The demands of being a lifeguard – swinging from inaction to life-and-death crises – are not for all. THEO PANAYIDES meets the president of the Limassol association, and finds a man always on the lookout

There’s an issue with the shades – or not an issue, but perhaps a question. Why won’t Avgoustinos Papadopoulos take off his sunglasses? It’s a kind of gesture, he tells me vaguely, preferring to keep them on not just for photos but throughout our interview. I think I understand, as we sit in the lifeguard’s tower overlooking the beach at the Four Seasons in Limassol; it’s a question of guarding his identity. You can have my knowledge, he tells me and every other interviewer, you can have what I know about being a lifeguard; I’ve been doing this for 25 years, I’m happy to share. But the eyes are the window to the soul, and you can’t have my soul.

Too dramatic? Maybe – then again, Avgoustinos is dramatic in his way, a restless almost-43-year-old with close-cropped hair and stubble, a scar on his back and a gold cross around his neck. He’s not relaxed. His legs keep twitching madly as he talks, like a bored little boy in the doctor’s office. He sips tea with lemon, intermittently picking out slices of lemon and eating them whole, spitting out the pips. “I’m a free spirit,” he tells me candidly. He takes out a packet of cigarettes and offers it politely; “D’you mind if I smoke?”. I shake my head, but tell him I’m a bit surprised that he smokes, given his profession. It’s true, he admits, but he doesn’t smoke much – and besides “it relaxes me. ’Cause I’m a bit hyperactive”.

His dad’s a musician, his mum a housewife; they met in Germany, where Dad was playing Greek music (Mum’s from Katerini in northern Greece). Avgoustinos, the eldest of three, was born in Munich but grew up in Cyprus, studied Hotel Management and tried the hospitality industry for a while, but couldn’t take it. “I’m a man of the sea,” he tells me. “I can’t do any other job”. He became a lifeguard in his teens – but it wasn’t a full-time job in those days, so he worked in bars and clubs as a doorman and bouncer. He quit a few years ago (and has barely been inside a club since), but for 19 years he was practically a fixture of Limassol nightlife. “People know me, and a lot of people know very well who I am,” he says, leaving me to wonder if there might be an edge to the second half of that sentence.

To be honest, this is not what I expected. The image of the lifeguard in popular culture (notably Baywatch) is calm, unruffled, imperious. The very concept of a lifeguard, high up on his perch looking out over the beach (we say ‘his’ though of course there are also female lifeguards, five of them in Limassol alone), suggests a superior being, serenely in control. Avgoustinos doesn’t seem especially serene – yet in fact his nervous energy is perfect for the job, for a simple reason which he emphasises again and again: “A drowning looks nothing like a drowning”.

Drownings in real life aren’t like in the movies. Watch what I’m doing, he urges at one point; I’m talking to you, but “my eyes are scanning everything” at the same time. (There are two small beaches, one on either side, and space for two lifeguards in the tower, though his partner sits outside while we talk.) A lifeguard should scan his territory every 30 seconds, he informs me gravely. A lifeguard can’t be smug, waiting to be called into action like Superman (or David Hasselhoff); in the vast majority of cases there won’t be any call, or indeed any sign whatsoever. “Most drownings take place completely silently,” explains Avgoustinos. “Without any splashing, without any cries, nothing. Because our breath is designed for breathing. Talking comes second. So, if you have someone who’s struggling to breathe – how’s he going to call out?”

Drowning people seldom cry out; even if they can, they’re often too embarrassed to call attention to themselves till it’s too late. Cries for help come from bystanders (assuming they realise that someone’s in trouble) or, in rare cases, from strong swimmers who feel unwell and have the presence of mind to call out. Feeling unwell is the first stage; the second is becoming gripped by stress – and the third is all-out panic, at which point the victim freezes up, the brain no longer gets properly oxygenated, movements become erratic and the person goes down in less than a minute. This is why a man of Avgoustinos’ restless disposition makes a good lifeguard – because you always have to be on the lookout, always scouring the water for signs of distress. “This job isn’t for everyone,” he says with a touch of annoyance, going on a rant against (some) lifeguards who are only there because politicians pulled strings on their behalf: “Just like everyone else in this country – the parties, you know what I mean…” Some fall to pieces when push comes to shove, unable to handle the sudden shift from days of inaction to life-and-death crisis.

Being a lifeguard is more of a proper job nowadays, hence the presence of unsuitable candidates who are only after a steady salary; an action plan was recently devised by the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre and the Ministry of the Interior (Avgoustinos, as president of the local lifeguards’ association, has fulsome praise for the heads of both those bodies), establishing year-round posts and hopefully extending the shift system to more towers. (At the moment, only five towers in Limassol – out of 24 – work with shifts, i.e. from 6am to 8pm.) More importantly, the medical equipment available to lifeguards has been hugely upgraded in recent years: stored in the tower around us are ‘Ambu bags’ for CPR, a portable defibrillator, a suction device to insert in a victim’s mouth and prevent choking, and so on. Indeed, Avgoustinos’ most memorable rescue wasn’t even of a swimmer, but a man who was sitting on the beach and suffered a heart attack – a rescue for which he was specially commended by the minister, the only lifeguard ever to have been so honoured.

He’s performed other rescues, of course: a wealthy Serbian gentleman, found desperately clinging to a buoy in the sea off the Hawaii Grand Hotel, who was so grateful he later plied Avgoustinos and his colleagues with whisky. (He also offered money but they refused, he says virtuously.) Or his very first professional rescue, as a boisterous teen on Malindi beach, which was actually surprisingly close to the Baywatch playbook: he’d gone down to the kiosk for a juice and a sandwich and, coming back, noticed a father and son whose little dinghy had capsized about 150m from land – so he simply plunged in without any rescue gear, forgetting the first rule of lifeguarding which is to avoid physical contact at all costs (a drowning person can pull you down with them), though of course “I was a very good swimmer, truth be told I was amazing at swimming”. He pulled the dinghy close to the father and kid, helped them grab hold, then pulled them out along with the boat. In 25 years, he may never have done anything more swashbuckling.

Then there are the others, those who slipped through his fingers. “See that guy there?” he says at one point, indicating a middle-aged tourist swimming alone. “The one who’s having difficulties? He’s almost treading water. If he was a little further in…” Prevention is everything, as already mentioned – but sometimes it happens too fast, even for experienced lifeguards; there’s only so much you can do, especially when a swimmer suffers a stroke or a heart attack. The sea isn’t always to blame.

Ah, the sea. Avgoustinos has a special relationship with the sea. Lifeguarding aside, he’s also a qualified Divemaster and fanatical spear-fishing enthusiast, freediving down to 25 or 30 metres. Don’t just call me a freediver, he cautions, “I’m a hunter” – and he hunts in the other way as well, with a gun up in the mountains, which he treats with the same quirky reverence as he does the sea. He hunts birds, but will always spare the hares (I assume it’s another gesture, like not taking off his sunglasses). He loves Nature in general, going for walks and picking mushrooms; he loves open spaces, and could never work in an office. Though he’s clearly very fit (he swims every day), I note that he doesn’t have the washboard stomach one associates with gym rats – which is no surprise, since he finds gyms claustrophobic and never goes to them. “I don’t like to be hemmed in.”

That applies metaphorically as well as literally – and indeed there’s something very pure (and a little immature) about this rugged, restless, unencumbered ‘man of the sea’, a free bird and happy commitment-phobe, a boy who never grew up. Is he married? Does he have any kids? He shakes his head: “I’m still raising little Avgoustinos,” he replies irresistibly. “I’m still the child. I don’t want any kids for the time being”. He loves women, but doesn’t know if he’ll ever be ready to settle down. Men and women are different, he muses: “I think a man has to be over 40 before he’s complete as a man. Especially in Cyprus, guys are so immature, never mind trying to start their own families… A woman is different. A woman has to find the right man to make things happen for her. We all know what a woman’s real job is.”

Having kids?

“Of course. After all, only a woman can give birth. That’s the true nature of a woman”. Avgoustinos is old-fashioned about things like that, nor does he agree with both parents working (though he admits it’s often necessary). “If you’re going to have kids so you can both work like dogs, don’t have kids, get a dog instead!” he quips.

He’s a throwback, in more ways than one – a happy Limassolian from the days when the city was smaller and cosier, before all the big money and tall buildings. “All of Limassol knows me, there’s no-one in Limassol who doesn’t know me!” he claims at one point – but that, I suspect, is no longer true. “We’ve sold out,” he admits sadly when I ask about the changes in the city. “We don’t own anything anymore… You’ll say to me, we’re just passing through anyway. OK. But that Cypriot culture is gone, that we used to have in the old days. In case you haven’t noticed, everything’s changed. People think about money, how to survive, there isn’t that…” He hesitates, unsure how to phrase it. “You know, the way we used to be in the old days.”

The old days were good to him, always the lord of his domain, whether he was guarding clubs or guarding beaches. He’s a bit embarrassed by his club years – he drank too much, and ate too much junk food – but it must’ve been a fun life, every night a party till the wee hours; there was seldom any trouble, after all “the troublemakers were my friends,” he says with a grin (everyone knew each other in the old Limassol). Has he ever thought about opening his own place – a bar, or something similar – with all his contacts? “Like I told you, big responsibilities aren’t for me,” replies Avgoustinos. When it’s your own business you’re there all the time, “and there’s no time left for living. I like to live free, do what I like, not have any working hours… All the energy that goes [into a business], what’s the point of it? Money? Like I said, we’re just passing through. I see people who grow old, they’re 100 years old and all they ever think about is money… I like to live free, my friend.”

Some may wonder how a man like this can handle the weight of being responsible for other people’s lives – but it’s not the same. Being a lifeguard is a different kind of burden. The energy it calls for is similar to that of the hunter in the mountains, or the bouncer at the door of the club: not a fixed routine but a constant tension, an alertness, a fearlessness, a readiness to deal with whatever should suddenly erupt. A more settled character might slacken, and lull himself into a false sense of security; Avgoustinos’ hyperactive style keeps him sharp.

‘Are you calm, or do you lose your temper?’ I ask at one point. “I’m impulsive!” he replies cheerfully. He’s calm, by and large, but liable to explode at any moment; like his job, he’s prone to upheavals. “I’m not slow, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m not slow. I’m very sparky, oh yes. I blow up, I catch fire, yes”. Right at the end, as a special favour, he takes off his shades, just for a moment or two, then smiles and goes back to scanning the sea for swimmers in peril. I say goodbye – but, before heading back to Nicosia, change my clothes in the car and go for a quick swim in the beautiful, warm August surf. Seems rude not to.

After having brought the village of Kalopanayiotis back to life, one of its leading sons has now been charged with advising the president on an ambitious plan to rejuvenate 115 mountain communities. THEO PANAYIDES meets him

Our interview with Yiannakis Papadouris begins where most other interviews end – at around the one-hour mark, when I switch off my tape recorder. At this point we’re still at his estate outside Kalopanayiotis, wedged in the fertile river valley that runs alongside the village. The estate, on a narrow strip of land, includes a swimming pool and sauna, homes for himself and his daughters Alexa and Emily – though the daughters live in England, and he’s in Dubai or travelling half the month anyway – and a large orchard designed to produce fruit all the year round (there’s an apple on the table beside him, and ‘Renos’ from Hyderabad – not his real name – also cuts me a couple of luscious figs). I switch off the tape recorder, feeling I already have enough to write a profile – but then we get in the car and Yiannakis drives me the eight kilometres to Kalopanayiotis, the village of his birth and the village he’s completely transformed since his return to Cyprus in 2002.

This is where he comes into his own, this rather stocky, 73-year-old man with the penetrating voice and thick glasses. This is where his vision unfolds all around us, with himself as voluble tour guide. Here’s the old coffee shop he bought and restored. Here’s the lift he constructed, as community leader, linking the top and bottom of the steep slope on which the village is built. Here, of course, is Casale Panayiotis, the jewel in his crown and “the lifeblood of the village”, a sprawling 40-room luxury hotel that’s actually a conglomeration of traditional homes in ‘old’ Kalopanayiotis, restored by various architects to give each one a slightly different character.

Yiannakis has bought around 10 properties in total (not counting those in Casale), plus abandoned vineyards; he’s now in the process of building a winery. He has plans – though the picture isn’t totally rosy. He points to a children’s playground as we walk down the narrow main road: “Needless to say, that was my donation,” he notes with a chuckle – and it is indeed needless to say so, simply because no council would’ve spent money on a children’s playground. Like all mountain villages, Kalopanayiotis has an ageing population and very few children live there. The local school closed a decade ago, and – despite the recent transformation – has yet to re-open.

That’s a point to ponder, as we celebrate the turnaround in his village’s fortunes; Kalopanayiotis may be a success story, but it’s both half-complete and atypical. Yiannakis takes me to Loutraki, another refurbished hotel that’s part of Casale and includes an upmarket steak house serving fine imported cuts (the prices, I note from the menu, are too high for locals). The restaurant is doing well, reports the manager – but is there really enough tourism in a small village to sustain all these places? “No,” replies Yiannakis with his usual bluntness. “I sustain them until there is”. Despite an influx of EU funds, this is still a work in progress. Visitor numbers are up, with another 80-90 agrotourism rooms added to Casale’s 40. Local youngsters (such as they are) don’t invariably leave now; young people have been tempted from other villages, even Nicosia – but young families, the true lifeblood of any village, are still very rare. And of course all the other mountain resorts are much, much worse. “If you go to Platres, you feel sorry,” says Yiannakis grimly. “If you go to Prodromos, it doesn’t exist. If you go to Pedoulas, you start crying.”

That’s another issue, and the reason why Yiannakis Papadouris is in the news at the moment: based on his success with Kalopanayiotis, he’s been appointed advisor to the hugely ambitious plan now being formulated by President Anastasiades for saving the 115 communities of the Troodos area. (“I have the right ear of the president,” as he puts it.) Simply put, the government has its work cut out, the decline and depopulation of mountain areas being a decades-old problem. Yiannakis – a man who likes to talk in numbers and concrete examples, as befits a civil engineer – recalls his primary-school days in the 1950s: when he entered school, there were 144 pupils, when he left six years later there were 106. He himself left in his teens, and spent almost 40 years living abroad before coming back and running for community leader.

Why did he do it? There are other examples of local lads turned wealthy benefactors, to be sure – but why him? I wonder if it might’ve been nostalgia, a longing for the half-remembered idyll of his childhood – but in fact he’d already come back for a while in his early 40s, with his now-estranged English wife Kathleen when the girls were small, and it turned out to be a disaster. I wonder if it might’ve been the opposite, a rebellious boy who left on bad terms and wanted to flaunt his success, as if to say ‘I’ll show them’ – but in fact Yiannakis didn’t leave because he was unhappy in Kalopanayiotis, it just happened that way. His older sister (he’s the fourth of five siblings) was a teacher at the Pancyprian Gymnasium and took him with her to Nicosia, then his older brother was in London so, again, he tagged along, drifting into a Civil Engineering degree and later moving to Dubai where he made his fortune.

So why come back? A sense of duty may have been involved; after all, his dad was also community leader, back in the 60s. But an even bigger factor, I suspect, may be simply that Yiannakis thrives on projects and micro-managing. I’m initially a bit embarrassed that he’s giving me such a grand tour of the village; after all, his daughters and their families are here from the UK, waiting for him to have lunch together (he has four grandchildren, two from each daughter; he and his wife aren’t officially divorced, but have “been apart for a very long time”). I soon realise, however, that the tour is as much for his own benefit as it is for mine.

We pause for a beer at the restaurant in Casale Panayiotis, and he calls the waitress over and chides her – gently, but firmly – for not having brought us an ice-cold glass. We go to the spa, which looks homely on the outside but has everything from mud baths and colour therapy to a “snow paradise” on the inside (it cost “about 6.5 million dirh – uh, euros to build,” he tells me, almost saying ‘dirhams’ like they do in Dubai), and he instantly notices that the grass outside the ‘relaxation room’ hasn’t been cut, and makes a call to the person responsible. His style is avuncular, never angry, but he does get involved. A few nights ago he left the estate and stayed in one of the rooms at Casale; “I wanted to see, ‘Am I missing something?’”. Similarly, if a room has some issue that’s supposedly been fixed, he’ll often spend a night there, just to check that it has indeed been fixed.

So he’s very hands-on, it appears.

“I cannot help being a hands-on man!” he laughs. “All my life! Sometimes my fellow employees complained to me that I interfered too much. Thank God now I’m a director, so I say, ‘If a director cannot interfere, who can interfere?’”. The vehicle for his success was Wade Adams, “one of the largest construction companies in the Emirates”, where he rose from site agent to general manager. (Since the move to Kalopanayiotis he’s been kicked upstairs to managing director, still in charge of the company – which he co-owns – without being involved in day-to-day activities.) For years, he worked crazy hours; “I was workaholic all my life,” he confirms. When the company was smaller, he’d work all day then stay on in the evenings preparing tenders for new projects. His girls largely grew up with their mother, he admits, and blames himself for their un-fluent Greek.

Does he wish he’d done things differently?

“Yes and no,” he replies frankly. “I’m – not very good at house chores. I’m not a ‘house-trained person’. So I think it worked for the best.”

One, perhaps unfortunate side effect is a lack of other interests. “I grew up in an age when we didn’t have the comfort to go into sport and hobbies,” says Yiannakis. Even now, his main relaxation is travel (and food and drink, he adds, patting his stomach ruefully); “I travel a hell of a lot”. Even when he travels for pleasure his mind keeps ticking, on the lookout for new ideas. Pots of geraniums line the side of the road at the entrance to Kalopanayiotis; he saw them in Innsbruck, he tells me, and copied the trick in his own village (they’re in bloom all the year round). He likes to move around, dividing his time between here and Dubai, tinkering with his lifestyle as he does with everything else. Despite all the time and effort he’s invested in the village, he admits – and despite how spacious his estate is – he’d go nuts if he had to stay here full-time.

How will such an active, dynamic man cope with working alongside civil servants (not to mention the mukhtars of small mountain villages) on the Troodos plan? It’s a valid question. Yiannakis is private-sector through and through, and scathing when it comes to government departments: “They sit there, they take no initiative, they only do what their bosses instruct them to do… They discover that it’s easier to remain apathetic; the salary’s coming anyway”. A big part of transforming Kalopanayiotis was chasing EU funds to allow the villagers to restore their old homes (not to make them look new, he clarifies, just to give them “the look they used to have”; roof tiles in place of corrugated iron, that kind of thing) – yet he had to employ someone full-time just to run the weekly gauntlet from department to department, or the applications would never have been processed in time. Once, he recalls, he took the initiative to make a development plan for Marathasa, expecting the relevant minister to welcome his ideas; instead, the man raged at him for acting without permission, “and he shouted at every employee who’d helped us. So yes, there is a very big institutional problem”.

Things may have changed; certainly, the ministers he’s met so far are a lot more progressive than the one in his story. What about the fear that a government – especially this government – tends to confuse development with developers, though? Is the plan just to build a lot of villas, like in Paphos? “Definitely not,” he says firmly. “Definitely not. If you do that, you’ll kill Troodos forever!”

Legislation needs to change, he explains; different criteria have to apply in the mountains. Cottage industries can’t compete with urban businesses; building regulations need to focus on preserving character, not the building coefficient and “all this bullshit which does not apply to my village”. Unsurprisingly, Yiannakis is taking on the work with a micro-manager’s zeal. He’s hired two people to visit all 115 villages with a detailed 30-page questionnaire, not content just to send it to community leaders. He’s also taken it upon himself to draft a new ‘policy statement’ for rural areas – the current one being unfit for purpose – because “if I leave it to them, it’ll take five or six years and it won’t be a policy statement”. I hope his message gets through, I say earnestly. “It’s getting through,” he reassures me. “But it’s proving more time-consuming, and more expensive, than I thought.”

Looking back, it almost didn’t happen. He was only elected community leader by six votes in 2002 – and of course, had he failed, it’s unlikely he’d have tried again, far more likely he’d have gone back to Dubai and left the village to its decline and decrepitude. Fast-forward 16 years and the place now has christenings and weddings, for the first time in years; “Before, the priest only did funerals!”. We talk pleasantly enough at Yiannakis’ estate, in the shadow of lemon and fig trees – but it’s only when we drive into Kalopanayiotis that I realise how devoted he is to this enterprise, the defining project of his late middle age. See that wall over there? I designed it. See that painting on the wall? It shows what the building was like before we refurbished it. Good morning, Mr. Papadouris. Thank you, Mr. Papadouris.

All in all, Yiannakis Papadouris is good company: down-to-earth, candid, outspoken. Unlike many rich men, he’s neither cagey nor self-important. “I’ve always been a guy who will go less for show, and more for the bricks and mortar,” he says. “Really a civil-engineer approach.” As community leader, he’ll often get phone calls from mayors in Greece or France or Italy, asking for their villages to be twinned; “Come on, it’s a waste of money!” he exclaims to me (I assume he’s more polite to them). Let others worry about cutting ribbons and exchanging plaques, “I am more interested in getting money to restore the roofs, and give a face-lift to all the houses that have not been restored”. He looks around at the steep paths and huddled homes of Kalopanayiotis. His village, in more ways than one.

In a grumpy old man with a love for retro trinkets and nostalgia for the good old days, THEO PANAYIDES finds an ‘anti-person’ trained in antique restoration in Switzerland

We stand on the pavement, in old Nicosia, just below the sign for ‘ANTIQUES’, surrounded by faded pictures and a couple of birdcages. The street is narrow and busy, and a car will occasionally slow down, its driver shouting something out to Haig Indjirdjian – sometimes asking for directions, sometimes a friend calling out a greeting, sometimes a possible customer. A man in the last-named category asks if Haig has any old wooden Coca-Cola boxes. Haig answers in the negative, and the man drives on.

