, Achilleas began to take on board that, just as when working on his innovative projects, so too, when it came to his new life on the island, he had to be ready and willing to readjust. As he put it, a little ruefully perhaps: “I understood that science at that time in Cyprus was neither capable nor ready to bring about the kind of changes I envisaged.” It simply lacked the resources for being an agent of change. Trying to be a pioneer in a rarified, specialised field in such circumstances was akin to being taken for “one of those Micky Mouse characters”. So it was that he switched creative disciplines and turned to art.
“My first love was always the creative rush that comes with invention and I think science is where that best flourishes. Art is more like a therapy. Yet, at that time in Cyprus people were moving away from the old school represented by the [Adamantios] Diamantis and [Michalis] Kashalos style of art and discovering a more modern art.”

This newfound curiosity bode well for the future and suggested to Achilleas that there was an audience open to and willing “to communicate”.

“The closest thing to creativity that people associated with was art. That was why I thought that art could make the difference then,” he explains.
So began another form of exploration. Not that Achilleas abandoned science entirely. Instead, he launched the Artos Foundation, a contemporary arts, science, innovation and social impact centre, dedicated to research, creativity and education.

“At that time it was a completely new departure because people didn’t yet see science as being an integral part of art. Here we were, launching all these new things from scratch and having to work extremely hard just to prove the obvious: that it all works together.”
Have they succeeded in their plans?

“In some ways definitely yes. We managed to attract an audience from all spectrums of society ranging from scientists, doctors, and priests, to policemen, poets, actors. We put together a lot of pioneering projects. An example was ‘the Kids University’ that teaches participants to use both the left and right sides of their brains simultaneously, the idea being to help them focus and learn how to imagine the whole picture when seeing only one part of the puzzle. We did workshops on how to design 3D sculptures on computers and how to do video mapping on buildings, all of this well before anybody else knew what it involved. We were probably the first organisation in Cyprus to work on programmes funded by the EU — not those sponsored through structural funds via the municipality, but those that you have to compete for with thousands of other organisations from all over the EU.”

Currently, one of the projects the Artos Foundation is preparing is documenting short stories about the history of Nicosia. In short, the aim is to make the city an open book. The intent is to have researchers tell these stories on video, which then graffiti artists and designers will use to create stencils in different places in the town. These will be geo-tagged for tourists to find. Using their mobile phones, visitors will then be able to see what the location looked like at the time of the particular story while listening to the narrator explaining what happened.

Achilleas talks with pride of the foundation’s accomplishments and describes the struggles to find funding for the ambitious projects it has carried out over the last 18 years. “Every year we start from scratch and have to acquire a five-digit sum in order to do all our projects, and yes, we always manage it.” That said, he readily admits to disappointment at what he perceives to be art’s declining social impact.

“When we were starting, I thought it would act as a language that people would speak, understand and communicate for common issues but unfortunately nowadays I see it rather as a break from reality. Yes, it can still work as a therapy but more on a personal level than global.”

Now he is exploring another approach, “a kind of creativity called ‘mature activism’ where one knows where to focus, what and how much to say, and also how to build teams.”

Achilleas’ thoughts have distilled into another new project he calls Innovation Gym, a research lab dedicated to the discovery of new ways to invent and re-assess ideas, processes, products, policies and infrastructures.

“People want to find the ways to improve the process of working in their organisations. They want more innovative products, better standards, more compatibility with environmental issues but they don’t know how to approach such changes. So, using neuroscience, I developed my own technique about helping them find solutions. I connect them to various sensors and study their bodies with quantum medicine. I learn what their patterns are, how their brains work and analyse the results. Then I train them in how to adjust and to be more efficient. You might describe it as a study in human psychology but I see it as human mechanics. It is because I see their performance as if it was a machine with some problems that need to be addressed. Sometimes what has to be done is very simple. It might be just like a car that rattles when you drive it at over 120 km but is absolutely ok when you go slower. So you slow down in order to focus on the right things.”

The Innovation Gym project targets both young and old, individuals and corporation. It even goes as far as prescribing what one should eat — “because whatever you put in the machine has an impact”; and which emotions one should get rid of — “because wrong emotions are the most toxic chemicals you put into your body”.

And this is where Achilleas falls back into his childhood experiences once more because “it was the cave that opened my horizons and made me go against my fears, and it was the box that I buried that taught me how to turn the page.”