“Karagiozides [clowns]…” he mutters darkly after the car has gone. “Back when we had the boxes, I’d say ‘10 shillings’ and everyone was like ‘Oh no, that’s too much’. So I burned them all!” ‘Now they’ve suddenly decided that they want them’ is the grumble implied in his eloquent grunt, aimed in the direction of the departing car.

The driver of that car shouldn’t feel too insulted – because Haig has something grumpy to say about everyone, even those he considers good friends. To be honest, the interview doesn’t go as expected. I thought we’d be browsing through rooms piled high with antiques, and I’d be asking about the provenance of this or that piece – but in fact antiques are barely mentioned though they are indeed present, a poky shop next to us being full of retro items, if not quite antiques per se. There are old alarm clocks, cameras, heaters, a creepy old doll, the elegant tin boxes in which cigarettes used to be sold (he has all the old brands, ‘555’ and ‘Craven A’), periscopes and military paraphernalia, a large model ship – not for sale – which he made himself as a child. “I have to like it first,” he explains, that being apparently the main criterion for why an item ends up in his collection.

There are three small shops, but only one contains antiques. That didn’t used to be the case – but then, in January 2017, a passing car swerved to avoid a stray dog and crashed into the first of his shops, smashing both blinds and window. That shop is now boarded up, and has been turned – along with its neighbour – into a warehouse and workshop filled with boxes of hooks, screws and bushings, servicing the watch-repair business Haig carries out in addition to selling antiques. (Watches are the family business, the Indjirdjians having imported and fixed them for almost a century; Haig himself trained at Rolex in Switzerland, back in the day.) It’s now 18 months since that car destroyed his shopfront, but the insurance people still refuse to pay. They too, it appears, are among the clowns and incompetents who make his life a misery.

We should note at this point that talking to Haig is great fun, this irascible 66-year-old being a sober version of the angry guy you meet in a bar, the one who has theories on everything and a cutting quip to make about everyone. “Just ask the questions,” he tells me, switching from Greek to English (he also speaks Turkish, French, and of course Armenian). “Ask me, I don’t care. Am I lying? When you tell the truth, you’re always a bad person”.

We talk about lazy teachers, venal doctors, civil servants in general. Well-known names – Nicos Shacolas, Demetris Christofias – get bandied about. We talk of the haircut in 2013, in which his family lost a staggering €700,000. “They couldn’t care less,” he says, of the governments and various officials who engineered the bailout. “‘I’m all right Jack’, go and f**k yourself!”. We talk of the breakdown of society, the low standard of journalism in Cyprus (I don’t take offence), the awfulness of the EU, the glut of migrants, the deterioration of public services. We talk – above all – of corruption, the mutual back-scratching and rampant greed that’s destroying the island. It looks like the system may have worked in the past, I venture – or at least there was money enough for everyone – but now it’s no longer viable, only nobody knows how to stop it. “Yes, because they’re going to lose five votes. Unfortunately. But you can’t say that. You’re a bad person. You’re an anti-person.”

Another car slows down, and the driver asks the price of a vintage Kenwood mixer that’s sitting on the pavement next to the birdcages. “€70,” says Haig. The man drives on; Haig chuckles darkly again. That’s not the real price, he tells me, but what does it matter? No-one can be serious about buying when they don’t even stop the car. I know a thing or two, he assures me, “I’ve been in the business since I was seven years old”. That was in Eoka days, when Haig and his fellow urchins thought it might be fun to chant “F**king bastards!” at the Brits; a British soldier chased the boy – I don’t blame him, says Haig; he wasn’t much more than a kid himself – and split his head open with a rifle-butt, after which Haig’s dad put him to work in the shop to keep him out of trouble.

The family wasn’t grand but certainly respectable, a well-off Armenian-Cypriot family. His dad graduated from the English School, and was classmates with Rauf Denktash (whom he knew by his birth-name, Rauf Raif). Haig himself studied antique restoration in Switzerland, and thought about emigrating there after the invasion. He seems to have enjoyed life as a younger man – “I ate it up with a spoon!” – and mentions various girlfriends, a fiancée, a phase in his 20s when he used to frequent high-end cabarets in Limassol (“It’s a phase, you have to go through it,” he muses), incidentally moving in the same circles as a young, just-qualified lawyer named Nicos Anastasiades. “I was carefree, I was happy,” he recalls. “No responsibilities. No government of thieves to support.”

And a lot more positive about life?

Haig looks at me sourly. “Well, show me – you are younger than me – show me a positive future here,” he challenges. I shrug; he nods, as if to say ‘There you go then’. “So why am I being criticised for being negative?”

You just seem a little bitter, I note.

“Yes, I am bitter… After the bail-in or whatever, you tend to become bitter. You work, you fight for your country, you do this, you do that. And what do you get for appreciation?” He pauses significantly: “Zero!”.

Life was good, once upon a time – but now “we’re getting screwed on a daily basis. And some people, just because they have a tongue five metres long, what you make in a year, they make in a month. And they have all the benefits”. Haig shakes his head: “What we have done now is we have erased the middle class… Generally, I’m bitter – because they have erased the middle class and they have created a new class of people: the ‘nouveau poor’, and the poor!”.

I see his point, as we stand on the pavement in the mid-August heat. The ground-floor shops opposite (in a building whose roof he once climbed with an RPG on his back, as a soldier in ’74) have been turned into low-income flats, and pop music blares into the street – Adele, Bonnie Tyler – blending cacophonously with the Greek music from Haig’s own radio; “The girls are on holiday,” he explains indulgently, indicating his Filipina neighbours. The old town is neglected. The rubbish skip down the road “has been broken for five years, they don’t come to clean it. The stench, the bees, the wasps…” His own situation isn’t much better. Look, he says, we’ve been standing here for nearly an hour: how many customers have come in? (The answer is none, of course.) Even when they do, he adds bleakly, it’s more often people wanting to sell – many of them migrants who’ve found some old junk while painting or cleaning houses – than looking to buy.

So how does he live?

“With a wonderful pension!” he replies with heavy irony. “And I sell what I can”. The internet helps, with its global market for retro trinkets – but his ‘wonderful pension’ is a mere €356 a month. Is that all, after 45 years? “What did you expect? I’m not a civil servant.”

So how does he live on that?

“Ask me!” he responds with grim enthusiasm. “Yes. I used to live in a house, a proper house. Now I’ve collected all my belongings, and my household, in a big warehouse”. That’s where he sleeps, in a former packaging plant that’s functional (and cheap) but not very pleasant. He gets up early and comes to the shop, just to see a bit of life. What does he do for fun? “I’m here, where am I going to go? Wherever you go, it’s just unnecessary expense”.

I thought we were going to talk about antiques – and we do, in a way, but less about old objects than about the old days, the good days, before Haig Indjirdjian joined the ranks of the ‘nouveau poor’. His friend John Vickers once wrote a song called ‘It Was an Island’, he muses, and it’s true, “it used to be. Now it’s not. It was a paradise. Now it’s a paradise only if you’re a high-ranking government employee, or a thief, or an ex-banker or a banker”.

The haircut was one major factor in Haig’s disenchantment. Another must’ve been his divorce in 2001, after eight years of marriage, at which point his English wife took their twin daughters back to the UK with her. He accused his ex (with some justification, it seems) of having abandoned the marital home and illegally abducted the children – but “our justice system saw fit” to side with the mother, he says sullenly. He demanded to see the minister, but the secretary wouldn’t let him in. “With my name, for two weeks it was impossible to see him”. Then he tried again and it was a new secretary, so he gave a different name: “Ali Mehmet [a Turkish Cypriot name]. In three minutes, the minister was outside!”.

Some may wonder at the point of that story – but Haig isn’t ‘anti’ Turkish Cypriot, any more than he’s ‘anti’ refugee (though he fiercely resents all the benefits they get in “the hotel called Cyprus”); the sad truth is that, when you’re unhappy with your lot, everyone else seems to have it better than you. He’s pretty obviously not an Elam supporter – at one point he pokes fun at the nationalist version of history where “the sun shines out of our ancient Greek ancestors’ behinds” – but I also suspect that, if a populist party appeared in Cyprus as it has, for instance, in Italy, promising to soak the rich and kick out the foreigners, this smart, cultured man would probably vote for them. (Why wouldn’t he? Why keep voting for the same gang of crooks?) Still, the bulk of his vitriol is directed at the Civil Service, this slavering monster in our midst: “The people who are supposed to be served by them, they have turned into their slaves. And he talks to you,” he adds, meaning this or that government functionary, “he comes here with a brand new car – and you wonder, does he even have an education? Is he even worth the dirt in my nail?…”

So it goes on, the litany of grievances, the collection of clowns big and small who’ve ruined the life he once led. There’s no self-pity in Haig, he makes it entertaining. Like the guy in the bar, you want to keep buying him rounds and listening to his stories.

Still, he does seem to run into more than his share of chicanery and foolishness. He was all set to buy the house he’d been renting for 20 years (which would certainly have made life easier today) but was beaten to the punch – despite having made a down-payment – by a last-minute interloper who also happened to be deputy mayor of Nicosia. He applied for a birth certificate, but the clerk insisted on changing his middle name George (his father’s name) to the Greek ‘Giorgos’. His 40-foot boat, his pride and joy, was destroyed when a jetty collapsed at Larnaca marina; he sued the CTO and, after eight years, the Supreme Court recently awarded him a puny €5,200 (which doesn’t even pay for the valuation of damages, let alone the damages themselves). It almost makes you wonder if unhappy energy attracts more bad fortune, turning itself into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At least he has his treasures, the sundry antiques he loves to hoard. (The items in the shop are just a sample; he has many more stored away.) “I love seeing the old things because they were functional, they were practical, and they were built in a different era of – you know, craftsmanship,” he says, implicitly contrasting those virtues with today’s dysfunctional Cyprus. He’s had enough, he assures me. His daughters (now 22) are in England, and he’s hoping to join them: “I’m not going to die here!” The story of his boat comes with a punchline, the perfect irony for this grumpy, long-suffering man – because the name of the boat, the boat that was wrecked by bad craftsmanship and is still, eight years later, moored at the marina, still being charged a daily rate by the same CTO that destroyed it… the name of this boat is ‘Ypomoni’, which of course means ‘Patience’! You couldn’t make it up.

With her future stretching before her THEO PANAYIDES meets a fashion designer determined to find love on her own terms and do her bit to save the Earth in addition to working at a job she loves

I don’t often talk to the under-30s, at least for interview purposes. The reason is obvious: they’re just starting out in life, especially these days when a large chunk of one’s 20s goes on studying. I wouldn’t say Marianna Ladreyt is an exception, exactly (she only graduated two summers ago), but she’s certainly unusual, a half-Cypriot fashion designer in Paris – and besides, it’s nice to be reminded of that life once in a while, a life of flatmates and late nights and working random jobs to make ends meet. A life, above all, of making plans, and thinking about what comes next.

I catch her at the best possible moment – on a week’s holiday, sitting in the front room of her grandfather’s house in Nicosia, just back from a few days in Polis. Not only is this her first holiday in ages, it’s the first time since May that her life hasn’t been completely insane. Marianna’s busy, even by the standards of ambitious 28-year-olds: she hand-crafts her own brand of bags, on a sewing machine in her flat in Paris – she has around 50 orders to complete, at a wholesale price of €145 each – and also freelances as design and studio assistant at Hyun Mi Nielsen, the Paris studio of Korean-Danish designer Christine Nielsen. The studio was closed during August (she was working on the bags instead) but it’s now about to re-open, with a show coming up in late September.

So what happens when she goes back to Paris next week?

“It’s gonna be intense,” she replies in a frightened whisper, looking momentarily younger than her years.

How intense?

“I think it’s gonna be, like, at least 12 hours a day. For a month, seven days a week.”

Really? Every day?

“Maybe. I mean, it has to be done, you know?” ‘It’ includes administrative duties, like organising fittings with models, but also unglamorous work like making prototypes and cutting fabrics. Fashion – i.e. high-end fashion, not the likes of H&M – is a rather paradoxical industry: very serious, and a bit self-important, full of people working long hours in joyless environments – yet also with an in-built sense of irony, simply because the clothes aren’t real clothes. They’re not functional, generally speaking, the designs in collections and fashion weeks. You’re meant to admire them, not wear them.

That’s also true of her own big collection, which was one of 10 finalists at last year’s edition of the Hyères Festival, the oldest fashion festival in the world (incidentally taking place just down the road from her home town, the small town of Six-Fours-les-Plages on the outskirts of Toulon) – but was also a slightly expanded version of her graduation collection, from her days as a student. She looks a bit like a student now, to be honest, a languid, unaffected young woman with big green eyes and a thin, noncommittal mouth, decked out in pink T-shirt and faded white beach shorts. How does she usually dress when in Paris? I ask – and get a very French “Phfft!” in response. “Super-chilled. Completely normal, I think. Most of the time a shirt and jeans.”

Doesn’t she want to look impressive?

Another shrug. “No, I don’t care… All the designers I know, we all dress super-casual.”

Marianna is no bimbo, despite all the stereotypes that may come to mind about working in fashion. She was always a child who “read a lot”, and her CV includes a course in Art History and Philosophy at the Sorbonne. Her collection – the one that did so well at Hyères – works conceptually as well as sartorially, being a modern take on the Greco-Roman toga, a garment that continues to fascinate her.

“There are so many ways of notching a toga, of wearing a toga, the way to make the knot… It looks simple, but it’s not that simple – which is fascinating, I feel, and I’m not over it, and I’ll probably never be over it”. It wasn’t just a question of parading a bunch of togas, though, “it was really research on the pleat, on the drape – because the pleat is like, you know, when Deleuze talks about the pleat…” That’s Gilles Deleuze, the celebrated French philosopher who did indeed write a book called Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (‘The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque’) – and Marianna duly launches into a long intellectual explanation of what she had in mind with her collection: “When you see a drape, it’s about infinity, because it’s 3D and 2D at the same time… And you know, a toga can be flat, then it’s 3D, then you unknot it and it’s just a piece of fabric”. She blended the togas with eight different archetypes, characters like the old-fashioned aviator with his bomber jacket and silk scarf, or the colonial administrator in safari gear, beige clothes and pith helmet (“a really romanticised and cliché view”) – making, for instance, a Safari Toga, in beige with pockets, or a Bomber Toga over silk overalls.

“It’s a bit like in Mary Poppins, when they jump into the picture and discover this new world which is completely 2D,” she explains, citing also Disneyland-style “hyper-realism” and the trompe-l’oeil dioramas at the Museum of Natural History in New York (another case of 3D objects blending with 2D backgrounds), which also inspired her. “And then I was like, ‘But what’s 4D, then?’,” recalls Marianna, beginning to talk of how this frontier between dimensions might perhaps spawn a new, fourth dimension, starting to explain how she also tried to incorporate Baudelaire’s figure of the flâneur, or wanderer – then she laughs, conscious perhaps that she’s giving me more than strictly necessary. “Ah, f**k,” she shrugs good-humouredly. “It’s really a long time ago that I talked about all this…”

That’s the way it goes in your 20s: you spend years in student mode, working with academic concepts – then find yourself thrust in the wider world, where jobs are scarce and the discourse is much more prosaic. Fortunately, Marianna can work both sides of the fence, having grown up as the oldest of three in a nicely bifurcated family: her dad’s side are teachers and engineers, her mum’s are mostly artists. (Mum is a musician, as is Marianna’s uncle Alex – he’s actually Alex Panayi, the singer and composer who’s represented Cyprus at Eurovision, among other things – while her other uncle Nicholas is a noted painter.) She’s creative but also “super-rational,” she assures me – and extremely focused on work, like so many millennials forced to survive in a very competitive workplace.

Sure, but she’s only 28, I point out, trying not to sound condescending. Isn’t she looking for love as well?

“I guess…” replies Marianna dubiously. “But until now, not at all. I was like ‘This is not interesting at all. I need to sort out my professional life, I think it’s much more important’. Because for me, if you’re not happy in your professional life, you cannot be happy – at least, in my case. Because it’s really something that makes me [feel] bigger and stronger… But now, why not?” she adds playfully, thinking of her slightly more settled – if still precarious – existence. “We see.”

It’s a new world, with Tinder and so on.

“I don’t know,” she shrugs. “But I find it quite difficult, though – to meet people, new people, and stuff like this. I don’t know, maybe it has to do with women’s position as well. I mean, like, we are super-independent now. And I feel like my last relationship ended partly because – even though we are in 2018, I can’t believe this happened – but because I was super-independent and I love my job, or I know where I’m going at least, and he didn’t, you know?”

So her ex resented the fact that she had a better job?

“He was doing a job because he has to do a job,” explains Marianna. “You know what I mean? And I think it ended, a bit, because of that. Because I’m more épanouie – I don’t know how to say it in English,” she adds, meaning ‘fulfilled’ or ‘contented’.

The path to becoming épanouie seems to be a defining motif in the life of this industrious young woman. She’s always hustled, even when she was out of work for almost a year after college; “I was always doing something”. It helps, I suppose, that she’s confident. I mention the new law in France against sexual harassment, making it a crime even to wolf-whistle at girls in the street, and Marianna admits (even though she’s in favour of the law) that she’s unlikely ever to seek its protection: “If I have a guy who’s starting to be f**king annoying, I’m going to turn around and – do something about it, you know?”. Her half-and-half status helps too, giving her an edge over her all-French comrades (unlike most of them, she doesn’t mind the thought of living in a foreign country); her relationship with Cyprus is strong and she even speaks Greek quite fluently, albeit with an accent. Above all, however, it seems to be work that motivates her – though work as a form of independence, not working for others but working “on my stuff, for my ideas”.

Is it the money?

“Oh no!” she replies, sounding almost disappointed that I brought it up.

Well, money isn’t so bad.

“No, no,” she agrees, “money is super-important, and I want to earn enough money to live correctly and well – but no, I never think about money. I’m super-bad with money!”

So what does she want out of life?

“I want to be happy. That’s it.”

I don’t often talk to the under-30s, but Marianna seems a plausible poster child: so focused, so grounded – a child of crisis and recession – yet also serious when it comes to self-fulfilment. The difference between her generation and previous ones, she claims, “is that your job needs to be something you really like. It’s not like you’d work just for money… People aren’t afraid to go back to studies, even at 28”.

And there’s also another millennial trait, an angry idealism seething below the surface. “I’m going to say something really lame, maybe…” she mumbles, embarrassed, when I ask about politics – but she is “a bit angry all the time”, especially about the environment. “You have the impression that everybody’s working just for money,” she complains. “It’s money, money, money, and then the Earth is, like, getting f**ked and nobody cares, and you can’t do anything about it”. For a fashion designer, even the question of materials is an eco-quandary. Polyester is a nightmare because it dissolves into micro-fibres when you wash it, which end up in the sea from your washing machine and kill all the fish – but cotton, and natural fibres generally, require so much water to cultivate that they’re even less green. “This really depresses me,” says Marianna, shaking her head glumly. “We should all be like Gandhi, knitting our own.”

Finding a job that fulfils you. Finding love on your own terms. Trying to save the Earth, or at least not mess it up even further. It sounds rather stressful being Marianna Ladreyt – but the lady herself doesn’t mind, maybe because she also understands the saving grace provided by youth: the blessed future, stretching out endlessly. Her life is insane at the moment, she admits, but we’ll see what happens after the show – as a freelancer, she might not even stay at Hyun Mi Nielsen – “then I think my next step is to make a new collection”, the better to burnish her brand. One way or another, she’s going places.

“I feel like I’m more independent now,” she says optimistically, “because I really know what I’m doing. And when you like what you do, you’re so much better and everything seems – not easy, of course, it’s a lot, a lot, a lot of work, but it’s completely logical and everything works well… I feel lucky now, to have found what I really want to do”. It’s no small thing, to be feeling épanouie at 28. I shake hands quickly, aware that I’m eating up her holiday time, then leave her to go to the beach and enjoy herself, like a young person.

With conservative parents and pushy peer pressure, the number of weddings taking place in Cyprus shows no sign of slowing down. THEO PANAYIDES meets two wedding planners for whom the sky is the limit

Needless to say, this is high season. Lily Papadopoulou had not one but two weddings to co-ordinate on Saturday, one more on Sunday (in the picturesque village of Tochni) then a two-parter during the week, church service and a cocktail party on Thursday followed by the dinner on Friday. Now it’s Saturday again and she’s girding her loins for an upcoming monster in Ayia Napa, a beachside wedding that’ll cost somewhere in the six figures – but first she and business partner Rena Ioannidou are sitting down in the Nicosia office of ‘Events by Lily’, talking about wedding planning and bracing themselves for the question I find most intriguing about their milieu: ‘Are weddings necessary?’.

The office is small but designed to look bigger, with wall-length mirrors and a partition of potted ferns hiding the outside world behind their fronds. The company, launched in 2012, has organised everything from fashion shows to children’s parties – but weddings are Lily and Rena’s bread-and-butter, especially in summer; they plan around 30 nuptials a year, almost all of them between April and October. Lily’s a suntanned, young-looking 49 with shrewd, lively eyes and a crooked smile, decked out in olive-green top and jeans; Rena is bubblier, and presumably a bit younger. I don’t catch her age but she says she got married in May 2002, whereas Lily got married on December 26, 1993. By their weddings shall ye know them.

Both weddings were on the lavish side, at least for those days. Lily’s included a belly dancer, strutting her stuff for the assembled guests; Rena’s was another two-day affair, first a dinner in the garden of her parents’ home then, the next evening, a glitzy party at then-trendy Zoo Club. Both marriages are still going strong, both are to what might be termed ‘good catches’: Rena’s husband is a businessman, Lily’s a celebrity footballer. “He was Andros Petrides –” she starts to say, then stops herself with a laugh: “He is! He’s Andros Petrides!”, Andros being the now-retired goalkeeper for Apoel Nicosia and the Cyprus national team.

Still, it goes without saying that neither wedding came with a planner, such a thing being entirely unknown at the time. (The closest we had in Nicosia was a florist named Angelina who also helped out with the venue, says Lily.) She and Rena were pioneers, and even now – when other wedding planners, or self-proclaimed wedding planners, have come out of the woodwork – their role is often misunderstood in Cyprus. “Some people just want us to arrange the place-cards on the table, or help with the party favours,” she sighs, shaking her head. What they actually do is far more onerous, a case of top-down planning from flower arrangements and wedding invites – they work with an in-house florist and graphic designer – to running power cables and looking after overseas guests. All we ask of a client, says Lily, is that “they should trust us to do all the legwork”.

There is, it should be noted, a certain something running through our conversation – not quite snobbery but perhaps professional pride, an implied recognition that we don’t do those kinds of weddings. They don’t take on many “classic” weddings, admits Lily, the familiar kind with a buffet dinner at the Hilton Park or the Four Seasons, let alone humbler venues; “Fortunately or unfortunately, we don’t get the mass of weddings”. Markets work by supply and demand – and the rise of wedding planners is partly in response to (some) couples becoming more ambitious, and demanding something more imaginative on their special day.

Lily’s weddings are less likely to unfold in hotels, more likely to take place in open fields, private gardens, empty beaches. Probably the team’s best-known wedding (it was in all the papers) was actually a ‘pre-wedding’ at Curium amphitheatre, where “a play was staged representing the couple”. An Italian director married to a soprano in Limassol wrote a half-hour opera about the bride and groom (it’s unclear what his relationship to the couple was) and the piece was staged at Curium with the wedding guests in attendance, all wearing white. Their most expensive wedding cost around €250,000, a dinner party for 300 guests on the beach at Ayia Napa which required a wooden deck to be constructed on the sand and a marquee to be erected at the last minute (the two planners went for 48 hours without sleep on that one). It still seems a rather steep price-tag, I venture – but apparently the deck alone cost around €12,000, and besides my question is naïve: weddings are expensive, more or less by definition. “When you can end up spending €30-40,000 just on the flowers…” shrugs Lily, leaving the sentence unfinished.

As far as she’s concerned, the sky’s the limit. The customer isn’t always right, and she’ll step in when she thinks a couple are “going too far” – mostly when, for instance, they want to show a 15-minute video of their lives together, which she knows will bore guests silly – but I doubt she’d ever slap them down for being too imaginative. “It’s a challenge. Everything different, for us, is a challenge.” (That’s why she’s also looking forward to gay weddings, to try something different.) Many of the nuptials she plans are ‘destination weddings’, where a couple live abroad and come to Cyprus specially to get married, having found ‘Events by Lily’ through their website – usually, though not always, there’s some connection to the island, like one partner being from the diaspora – so requests are sometimes unusual, trying to make the day as memorable as possible.

One couple wanted a donkey so she had one brought down from a donkey farm, garlanded with flowers for the big day. Another bride – staying with the equine theme – asked to ride to church on a horse, like an Amazon, to be met by her groom at the entrance and coaxed off her mount with a bouquet of flowers. Alas, the horse got skittish and refused to play along, necessitating a delay while Lily and Rena tried to find a replacement horse – which of course had its own problems, since the bride had taken riding lessons on that particular horse and felt a bit insecure on some random steed. (Being thrown off a horse on your wedding day would indeed be memorable.) Things go wrong occasionally; just last week, the groom fainted dead away in the middle of the ceremony (was it the heat? stress? who knows) and the priest had to resume with the couple sitting down. Then there was another groom who got cold feet, and wouldn’t get in the car to go to church – though she also recalls the “cool brides”, like the woman whose heel broke just as she was leaving the house. “She just tossed it, put on another pair of shoes, and we carried on.”

What happened with the groom who had a panic attack? “We just gave him time to calm down,” shrugs Lily – and it’s significant that she and Rena also talked to him and tried to reassure him, along with his parents. Wedding planners tend to bond with their clients, especially the brides; on the day itself, they’re almost like family. The couple confide in them, divulging family secrets “that you have to know in order to handle certain situations”. And of course there are also those couples where you sense something not quite right in the dynamic. “We had a wedding where they got divorced a month later.”

Did she and Rena see it coming?

“Yeah, we understood there was…” She shrugs: “I don’t know, you feel a vibe, you pick up a vibe”. Sometimes the commitment isn’t there. Marriage, it turns out, isn’t for everyone, despite the exorbitant cost of tying the knot.

There’s a paradox here. Around one in three marriages in Cyprus currently end in divorce. The whole institution is tottering badly. It’s not even clear that getting married helps – or has any effect on – the relationship, when a couple are already living together. “I ask them ‘Has anything changed?’,” admits Lily, speaking of the times when she sees ‘her’ couples again after the wedding (she’s often hired to plan christenings too). “The answer I get from them is ‘No’.” Here, in other words, is a custom – the traditional wedding – that appears to confer few real benefits, and is available in much simpler form (a quick civil ceremony) if you only want the legal status of being married – yet thousands of people happily spend a small fortune on it every year, indeed the wedding day is “a very, very big deal, especially for brides”. Which brings me to the question that’s been at the back of my mind throughout our interview: Are weddings necessary?

“I think so,” replies Lily cautiously. “At least, for Cyprus society… It’s our mentality, the Cypriot mentality. The parents,” she adds with finality, as if those two words were enough to explain everything.

“It’s social pressure,” puts in Rena.

“They start in on them: ‘When are you getting married?’. ‘They’ve been together all these years, why aren’t they married?’ Then, once they marry, it’s ‘When are you having a baby?’” goes on Lily, both laughing merrily.

But isn’t the world changing? Surely it’s a matter of time before weddings start to seem outdated?

“It may be a matter of time – but, like I said, the Cypriot mentality won’t allow it. I assure you it’s true. Because you’ll often get couples telling you ‘I won’t do this, I won’t do that’, but then they end up doing all the usual clichés anyway – because they’re being pressured by the family behind the scenes.” It’s not like bride and groom are having their arms twisted. Some couples genuinely believe in the sanctity of marriage. Even if they don’t, most aren’t averse to dressing up, being the centre of attention and having a party. But conservative peer pressure and pushy parents also have a lot to do with it.

Sounds about right. Cyprus society is, after all, quite conservative, and parents do wield disproportionate influence over the lives of their grown children. Lily Papadopoulou knows this first-hand, from her own life – which we don’t really talk about much, partly because it seems so straightforward. Her dad owned a paper-importing business; after school she did a secretarial course at St Godric’s in London – an old-fashioned girls’ college that closed down in 1992, soon after she graduated – and came back to work in Dad’s business (though “it didn’t fulfil me”), then left to get married. She raised her son, who’s now 22, and got into event planning some years ago. She has no hobbies to speak of, nor other passions. She seems sociable, personable, obviously very good at what she does, and perhaps a bit conventional. If anyone was going to mount an attack on weddings as being shallow and unnecessary, it probably wouldn’t be her – even if she wasn’t a wedding planner.

Yet that’s not the whole story. Many a placid life has a stormy undercurrent below the surface – and Lily’s undercurrent is her son, who was born premature, weighing only 650g at birth, and survived his first three months in an incubator. He suffers from dyspraxia, a developmental disorder where the brain “can’t send the right messages to the body to execute actions properly”, which explains why she devoted herself full-time to raising him – and it must’ve been a struggle but “thank God, he’s okay now”, still having difficulties but away at uni and doing remarkably well.

This, I suspect, is why Lily finds it hard to be cynical, even when she hears young couples vow undying love and knows they could well be at each other’s throats in a couple of years. This is why she prefers to “live their happiness with them”, knowing from her son that happiness is precious – and knowing that a wedding day, despite being fake and naively sentimental and a total waste of money, is also rather beautiful.

Weddings are for show, I suggest mischievously, and Lily agrees: “I think it is mostly just a show”. Still, she and Rena are optimistic – mostly because they’re having too much fun doing what they do, taking on challenges and juggling a multitude of issues, supporting couples on their Greatest Day Ever and trying to find a horse to replace the other horse. The divorce rate is going up all the time, I note glumly; maybe their work will start going down soon. “Or it’ll go up,” replies Rena breezily. “They divorce, then they marry again!”. Can’t argue with that.

In the mayor of the island’s liveliest resort THEO PANAYIDES finds a smooth-talking dynamo with a different vision of Ayia Napa, determined to turn it into a destination offering a Complete Tourism Experience

Ayias Mavris street in the centre of Ayia Napa is a street full of bars (though also, incidentally, the street where the Town Hall is located). There they are, the signs and shopfronts and enticements to drunken youth which have stood the town in good stead for several decades now. ‘12 Jagerbombs, 12 Spirits + Mixer: €20.’ ‘Special offers for hen and stag parties.’ A pub festooned with the inarguably true ‘It is better to be full of beer than full of shit’. Pirates Inn at the top of the road, with its punning, pirate-themed plaques – ‘To err is human, to arr is pirate’ – which will surely mean nothing to Russian visitors, a reminder that Napa has built its reputation on UK tourism: Craig’s Bar, just before the Town Hall, has a Scottish theme, Taffy’s sports the Welsh flag, Paddy’s… well, you get the idea.

Also on the street, tacked up on a shop window, is an advertisement for ‘Karousos Beach Restaurant, Est. 1973’, located near the harbour and offering deals like a ‘Mediterranean platter for two persons’ at €34. The Karousos family have been prominent in the region for many years – they also own hotels, notably the Aeneas Resort – and Yiannis Karousos, mayor of Ayia Napa since 2013, admits as much, sitting in his office in the aforementioned Town Hall: “My background is tourism. I was born and raised in tourism”.

Yiannis is 38, burly and bearded with a receding hairline and what look like permanent bags under his eyes – and he’s also quite informal in his manner, refusing to stand on ceremony (he’s notorious for never wearing a tie). “Hello, Mr. Mayor –” I begin, but he waves me in briskly, switching straight to the familiar Greek form in addressing me. I suppose it’s hard to be pompous when your building is directly opposite Senior [sic] Frog’s Dance Bar & Restaurant, and a giant plastic frog eyeballs you from across the street each time you go to the window.

His desk is piled high with papers, so much so that we head to a narrow conference table for the interview. Half-hidden behind his In and Out trays, he could pass for a harried corporate accountant at a medium-sized firm – but don’t be fooled, he’s a powerful player. Napa punches well above its weight, contributing about 5 per cent of the total GDP of Cyprus (€700-800 million), and is currently being revamped to the tune of around €10 million in government funding. Party politics helps, the south-east being traditionally pro-Disy – “All previous governments, with the exception of this one, totally ignored Ayia Napa,” he fumes – but his own “assertive policy” and dogged personality also play a role. The phone rings often, though he mostly ignores it while we’re talking. “I’m going to send a letter to Town Planning, saying I’m against it!” he tells one interlocutor. “Get me a meeting with the president,” he tells another.

Yiannis talks fast, and mostly about Ayia Napa. Personal info is sparse: he studied Hospitality and Tourism at Surrey, followed by a joint MBA (jointly awarded by the French ESSEC and Cornell University), but always planned to come back to Napa. He’s been married since 2006 – though his wife likes to say he’s married to the Municipality, given how ceaselessly he worries away at the job – and has two children. He plays drums and guitar for fun, and used to play in a rock band of sorts, but doesn’t get time nowadays. He became a local councillor in 2007, then ran for mayor when his predecessor passed away unexpectedly; he’s since been re-elected with a hefty 65 per cent of the vote, his current term expiring in December 2021.

He also has a taste for the spotlight, or at least doesn’t shy away from public pronouncements. Just last month, in a Facebook post, he censured a local club-owner who’d made light of noise pollution by sending an angry neighbour a pair of earmuffs. (Noise pollution is no laughing matter, he chides, vividly comparing its effect to milking a cow – i.e. doing so much to improve Napa – then kicking away the bucket of milk instead of drinking it.) Back in March, he made headlines by sending a letter to tour operators abroad – the letter was published in The Telegraph – warning that “low-quality youth” tourism, meaning organised lads’ holidays for young men who want to get drunk and make trouble, was no longer welcome in Ayia Napa. Does he really think he can manage without them?

In response, he launches into his spiel – and indeed I know it’s a spiel, because halfway through we happen to switch from English to Greek and he repeats the exact same speech in a new language, word for word. “In 2013, when I was elected mayor, the first thing I did was to establish a vision for Ayia Napa and communicate that with all the stakeholders of the city,” he declaims. “The vision was – is! – to turn Ayia Napa by 2030 into the best and most cosmopolitan tourist resort of the Mediterranean. So we set out a strategy in 2013 and we started the implementation of this strategy, meaning it was time to upgrade Ayia Napa, plus to upgrade the nightlife of Ayia Napa because it does not represent what we believe is sustainable for the city. To do that we use a tool, we call it the ‘Complete Tourist Experience’.”

The details of the CTE are perhaps less important than the fact that a CTE exists (and can be recited, so he claims, by any random Ayia Napan, his vision having now become the whole town’s) – but a key word is certainly ‘landmarks’. “Because you’ll come for the sun and the sea,” he explains, ‘you’ being the average tourist, “but the sun and sea won’t bring you back. You need to have experiences. Things to see, things to do.”

Really? Isn’t it enough just to have a good time?

“No, that’s not sustainable to hold on to your tourism,” replies Yiannis (he’s the kind of smooth-talking dynamo who’ll toss around words like ‘stakeholders’ and ‘sustainable’). “So we’ve created various landmarks – like the sculpture park, the cactus park, the harbour sculptures, the Mermaid, the Fisherman, the love bridge, the eco-awareness centre at Cavo Greco, ‘Agrotis’ square. Landmarks!” he goes on, warming to his theme. “The ‘I love Ayia Napa’ sign in the centre… The beachfront that’s now being completed, [which cost] €6.5 million. Our monastery is about to be turned into an archaeological museum. Things to do! We basically want to transform Ayia Napa into a town of experiences, of parks and monuments. And landmarks. Not just the sun and the sea. In 2013, we had 400,000 arrivals in Ayia Napa. In 2018 we’re going to have about 650,000”. Not to mention the jewel in the crown: “We found an investor for the marina,” he says proudly, “which is going to be a world-class landmark. It won’t just be a marina but a landmark marina, with unique architecture. The investor plans to turn it into the finest marina in the Mediterranean.”

Various thoughts flicker through my head at the close of this impressive presentation. The first is that it’s slightly ironic that the Town Hall is located so close to the bars in the centre of town – because that nightlife, with its appeal to now-unwelcome yobs, is something of a fly in the ointment of this grand scheme. In fact, a battle is perhaps being fought (or about to be fought) for the soul of Ayia Napa, pitting the old Napa of cheap booze and tacky tourist restaurants with photos of the menu outside – what Yiannis calls “visual pollution” – against a new one of spa hotels, orderly beaches (now taken over by the Municipality) and structured itineraries. Hotels often mean ‘all-inclusive’ packages, of course, so tourists tend to stay in their hotel and not spend money in town – which is fine for hotel owners, less so for bar owners. That’s another potential divide.

Ayia Napa Sculpture park

The second, heretical thought is that no tourist is seriously going to come to Ayia Napa to see sculptures and visit museums – but Yiannis, predictably, has statistics to bolster his case. Despite its reputation as Party Central, only about 10 per cent of Napa’s tourists are under-25s, even though the bad impression created by some rowdy youngsters “is so negative that it threatens to drive away the other 90 per cent”. (It also discourages Brits from coming at all: only 8.5 per cent of British visitors to Cyprus stay in Napa, as opposed to 60 per cent of Scandinavians.) The resort already caters to plenty of other demographics: 1,500 weddings a year, 150 football teams coming down for winter training, senior citizens, families. Given those numbers, it shouldn’t be too hard to ditch the lager louts for higher-end tourism.

Indeed, it’s already happening. The re-branding of everyone’s favourite den of debauchery may seem implausible – “Yes, we’re proposing to apply for European culture capital of the year in 2030. And why not?” says Yiannis hotly, obviously fed up with people laughing when he moots the idea – but the point is to do the right things and make the right gestures. Tour operators don’t especially care if Ayia Napa’s ‘landmarks’ were created artificially by a canny mayor. All that matters is that they exist, meaning you can put them on the brochure, meaning you can persuade tourists that there’s more to Napa than gangs of young men being sick in the street.

“For the first time in 25 years, we’ve had Germans signing contracts for 40,000 tourists,” he enthuses. “A big company started direct flights from three German cities, for 40,000 people in the first year! I asked the CEO ‘Why now?’, he said ‘Mayor, we couldn’t sell Ayia Napa before. Now things have changed’.” Nor are the newly-built sights just a gimmick, hence this rather incredible story: Yiannis was in the Greek city of Ioannina recently, and a school bus stopped beside him. A teacher descended, having somehow recognised him, and said: “Are you the mayor of Ayia Napa? We come to Ayia Napa for the sculpture park, congratulations!”. The park contains 200 sculptures by 140 artists from all over the world, he informs me. A 2,500-seat amphitheatre is due to be built soon, depending on funding. The marina should be ready by next year. Roads in the centre of town will be upgraded. CCTV will be installed. Thousands of trees will be planted in the next two years, responding to criticisms that Napa isn’t green enough. The mayor’s ambition seems unbounded.

How uncritically can we take Yiannis Karousos? His account of life in Napa does seem slightly too rosy. He denies that drugs are a problem (at least among locals), which seems unlikely when they’re so widely available. He plays down social problems in general, despite what he admits is Napa’s “anarchic development” over the years. He praises the town’s multiculturalism – out of 56 first-year pupils in the local primary school, 34 have at least one foreign parent! – but surely a small village can’t mutate into a multicultural hub in a few decades without some serious identity issues.

In a way, Ayia Napa doesn’t really exist; it’s just shiny urban putty, to be moulded as its leaders see fit. (His metaphor of milking a cow seems oddly appropriate.) ‘Are the locals OK with the town’s character changing?’ I ask at one point, apropos of his grand vision – but Yiannis shrugs noncommittally. “But the character of Ayia Napa has changed. I mean, it doesn’t really have a character anymore. Does the centre of Ayia Napa have a character? They knocked down everything – they pulled down all the old houses, on the altar of money. We had old buildings, which could’ve been listed today and turned into something else – but they knocked them down. They destroyed them, back in the 80s. Did you know the mediaeval aqueduct ran right through the middle of Ayia Napa? They knocked it down, and built houses”.

The old Ayia Napa – not the Napa of Craig’s Bar and Taffy’s Bar but the real old Napa, the one of his parents and grandparents – is gone for good. Back in the early 70s, when tourists were a fraction of today’s numbers, Yiannis’ grandparents had an orchard down the road from the Nissi Beach; one day an Austrian couple wandered into the orchard, his grandma invited them for lunch – and a friendship was born which endured for many decades (“They must’ve come to Ayia Napa over 200 times!”), despite one couple speaking only Greek and the other only German. That kind of tourism – a human connection that had nothing to do with money – is never coming back. Is he nostalgic? “Look,” replies Yiannis smoothly, “in America they call it ‘shifting the paradigm’…”

Some might say the ‘Complete Tourist Experience’ is essentially an unworthy project. Maybe so – but it’s hard to argue with the drive of this youngish mayor. He’ll visit pubs at 2am to talk to tourists, or skip the office in the morning to carry out some on-the-spot inspection. He claims to have turned a deficit at the Municipality into a €3 million surplus, and raised its income by 70 per cent. He’s fallen out with friends and relatives by being unwilling to bend the rules. His plan, he affirms, is to put Ayia Napa on a par with Mykonos and Ibiza – though he also insists that he only wants two terms as mayor, maximum three; if you can’t get it done in 15 years, he says sternly, you might as well give up. And then what? He’ll only be in his late 40s, after all, and he is “a man who likes to contribute to public life”. Maybe an MP? Or even higher? Yiannis Karousos shrugs modestly, his lofty aims at odds with the come-ons and five-litres-of-alcohol-for-€10 offers on the bar signs around us.

Balance and control seem to be the tricks of the trade for a champion motorcycle stunt rider, finds THEO PANAYIDES, meeting a man who has been around bikes all his life

What does Aras Gibieza think about climate change? Is he a dog person or a cat person? What goes through his mind when he’s gazing at a beautiful sunset? I don’t know the answers to these questions, nor am I even convinced that the answers would be very exciting. What’s exciting is watching Aras (short for Arunas) wheel around, doing perilous stunts, on his customised Kawasaki Ninja 636 motorcycle – which is mostly what we talk about as we sit in the lobby of the Navarria Hotel in Limassol, just a few hours before he’s due to give a show at the 2^nd Limassol Motor Show & Motion.