Nearly three decades of running a landmark bar in Larnaca adds up to a lot of memories for its owner, finds THEO PANAYIDES

The first thing I see of Christos Koukkides is his back. I turn into a nondescript alley off Finikoudes, wedged between two tourist restaurants serving brandy sours and mojitos, walk a few steps to the entrance of Savino Rock Bar – and there, at 2pm on a Friday, is Christos, standing shirtless with his back to me and shifting boxes, or hanging up lights, or doing any of the countless little chores he’s been doing since Savino opened in 1990. His back, I can safely report, is quite hairy, though also neatly trimmed – possibly at the urging of Mariann, his Norwegian wife of 31 years.

That may seem an unorthodox starting-point, then again Christos (or in fact ‘Moulos’, on which more later) is also a bit unorthodox – something of a cult figure in Larnaca, owner of the town’s most beloved and venerable bar, his main distinguishing feature being the long Billy Connolly beard which swings in the breeze as he walks and is thoughtfully caressed as he talks. He is, indisputably, a ‘character’, you can tell at a glance – yet he’s also adept at the art of compromise, keeping a balance that allows him to be both a cheerful nonconformist and successful businessman.

One, slightly random example: toilets in bars are notoriously riddled with ‘witty’ graffiti scribbled on the walls by happy customers, brought on by the twin euphoria of fuddled brains and grateful bladders. Some bars paint over the doodles every few months, thus dismaying regulars whose message to the planet disappears overnight. Others put up stern notices asking patrons not to write on the walls, which of course is no fun at all. Savino has the perfect compromise: a large, much-abused whiteboard tacked up next to the loo, on which drinkers can compose poignant messages like “Theo and Marina Wuz ’Ere”, or creative projects like this little gem: “Roses are tits / Violets are tits / I like tits / Tits.”

Another example: the bar itself, which is gloriously cluttered. The place reflects the man, being deliberately expansive and all-embracing. “I don’t remove anything,” he tells me; “I only add”. The décor in Savino is a study in letting it all hang out, an Aladdin’s cave of hoarded memorabilia – but the clutter isn’t (just) because Christos likes freedom, hence messiness; it’s also a way of building a community, hence more business. His free-and-easy style is also a case of canny branding. There’s a reason why the place celebrates 28 years of existence next month.

Here are fairly standard bar items, photos of celebs and ‘Things That Are Difficult to Say When You’re Drunk’ signs – but here also, for instance, is a wall adorned with old mobile phones, which their owners either left behind or smashed in a rage. Here’s a rather cryptic photo of Christos with a young Italian kid named Milo. Here are Savino-themed artworks, made by customers. The bar isn’t just a bar, it’s a repository of its 28 years and all who’ve passed through it. Here are actual strands of hair, tacked up on the wall, commemorating shaven beards from days gone by. Here’s a photo of two young men who look like twins, both with bulging eyes and curly hair: “They used to work here,” he explains. “One’s a doctor now, the other a chartered accountant.”

That, incidentally, is par for the course: staff move on to ‘respectable’ jobs, just as customers go home every night and wake up for work in the morning. Only ‘Moulos’ (the Mule) stays on, his nickname – more than just a nickname; it’s how he’s universally known – having been bestowed by his brother years ago, when the brother was trying to ask him something and Christos was stubbornly ignoring him: “‘You’re a real Moulos,’ he told me, and the name stuck”. He opened the bar, with Mariann, in his 20s (he’s now 52) and has been there ever since, working late – he usually gets home around four – and operating on about five hours’ sleep. He’s not just the owner of Savino, he’s the custodian of the whole Savino Experience: an unchanging place, stubborn as Moulos himself, famously open 365 days a year. It only closed once, for four days in 1997, when a fire destroyed the bottles of booze and left the walls sooty; the regulars had nowhere to go, he recalls, and begged him to open anyway. “I don’t have any chairs,” he protested. “We don’t care!” they replied.

He’s never done anything else, not really – yet his background isn’t especially unconventional. His father worked as a union rep, allowing him to find work quickly after the family fled their native Famagusta. Christos, the youngest of three, passed an accounting exam in his teens (he changed his mind after a brief internship in a bank), then went to Florence for a degree in Hotel Management – but he came back for the summer, took a job tending bar at Cosmos Disco, met the Norwegian tourist who became his wife, and the rest is history. “I can’t imagine myself behind a desk,” he tells me now, as we sit in the breezy outdoor area away from the heat.