“My sport is called motorcycle stunt riding,” he explains in smooth but sometimes fractured English. “I do tricks, like on back wheel, on the front wheel. I do acro-tricks.” He’ll sit backwards on the saddle, pop wheelies, do handstands and headstands, “every kind of position you can imagine, actually. So we do nose-wheelies, back-wheelies, burnouts, drifts…” What’s a burnout? “Like a drifting, but standing drifting,” he replies, a little unhelpfully. Maybe it’s the one where he leaps up in the saddle, flips 180 degrees (all while the bike is moving, of course) and lands facing backwards, then performs a kind of reverse wheelie, making the bike rear up while facing in the opposite direction, and takes off at top speed – though actually I think it’s just the one where he floors the gas and brakes at the same time, making the tyres spin and producing a lot of smoke (hence ‘burnout’). Needless to say, reading about Aras’ stunts in a newspaper is no substitute for watching them on YouTube.

Take, for instance, the “360 unicycle no-hander”, a trick of his own devising which helped him win second place at the 2016 Stunt Grand Prix in Poland. It’s one thing to say that he keeps the bike in wheelie mode, straddles the handlebar with his body inches away from the front wheel, then lets go his hands and waves them while keeping his balance – but it’s something else to watch the play of forces, the bike roaring remorselessly in one direction while its rider climbs from saddle to handlebar with the quick, nimble moves of a human spider. The trick doesn’t actually work at the Grand Prix (at least in the clip on YouTube), though nothing very terrible happens as a result: the bike clatters to the ground and Aras quickly jumps off, eliciting a disappointed “Ayyyy” from the commentator.

Stunt riding isn’t massively dangerous; the bike doesn’t go fast enough for really serious injury. There are probably “more broken bones than deaths,” admits Aras. Racing is obviously riskier – though the dangers in his own sport shouldn’t be underestimated (he’s broken his foot, his wrist and both legs over the years) and besides stunt riding has something even hardcore racers crave, the flamboyance and grace under pressure which is what attracts most young men (it’s usually men) to bikes in the first place. “It’s no secret [that] every motorcycle rider wants to know how to pop a wheelie,” notes Aras wryly. He’ll often do shows at Moto GP and Superbike racing events, “and riders watch my show and they’re so happy, they say ‘Oh man, you’re killing!’… Even the bad bikers” – meaning gang members and Hell’s Angels types – “come up to me and say ‘Good job’.”

He was never in a gang, but he knows about racing. “In 2006, I became a professional motorcycle racer,” he recalls, a profession he pursued for three years before switching to stunts. He knows how it feels to be racing the famous Brno circuit in the Czech Republic, with its 1.2km straight where a bike can hit an almost-unimaginable top speed of 300km/h. We should also mention that Aras Gibieza will be 29 next month, meaning he was barely 17 years old in 2006. He started young.

Aras Gibieza performs at the Limassol Motor Show and Motion 2018 in Limassol, Cyprus on September 15, 2018 (Vytautas Dranginis / Red Bull Content Pool // AP)

Actually, he started very young. He sits in the lobby of the Navarria, blue eyes shining in a frank, relaxed face; as an “official Red Bull athlete” since 2013, he has no fear of interviews. His fair skin has one visible blemish, a scar on his forehead which – ironically, given all the mechanical monsters he’s ridden in the years since – comes from a bicycle accident when he was a child. Aras’ grandfather was a professional cyclist and the manager of the Lithuanian national team (Aras himself was born in Vilnius in 1989), “so I was used to cycling every day” – and bikes turned, inevitably, to thoughts of motorbikes. On his sixth birthday, young Aras asked his mum for a motorcycle helmet. At 10, he got his first scooter “and I started to ride that scooter around my block. I made a wheelie after one week. I was riding scooters for six years, then, when I was 16, I got my first real bike. Real big motorcycle, which was a Yamaha R6”.

Was he already thinking of turning pro someday, at 12 or 13?

At the time, “I didn’t thought [sic] I’m going to be a professional rider. I was, like – I was the kid with the passion. I was doing these tricks every day, winter, summer, doesn’t matter. I was on the street doing my stuff”. Aras shrugs disarmingly: “Somehow everything comes to me, by itself. Maybe because I put a lot of work into it.”

His life, at almost 29, is an enviable one. He’s not allowed to say how much he earns, but he has some big sponsors – Red Bull is the main one, Alpinestars (who sponsor his sports apparel) being another one – and he does around 120 shows a year in 30 venues all over the world, so you do the math. The days go by easily enough, especially when he’s home in Lithuania: he trains every day, practising his moves for about four hours, and goes to the gym every other day. One of his five motorbikes is housed in Barcelona where he’ll often spend a couple of months during the winter break, when shows are thin on the ground. It’s true he has to do what sponsors say, and can’t easily refuse an engagement – but it’s not a big problem, since “it’s always fun to do shows and to ride”.

All well and good; but you have to wonder how this enviable life must’ve seemed – especially to his parents – 15 years ago, when early-teenage Aras was spending a big chunk of every day doing wheelies in the street behind his house. (Was he good at school? “In the middle, I would say.”) His mum is perhaps the true hero of this profile – and there’s also another aspect, the fact that he lost his father to “heart problems” around the same time, a couple of years before turning pro. Must’ve been a life-changing shock, I venture. Did it actually change his life?

“I think so.”

How?

“I don’t know. You know, if he were alive I don’t know what it would be like, so I can’t tell you.”

Did it influence the job he’s doing now? Did it affect the kind of person he’s become?

“Maybe, maybe…” he replies, amiable but unwilling to probe too deeply, at least in public. “I don’t know. Because it is like it is, so I don’t know how it would be. I never thought [about] what it’d be like. It is like it is, and I’m okay with it.”

Mrs Gibieza, as already mentioned, deserves a lot of credit here; not only had she just become widowed, but her only son (Aras also has a sister) was racing motorbikes and doing stunts in the street, every parent’s nightmare – yet she didn’t forbid it. Surely she must’ve been worried? “Yeah, definitely. But she tells me now, ‘You were so passionate, so I couldn’t take this from you’. If something bad happened, [at least] it would happen doing the thing I love.” The family were, and remain, very close – Mum ran a dog-breeding business in his childhood; she now works as a hospital nurse in Sweden – and Aras is also patriotic about Lithuania, despite all the exotic places he sees on his travels. “I have many shows outside Europe, like in India, Qatar. I was four times in India, each time a month” (motorcycle culture is huge there). Last year he spent six months on the road; after Limassol it’s back to Lithuania, then a big show in Belgium.

I’m not sure I got very much of Aras Gibieza the person, as opposed to Aras Gibieza the stunt rider; then again, it may be that the person is more becalmed – more normal, in a word – than the stunt rider makes him appear. I’d pictured a kind of on-the-edge, itinerant life, free from social conventions – but, for instance, Aras didn’t drop out of school when he became a racing pro at 16, indeed he even went to university for a somewhat random-sounding course in “house-selling” (he’s a qualified “makler”, which apparently means ‘dealer’ in Lithuanian; can you study to become an estate agent now?). Further evidence of banal normality: he’s engaged to be married in a few months, his fiancée being an athlete like himself – actually a wakeboarder, which perhaps explains why Aras was by far the more nervous of the two when the couple did some parasailing (the sport where you’re towed behind a speedboat on a parachute) in Napa last week. “I’m a bit afraid of heights,” he admits by way of explanation, then offers an even more convincing explanation: “If it’s something I can’t control, I’m a bit afraid of it”.

This, I suspect, is where the stunt rider comes in, the quest for control being integral to Aras’ professional skill-set. There are other skills too, of course. He’s innovative, having been the first stunt rider to ride on the ice (a staple of winter in Lithuania) and among the few to have done stunts with the front wheel completely removed (!). He’s tough, as well; he believes that any injury sustained through sport should be shaken off, as far as possible, by doing sport, powering through the pain. When he broke his foot in 2010, it was during a practice session and he had a tournament coming up the next weekend; the cast came off two days before, then “I sprayed it with the cold spray”, took part in the contest and won first place. He broke his leg when a bike fell on top of him, but was riding again in 10 days: “You can still feel pain, but…” Physical toughness is the mark of any durable athlete – but it’s surely control that defines his sport. All driving is a form of control, harnessing the mechanical beast, but stunt riding takes it to a fine art, enjoining control not just in general but moment-by-moment.

What’s the secret to popping a wheelie? “You have to find the right balance,” he replies. Too low, and it doesn’t come off; too high, and the bike will flip over. Balance, control: these are the skills he’s nurtured over the years – and I’ve no doubt they bleed into his personal life too, making him bold but not too bold, emotionally open without being sloppy (as he says, “It is like it is”), candid in interview mode but (yes) controlled.

Anything else? Any message to the world?  “I would say a message for the motorcycle riders,” replies Aras virtuously, having heard about our problem with boy racers (even more of a problem since, apparently, “the tarmac is very slippery” in Cyprus). “Ride safe, be cautious of the cars… If you want to do wheelie you must go to a closed space, don’t do it in the street. And ride with helmet and full protection, even when it’s hot and sunny day”. He has to say this, not just because of his sponsors but because of his unique position vis-à-vis impressionable youth: not only is he doing what he loves, but what he loves happens to be many a teenage boy’s (and girl’s too, who knows?) idea of the coolest thing ever. I’m unable to watch him perform, having to head back to Nicosia – but I catch another show later on YouTube, Aras roaring into the arena on one wheel with an introductory stunt like the greeting of a circus performer, bouncing around on the saddle while keeping the front wheel aloft (on the left side! on the right! now up on the handlebar!), and the crowd cheering wildly.

THEO PANAYIDES finds the owner of the oldest pub in Cyprus to be a quiet extrovert

New owner Renos claims he’s inherited a museum, and vows to change it as little as possible. It’ll still be the only pub in town that opens at 11am, and the old football pennants on the walls will presumably stay. To be fair, some things could stand to be upgraded. The two shelves of books in a corner are incongruous enough, but the actual titles are even more incongruous – loads of chick-lit (seven books by Danielle Steel alone) and a couple of message-mongering titles from the 80s, Child Abuse with a cover photo of a battered child and The Lead Scandal, on the damage done to fragile psyches by the presence of lead in petrol; not exactly ideal reading-matter while you’re sipping your pint. Then again, maybe the books too should stay as they are, just because that’s how regulars like them. They’re a fixture, an exhibit, part and parcel of the oldest pub in Cyprus.

We speak, of course, of Romylos Pub in Nicosia, founded in 1979 by Panayiotis Kyriakou and officially (the CTO confirms it) the oldest still-functioning pub on the island. Panayiotis ran the place for 39 years – and should perhaps have waited till next year’s 40th anniversary to sell it, but another anniversary came first: his own 80th birthday on January 17 this year, making him feel it was time to move on.

He seems in fine fettle, though, I note.

“Touch wood, I feel great. But I was thinking of my family, my wife after all these years. You know, working at night, it’s difficult.”

What does he plan to do with himself?

“Do?” He chuckles dryly. “What will I do? At the moment I have no plans, just to relax. There’s my son too – he might need me, I don’t know…” His son Kyriakos is also in the pub on the Sunday evening of our interview – the TVs beaming out local football to a smattering of customers – and chats with me later, remembering his own childhood days of working at Romylos (he was 10 years old when it opened), mostly washing dishes and making sandwiches; there’s a famous photo of him pulling a pint when he’s barely tall enough to reach the counter. Kyriakos also puts his finger on something that’s been eluding me throughout the interview, offering a pithy description of his dad (whom he knows, after all, better than anyone): “A quiet extrovert”.

That, I suspect, is Panayiotis in a nutshell – ‘extrovert’ mostly in the sense that he’s not an introvert (he likes company and doesn’t seem the type to brood, nor does he have a particularly busy inner life; his main hobby is watching football), ‘quiet’ in the sense that… well, he doesn’t say much. He’s been coming to the pub for 40 years (and casinos for 20 years before that; we’ll get to them later), almost every day including weekends, alternating shifts with his brother Tasos but still either opening the place in the mornings or closing up in the wee hours. He’s met so many people, thousands of people, sat beside them and listened to their problems. He must really like to talk, I venture. “To be honest,” he replies, “I don’t talk much. I might sit down, and there might be 20 people having a conversation – I just sit and listen. If someone asks me something, I answer. I never butt into their conversations, because when you butt in, that’s when you might end up being misunderstood.”

He’s never had misunderstandings, he says proudly. I ask new owner Renos – who’s been a customer since his teens – if he’s ever seen his predecessor angry, and he shakes his head: “No, always calm”. His life has been “normal”, affirms Panayiotis, despite working nights and odd hours; he’s never had family troubles, the kind that often emerge in his line of work. “You know, many people in this business might get drunk, might become drunkards. Never! The pub has been operating just as you see it now for 40 years – just like this, quietly, legally, with all its licences, everything in order, year after year… There’s never been trouble, never any fights, never in 40 years”.

Football is his passion, so let’s bring in a football metaphor. Romylos is festooned with football posters and memorabilia, including a much-cherished photo of Panayiotis with Kevin Keegan and George Best when the two legends came to Cyprus for a friendly tournament in the late 80s – but, if Panayiotis were himself a footballer, he wouldn’t be a forward like those two flashy poachers. He’d be a defender, not a dirty one – not the type to commit professional fouls – but a solid and sturdy one, very hard to get past. Even better, he’d be a goalie, a safe pair of hands. This, I suspect, this sturdy unexcitable quality, was precisely what prompted an Indian princeling to offer the young Cypriot a job in his London casino, all those years ago.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The story begins in Yerolakkos, the now-occupied village just outside Nicosia where he was born, the son of a shepherd. Panayiotis was the second of eight siblings, and the family was by no means rich – so he emigrated in his early 20s, moving to London where he worked in construction and as a house painter. He met the Indian prince and his wife when they hired him to paint their flat – and met him again when he went, as a customer, to the man’s (semi-legal) gaming club, making enough of an impression to merit a job offer. The prince had installed roulette tables in “various clip joints around London,” explains Kyriakos, “and my job was to organise the list sending different croupiers to different clubs”. He soon graduated to running his own place in north London – then, when casinos became fully legal in 1970, applied for a licence to open a big casino and betting shop in the West End.

Had the licence been approved, his life might’ve been very different. Alas, the application was denied (a complicated story involving a duplicitous business partner who turned out to have a history of bankruptcy), “so it all fell apart, and I started on the journey back to Cyprus”. He built a house in Yerolakkos – it was going to be the first house in the village with central heating – sending money to his brother to build it. The whole family sailed back in July 1974, first the kids, then Panayiotis himself; he arrived on the day of the invasion – and of course never even saw the Yerolakkos house, let alone lived in it. Four years in Greece followed, as Gaming Manager at the well-established Parnitha casino – then, in 1979, he was passing by outside what’s now Romylos (at the time a private home and steam-press ironing business) and noticed a sign saying ‘For Rent’. And here we are.

There’s a sudden roar, and Panayiotis lifts his eyes to the TV: Omonia have scored in their game against Paralimni. They’re the team he supports in Cyprus, he tells me, but his first love will always be Arsenal: the wi-fi password at Romylos is the London club’s name followed by ‘1886’, the year it was founded. There’s a tinge of nostalgia for his days in the UK (which may just be an old man’s nostalgia for the days of his youth) but he insists he has no regrets, even though Romylos is a rung below a London casino – and even though he might’ve run a bigger establishment, even in Cyprus. About a year after they opened, Carlsberg came with an offer to manage a bar in Ayia Napa – but his kids were already in school in Nicosia and he didn’t want to uproot the family again, so he declined.

“So I stayed just with Romylos,” he muses. “40 years. I’ve had a good life here, with my people, my regulars. I always worked very honestly. The pub never had a bad name – because you heard a lot about pubs in those days, when they had women, selling women and so forth. Here, never! If a customer bought a waitress a drink – if the drink was £2, then £2 is what you charged. In other places, if the customer bought a girl a drink it might be £10. I never allowed such things.”

The old and new owners

The years have indeed passed quite smoothly. He never had trouble with underworld types, neither here nor (more surprisingly) in London: “I did have customers who were gangsters or what-have-you, and they respected me… They’d come to the casino, they gambled, lost their money and left like gentlemen. They did their dirty work elsewhere, never with me”. Was it because they knew he wouldn’t stand for it? “I don’t know, re koumbare. Whoever I met, even among so-called ‘villains’, they ended up liking me. Because of my manner, whatever. They never messed with me. Not there, not in Cyprus.” People generally seem to behave themselves around him. He’s only had to throw out a couple of customers during 40 years at Romylos – and not even throw them out but refuse them entry, because they were obviously blind drunk.

Bars do attract some lost souls, I point out.

“There are many people with problems,” he agrees. “I became a psychologist, without having studied. I never made it past primary school, but I could look at a customer and know what kind of person they were”. Many of these people shared their problems, whether family or financial; a barman who doesn’t talk much – and, implicitly, doesn’t judge – makes an excellent shoulder to cry on. He’d listen, recalls Panayiotis, and offer advice.

“Would you ever advise them to take risks?” I ask, already half-knowing the answer.

“No risks,” he replies instantly. “Not to take risks.”

That, more or less, is the crux of the matter when it comes to Panayiotis Kyriakou. He plays it safe; even his low-key, laconic persona is a function of playing it safe. I try to broaden the discussion, away from the pub and specific details of his life – asking, for instance, if there’s something that makes him angry about Cyprus society – but he’s not too happy with those kinds of questions; offering opinions on matters that don’t really concern you is a sure way of being misunderstood. It’s telling that both his children followed unimpeachably safe paths in life, nothing to do with clubs and casinos. Kyriakos graduated from the English School, and is now in financial services; his older sister Diamanto has a job at the Foreign Ministry. And of course there’s Romylos itself, a place that’s barely changed – that’s part of its charm – in 40 years. Panayiotis isn’t the type for radical makeovers.

It is indeed a museum, its subject being 80s ephemera. The posters and pennants are for old teams: QPR and Bristol City, Holland as the European champions in 1988. Also on the wall are a couple of yellowed Cyprus Mail articles, written by one Mike Woods who seems to have been quite a regular: “If you take a beer, and like your conversation heavily salted with soccer talk, then Peter [sic] Kyriakou is the host you must track down,” wrote Mr Woods, describing Panayiotis – in a reference that won’t mean much to anyone under 40 – as “the man who looks more like Herbert Lom than Herbert Lom”.

The pub was buzzing in those days, the 11am opening being a particular attraction – because those were the days when Cyprus was teeming with offshore companies, most of them staffed with Brits whose job was to keep an eye on things and send the occasional fax. This was pre-internet, and of course it was also pre-Starbucks and Costa Coffee; from late morning, Romylos was packed with underemployed expats with a taste for Keo and nowhere else to go. Then came the exodus, of course. Then came the smoking ban, which hit the place hard despite the addition of a small balcony. Then came the crisis, though the problem is largely cultural: jobless millennials are more likely to spend the day nursing a frappé than a cheap beer. Whatever the reasons, traffic has definitely slowed at Romylos.

Still, there’s cause for optimism. The area around the pub is being upgraded, and will soon be pedestrianised; nearby Makarios Avenue is sprouting with skyscrapers; and of course there’s a new owner, bringing fresh customers and a sense of renewal. “I have two children,” recites Panayiotis Kyriakou, with the air of reading out a prepared statement. “The pub is my third child, which I’m now abandoning. I have mixed feelings, because for 40 years I spent more time here than I did in my own home”. Will he return as a customer? “Well,” he says cagily, refusing to be drawn, “if there’s a football game, I might show up occasionally”. I leave him behind the bar, fiddling with the nozzle on a beer keg, his 80-year-old frame bent double as he shows the new owner how to deal with the problem. A man in his element.

With shows that bring together discipline and freedom and dancers showing differing grades of stillness, one Cyprus-born dancer has taken the world by storm. THEO PANAYIDES speaks to a woman who says it is important to be angry.

Maria Hassabi stands silently in the Point Centre for Contemporary Art in Nicosia, a few hours before the opening of her first-ever solo exhibition in Cyprus (the exhibition runs till October 31). A ground-floor room is hosting a screening of clips, shown on a loop, from her recent performative works Staging and Staging: Solo #2 – but the video playback is having some technical problems, so she stands in a corner of the room watching patiently as the techies try to make sense of it.

Suddenly she raises her arms to heaven, as if embarking on a yoga exercise, then, in the same flowing, unostentatious move, bends over, placing her hands on the floor – then continues the move, having now stretched her calf muscles, by crouching down low, just a couple of inches from the floor, and holding that pose, hunkered down comfortably and watching the men work. A dancer’s move.

Maria is indeed a dancer, and choreographer – and I don’t know enough about the field to describe her as the most prominent Cypriot (or Cypriot-born) choreographer, but she’s certainly up there. Based in New York since the mid-90s, she’s won a Bessie (the NYC dance world’s equivalent of the Oscars), a Herb Alpert Award and a Guggenheim fellowship – an award that comes with a cash prize, which she used to finance her short film The Ladies – and has also, over the past decade, become something of a brand-name in the dance world, her ‘brand’ having to do with slowness and stillness. “Maria Hassabi’s performers writhe in… in-between states, their movements protracted, their purposes unclear. Slack, they loll in doorways; slope down stairs; bodies pile upon on curled bodies,” wrote Harry Thorne in a recent interview in Frieze magazine.

I actually know Maria personally; I knew her family well (though mostly her two older brothers) when we were both children. I mention this both in the interests of full disclosure, and to explain – or suggest – how this interview came about, because she’s generally press-shy. Some artists like nothing better than to chat companionably (and often pretentiously) about their work, others just do it. Maria’s a doer – and, I suspect, a seriously intense one. Does she ever lose her temper? “Yes. Always, since I was a kid,” she replies, shooting me a meaningful glance. (I don’t actually recall her as being especially hot-tempered; I guess children aren’t very good at gauging the personality of other children.) So she’s not the type to hold back? “No, never have been.”

What makes her angry about the world?

“Many things,” she shrugs, not really wanting to get into it. “I used to think that anger drove me.” She pauses, noting my startled expression: “I think it’s important to be angry,” she says firmly. “Without harming other people, of course, but to – feel an edge.”

There’s an edge to Maria, no question. Her face is striking, rather hawkish, with a certain nervous tension – though the smile, when it comes, is overwhelming – and bags under her eyes; she’s one of those people who don’t sleep much, maybe five hours or so (plus an occasional power-nap). She speaks with a mainland-Greek accent, having spent more time in Athens than Cyprus in recent years, and its rather snappish rhythm adds to her edge. She smokes but doesn’t want to talk about it, not because it’s a bad habit for a dancer (though it obviously is) but because the new-fangled ‘heat sticks’ she smokes are produced by a well-known tobacco giant, and “I don’t want to support [them] more than I already do”. Her frequent anger, she explains, is “connected to ideology”, and I’m guessing there are any number of Causes about which she’s passionate – but she doesn’t really want to talk about politics, either. She has an exhibition coming up in a few hours.

There’s an edge to her work as well – which seems counter-intuitive when it’s so becalmed, the dancers (usually including herself) enacting gradations of stillness rather than actual motion. Slow, however, doesn’t mean placid. The exhibition at Point is different, being “a collage of materials” without actual performers – but most of her works, especially in the past few years, have been ‘live installations’ hosted in large, crowded venues like MoMA in New York or the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the work unfolding throughout the opening hours of the institution with the dancers moving (slowly) through public areas packed with visitors. The dance doesn’t take place onstage, before an attentive audience safely ensconced in their seats; the dancers are exposed, unshielded, unable to defend themselves from audience intrusions – and not just exposed, but objectified too. “Ms Hassabi has asked at least one viewer to step away from her,” reported the New York Times when Maria’s award-winning Plastic was staged at MoMA in 2015; “But you’re art!” retorted the intruder.

There’s an edge in another sense too. Slowness and stillness are disturbing in themselves, messing with our sense of lifelike rhythm. Take The Ladies, the short film Maria made with her Guggenheim money: this was a kind of social experiment, with various women hired to walk around the streets of New York “all dressed in black, with black sunglasses and bright lipstick” – usually bright-red or bright-orange – and not just to walk, but to walk “in a slower rhythm than anybody else”. (The Malaysian director Tsai Ming-liang has done something similar in his ‘Walker’ series, only with a Buddhist monk instead of Goth-looking women.) A hidden camera recorded the reactions of passers-by, many of which ranged from puzzlement to outright hostility; one man even slapped one of the ladies, though it doesn’t appear in the final cut. ‘Is it because stillness reminds us of death?’ I wonder. Do we cherish movement as a proof of being alive? Does she use that subtext in her work? “No,” replies Maria slyly. “But I like what you’re talking about.”

For her, it’s more about the clash between precision and imprecision, discipline and freedom. “The works I make are very precise,” she explains. “The dancers count the whole time, everything’s choreographed to the bone” – yet, even beyond the inevitable disruption caused by human nature, which of course is the beauty of live performance (“You think you’re counting ‘five’, but maybe it’s ‘four’. Or you might sneeze, or your muscles start trembling at a moment you didn’t expect”), there’s also the fact that what Maria seeks to capture is itself imprecise. When movements are quick, the viewer sees one pose, one image, followed by another – but when they’re slow they create an “in-between place”, a point where one image is starting to morph into the next, a point where the choreography is exposed instead of guiding the eye like it usually does.

So is that the point? “Everything is the point,” she replies with a sigh. “The duration is the point, you know?… For me, I was always interested in having more time to look. It was a desire from when I would watch things – especially in performance, I’d go and see shows and I’d be like: ‘Stop moving, I want to look at you! I want to have more time to see’”.

Where does it come from, this impulse? Maybe a rebellion, seeking the freedom conferred by images – you can gaze at an image all day – against what she calls the “dictatorship-like” aspect of dance (though, as so often with creative tension, she has something of the same dictatorial aspect in her own process). One thing’s for sure, it’s not because she’s slow-moving by temperament. “The art is a construction,” notes Maria. “My life – I’m very fast in my life. I do a million things, I’m a very stressed person”. The moment our interview is over, she gets up and rushes to the railing at the edge of the room – we’ve been sitting on the floor in the first-floor exhibition space at Point, letting the techies get on with it downstairs – having spotted “an imperfection”: the railing’s been covered with pink tape but a bit of white was showing through a gap in the tape, which she now fixes busily. She’s pretty driven.

She’s always been driven. This is all she ever wanted to do, maybe not dance per se (“I wasn’t doing ballet ever since I was a baby, and all that stuff”) but certainly performance, self-expression. She was born in November 1973 and went to CalArts, the California Institute of the Arts, in 1990, having finished high school at 16. She must’ve been the youngest person there, I marvel. “There was one more,” she replies. “Who’s dead now,” she adds with disconcerting bluntness. (That edge again!) She had no technique or portfolio, but she sent a video and they must’ve seen something of her presence, her passion. (“I was lucky, I think,” notes Maria modestly.) She went straight to New York after graduation, started showing her work seriously in 2001 – around the time of 9/11; she witnessed the second tower coming down from her Chinatown rooftop – then, around 2007, she began working with duration and found herself becoming a brand-name. She doesn’t really think of her work as an oeuvre, “I just know it’s a body of work because of the way that, when my name comes up, everybody talks about slowness and stillness, so I’m like ‘Oh, I’m that person’. You know, there’s a name. I’m an established artist.”

Plastic also won her the Bessie in 2016, for Outstanding Production. Was she surprised to win?

“I should’ve gotten it so many years ago,” she shrugs, briefly spiky again. “I was nominated so many times, and I never got it – so I couldn’t care less anymore about them. I hated all of them!”

She’s chuckling as she says it, not entirely serious – but there is a serious side to the affair, in that Maria wasn’t even at the awards ceremony in New York: her father had just passed away, and she was in Cyprus for the funeral. There’s a touch of that in our conversation, the muffled subject of time going by – and not just because stillness, as already mentioned, carries echoes of mortality. Maybe it’s because we remind each other of long-gone childhood days. Maybe it’s because growing older has such inescapable consequences for a dancer – though Maria insists she doesn’t think about that, nor does she worry about her body breaking down. (“When it does, it does.”) Maybe it’s because of her lifestyle too, and the fact that, in her mid-40s, she’s living such an in-between, unsettled life.

“The last few years, I’ve been a nomad,” she admits. New York is her base, but she’s only there about three months of the year; the rest of the time she’s travelling, usually from museum to museum, setting up her live installations in city after city. She’s not single, her partner accompanying her on most of her travels, and she also spends time with family in Greece and Cyprus (“Every time I come to Cyprus, I’m very touched… Everything means something, you know?”) – but it’s still the kind of lifestyle that creates a certain stress, especially in a person who, by her own admission, is so stressed anyway.

Does she wish she were more relaxed?

“I get things done, so – I dunno, it works,” she replies briskly. “I mean, losing your temper I don’t think is good for anyone. Stress, it would be nice if it was less. But I do like that I’m fast-paced and can get a lot of things done, yes.”

In the end, what holds Maria Hassabi together may be the exact same thing that tends to pull her apart: her work, with its constant strains and challenges, and joys and triumphs. The details of her life are banal, like everyone else’s: she’s not much for sweets, avoids pasta, and unwinds by watching TV shows (she’s just finished Ozark). But “the thing I’m most perplexed by is that – I remember less and less, you know?” she admits, almost with a sense of wonder. Friends reminisce, and she draws a blank. The past grows fuzzy; the now is everything.

“And it has to do with age, of course – but also, I’m so occupied with my work and my lifestyle that everything else falls apart, in a way. Not in a bad sense, but there’s not enough space in here” – she indicates her head – “to hold everything”. We hug, after all these years, and I leave her to do what she does best: fix the pink tape on the railing, and try to figure out what those techies are doing.

The taste for adventure and a world that was larger-than-life led one woman to lead a life in film. THEO PANAYIDES meets someone now giving emerging filmmakers the benefit of 25 years navigating one of the world’s toughest, most duplicitous businesses

I imagine Kathleen McInnis rescuing strays, or swiftly intervening if a man berates a child in the street. I imagine her as one of those Broadway doyennes, smoking cigarillos in her dressing room and describing herself as a ‘tough old broad’ – and she did start out as a stage actress, though I don’t think she smokes and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t use those words to describe herself. Round-faced, big-voiced, grey-haired, green-eyed, she sits in the lobby of the Centrum Hotel in Nicosia, here at the invitation of the Directors’ Guild of Cyprus to deliver a two-day workshop on film/screenplay business development. She’s been in movies for 25 years as a programmer, festival director, writer, producer, publicist, journalist, and now festival strategist and project development mentor. She also used to own a cheese-and-wine shop, called Brie and Bordeaux.

We don’t talk much about cheese and wine – though the shop, weirdly enough, was her way back into showbiz after taking a few years off (she’d been acting, or studying acting, since the age of 10). “It’s a funny story which I won’t bore you with, unless you want it,” she says, a tinge of self-deprecation being part of her patter (“Raise your hand if you’re getting bored,” she implores me later). It’s important in her business to make people feel at ease.

The story she tells is of a skiing accident in the mountains around Seattle, after which she started leaving notes for customers – including the occasional movie review – in the window of her cheese-and-wine shop, and became inadvertently known as a film journalist. “I really like the power of this window,” she recalls herself thinking. Years earlier, in her teens, she’d once told her mum that she wanted to be Robert Stigwood (the producer of Grease and Saturday Night Fever) “because he’s the one who makes it happen, who controls it, who puts it all together”. It’s fair to say she’s always been driven less by money, more by power and control and “having a bigger impact”, as she puts it.

So what is her relationship with money?

Kathleen laughs uproariously, which she does quite often. With her big voice and shock of grey hair, she’s one of those people who dominate a room, an obvious extrovert and very possibly a secret introvert (she has no problem being on her own). “First of all, I’ve never had very much,” she replies. “So that’s my first relationship – that we’re not particularly intimate with each other. I’ve never been money-driven, I think I would’ve chosen otherwise if I had been. Perhaps unfortunately – I’m not sure yet! – I know how to live on very little. I live close to the ground.

“I think if I had – um, made other choices,” she goes on carefully, “if I’d had a family or decided to do things differently, I wouldn’t have had this luxury of living close to the ground. But I’ve always – other things have been more important than money, let’s say”.

A quick timeline of her years in the movie business, after having sold the cheese-and-wine place at 32 (she’s currently a few months shy of 60): six years as publicist and programmer for the Seattle Film Festival, a year as festival director of Slamdance (the black-sheep little brother of Sundance, though the two are run by different people), 10 years at Palm Springs ShortFest, assorted stints as writer and producer – and now her present situation, still curating and programming at a few major festivals, doing masterclasses like the one she’s doing in Cyprus, but also travelling some 150,000 miles every year on the lookout for emerging filmmakers all over the world, a select few of whom she then helps in their business/creative development. She’s alternately hard-nosed consultant, publicist, cheerleader, social-media manager and den mother. You see what I mean about rescuing strays.

“If I’d had kids, and a family, I would not have been able to do what I did,” she muses again. This is not some idle middle-aged daydream, nor a case of having allowed time to slip through her fingers; she’s faced this dilemma, more than once, and made hard decisions. She lived with a man for four years, and settling down seemed a real possibility. Later, she went through a time “when I’m struggling to pay the rent, and I’m struggling to make my way forward in the business, and I’m like ‘What am I doing?’”; a life as doting mum and domestic goddess seemed quite tempting, at least for a while. Later still, she was faced with a stark ultimatum – “the advancing march of age” now upon her, and doctors making clear that, if it came to having kids, it was now or never.

“These aren’t cavalier questions you ask yourself, for sure. And, for whatever reasons, every time I said: ‘I’ll just keep going where I’m going. I think I’m better this way’. I hope I don’t feel differently when it comes to the end of my life. But right now, I feel like all my filmmakers are my kids instead.”

There’s a story here, the story of an independent, “very opinionated” woman navigating one of the world’s toughest, most duplicitous businesses – and determined to stay independent, even when it meant making sacrifices in her personal life. In a way, it goes back to her grandma – a woman who did manage to have it all, for what it’s worth (which is not to say that Kathleen feels her life to be incomplete, or regrets her choices). Grandma was a showgirl in the rip-roaring, anything-goes Hollywood of the 1920s, married six times – producing one child, Kathleen’s father – and generally “had a brilliant life, she lived it to its fullest”, working as a dancer and ‘Goldwyn Girl’ before finally dropping out of showbiz and filling her devoted granddaughter’s head with tales of youthful exploits. “She would never have called herself a feminist – but she was a feminist in the way that she lived her life according to what she wanted to do… No man [ever] stopped her from anything”.

At the UCLA School of Theater

The taste for adventure and a world that was larger-than-life came from Grandma, or perhaps it was passed down genetically. (No-one had to push 10-year-old Kathleen into children’s theatre; she pushed her parents.) The opinionated streak may have come from growing up in a household of strong-willed people. “My father loved to debate, he loved to make sure we could hold our own at the dinner table”; he’d pick any side, just to see how well Kathleen and her sister could argue the other side. Dad also used to joke that when she, her sister and their mum were all together, he had to leave the house because “without realising it, we would fight for dominance in how loud our voices would get”! Her expansive quality – the way she dominates a room – is a function of that, and can rub certain people the wrong way.

Really? But she seems so easy to talk to.

Kathleen laughs again. “You’re very sweet,” she says, in the general tone one might use to say ‘You’re very naive’. “There are some people who don’t like me, sure. I’m not going to give you a list, mind you – but there are some people who don’t like me”. Just last year, at a well-known festival, “someone on the inside was angry with me, someone who doesn’t like me, and I heard that they were screaming in the back room: ‘What does some grey-haired old lady think she knows?’”. Kathleen shakes her head: “I just started laughing, I’m like ‘Are you fuckin’ kidding me?’. First of all, I’ve been grey since I was 16” (she dyed her hair till her mid-30s, then stopped bothering), “you really want to use that as an excuse? And second of all” – she pauses, a definite gleam in her eye now – “you were wrong, by the way. And I was right!”. Still, she adds soberly, that’s what comes from being nearly 60: her first experience of ageism.

And what about sexism? Has she experienced that?

A longer pause. “This is a bigger question,” she notes – and an obviously loaded one, especially in the age of MeToo. “Yes. I would say that I’ve been dismissed because I’m a woman, or a girl, my whole life,” she replies flatly. “I mean, literally. I’ve been facing this since I was 10.”

What makes her think so?

“Because it’s blatant. Oh, it’s just blatant! It’s dismissal by men in general – literally turning away from you when you’re giving an answer to something. It’s them turning away or walking out of the room when you’re about to present something, it’s them being just – vilely inappropriate on any sexual level. I’ve had that since I was 13. It’s literally every day of our lives, for most of the women I know.” Some men also acted on the inappropriate remarks, or tried to – “and like many women I didn’t report it at the time, because women have this innate feeling that we somehow did something wrong, and that’s why it happened”. The great cosmic joke, of course, is that, by the time you realise it was never your fault, “and you’ve learned who you are, and you’re comfortable in your own skin” – well, let’s just say you’re not 19 anymore, and it doesn’t tend to happen as much.

Were these men just obnoxious people in general, though?

Kathleen shakes her head sadly: “No, this is the thing. It’s not that they’re obnoxious men. There’s a – fraternity of men who feel, who are taught to feel, entitled. Who are taught that aggression is how you move forward in the business. Who are taught to dismiss anything that wastes their time – and, by default, women waste their time.”

It’s something to bear in mind when considering what Kathleen McInnis does nowadays, operating in a niche which some people – people with outdated ideas, she believes – would indeed consider a waste of time. She’s been working in movies since the early 90s; in that time, the Hollywood-blockbuster model has increasingly taken over, running roughshod over everything else. Kathleen’s just come back from the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the biggest in the world, where she worked with six “fantastic films with amazing film teams”: two Israeli, one Nigerian, one Tunisian, one Japanese, and one (a film called Summer Survivors) made by two Lithuanian women called Marija. “Everyone did really well,” she reports proudly – but will any of these films come to Cyprus, for instance? Will any of them even play outside their respective countries, and perhaps a handful of big markets?

On the one hand, the surprising answer is ‘Yes’. We live, she insists, in a new world, one that didn’t exist even 10 years ago, a world equipped with two powerful new weapons for the indie filmmaker: one is online viewing platforms like Netflix and Amazon, allowing You the Viewer to see almost anything (assuming you know it exists), and the other is social media, allowing people like Kathleen to guide you to the films, and indeed the filmmakers. An important part of her strategy is that directors can now become brands, using social media to create a global audience (like “a new version of a fan club”) that’ll follow their careers and empower them to craft their own voices. “It seems so simple to me,” she shrugs. “But to everybody else, it seems revolutionary”.

Then again, it may also be true that it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter if emerging filmmakers are indeed better-placed to succeed than they’ve ever been, it doesn’t matter how tough Kathleen’s job is. What matters is that it’s her job, allowing this passionate woman to beat the drum for what she believes in. Everyone seems to want Hollywood films nowadays, I suggest. “And I want to change their minds!” she retorts, albeit happy to admit there’s a time and place for Hollywood films (“I watch them on the plane all the time”). “Maybe that’s why I haven’t quit. I’m not done proselytising to the audience, to change their minds on how they look at film. My whole worldview is enhanced and informed, and empowered, by the work I see from all these different countries”. The only filmmakers with whom she never – or seldom – works are her fellow Americans. “They already have whatever help they need. I like to help the other ones.”

Is it all part of seeking control, and “a bigger impact”? (The more a person needs you, the more they’re likely to be influenced by you.) Is it all part of rescuing strays? One thing’s for sure, it’s the outcome of a long, often turbulent journey. Kathleen seems so candid and confident now – but when she was younger, even beyond the incursions of sexist men, she went through “great bouts of massive depression, as I tried to figure out how to move forward”. The one thing that helped was “to be physical, to get up and move,” she recalls – and maybe that’s a key to the woman, that she fights against over-thinking and derives her formidable energy from doing, from action. I imagine her hiking (one of her favourite pastimes) up a high jagged mountain, climbing over rocks and other obstacles, climbing all the way to the top – then just standing there and laughing at the sky, uproariously.

KATHLEEN McINNIS’ 10 FAVOURITE FILMS

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962)
12 ANGRY MEN (1957)
THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)
THE BIG CHILL (1983)
ROMEO + JULIET (1996)
TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN! (1989) (but really anything by Pedro Almodovar)
ARIZONA DREAM (1993) (but really anything by Emir Kusturica)
THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE (2001) (but really anything by Guillermo del Toro)
Anything by Jane Campion, though SWEETIE (1989) and AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (1990) were the ones that first made an impact.
Anything by Patti Jenkins, including WONDER WOMAN (2017)

In the mukhtar of Fikardou AGNIESZKA RAKOCZY meets a fiery man who has no time for government or civil servants but is happy to toil for one of the island’s most picturesque villages

A walk on the Troodos with Sophocles Markides is much more than a stroll along steep and winding nature paths. It is a walk through the history of the country he loves with equal amounts of passion and, let it be said (indeed, it must be said), exasperation. Bounding along the familiar trails, he enthuses about the scenic contours, clearly a source of great pleasure and serenity to this complex and multi-faceted man. His love of nature and landscape is infectious but stray from the topic of the great outdoors and into the world of pettifogging bureaucrats and the sky will darken and the storm clouds will gather.

Sophocles does not suffer fools gladly and in his view bureaucrats and politicians mostly fit that category. Ironic this, given that late in life, the now 76-year-old Sophocles became the mukhtar of Fikardou, the unique mountain village transformed in the late 1970s by the Department of Antiquities into an open-air museum, full of original 18th-century stone-built dwellings.

Sophocles Markides was born into a prosperous Nicosia family, one of two children, privileged and, by his own admission, somewhat spoiled. His father launched into business in his early twenties and by 1947 had set up the Cyprus Transport Company, which was the largest non-public sector employer on the island with more than 1,000 employees.

Sophocles attended the Pancyprian Gymnasium during turbulent times when his parents were active in Eoka to the extent that the family home was raided frequently. His father’s business provided an invaluable network for the Eoka movement, four of whose top leaders worked for the company. At one point his mother was jailed for 18 months. Sophocles himself became a member of the Eoka youth movement. In the spring of 1957, he was arrested and taken to the police station. A friendly police chief, a Turkish Cypriot called Niyazi, called his father to tell him ‘They’ve got your son and they’ll beat the hell out of him to find out what’s going in your house so it’s best if he disappears.’ The police chief arranged for Sophocles to be let out to fetch some clothes. Instead, he was hustled away to the airport, put on a plane and sent to Greece.

Once there he found himself enrolled in the Anavryta Classical Lyceum with its exclusive intake of the sons and heirs of the Athenian elite. However, 15-year-old Sophocles, showing the stubbornness that was to become a signature characteristic, was unimpressed.

“I went on hunger strike. I wanted to go back to Cyprus and fight in the mountains.” For four weeks, he held out, not eating, just sipping water. Finally a friend convinced him to stay, arguing that there was no need for him to go back to Cyprus just then. “I stayed there three years and I had a great time.”

Once he reached the sixth form, he qualified for even greater privileges since it was part of the curriculum for the top class (literally) to dine every fortnight at the palace with the royal family. They were “very nice”, he says, recalling that Queen Frederica was a “fantastic person”. His favourite was Princess Irini.