We’re interrupted by a blonde young woman in her 20s, who emerges (or staggers) from the block of hotel apartments next door. “Hey! Good morning, good morning!” calls out Christos, tactfully ignoring the fact that it’s mid-afternoon.

“Don’t feel so good right now,” mumbles the girl, and laughs.

“Oh, a hangover!” he replies, chuckling. “Hung over, a little bit… Eh, by tonight you’re gonna be sober!” She’s a Danish-Romanian tourist, he explains later, part of a group who were at the bar the night before and got very drunk on zivania. What I’ve just witnessed, I presume, was his business face – the fun-loving guy with the wild beard, enjoining tourists to party. “The owner is living it [sic] with the customers and is a very good host,” says a Google review of Savino from about a month ago; “You’ll have an experience there”. The catch, however, is that Christos himself – the ebullient master of ceremonies, and living legend – doesn’t actually drink. Once again, he’s keeping a balance.

I imagine tales of 12-step programmes and AA meetings (after all, he’s been working in bars and clubs since the age of 15), but it’s nothing like that. He did drink a lot as a younger man, but he never enjoyed getting drunk. By the same token, it’s not like he’s stopped drinking altogether; he’ll still have a shot now and then, with the staff at closing time for instance. But it’s not very sensible to drink when you’re running a bar; it’s not good business. “Better if you’re sober and your customers are drunk, that’s my philosophy!” Not to mention that the work was hard, even with a clear head – especially in the early days, with Mariann working as an air stewardess (at Eurocypria) and Christos having to get up on a couple of hours’ sleep and take care of their baby son Julien.

We’re again interrupted, this time by a friend toting a Frank Zappa CD; “Maybe Julien doesn’t have it,” says Christos, and thanks him for his trouble. Julien, now 27, collects albums by the famously prolific Zappa (and is himself a musician, with a band called Abettor); his younger brother Sebastian did a Fine Arts degree, and is now studying Architecture. The sons are creative, as befits Moulos’ crazy beard and nocturnal lifestyle – but let’s also note, for instance, that he used to organise ‘musical afternoons’ back in 1979, as a boy of 13, booking a disco from four to eight p.m. and having a DJ spin records for his classmates (who otherwise weren’t allowed out by their parents), ending up with a cool £50-60 a week. He’s always had a head for business. Christos can’t tell me his favourite song (he settles, rather coyly, on ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’), but he knows the interest rate on the first loan he took out on the bar, back in 1990.

Meaning what? That he’s somehow a fake? Not at all. But Christos Koukkides is an interesting mix – laid-back yet hard-nosed, more disciplined than he probably looks and more of a perfectionist (he recalls being thrown out of kindergarten for beating up other kids, but only those who were dirty or snot-nosed; I suspect they offended his sensibilities). He’s steered Savino – and adjoining rock club Savino Live – through some difficult times, especially in the early 90s when rock music was associated with “anarchists, druggies, whatever” and people in Larnaca drove to Nicosia for their nights out. His presence alone seems to deter brawls (he can only recall half a dozen in 28 years), though he also keeps an eye on who comes in; British soldiers are notoriously troublesome, or they were a few years ago when troops fighting in Iraq came to Cyprus on R&R. Mostly, though, people behave themselves. “Maybe they’d cause trouble at another place, some of them. But they’re like: ‘I’m at Moulos’ place now, I won’t make any trouble’. And they let things slide. Because it’s me, and because they want to come back”.

Savino is a business; but it’s a community too, with its own history and traditions. The history appears on its walls, in the photos and knick-knacks, the strands of hair and old mobile phones. Traditions include, for instance, the two days a year – the bar’s birthday in August, and Christos’ own birthday on February 23 – when all drinks are 50 per cent off, and there’s also the tradition of ‘baptising’ tourists as honorary Moulos-es, using little plastic horses for mules (the trinkets come with White Horse whisky bottles, though it’s unclear if he pins them to initiates’ T-shirts or something more elaborate). The vibe has always been democratic: even now, anyone can go to the computer and punch in a song they want to hear – a throwback to the days before computers, when people brought their own CDs and tapes hoping to introduce fellow patrons to this or that cool rock song.