Despite such heady outings, it was a tough school and he benefited from its emphasis on the responsibilities of duty and leadership. “I was a spoiled kid. I didn’t know the world. I thought everyone was well off. The school taught us humanity, the need to help and lead, to be compassionate and civil, considerate of others, not condescending.”

After graduation Sophocles read economics at the City University of London, taking his degree in 1967. Back in Cyprus, he came first among applicants for a position with the government planning bureau, took up the think tank post and found himself answering direct to the President. He married the next year and worked in government until 1971, when he left Cyprus to pursue a PhD. He never got to finish it because he was called back to Cyprus to help with the family business.

Fast forwarding to the invasion, Sophocles was aghast at how disorganised “our side was”. Having served in the Intelligence Corps, he was familiar with defence planning and thought what was happening “was unexplainable”.

“We are still trying to find out why. Everything is very disconnected. I can tell you what happened in Ayios Kassianos but not in Paphos Gate or Kyrenia. A friend there said there was no plan in Kyrenia either, just chaos.” To this day, Sophocles believes there was “some dirty business” involved.

He was released from military service in October 1974, but as his wife and two children were in the UK and the house was empty, he headed off to the family-owned hotel in the Troodos. There he found his parents and practically the entire pre-coup government as well as many refugees from his father’s village of Yerolakkos. “We told them ‘nobody pays for anything, as long as there is food we share but don’t expect luxury’”.
Seeing that many government houses in the vicinity had been vacated, Sophocles broke in and he commandeered some empty hotels to accommodate the hordes of refugees who had been huddling under trees in the cold. The British base in Troodos helped with blankets.

In January 1975, Sophocles was the recipient of an official letter from the district office in Limassol, accusing him of damage to government properties and of housing refugees who he must now remove from said premises. “We had a copy machine so I copied this letter, put it in envelope, said something nasty on top of it and sent it back – never heard from them again…”

Those sentiments continue to inform his view of a political aparatchik-favouring system which, he maintains, “has been designed to produce stupid politicians.” He doesn’t mince his words. Never has. “They have no interest of the country as their priority. They care more about their party’s interest. They are bunch of liars.”

With a touch of relish, Sophocles admits that he likes to challenge the system. “The last time was a few weeks ago. They passed a law to capture crooks in the government and local authorities. So now we have to disclose not only our incomes and properties but also our wife’s and those of our children who are not adults, and what’s more they claim the right to go back some 30 years.

“All this I fine with me. But then when they send me a form to fill in and the currency stated on it is British pounds – not euros! I wrote them back in January and said ‘you made a mistake, I am not going to fill the form with sterling because we are the Republic of Cyprus so you need to change the form’.

“In May, a letter arrived saying ‘you failed to fill this form so you have to pay a fine of 100 euro and 10 euros a day until you pay”.

True to form (in every sense of the word), Sophocles hit the roof and wrote back saying the sender was unsuited to public office having ignored the gist of his letter that sterling is not the legal currency of Cyprus, adding that “I am suing you for damages, you personally and not the Republic, because I don’t think the Republic should be paying for idiots like yourself’. The form has since been modified to euros and an eager Sophocles looks forward to his day in court.
It won’t be the first and it’s unlikely to be his last. He says he has won many cases and spent considerable sums in taking such actions. But why?

“When something is wrong it has to be put right. You have to try. I don’t attack the system as such. We still have a democracy and I don’t want to see it overthrown. I take on people within the system who make wrong decisions be it the president, ministers, whoever. If somebody is wrong, they have to be removed. It is usually people who do wrong – the actual law is good but implementation is wrong. Like the law on local government – something that is very close to me as a mukhtar.”

Sophocles and family lost access to friends and properties in the north after the events of 1974. For years he and wife were looking for a place in the mountains.

Twenty years later, thanks to a friend who lived nearby, they were introduced to Fikardou and there they found what they were looking for, literally, a property perched on a peak. An architect friend helped build a home making sure not to spoil the mountain or the stone walls lining the plot. Today, the house is fully biological and environmentally friendly, complete with its own water and electricity (photovoltaic and generator-powered) which means “we don’t need anything from the government”.

Not long after arriving in the village, Sophocles was asked to join the village council and he agreed principally to help the then mukhtar, Yiannakos, a local taverna owner, with administration. Five years on and he was asked to be the new mukhtar, a post he reluctantly accepted, conditional on Yiannakos agreeing to be part of the council.

Yiannakos said yes and Sophocles was handed 15 pages of documents about the village’s administration. Today, those pages have grown to big boxes full of files, lots of correspondence and, as Sophocles says, “practically, my office in Nicosia works for Fikardou.” He is currently in his third five-year term, having been ready to wrap up in keeping with the two-term limit that was proposed and then blocked by MPs.

These days there are only three permanent residents in the village proper, while some 50 people live in the immediate hinterland. Added to this, 200 or so former residents or their children return to Fikardou each summer. The fluctuating population presents its own problems. When no-one is around, security is a concern, especially that of the church. Sometimes Sophocles ventures forth at midnight, a one-man patrol, checking doors to ensure that all is well.

If Fikardou is to have a future, people have to be convinced that it is a desirable and viable place to live. Currently, there are building re-strictions and employment opportunities are virtually non-existent. There is no transport link for those who might wish to live in Fikardou and work in Nicosia. There is no school bus service and the seven children living in the village, all members of the one family, are driven daily by their mother to Klirou. It will take decades of planning, Sophocles maintains, to address the problems of rural Cyprus, where the countryside is becoming increasingly depopulated and more and more resembles an old people’s home.

The village’s budget is raised from a combination of donations, taxation and a big voluntary work effort that keeps costs down. For example, Sophocles donates his mukhtar salary to the village. The Antiquities Department looks after the open-air museum and is responsible for restoring the old houses and showing people round. Visitors pay a small fee. Though the government objects, Sophocles refuses to tax the coffee shop, a break-even enterprise at best.

Sophocles likes to boast about some of Fikardou’s accomplishments. For example. thanks to voluntary efforts, they were able to provide water to the village of Pyrgos, about six km away, at a fraction of the actual cost. He is proud too that “we have the best public toilets in the East Mediterranean, with great views and biologically treated water”. The architect responsible for the design, the daughter of a Fikardou resident, now teaches at Oslo University. Turning the design into a reality clearly irked Sophocles because he reckoned had they gone with the old village craftsmen they could have delivered the job for €35,000 whereas, thanks to the government’s insistence on tender bids by companies, it wound up “costing us almost 100,000”. Even then, they had to call the old-timers in to correct and fine-tune the work done by the contractors.

And with Sophocles and people like him still in the saddle, it looks like the old-timers will continue to ride into the sunset over Fikardou.

Well-positioned in her eyrie, THEO PANAYIDES meets a lifelong diplomat and former minister who has lived somewhat above the fray but is now enjoying her freedom and looking forward to publishing a book of poems

The solitary elevator – like the building – is rather old, creaking and shuddering its way to the 12^th floor. It’s a bit inconvenient, admits Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis, but she and her husband wouldn’t change their current abode for anything. (They’ve lived here since coming back to Cyprus from the US in the late 80s.) The penthouse flat occupies an entire floor, furnished in old-fashioned style – overstuffed armchairs, fringed curtains, glass-display cabinets piled high with china, a large unwieldy beast of an air-conditioning unit – but the main attraction is undoubtedly the view. Standing at her window she can see the sprawl of Nicosia stretching out in every direction, from the roofs of distant suburbs to the Pentadaktylos in the north.

Erato in her eyrie, looking down on crowded streets and traffic jams: it’s a fitting image for this polished, rather patrician 69-year-old woman, scion of a well-known Limassol family (her dad, a cardiologist, was among the pioneers of medicine in Cyprus) who rose to the top as a lifelong diplomat and late-in-life politician. She served as Ambassador to Sweden (1996-98), then Ambassador to the United States (1998-2003) and Ambassador to Lebanon and Jordan (2005-07) – then was selected by two wildly different presidents, Tassos Papadopoulos and Demetris Christofias, to be Minister of Foreign Affairs (in 2007-08, then again in 2011-13), with a stint as Minister of Communications and Works in between. Through it all she’s remained above the fray, never joining any political party – “My political party is my country” – or getting involved in factional dogfights, as serenely composed and confident as I assume she must feel looking down on Nicosia from her 12^th-floor apartment.

“We always had dreams to pursue higher things,” she muses. “Both me and my husband”. Like a lot of successful people, it’s helped that her personal life – especially her marriage – has been so stable. She and her husband George (a specialist in oncology and haematology, currently Professor of Medicine at the University of Nicosia) met in high school, as fifth-formers, then studied together in Athens; they got married in 1970, just a few weeks after Erato’s 21^st birthday. (They now have a son, and three grandkids.) Note, incidentally, that she and George weren’t at the same high school, the sexes being still somewhat separate in the 60s: Erato was at the Lanitio High School for Girls, from which she graduated as the school’s top student. “This was my objective from the beginning, to set high standards – here! – high standards of achievement in my school, and later at university”. That ‘here!’ in the middle is addressed to the maid, instructing her where to set down our coffees. Erato takes a double skettos in an oversized cup.

It’s worth dwelling a little more on those early years, if only because she was so set on having a career at a time when it wasn’t common for women in Cyprus (and not just in Cyprus). This reflects the influence of her late mother, a singular woman whose memoirs – originally written in Russian – Erato is now in the process of translating and publishing. Mum was a Pontian Greek from Georgia who’d fled the Soviet Union under Stalin, met her future husband in Greece, and wound up in Cyprus; she was highly educated, having studied Civil Engineering in Odessa – but respectable women didn’t work as civil engineers in the 40s, so instead she stayed home and raised two daughters. Erato doesn’t say so explicitly, but it seems clear her mother channelled some of her frustrations through her girls, imbuing them with a hunger to make their mark on the world (“That was, for her, the most important tool in life: to be a professional”). Once again there’s a hint of life on an emblematic 12^th floor, part of the common run of things yet also subtly separate.

The Kozakou household was progressive, and their politics – like hers, even if she’s not actually affiliated with any political party – veered much closer to Left than Right, with an emphasis on social justice. Life in Greece under the junta shaped her even more dramatically, and four years in Helsinki in the late 70s (where she did a PhD, as well as giving birth to her son) completed the process. Athens was a riot, both literally and metaphorically. George spent a week in police custody after rushing to help wounded students during the Polytechnic uprising of 1973; Erato collected money for refugees after the invasion and, around the same time, staged a hunger strike outside the American Embassy during which she ate nothing for six days, “just water”. (How did she feel? “It was fine,” she shrugs, “but I was young. If I [did it] now, I wouldn’t survive!”) Then came Finland, where “we were able to acquaint ourselves with a very progressive society, especially in the area of gender equality, and a social welfare state. So it was an eye-opener for both of us”.

Those remain, even now, her basic principles: “I believe very strongly in a social welfare state, like Finland or Sweden – and I wish we could introduce this concept here in Cyprus”. Gender equality is her particular hobby-horse; she believes in quotas to secure more female MPs (though only by achieving parity on electoral lists, not reserving seats for women in Parliament itself) – but it’s not just gender equality, “I believe we could do much more in all spheres. Cyprus could really be a pioneering country in many areas, and we are not doing it. On the environment, for instance, we’re doing very badly. Very badly”. We could easily be getting 80 per cent of our energy from renewable sources, instead we’re paying fines to the EU for not even doing the bare minimum. We remain without a health system, and boast an education sector whose most conspicuous feature is parents paying a fortune for private lessons. “So many things that need to change, really…”

All true, no doubt – and that’s not even counting the permanently-stalled ‘Cyprus problem’. But it also raises a slightly awkward question – since Erato, after all, isn’t just an ordinary citizen who might rant about these things in a coffee shop. She’s been in public life for decades, including four years in the innermost circles of government. Does she ever blame herself for all this public dysfunction? Does she feel she could’ve done more?

The question, admittedly, is slightly unfair. She was never in a position to influence domestic issues like health or the environment; indeed, as a diplomat, she was forced to keep her mouth shut – to remain ‘above the fray’ – even more than the ordinary citizen. Yet it’s also true (at least, with regard to the Cyprus problem) that her big jobs, as ambassador and foreign minister of a small country in a tricky situation, operated on a kind of wishful thinking, pushing the pretence that progress could be fuelled by good impressions and the bonds of international friendship – when everyone, including Erato, must’ve known that the world is cynical, and a small country’s power to decide its own fate is sadly limited.

-As minister in the Demetris Christofias cabinet

She bristles at the words ‘public relations’ – yet what else was she doing, even when she went on “full-fledged” official visits to 30 American states and spent an hour chatting with George W Bush in his days as Governor of Texas? Erato looks back to her first term as foreign minister, “at a moment that was very crucial. It was just three years after the Annan Plan, we were under attack from many quarters, especially from the EU – so there was a lot of work that needed to be done, to project our views around the world and especially within the EU”. (Isn’t ‘projecting our views’ just a form of selling the Cyprus brand, though?) “What I tried to do,” she adds a little later, “during both of my tenures, was to project the image of Cyprus in general. That’s why I always believed in cultural diplomacy, economic diplomacy – you know, that we shouldn’t project ourselves as a problem country”. Her second term also coincided with Cyprus’ EU presidency, during the second half of 2012; she and her team spent months preparing and organising, and – by all accounts – did an outstanding job. “It was really very successful. It was our first presidency, and we did extremely well.”

Sure, I note – but then, three months later, those same EU partners didn’t exactly stand up for us when the haircut was imposed.

“Yeah,” she agrees, and laughs. “That’s politics!”

Some may wonder how much of an impact Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis ultimately managed to have, despite her brilliant career; but the question is misleading, for two reasons. The first is that, whatever the specifics of her various tenures, the world of high politics and great international fora – including the UN, which she tried to join during her years in New York – is where she’s always belonged, and always saw herself. She studied Law in Athens (followed by a second degree in Political Science), but knew from the start that she wouldn’t practise: “I could never imagine myself – you know, just being a lawyer”. The lofty pursuit of ‘higher things’ has always been more her speed.

But there’s also a second reason why the question is premature – viz. that her career isn’t over yet, nor is her chance to make an impact. Her life at the moment seems ruled by opposing forces. On the one hand, she’s taking a step back, mostly because “I’m trying to finish at least three books”. One is a collection of her articles from the past five years, another is her mum’s autobiography (it’s now been translated, but she also wants to place it in the “wider context” of the Pontian Greek diaspora). The third is a book of Erato’s own poetry, which she’s been writing since girlhood; she published a collection in 1977 – but 500 more poems have piled up since then, and she’s trying to sort out the best ones. ‘What kind of poems?’ I ask, slightly surprised to find a poetic streak in such a worldly woman. “Mostly they’re about social issues,” she explains. “The Cyprus question – or rather, the pain and suffering of the division”. No surprise that she’s staunchly bicommunal, with friends on both sides and a deep-seated horror of the growing threat of partition.

In other words, we’re back to politics again – and, despite the books and the impulse to take a breather, she’s actually busier than ever. She has two supervisory roles (at RCB Bank and the Cyprus Institute), both of which she takes seriously – but she’s also become “very active and very outspoken on a number of issues, especially gender equality [and] the social issues that pertain to a social welfare state”. She’s forever writing articles and making TV appearances – and she’s even half-thinking of joining a party and actually going into ‘low’ politics (wading into the fray, you might say), though she’s also hesitant. “Especially after 2013,” explains Erato – that being the year when she stepped down as Foreign Minister – “I’ve started to feel very free, for the first time in my life. I don’t want to become part of another circle, where I have to obey instructions and do things other people decide… I kept my mouth shut for many years,” she admits with a laugh. “But now, as I said, I’m free.”

Not that she’s likely to abuse that freedom, being a clubbable type who likes to get on with people: “I hate conflict, generally speaking”. Becoming a diplomat was clearly a good fit, despite those early years staging hunger strikes. “In my interpersonal relations, I try always to solve problems. I’m a problem-solver, I believe very much in conflict resolution”. Writing poems seems to be her only solitary pastime, life outside work being otherwise full of friends and family – and of course her husband, high-school Romeo and mature companion of the past 53 years. What’s the secret to such a long relationship?

“Very simple,” replies Erato, sipping at the dregs of her near-empty coffee cup, then gives me her No. 1 rule: “Compromise. And not general compromise, ‘I’ll do this and you’ll do that’ – it’s the small daily compromises. That’s the key… And listening. We don’t listen, unfortunately,” she goes on, all too aware that what she’s saying applies not just to marriages but also politics, and life in general. “One of the problems in our problem, the Cyprus problem, is that we don’t listen to the other side. We have our narrative, they have theirs. We have completely separate worlds”. I leave her in her own slightly separate world – a humane, gracious, idealistic woman in a room with a view – and take the ramshackle old lift back down to the ground floor.

THEO PANAYIDES meets the elder statesman of the local scene, whose concerts regularly bring people to tears, and finds a man who describes what he sees in the local dialect

Julio (or ‘Julio Komboloi’, to give him his YouTube handle) raps in Greek, actually not even Greek but Cypriot dialect. This is a problem for our purposes, since any attempt to quote his lyrics in English translation will inevitably lose his ‘flow’ – and flow is important for a rapper, indeed it’s the highest skill. The form, after all, is repetitive, the beat monotonous; the trick is “to keep the other person in the same loop for three and a half minutes,” which is where the words come in – both the turns of phrase and compelling ideas but also the flow, how smoothly it all runs together.

There are tricks to the trade, like using extra words – a ‘man’ here, a ‘yo’ there – to round out the metre, but he’s not having any of it. “I try not to use extra words. I try not to use exaggerated Cypriot, where you’re straining to sound as Cypriot as possible. I try not to swear too much. Or rather –” he backtracks, chuckling –“I don’t [deliberately] try to swear in my songs”. How easy are they to write? He thinks about it: “By now, it comes easily. When I have the subject clear in my head – and how I feel about it – it flows like water. These days, the hard thing is not to get bogged down in my thoughts”.

There’s a secret truth in that last sentence, viz. that Julio – a graphic designer by trade – is a thinking man, and a thinking man’s rapper. At 35, he’s the elder statesman of the local rap scene – and, unlike many of his younger comrades, likes to dig deep in his songs, making work that’s “a little grey” (i.e. downbeat, depressing) and often socio-political. Songs on his YouTube channel include ‘To manifesto tou sklavou’ (‘The Slave’s Manifesto’), rapping angrily, over an airy mandolin riff, about life under late-stage capitalism: “This is modern slavery / They once had chains, now they just have money. / And you, wasting all day at work / So you don’t have any time left to think about this stuff”. You see what I mean about losing the flow.

His live concerts are apparently legendary. The fans are unusually devoted (though he doesn’t like to think of them as fans; more on this later), often sing along, and know all the words. It’s not just political songs; he sings about friends who’ve passed away, personal failures, thoughts of sadness and despair at the world in general (“Dry your eyes, darling,” he counsels on ‘Metrima’. “That’s what life is like, one step forward, five steps back”). He talks to the crowd, doing candid and emotional intros – “an exchange of feelings” as he puts it. Invariably, at some point in the concert, “I have people who are crying”.

His home life isn’t quite so dramatic, taking place in a first-floor flat in a solidly unglamorous part of Limassol. We meet on a Friday afternoon, after he comes home from work, sitting in a small TV room in the fading light. Posters on the wall include Antifa League, Kiss My Bass Party and a T-shirt for something called the ‘Barco Pirata Collective’, a 12-strong band of creatives (including Julio) dedicated to ‘keeping it real’. A cat shoots a startled look as I walk through the door then instantly flees at top speed, never to reappear. Julio – crew-cut, straggly beard, expressive blue eyes – lives here with his partner Paradisa who’s now a Cypriot citizen but spent decades in limbo, having arrived from Iran as a refugee at six years old. It may or may not be a coincidence (probably not) that the proceeds from his gigs used to go to children’s charities but are now donated to support refugees and asylum seekers in the camp at Kofinou – where he, along with other Barco Pirata types, also does volunteer work every couple of weeks. “We’re trying to do more than just talk,” he explains. “Not just try to solve problems with rap music. Get our hands a little dirty as well.”

Needless to say, if he’s giving all his proceeds to charity, it’s fair to assume that he’s not doing this for the money. (There’s also the problem that music seldom makes any money – being consumed for free on the internet – these days.) The local scene is still rather small, admittedly: Julio gets an average of 120-150 people attending his “lives”, ranging in age from teens to 50-somethings – he does about four gigs a year, half of those in his own name and half under Barco Pirata, though he’s often invited to guest-rap on songs or perform at festivals – indeed he only started charging admission a couple of years ago. Hip-hop often faces this disjunction, between the celebrity rappers, the Drakes and Kanye Wests raking in millions, and the genre’s origins in scrappy, impecunious “conscious rap” speaking truth to power. Julio views his ‘lives’, among other things, as a necessary process of demystification – and tells a funny story from 2013, when he was still giving free concerts:

On that night, he and a friend went out for food after the show, accompanied by a couple of youngsters from the audience (he always sits down with fans once the concert is over, meeting and mingling). “I didn’t have any money,” he recalls. “That was the time when I hadn’t even found a job, after coming back from the UK. And I tell my friend – the kids had sat down opposite us, they were from a village near Limassol, must’ve been 17 or 18 – I tell him ‘Mate, you’re gonna have to buy me dinner, have you got €10 you can lend me?’ and I see the kids, their jaw dropped, like this!” He illustrates, laughing. “One of them says, ‘Re, don’t you have any money?’. I say, ‘Why should I have money?’. The kid says, ‘You rap like that, and you don’t have any money?’.”

“How many of my songs have you listened to?” asked Julio.

“All of them, man! Everything you’ve ever done!”

“Did you pay for any of them?”

“Well, no…”

“Did you pay for the concert tonight?”

“No…”

“So I say to him, ‘So how am I gonna make money from rapping, dude? I’m giving you everything for free, aren’t I?’.” He laughs at the memory – though in fact there’s no bitterness in the story (the point is simply how important it was to cut through the glamour and show the youngsters the truth), nor does he whine at any point about not making money. Rap means something more to Julio, in fact he’s been rapping (initially in Greek, then Cypriot) since the age of 18 – but he also spent a decade learning his craft, rapping only for himself, only starting to release songs to YouTube in 2011. The songs, I suspect, were a form of therapy (they’re still therapy now) after a turbulent adolescence – a time when money, incidentally, was also an issue, though of course he was just a kid and “never really understood how poor we were”.

His parents both worked in hotels, Dad a receptionist, Mum a cleaner. They moved from Limassol to the Paralimni area, where the tourists were – and Julio, an outsider saddled with a funny name (his real name is indeed Ioulios; he doesn’t divulge his last name), was a misfit from the start. “I rebelled, I rebelled against everything,” he sighs – though not his family, who supported him throughout, just against school and his peers. “Always sitting in the back row,” he recalls in ‘Thimoume’ (‘I Remember’), his biggest YouTube hit with 150,000 views. “I remember the teachers wanting to kick me out / Which they did in the end, for my own good they said. / The excuse was graffiti, I don’t know the real reason / Guess they just didn’t like me being a foreign object / Guess it bothered them that I laid into everyone / And told them to their face that they were just rich peasants”. (We’re still missing the flow, of course.) He was the classic teenage smart-aleck – and a stoner, so the song implies – getting into arguments with teachers about history lessons being biased. “I can’t stay silent over something I consider unjust, or a lie,” he protests. “I love truth. It’s my goal, both in music and life. To live the truth, to speak the truth.”

He was finally expelled, like it says in ‘Thimoume’ – though he did later go to university on borrowed money, doing a BA in Graphic Design and a Master’s in Fine Art at Wolverhampton. (“I didn’t want to study Music,” he explains, “because I didn’t want my music to become commercial, if I had to live off it.”) The same song speaks scathingly of being part of a generation that “believed in magic” – the magic in question being the bit of paper (actually two bits of paper) which he came back to Cyprus clutching, only to get swallowed up by the economic crisis. (35-year-olds are the age group with most to complain about in this regard.) Rap often comes from an angry place, I point out; does he ever have trouble accessing that anger as he gets older? Julio chuckles: “In the first place,” he replies, “as I get older, I get poorer”.

Isn’t Limassol doing well, though?

“For others, sure. But I’m not the one getting the rent, I’m the one who has to pay it!” He laughs again, pointing to the T-shirt he’s wearing – a Nike top, emblazoned with the inevitable ‘Just do it’. This is probably the most expensive T-shirt he owns, he says wryly, chuckling at the irony of inadvertently promoting a big corporation in our photo.

But here we are talking about money again – and it’s not about money, Julio makes that clear again and again. It’s not about money, nor about celebrity, nor about being a star – nor does he see them as ‘fans’, the people who follow him on social media and come to his gigs. “I’m no superstar, I don’t want to be. All I’m doing is describing what I see – and if I have a gift for saying it clearly, so people understand, that’s no reason to think I’m special. So, for instance, almost everyone who talks to me on Facebook, I reply. And there are days when there’s so many of them, and it’s like – I can’t, man, like a kid will come along and say ‘I have this problem, I don’t know what to do’.” But it’s hardly his job to give advice, I point out. “No, of course not – but I’m a human being. And I’m trying to stay human, and have human contact with the people who listen to my music.”

That, it seems, is the crux of being Julio – a basic human decency (it’s not just posturing: he does volunteer at Kofinou, and does donate his proceeds to good causes) that’s also, however, a way of connecting for a man who never felt like he belonged, growing up. “Your country is where your lover wakes up / And it doesn’t matter where your bed is,” he sings – and ‘home’, for him, is indeed wherever he feels surrounded by the people he loves. (He’d have no problem leaving Cyprus, though he doubts he could ever rap in anything but Cypriot; it’s taken too long to master this particular flow.) His concerts – his music in general – are a conscious way of feeding that love, which is why he thinks of fans as friends and is always a bit wary of being recognised in cafés and so on. “I feel uncomfortable having someone come along while I’m sat having coffee, saying ‘Let’s take a photo’ – I’m like ‘Sit down and let’s talk, it’s much better than a photo’.” The idea of a celebrity rapper really doesn’t agree with him.

Simply put, I liked talking to Julio; even his politics aren’t simplistic ‘celebrity politics’. His ideas are a bit “black and red” (i.e. anarchist-Communist), he admits – but his real fealty is to the truth, and the truth is that Communism probably wouldn’t work any better than capitalism. (His personal choice is the so-called ‘Venus Project’, a vision of the future propounded by one Jacque Fresco; look it up.) Doesn’t sound like he has much faith in human nature, I tease.

“Yeah, well – c’mon man, you see what’s going on around us. I dunno, maybe I ought to have kids at some point. Maybe then I’ll see the light!”

Or maybe he’d feel even guiltier, bringing kids into such a world.

“Isn’t that why?” he agrees, laughing merrily. “I’m 35, and I’m not even thinking about it.”

Is that all? Almost – but not quite. We have time for one more story, the story of Filippos, a fan (or friend) who became an actual friend. Julio was approached by the young man’s buddies at a concert and told of Filippos, who was battling leukaemia; Julio was touched by the story and penned ‘Stin igeia sou’ (‘To Your Health’) for Filippos, inviting him to come and meet up after he got better – which he did, the two of them becoming close friends for the last two years of his life. Sometimes he’d come to concerts unannounced, recalls Julio, and the whole audience would sing his song (they all knew the words, of course). “At his funeral, when the priest had finished, they took out their phones and played the song. And not just anyone – his family. His sister, his best friend, his brother, his mother. That, for me, mate, was the greatest honour I ever received”. Julio pauses, reflective: “And this, for me, is the real power of music”. Love over gold, human contact over celebrity. And the flow, of course.

In a matchmaker of five decades’ standing, THEO PANAYIDES meets a woman who had no joy in her own marriage but still preaches to those searching for love that the most important thing in any relationship is communication

Georgia Georgiadou has never heard of Tinder. On the one hand, that’s not too surprising, given that Georgia is 66 years old and not very savvy about technology. On the other, it’s extremely surprising – because Georgia is a professional matchmaker, and you’d think she’d at least be aware of the dating app that’s (presumably) eating away at her business.

We sit in her small rented home in the backroads of Limassol, the walls decorated with religious icons and photos of her children and grandchildren – I note a map of Cyprus overlaid with pictures of religious gentlemen with halos: ‘The Island of the Saints’ – and she mentions that she’s now started taking computer classes, so she can finally upgrade her website (http://meetmecyprus.com/) after two years of trying to find a techie to do it. She’s no spring chicken; she’s been bringing couples together since 1970. Still, different times call for new approaches – and Tinder, whatever it is, sounds like part of the problem. “Do you mean Twitter?” she asks, with a note of desperation.

Then again, maybe Tinder isn’t really so relevant here, for two reasons. The first is obvious: Tinder, frequented mostly by young people, is typically used for casual meetings rather than long-term relationships (“The app,” as Wikipedia puts it, “is often used as a hook-up app”) – whereas Georgia is very clear that her agency, known as ‘Lucky Chance’, is only for people looking to get married. “Only on that basis should anyone come to me,” she says firmly, her eyes magnified behind thick glasses. “I’ve turned away so many people, when I realised they were – thinking of something else, let’s say.”

The second reason why there’s still a place for what she does, even in the age of Tinder (and Facebook, and the rest of the online landscape), is perhaps less obvious, having to do with Cyprus specifically – or not Cyprus per se, but any small country of a rather conservative bent. Simply put, Georgia is discreet, not to say anonymous. “All the ads are designed in such a way that the information is true, of course, but at the same time it’s also very vague, so no-one can identify who the person is,” she explains of the lonely-hearts capsules she keeps on file and places on her website (she also runs a daily listing in Politis newspaper). “It could be your brother – yet you wouldn’t know that it’s your brother.”

A typical ad, plucked at random from the website, might go like this: “Gentleman, divorced, 43 years old, Limassol resident, college graduate, employee in a family business, height 1.80 and 70 kilos, smoker, asks acquaintance of marriage [sic] with a lady without children, 35-45 years old, with the ability to live in Limassol, simple, accepting, with good manners, thin and family principles”. The basic information is always the same, with occasional variations. Clients are encouraged to include a brief description of their character, “if they’re sensitive, if they’re sociable, if they’re introverted”. Some people seek a mate born under a specific star sign, Taurus and Cancer – for some reason – being especially popular. (Georgia herself is a Virgo.) Others specify nationality, a recent development as the island becomes multicultural. Another recent quirk is people wanting to be clear on their attitude to animals – “because some will say: ‘I can’t abide animals in the house, only outside’. Or, alternatively: “I’m an animal lover, I have animals in the house, I need a person who won’t have a problem with that”. Needless to say, none of this can predict the attraction – let alone compatibility – between two random people. Still, it’s a start.

Social media works with photos (Instagram is nothing but photos) – but ‘Lucky Chance’ doesn’t include visual aids with its descriptions, and Georgia is very insistent on clients not seeing their dates till they’ve seen them in the flesh. (She’s quite insistent in general; she must be difficult to argue against.) Her system works by giving interested parties each other’s phone number, so they can arrange their own meeting – and one of her biggest peeves is one client using the number to find the other on Facebook, then checking him/her out before the meeting. “I’ve now reached the point where I make it clear that, if I’m going to give you the number and you find them on Facebook, then just get out right now,” she blusters. “I don’t care if they have three Master’s degrees, if they do such a thing then I’m sorry Theo, they’re idiots! And you can put that in the paper!… Because they don’t have the social grace, the human decency to go and have a coffee with a person. Go and sit down for five, 10 minutes, have a coffee with a person, look at how they behave, how they talk. Find out if there can be communication between you – because that’s the most important thing, communication between two people.”

She’s right, of course – though you also have to wonder, why the big deal? Georgia’s argument is that photos on Facebook aren’t a good likeness, but it’s hard to see why that should be a hindrance (surely, in most cases, they’ll make the person look better?) – and besides, an online persona is part of the game these days. The new model, the Tinder and Facebook model, is a market-based model, a consumerist model: you put yourself out there, the bigger the better – and if you choose to dress up the product a little, well, caveat emptor. Georgia’s model is more old-fashioned (and, in a way, more romantic), based on reticence and discretion; the person remains pointedly hidden, as if behind a screen, to be explored only by actual human contact. It’s a model with a hint of magical thinking that soulmates will find each other anyway – though also tinged with self-conscious guilt (hence the anonymity) at having to be searching at all.

This has always been a problem in Cyprus, the ‘What will people say?’ aspect of going to a matchmaker. Even now, Georgia values discretion above all. “Giorgoulla, did you marry them?” mutual friends will ask at the wedding of this or that couple; ‘No dear, just a friend of the family,” she’ll reply – even when she did in fact marry them. She’s been tireless in her five decades of matchmaking, publishing a free personal-ads newspaper in the 80s and even opening a music bar called Esperides in 1989, specifically designed for singles to meet in a congenial environment – but her paper didn’t get many ads at first, because of “the taboo” (her clients were mostly “people who’d studied abroad and had their eyes opened”), and Esperides foundered because the single ladies of Limassol didn’t want to be seen “looking for a man” in public.

Why the guilt? Maybe it’s a fear that consulting Georgia marks you out as a misfit, one who couldn’t find a mate through the usual channels. Maybe, too, it’s a holdover from the days when most couples met through arranged marriages, or family contacts. At this point, however, something very important needs to be said about Georgia Georgiadou, something which informs her whole life and the work she’s chosen. Her life – her emotional life, in particular – has been terribly hard. She was badly let down by the usual channels, and found no joy in her own arranged marriage.

It wasn’t even really an arranged marriage; those, after all, were usually between two families who knew each other already, and the girl would at least be consulted. In Georgia’s case, on the other hand, her old-fashioned father – who believed that women needed no education since their only role in life was to get married, have children and look after the household (her childhood was “painful,” she admits, without elaborating) – heard about a friend of a friend of his mother’s, whom he didn’t know but who, apparently, had a son. “The guy’s mother talked to my father: ‘I have a son, he’s very nice’. ‘OK,’ he tells her, ‘come by on Sunday and we’ll seal the deal’, without even telling me!… So he has them over for lunch, and they call me out from my bedroom – I knew nothing – and they said: ‘Come out here, we want you. Sit down there, that’s your fiancé’.”

It sounds unreal, like the set-up for a joke. Alas, it was real, and the marriage – which could, after all, have turned out well notwithstanding – was emphatically no joke. Georgia and her husband simply weren’t compatible, for many reasons; there was, as she likes to say, no communication between them. (They divorced in 1995, after years of estrangement.) Being essentially sold to a stranger, like a piece of meat, would be traumatic under any circumstances – but for her it was even worse, since the young Georgia was quite something. Also on the wall is a photo of herself in her teens; she looks stunning. (She’d apparently had a number of suitors, all rejected by her dad.) But it wasn’t just physical beauty. Here was a working-class girl in 1970 who was hoping to go to France and study French literature – could there be a more romantic pursuit? – and had put herself through high school, presumably against her father’s wishes (it was the prestigious convent school known as St Mary’s, aka ‘Kalogries’), by working summers: “From the day I finished primary school, the next day I was at an ice-cream parlour scooping ice cream,” she recalls – then, when the grape harvest came, she went to Fasouri and worked packing grapes, all before she was even in her teens. “I paid for my own schooling, from 12 years old.”

So much effort, so much golden youth, so many dreams – all for naught, just an unfulfilling life as a wife and mother (she became pregnant, with the first of her three boys, right after marriage). “What a person wants is one thing,” she notes philosophically, “and what life brings for them is another.”

As her marriage fell apart, Georgia still looked forward to a new life, and perhaps a second bite at the apple. Her plan, she tells me, was to wait for her boys to finish the army and leave home, then move on with her own life, having already had a few offers – but there was one more crushing blow to come, the death of her youngest son in a road accident at the age of 19, after which she collapsed both physically (her weight ballooned, she suffered from health problems and was forced to walk with a cane) and, for a while, psychologically. This enabler of other people’s marriages has never herself remarried. She now lives alone in the small rented house in Limassol – and indeed, in a final sad touch to this rather bleak story, the last of her pet birds expired the day before our interview, leaving her completely alone.

The coincidence is almost too much to bear, that this woman who’s spent her life arranging others’ happiness should’ve found so little herself – but in fact it’s not a coincidence, her life having indirectly influenced her choice of profession. Georgia put her youthful dynamism to work even after getting married, finding a part-time job selling Tupperware (that was the time of ‘Tupperware parties’, when salespeople gave presentations on the new plastic miracle to assembled housewives) – but when she went into people’s homes to give her spiel, “because I had my own communication problems at home, I immediately saw the dynamic behind every family”. Fascinated by the angst that seemed to exist in even the nicest homes, she started reading books on relationships – and also, being “a sociable person”, started meeting people, earning their trust, and sometimes being asked to advise on suitable mates for their sons or daughters. “Because I was hurting,” recalls Georgia, “because I had my pain and my problems,” she asked herself why no-one was helping others with this vital issue – “and so I devoted my life, until I close my eyes for the last time, to doing this thing”.

The people who meet Georgia Georgiadou professionally (usually younger than herself, though she counts a 76-year-old man among her successes) are unlikely to guess at the flurry of experiences behind this small, chatty woman. The 1970s were her decade of young motherhood and word-of-mouth, becoming known as a (still-unpaid) matchmaker till potential clients started calling from beyond Limassol and she thought about opening an office. The 80s were a decade of perpetual motion, handing out advertising leaflets at traffic lights (a different town each day), launching Esperides and the newspaper, dealing with hundreds of ads a month. The 90s were a decade of turbulence and tragedy – and now the 21^st century, with the action migrating online but human beings still searching for love, as they’ve always done.

Is there perhaps an irony to the poignant contrast between her life and work? “No, there’s no irony,” retorts Georgia, refusing to be drawn into self-pity. “It just gives me all the more joy and satisfaction. Every time I unite a couple, it’s as though the joy I receive covers up a part of… It gives me life!” she concludes, once again preferring not to dwell. “It’s like when your car runs out of petrol, so you go and put more petrol”.

Does she feel an emptiness sometimes? This romantic, French Lit-loving girl who never quite found romantic love?

“Of course I feel the emptiness. But life simply never gave me that possibility.” It’s too bad she never met someone like herself, back in her teens – someone with the itch to connect people with those who might fall in love with them, and the tireless energy to make it happen. Even in the age of Tinder.

How to make a positive contribution is the driving force of a Nicosia art dealer and former physics teacher. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man surrounded by art of all kinds, driven to choose the good path over the bad

What is art? All the paintings, prints and antiquarian maps ranged around Diachroniki Gallery in old Nicosia fit the bill, certainly – but that’s not the end of it. A cube of sugar is also “a work of art,” declares Christofis Kikas; see how perfectly aligned its molecules are! Christofis is the owner of Diachroniki, having opened the place after coming back from England in the early 90s – but he also spent nearly four decades as a Physics teacher, so his worldview is a bit more expansive. He straddles worlds not often straddled.

We talk quite a bit about the past, understandably. His life has always been full; even now, at 66, he’s not slowing down. On Monday he’s flying to Brussels with the senior-citizen arm of the Cyprus Green Party, for a tour of the European Parliament. Where others watch TV to relax, he does online courses on the Hellenistic period (323-31 BC) or the relative merits of pre-Socratic philosophers. But it’s also true that Diachroniki isn’t one of the trendy Nicosia galleries, in the sense of being a hub where potential buyers go to see and be seen. “Our buyers are normal people,” as he puts it. “Educated, usually, and people of some integrity. I can tell you for sure that we don’t have as customers corrupt people, very rich people, or the so-called big names of Cypriot society. They are not our customers.”

Christofis’ aim in opening the gallery was to open something more than a gallery: he was trying for a grown-up version of the Cultural Youth Club he launched in the 60s, as a teenager in Dali – a place where lectures and debates could be held, surrounded by art. Just last week, he screened a documentary on early Spanish art (there’s a screening every Wednesday, followed by drinks and a discussion) and joined Dr Yiannis Christodoulou, a former philosophy professor at the University of Nicosia, in a comparative analysis of ‘Schooling and True Education’. He’s impressively vigorous – yet he may, now and then, also wonder if he’s really fulfilled his potential, looking back to his nine years as Head of Physics at South Hampstead High School for Girls (one of the best schools in Britain, “ranked second in the country for A-Level results” in 2011 according to Wikipedia) or even further back, to his glittering teenage career capped by a scholarship to Imperial College. “At the time,” he recalls with a smile, “I was the highest-earning 18-year-old in Cyprus.”

He’s certainly unusual, a shrewd, compact man with a round face and bald pate, fringed by a halo of white hair. He speaks softly, as if to himself. He’s determinedly poker-faced, one of those people who purposely withhold the expected reaction, as if to keep you on your toes: he’ll tell a joke without smiling, pose for photos with a totally blank expression, lower his voice for emphasis instead of raising it. He’s not given to false modesty; his stories tend to end with the other person admitting “I should’ve listened to you”. Yet he’s too un-emphatic to appear vain, or embittered. The overall impression is of a high achiever aged, like fine wine, into quiet idiosyncrasy, a man who no longer tries – or expects – to sway the majority, but only to meet his own exacting standards.

He’s been dealing in art since his teens, yet is happiest in the world of ideas. I ask about artists who blew his mind as a young man, but he makes no mention of Van Gogh or Caravaggio: “For me, it’s always been the philosophical aspect of life. How to conduct your life in the best possible way,” says Christofis. (His English is near-flawless, one of his three languages along with Greek and German.) “And to make a positive contribution to any society you live in.” The stories he tells often deal in people’s indifference, and his own attempts to make things better. He recalls breaking up a fight between two tramps outside Bayswater Tube station – he was quite an athlete in his youth, a star of the 200m – and the throng of dead-eyed people who just stood there watching. He recalls seeing a young boy beaten bloody by police in a post-coup student protest in Athens, in 1974, and being threatened with a gun when he tried to intervene.

So he’s always been quite idealistic?

“My heart was, is, and will always be for the underdog, the downtrodden, the vulnerable people,” he replies, using the question as a springboard for a statement of principle. “But I’m very much – from the age of 15 or 16, when I realised how rotten society was becoming – I’m very much in favour of meritocracy. In the true sense of the word. This, unfortunately, has never happened here, ever since we had –” he hesitates, looking for the words – “our new rulers.

“Because, having escaped from the Franks, the Venetians, the Ottomans, the English, I was hoping that the people who rule us would look after us, would fend for us, would try their best for us and, if need be, would fight for us – instead of fighting us instead! Unfortunately the latter is happening and our right to be served by them, they pervert into an obligation to chase after them, and to beg them for what is rightfully ours. If you’re not involved with the sinful political parties – which manage somehow to squeeze their own people into all posts, whatever their capabilities – if you’re not one of them, you’re on the periphery of our society, you are pointed out as a ‘wrong’ person. Whereas it should be the other way around.”