Larnaca’s changed quite a bit since then. Everyone gets their music from the internet, Finikoudes has bloomed (if that’s the word) with tourist restaurants and fast-food franchises – but Moulos, stubborn as his nickname, keeps going. He doesn’t work behind the bar anymore (he only works four nights a week, though often comes in anyway) but he’s doing pretty well for an old coot, his only vice being the Manitou roll-ups on the table between us – and of course pilotta, his favourite card game and drug of choice: “Every day, at five o’clock, we must play pilotta!” He recently arranged another ‘musical afternoon’, for old times’ sake – the guests being his old classmates, a kind of high-school reunion – and some of them look so old now, he sighs ruefully. Say what you like about the night, it keeps you young.

He’s not just a bar owner, he’s a local landmark – and of course a psychiatrist, like any barkeep, patiently listening to people’s problems. “One can’t find a woman, another one can’t find a man, another got divorced, another’s telling me about his kid…” In a fickle world, Savino stays the same, taking in everyone from Danish-Romanian tourists to the sad, broken-down and depressed.

“I remember one night, years ago. I was about to close the shop,” says the affable Mule. “Suddenly a guy comes in, orders a drink. I say to myself: ‘OK, it’s only 1.30, I’ll stay a little longer’. He was already – well, he’d had a few – and he says to me: ‘I’m going to kill myself’. So I’m like, f**k me, am I supposed to sit and talk to him now? But what if I say ‘Go ahead’, and he does it?”. Christos shakes his head: “What if you tell him you don’t care, then next morning you open the paper and read ‘Man jumps from the Dipa building’? It’d be like you pushed him!”

So he sat down with the man – who, it turned out, had split up with his girlfriend – and they talked for a good two hours, the man insisting that he couldn’t live without her and Moulos trying to convince him that life is beautiful. Then, at around four a.m., his customer safely dispatched and hopefully going straight home, Moulos closed the bar and went back to his own home, ready to sleep a few hours and return to Savino the next day. And the one after that, and so on and so forth. 28 years and counting.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a mild-mannered biology teacher who turns into an award-winning fiction writer by night, and who sees himself as always being on the outskirts

It’s the perfect cultural exchange, really. Kevin Jared Hosein, at 31, gets his first trip to Europe (or the outskirts of Europe) while I, at a good few years older, get my first conversation with a person from the Caribbean generally, and Trinidad and Tobago specifically. I suppose we have the Commonwealth to thank for bringing us together – and indeed, Kevin isn’t here for a Sunday Mail interview but something (even) more prestigious: the award of the annual Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which he won last month (beating out some 5,200 entries from 48 countries) for his short story Passage.

The choice of Cyprus as the venue for this year’s ceremony isn’t entirely coincidental: this year, for the first time, Greek has been added to the list of languages in which entries can be written (the others are English, Bengali, Chinese, Malay, Portuguese, Samoan, Swahili and Tamil), hopefully encouraging more Cypriots to participate. Relatively few writers have competed from Cyprus since the prize was relaunched in 2012, whether we’re talking native Cypriots or other Commonwealth citizens (Indians, Sri Lankans, etc) living in Cyprus. Trinidad, on the other hand, has been quite the literary lion: Kevin is the third writer from that nation to have won the prize in the past six years – and indeed he was also the Caribbean regional winner in 2015, netting him £2,500 in addition to the £5,000 he won this year.

Literary prizes aren’t enough to live on, of course: despite his growing fame (he also has a published novel, The Repenters), he continues to make ends meet – as he’s done for the past seven years – as a science teacher at the local high school in Chaguanas, central Trinidad. The hours aren’t too bad (usually from nine till 2.30), allowing him to write in occasional pockets of free time, even at work. “I usually just find a corner and write,” he tells me, sitting in the lounge of the Cleopatra Hotel in Nicosia the day after his prize-giving. “It doesn’t have to be good. When I go home, in the night, I will edit it”. That said, he seldom mentions his writing career during school hours, leading a double life as mild-mannered biology teacher by day, award-winning writer of knotty, moody fiction by night.

At first glance, you wouldn’t really peg him as a published author: a large, hulking man, well over six foot tall, with a thin beard and lush, unruly thatch of hair. Unsurprisingly, despite his gentle nature, he doesn’t have a problem getting pupils to pay attention. “A lot of them are afraid of me,” he says, then modifies it slightly: “They start off bein’ afraid of me, because of my stature. They think I’m a beast, right?”. ‘Right?’ is his standard punctuation, the Trinidadian accent not quite as sing-song as the Jamaican – though it’s still ‘tink’ for ‘think’, ‘rate’ for ‘right’, ‘dey’ for ‘they’. His voice is deep, the knuckles on his left hand discoloured, as if recently bruised. ‘What happened there?’ I ask, and he laughs.