Is that Christofis’ secret history? A man who started out in the mainstream of society – his grandfather was a former mayor of Dali – and gradually moved to the periphery, mostly through refusing to play the game? He’s always been conspicuously moral, “very much taken” as a schoolboy by stories of Hercules choosing the good path over the bad (the teacher used to call him ‘Aristotle’) and flummoxing the headmistress of South Hampstead High by enquiring about the “ethos” of the school before accepting the job – yet that same moral code may have got in the way occasionally, making him balk when another man might’ve gone with the flow.

The big turning-point in his life was his return to Cyprus from the UK, mostly for personal reasons: he was nearly 40, he’d just met his Cypriot wife and they wanted to come back and start a family. (They have a son, Michael, now 26 and finishing a Master’s in Theoretical Physics at UCL.) His nine years at South Hampstead attracted the attention of the English School, his alma mater – but he clashed with “political-party people” at the interview, and walked away. It didn’t really matter, since he wanted to focus on the gallery anyway – but Diachroniki, too, has been largely ignored by the System, never receiving much in the way of official largesse. “I had a very unpleasant experience with the Ministry of Education and Culture,” he sighs, recalling how a member of the state committee responsible for buying paintings made a disparaging remark about one of his artists, which led to an argument. It’s unclear whether, and how far, fences have been mended since then.

He doesn’t strike me as an angry person – but I suspect he can be stubborn, when it comes to matters of principle. Even the artists he champions at Diachroniki “have to have a good character” as well as talent, and can’t expect to command top prices until they’ve “served an apprenticeship,” as he puts it. So why don’t they defect to other galleries, which might offer more? “Here they get protected as well,” claims Christofis. The gallery will sometimes buy paintings from its stable of artists, to keep them going (“Nobody else does that”), just as he once bought back some paintings from a UK customer who needed some ready cash after his divorce. Is he even making money out of this? “It’s difficult. Because whatever little extra we sometimes make goes to the artists… That’s why they choose to stay with us.”

We’ve been sitting upstairs in the gallery, Christofis scuttling down to the entrance and up again whenever a customer comes in (leaving him out of breath and causing him to clutch at his heart on one occasion; he’s not a teenage athlete anymore!). One of the interruptions is by a local mother whose son he’s agreed to coach in Physics – which he still does now and then, always unpaid and as a favour, unable to desert his true vocation. There are several sides to Christofis Kikas: the art dealer, the moral philosopher, the scientist and physicist. He’s even dabbled in politics, standing for MP with Simaia, a small ‘social movement’ that flourished briefly during the crisis. If you had to distil him down to one aspect, however, it would surely be Christofis the teacher, helping people “achieve their potential”.

That’s what he did in the UK, going from one of the worst schools in London – “Ladbroke School for Girls, my colleagues used to call it Ladbroke Zoo for Girls” – to one of the best, and excelling in both. That’s what he did after coming back, the English School’s loss being the American Academy’s and GC School of Careers’ gain. That’s even what he did as a teenager, finding himself with 58 students, many much older than himself (he’d initially been an assistant, taking over the class when the teacher left), whom he charged £2.50 a month to help them pass their exams; at the time he was also selling insurance for Universal Life and had a job (paying a princely £38 a month) at the UN supply store, which explains his status as the island’s highest-earning 18-year-old – and of course he was also doing his A Levels, and learning German and running the 200m. Did he even have a social life? “Well, we had the youth club,” he replies (which doesn’t really answer the question), “and I was their president”.

Christofis Kikas has done – and continues to do – a lot, for a soft-spoken man running a not-very-trendy art gallery; “My life has always been full of action,” he admits, “ever since I can remember”. He bought and sold 19^th-century art while still at uni, then later, in the 90s, founded ‘Deipnos kai Logos’ (‘Dinner and Discourse’), a kind of salon whose members used to meet and “discuss philosophy, politics, religion, all these important issues”. (Making his own art is the only aspect that’s eluded him; he dabbled at painting but, he says, lacked the talent.) Maybe it’s his teacher side, urging him, as it does his students, to work hard and do good deeds – though it’s also, I suspect, his physicist side, keenly aware that every system (and what’s a human life, if not a system?) “faces a formidable foe: entropy”.

Take that cube of sugar, the one we mentioned earlier, the “work of art” with such beautifully laid-out molecules. Put it in a glass of water and it instantly starts to dissolve, the molecules drifting apart as the structure around them collapses; this is entropy, the “tendency for all systems to tend towards chaos” (the molecules may theoretically re-form into a new cube of sugar, if left alone for X billions of years; but it’s unlikely). This is the way of the world, muses Christofis. “Entropy takes over. But it cannot take over your spirit, which is pure energy. Which is not a physical system. And perhaps our purpose in life is to cultivate the spirit to such a high level that it remains pure, pure enough to join the Creative Force”.

Scientists have a reputation for being boring materialists – but physics is slightly different: the more we learn about how everything works, in the age of quantum mechanics, the weirder and more mysterious it seems. Christofis isn’t religious per se, but he does believe in a ‘Creative Force’ behind the universe – and does believe that “this all-pervasive power is out there, in the form of some kind of pure energy, which we join if we ourselves become like that”.

How to ‘become like that’? By trying to do good, not being indifferent, making “a positive contribution” to the world. By promoting art, perhaps, art being undoubtedly an outpouring of some type of Creative Force. By trying to help others achieve their potential, whether it’s struggling Cypriot artists or the girl from a nearby comprehensive (a “timid little mouse”) whom he took into his A Level class at South Hampstead High and steered to success in the exams – then met on the Tube five years later, when she thanked him with all her heart and told him she was graduating in Medicine that same year. Or maybe just by persevering, even when society is corrupt and your work seems increasingly “on the periphery”.

Almost time to go. Christofis suggests a glass of wine, which I regretfully decline, then he goes downstairs to greet customers. A family of Scandinavian tourists come in briefly, take a look around, then exit with the slightly abashed smile of tourists everywhere; he smiles back, a quiet man in late middle age. I recall what I asked him earlier: Does he still have faith in human nature? “I would say yes,” he replies, “simply because – even in the most dark of darknesses – when you light a candle, it still shines”. I leave him to it, trying to light a candle in a dark world, surrounded by art of all descriptions.

Working at the Institute for the Future, one American woman is less about life-changing ideas and more about thinking of a world yet to come and how to shape it. THEO PANAYIDES meets her

The breakfast room of the Amathus Beach Hotel – which is where I meet Rachel Maguire, the morning after her lecture in the ‘Life Changing Ideas’ series at the University of Nicosia – isn’t the most obvious place to discuss the future of humanity, then again there is no good place to discuss the future of humanity; not because it’s bleak, necessarily, but because it’s so uncertain. For the first time in human history, our collective future runs the gamut from extinction all the way to immortality. Both are “plausible scenarios” as they say at the Institute for the Future, where Rachel is Research Director.

‘Life extension’ is dramatically close, by all accounts, the technology of cellular systems having got to the point where scientists can start intervening in the ageing process. In his bestselling book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari (a favourite of Silicon Valley, where the Institute is based) gives an idea of how such a future could work: “Every 10 years or so we will march into the clinic and receive a makeover treatment that will not only cure illnesses, but will also regenerate decaying tissues, and upgrade hands, eyes and brains”. Then again, even Harari isn’t sure this could happen anytime soon – he’s just citing the various true believers who insist we can live to be 500, or more – and of course a very different future is also dramatically close: last month, an IPCC report projected a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030 (unless something is done, of course), which would usher in the worst effects of climate change.

Where does Rachel fit into all this? To be honest, she does and she doesn’t. Anyone expecting grand pronouncements will be disappointed – and indeed, the Institute for the Future doesn’t actually claim to know the future. “We don’t predict,” she cautions. “One thing we don’t do is to say ‘This is what will happen’.” Her main role seems to lie in what she calls “foresight training”, guiding people – mostly the large corporate clients who consult her employers – in thinking about their future, and allowing them to “take more agency” in shaping it. The windows of the Institute are adorned with a telling quote by Buckminster Fuller: “We are called to be the architects of the future, not its victims”.

She herself is refreshingly grounded, a tall, pale, cheerful 42-year-old with blue eyes and rather angular features. She’s made an effort to fill her plate from the breakfast buffet – rye bread, salad, a sliver of feta, a hunk of smoked salmon – but doesn’t even touch it as we speak, only taking sips from a glass of latte; she doesn’t have much appetite in the mornings. Last night’s lecture was on a very specific subject, ‘The Next Era of Human-Machine Partnerships’ (aka Will the robots take all our jobs?), a subject on which she’s cautiously optimistic – but the point, she repeats, isn’t to proclaim what humanity’s future might be, but to get people comfortable in discussing it: “To talk about the future,” as she puts it, “in the same way we talk about the past”.

It’s a weird idea, seemingly counter-intuitive. The future, after all, is impossible to pin down. The past exists, albeit in different versions; the future keeps changing. “It’s sort of chaos theory,” notes Rachel, insofar as talking about the future automatically affects that future. “Like, for instance, this notion of machines taking our jobs. Once that was identified as a plausible scenario, actions have been taken now that are either going to accelerate that future or decelerate it”. Then again, that’s the point – the totemic power that exists simply in giving voice to possible outcomes. “As a futurist think-tank,” she explains, “I think our job is to help people re-imagine –” she backtracks, trying to phrase it more precisely – “help people imagine a different future”.

Does it matter, though? Never mind humanity, take Rachel herself as an example. Is her life now the way she imagined it at 18, for instance? She pauses, frowning. “No,” she admits. “As an 18-year-old, I planned to live in lots of different countries and – you know, everything was about adventure, nothing about stability… I didn’t understand why someone would want the house, and the car, and the kids and the day-to-day.” The future has a way of sneaking up on you – because now, of course, she does have a house and a car, not to mention a nine-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl. I’ve already met her husband Adrian (he works in ‘FinTech’, or financial technology), and wonder if the kids too may be lurking around somewhere – but in fact they’re with their grandparents in Mexico City, she and Adrian having taken advantage of Thanksgiving (and Rachel’s speaking engagement) to take that most mythical of beasts for Americans, a week’s vacation. Their immediate future looks bright, including a trip to the Troodos mountains and a half-marathon in the Cyprus Challenge.

It’s funny how the three planks of life – past, present and future – work in tandem to explain the whole, whether it’s society or an individual. Most of us, especially in Cyprus, are rooted to a place, usually the place where we grew up – but Rachel had a very particular childhood, growing up in Anchorage, Alaska, a small, icy city with a sense of a new frontier and a rather transient population who’d all come from somewhere else; her dad was from New York, her mother from Michigan. None of her family stayed in her chilly hometown. Dad – now widowed – lives in Seattle, Rachel’s sister in Oregon, her brother in Washington DC, Rachel herself in Austin, Texas. (Shouldn’t they all have met for Thanksgiving? “It’s rare for my family to get together for Thanksgiving, because we’re so distributed across the US.”) One shouldn’t grant too much importance to the past, of course – yet one also has to wonder if this rather free-floating background helps her in imagining a free-floating future, a bevy of ‘plausible scenarios’. And of course her parents’ sense of adventure, moving to the middle of nowhere for no obvious reason, rubbed off on her, at least in her 20s.

That 18-year-old’s itch to travel was no idle dream. Rachel roamed the Americas as a young backpacker then settled in Mexico for some years, working for the Ministry of Health (her background is in health-care policy). Was she happier in her 20s, or now? “I’ve never really thought about these questions,” she shrugs – “but I enjoyed my 20s very much. When you only needed enough money to pay for whatever you were going to do that day, or to get a bus ticket to the next place… I liked mapping out where I would go next, trying to find a way to make a few dollars in every place where I showed up”. She lived, in other words, for the present, which is what young people do – just like many older people tend to live in the past. No wonder the future gets sidelined.

What’ll it be, immortality or extinction? Will we vanquish death, or die in heatwaves and hurricanes? But she doesn’t say, and in fact we don’t talk much about grand ideas – though, as already mentioned, she reckons “there’s a little bit of over-hype on what machines can do at a systems level, what they can do consistently and effectively”. (Translation: the robots won’t be taking all our jobs, at least not for a while.) We probably talk more about mundane things like working hours and the joys of parenthood, and whether nine-year-olds should have smartphones.

Hers doesn’t, anyway. It’s odd, admits Rachel on the subject of kids and phones, she spends her professional life urging people to improve their “digital literacy”, yet “I don’t parent that way. I don’t actually let my children spend very much time around technology… I know you can make an argument that it’s good to introduce them, so they’ll learn how to moderate – but I don’t think children are very good at moderating anything, you know? They want the whole cookie!”. This may be a trend, people in the know being spooked by what she calls “the dopamine economy”, i.e. addiction. We’ve already heard about some elite schools going ‘no-tech’ and Silicon Valley executives not letting their kids play video games – and indeed, says Rachel, many of their clients at the Institute are tech companies, worried by the impact their products are having in our new connected world.

Is that the way the future’s going to go? The human brain re-wired by too much social media? But again, she doesn’t really say – both because we can’t know (at best, it’s a plausible scenario) and also, I suspect, because Rachel Maguire isn’t the type to make pronouncements. She is, as she puts it, “linear-minded”, albeit in a field where she’s often surrounded by “non-linear thinkers” and other creatives. She doesn’t go in for apples-and-oranges metrics like comparing happiness in her 20s and 40s, nor does she share the utopian Silicon Valley belief in a solution to everything – which is partly why she left for Texas, finding the Valley “too much of a bubble” (another reason was that rents were exorbitant). Silicon Valley types tend to embrace the extreme as an article of faith, subjecting themselves to starvation diets in pursuit of “wellbeing” and pouring billions into medical advances that’ll let us live for hundreds of years. Rachel, on the other hand, keeps fit and happy by running – she’s a runner, has been since her teens, hence her interest in the Cyprus Challenge – and is wary when it comes to life extension, viewing it mainly as a pet project for those in the ‘bubble’. “I’m interested in systems-level change, and I don’t know how many people across the globe actually want to continue to live the life they’re living for 150 years,” she notes slyly. “If you’re not going to figure out drinkable water, and yet you want [people] to live 150 years…” She shrugs, letting the sentence tail off. That’s the other thing about the future, it’s not monolithic; her employer should really be called the Institute for Eight Billion Different Futures.

That’s a big issue, though, the increasing divide between elite and underclass. We do talk a bit about that, Rachel musing that democracy may fall by the wayside (“Will democracy look the same way it is? Will it fundamentally be a democracy?”) and the future, whatever it brings, may be less egalitarian than the present – which is already pretty unequal, especially in the US. “I think there are so many forces converging over the next two decades that make it a really ripe opportunity to re-think our economic structures, at the largest scale possible,” she says, decorously hinting that capitalism may no longer be fit for purpose. And what of universal basic income? What about those robots? Cyborgs? Cloned babies? What about all the old clichés, “flying cars, food in a pill”? So many futures, so little time.

It’ll come, one way or the other; like death, it’s unavoidable (unless of course we manage to pull off immortality, and avoid extinction). But meanwhile there’s the present – which, for Rachel, seems quite agreeable. Not only does she work from home but Austin is two hours ahead of Palo Alto, meaning she can see the kids off to school and still be at her desk in good time. She bills around 40 hours a week, which is not excessive. She runs a lot, and also reads a lot (most recently Bad Blood, the true story of fraudster Elizabeth Holmes). It wouldn’t be right to call her non-political – diversity, especially gender diversity, is one of her Causes – but she doesn’t come across as an ideologue. Her role, as we sit in the noisy breakfast room, isn’t that of Silicon Valley guru. She’s more like a devotee of some mildly arcane practice (some new form of yoga, say), trying to demystify her practice and explain how much better the world would feel if they adopted it.

We can’t know the future, of course we can’t – but it’s vitally important to explore it and talk about it, ‘foresight training’ helping in the way that a History course might help in making sense of the past. Her plate of breakfast remains untouched, and Adrian is waiting to set off on their trip to the mountains. “To just hand over the future and let it be built by – y’know, corporations, governments, people in power, I think that’s – we’ve done that for too long,” concludes Rachel Maguire. “I think more of us need to feel empowered to create the future that we want”. We shake hands then part, each to their future.

In the most popular man on Cyprus television, THEO PANAYIDES meets a comedian who is chatty, gregarious and exactly the same as his onscreen persona

There he is, the most popular man on Cyprus television, sitting in a coffee shop on a Monday morning, eating a ham-and-cheese toasted sandwich (he offers me half, and laughs when I decline: “Are you sure? ’Cause there won’t be any left later!”), smoking a cigarette then lighting up another. Louis Night Show – shown on Alpha every Friday, and featuring the comic talents of Louis Patsalides – is the top-rated programme on local TV, and has been for some time (it premiered in 2015, initially on Sigma); so why is the man himself meeting me here, in a rather anonymous Coffeebrands outlet beside a main road, instead of in his home or at the studio? Louis shrugs; the people who run it are friends, he explains, and the brand has been a sponsor of the show. “I always support the people who support me.”

That’s significant, for two reasons. First, because it speaks to his sociable nature and the importance he ascribes to personal relationships. Second, because it’s such a Cypriot thing to say – and Louis, as he notes more than once, considers himself to be “the average Cypriot”. Mutual back-scratching is part of our small-country culture, and he’s fine with that. At one point I ask about his National Service, and whether it was awkward given that his dad is a military man (a former brigadier-general, now retired); surely his fellow soldiers knew that he must’ve pulled strings for an easier posting, the dreaded ‘meso’? “It’s to be expected,” he replies with another shrug, “we’re in Cyprus. It was the same when I worked in the bank, and the children of colleagues got jobs there. We all said the same thing”.

‘The bank’ was the late lamented Laiki, where he worked as a clerk between the ages of 20 and 33. He turned 38 a few weeks ago (though his greying beard could belong to an older man) so the shift from banking to showbiz is relatively recent, not to mention that he spent over a decade working in a job – or a sector – he didn’t particularly like. “I was always one foot in, one foot out at the bank,” he replies when I ask why he did it. “I was just waiting for the right moment.” He was doing stand-up comedy from the mid-00s (he still does, along with his TV commitments and a radio show) – and the ‘right moment’ was when the stand-up got upgraded to a full season, i.e. not intermittent performances but a regular job, at which point he quit his other regular job and did that instead. He’s very sensible.

That’s a major part of his appeal: the grounded demeanour, the down-to-earth guy with a job and a house and a family. (He’s been married since 2007 to Astero Kyprianou, a TV and theatre actress; they have two kids, a 10-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son.) The first, satirical half of the Louis Night Show features clips from local TV, a litany of bungled lines and inadvertent faux pas – and the clips take up half the frame, the other half being Louis watching the disasters unfold along with You at Home, shaking his head like the down-to-earth fellow he is. His comments afterwards (what he calls ‘trolling’) are wry, sardonic – and a bit conservative, thus for instance a recent instalment on Black Friday showed an interview with a youngster who admitted he’d skipped school to go shopping instead, though he wasn’t sure what to get. “I’ll tell you what you’ll get,” quipped Louis, when the clip was over: “A three-day suspension!” (In a social-media punchline, the kid later left a message on Louis’ Facebook page, announcing that he didn’t get suspended and adding “You’re the best”; even the targets of his trolling love the show.) He’s no rebel – at least not on TV; his stand-up shows are slightly edgier – nor is he the type to have said ‘Good for you, kid, school is for suckers’. He’s the average Cypriot.

That’s the question, of course: how far is the Louis Patsalides persona just a persona? Again and again, he insists that what you see is what you get. “The way I am onstage is the way I am in daily life – and always have been. Even when I worked in the bank, it was the same.” His favourite comics include Jim Carrey and the late Robin Williams, both notorious for being bipolar types with inner demons; that, he insists, isn’t him. He’s straightforward, and has never lacked for self-confidence. “I’ve always been a glass-half-full person.” Sure, he has moments when he wants to be alone, “but those moments are rare. I’m usually full of energy and very bouncy”. I can testify to his sociability, an almost compulsive need to bond and talk: our interview starts with Louis making clear that he absolutely has to be somewhere at a certain time, and ends with me looking at my watch and saying ‘So I guess you have to go, right?’ and him assuring me that it’s okay, we can do a couple more questions. (It’s not like he has time to spare; December is chock-a-block with Christmas shows and charity events, in addition to his usual schedule.) It may well be that the affable, friendly comic onstage and on TV is merely an extension of this chatty, gregarious man, talking of his life in between puffs on cig and bites of sandwich.

But there’s something more, too. It comes up when I ask him to define the typical Cypriot, given that he touts himself as a good example of the species. “The Cypriot is a person who laughs loudly, lives intensely and lives for the now,” replies Louis. “He’s loud, very loud. I mean, you can tell a Cypriot abroad just by the volume of his voice!” This happened to him once, on a trip to the US as an adolescent, when he saw two strangers in a mall and instantly knew their nationality by how loudly they were talking – but the more significant detail in the story is that he was in America “because my mum was having some treatment”. It’s a darkness that hovers, inescapably, in the background of our conversation: Louis’ mother was diagnosed with cancer when the boy was 13 and died 14 years later, a year after he started doing stand-up – yet he insists his childhood was idyllic, despite the black cloud hanging over much of it.

“We never felt it at home,” he tells me, ‘we’ including his dad and younger brother. “Because we’re all very loud and, let’s say, very fun people, so we didn’t grow up being depressed that Mum had cancer. Because even my mum didn’t experience it that way.”

How else can you experience it?

“She was too much of an extroverted person, too much of a happy person to let any illness get her down psychologically,” he explains. “So it rubbed off on us too. We even made jokes about her illness, within the family – which, if you made those jokes outside, you’d be ‘very, very offensive’… So we