“The knuckles, that’s just something from long ago”.

Did something happen?

“Um … No, it’s just me bein’ angry.”

Did he get into a fight?

“More like a fight with the wall,” he replies, and laughs again. “Yeah, they still have a little scarring on them”. This was in his teens, during an angry rebellious phase when he was “just a mess, really” and writing stories was virtually the only thing that kept him sane – though he’s not angry now, he hastens to add. “I’m very patient now. I have to be.” Kevin shrugs: “I have to remain calm, because everyone else is angry. Everyone else wants to fight.”

He means his pupils, but there’s also a larger question here – a question that could even be phrased in terms of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, asking why Trinidad (we’ll omit Tobago from here on, for brevity’s sake) takes it so seriously whereas Cyprus, it seems, largely ignores it. The answer is partly due to language, the fact that English is commonly spoken there (albeit as a dialect known as Trinidadian Creole English) but comes with colonial baggage here. That’s part of the difference – but there’s also another difference, having to do with the role that writing plays in the culture, how it acts as a channel and, for many, a safety valve. Simply put, Trinidad seems to be a much wilder, more raucous place, with dark undercurrents which provide fertile ground for a writer.

Cyprus and Trinidad have a lot in common. Their population is about 1.3 million, ours about 1.2 million. They’re 165^th in the world when ranked by area, we’re 162^nd. They gained independence from Britain in 1962, we in 1960. Trinidad, like Cyprus, is quite well-off (“We have oil and gas, so we got lucky there,” says Kevin wryly). They, like us, have a local dialect which everyone speaks but few people write, making for a slight disconnect. They, like us, have a history of being under someone’s thumb, most of the population being either descendants of slaves or – like Kevin’s own family – of the indentured labourers who came over from India to work the sugar-cane plantations in the 19^th century, and are now the biggest ethnic group in the country. There was “a dependency” on white overseers, he explains – then, when they pulled out, “we were left with ourselves, and I don’t think we respected ourselves enough”. Sound familiar?

Yet the texture of life is apparently different back home – starting with the fact that the place is multicultural without even trying: “We have all races. We have African, Indian, Chinese, Syrian, Latin American, and everyone pretty much gets along, right?”. He’s been in Cyprus for four days, and cultural differences stand out. Nicosia is surprisingly empty compared to Port of Spain; his taxi driver complained about the traffic, “but there wasn’t any traffic”. In Trinidad, if you wanted to go from Chaguanas to Port of Spain – which should take half an hour – you’d budget two and a half hours, because there’s only one road into town and it’s absolutely jammed. The only music in old Nicosia came from buskers, whereas “there’s a lot of music just blastin’ all over the place in Trinidad, there’s a lot of speaker boxes everywhere… And everyone [here] is kind of sittin’ down, in Trinidad they’d be up and about, movin’.”

“People say Trinidad is the happiest place, the happiest people – which is true, to a point. It is not tense, at all,” goes on Kevin. “The texture of life is easy-going, maybe too easy-going. I think a lot of us are too easy-going – just kind of glidin’ through life, you know?” Yet the place is also slightly schizophrenic. Crime is a major problem; there were almost 500 murders last year. Kevin himself has witnessed a man being gunned down (it was a drive-by shooting; he happened to be driving behind the shooters’ car) and was mugged years ago though he managed to escape without being robbed, or worse. “I don’t like to normalise it – [but] I think almost everybody in Trinidad knows at least one person who’s been killed”.

Old superstitions fester beneath the surface. A year ago, in south Trinidad, neighbours noticed a bad smell coming from a family home and discovered the entire household still caring for a baby who’d died weeks before (Kevin thinks it was probably part of a ritual aimed at resurrecting the baby). A recent news story concerned a self-styled shaman who promised to remove curses for $10,000. The state tends to be slow and dysfunctional. The country’s only forensic pathologist recently quit, “because bodies kept piling up and nobody was doing anything about it”; the freezer at the morgue was so full that he literally had to throw out older corpses to put in the new ones. Sounds like a story waiting to be written, I note. “Well, that’s the thing!” he replies. “I don’t mean to sound like I’m profiting off of it – but it’s quality. It’s quality stories, right? Because you don’t really hear that in other countries so much. Like you come to Cyprus, right, there’s nothing like that.”

Like his country – though of course in different ways – Kevin Jared Hosein is also slightly schizophrenic. There’s his double life, as already mentioned, as an under-the-radar writer. There’s his surname, which is Muslim, whereas Kevin himself is Hindu. Above all, there’s his status as a kind of semi-outsider, part of society but also – like so many writers – observing from a slight remove, using its stranger excesses to feed his creative muse.

He lives on a quiet suburban street in Chaguanas (also the birthplace of VS Naipaul, the most famous Trinidadian writer), but just “one street away” there’s a kind of slum area where killings are commonplace. (“In that street there, the garbage is hardly ever picked up.”) He’s next to the darkness, yet not really of it – just as, even though he’s proudly Trinidadian (unlike Naipaul, who hates the place), he’s not typically Trinidadian. “I think I’m my own thing,” he admits. “Always on the outskirts, not really mainstream.”

Most of his compatriots are “partying people”, but Kevin and his fiancée are stay-at-home people. Most Trinidadians know only the city, but Kevin likes to spend time in the small village where his grandparents live, or hiking through forests in search of flora. (His degree, at the University of West Indies, was in Biology and Environmental Science; he’s never studied literature – it wasn’t even taught at his all-boys high school – in fact “I have no academic qualification whatsoever, for literature”.) Most Trinidadians grow up with soca music, the local dance music, but Kevin grew up listening to heavy metal. Most have siblings, he’s an only child. Above all, most – or many – grow up in authoritarian families, with the threat of “flogging” always present, whereas Kevin was raised in a milder environment, merely observing the effect the beatings had on his fellows.

“A lot of us are not in touch with our emotions,” he tells me. “Men, especially.” He recalls a story from primary school, where “this boy came in, he was laughin’ and grinnin’, and he was like ‘You know, my mother just poisoned all six of our dogs, and they’re lyin’ down funny!’. I was like ‘Why are you laughing?’. But see, if you cry, you get beaten”. Like that boy (at least, according to Kevin), cheerful Trinidadians often hide pain and resentment beneath the happy-go-lucky exterior, having been taught from childhood to “toughen up” – a pain that then gets channeled into lashing out, through domestic violence or even murder. Or, if you’re lucky, into writing.

Is that why stories seem to be such a vital part of the island’s culture (more, arguably, than in Cyprus, though of course we’re also repressed in our own small-island ways)? Is that why Trinidadians keep winning the Commonwealth Short Story Prize? I’m being facetious, of course – but it’s notable, for instance, that news of Kevin’s ‘secret identity’ has only upped his street-cred at school; many of his pupils are aspiring writers themselves. The only problem, he sighs, is that local literature doesn’t pay enough attention to genre, “those fun books” like the Stephen King novels he devoured in his youth; his own work dabbles in the eerie and uncanny, the lurking darkness of the Caribbean. At nine he wrote his first published story, a sci-fi yarn about a boy who wakes up in an alien world; at 15 he finished an entire, 100,000-word fantasy novel, the kind of project many teens attempt but few complete. “It was bad, right. But I finished it…”

And now? The practical value of the prize he’s just won is significant. “There’s not many publishing opportunities in the Caribbean”, and name recognition is vital to attract foreign publishers. Would he go live in London, though, as VS Naipaul did? Would he quit the teaching job, and abandon small, problematic Trinidad? Kevin pauses: “Yeah, people ask me this”. He pauses again: “Yes and no, right?”.

On the one hand, he’d have so many more opportunities; on the other, the writing would surely change. Like any small-islander, his creative soul is bound up with the place he’s known all his life – and yes, “I would miss Trinidad,” he affirms in his deep, slow voice. “I’d miss the people. Even though I spoke negatively about the jokin’ around and things like that, I would miss the kind of happy-go-luckyness we have there, the friendliness. I mean, there’s a kind of kinship, you know? You don’t feel disconnected”. He smiles and looks out the window, disconnected – but not for long – from his Caribbean home, looking out at the alien faces and sparse not-quite-traffic of a Nicosia morning. A cultural exchange, indeed.

KEVIN JARED HOSEIN’S 10 FAVOURITE BOOKS

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

No Pain Like This Body by Harold Sonny Ladoo

Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

Watchmen by Alan Moore

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

Miguel Street by VS Naipaul

The Shining by Stephen King

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut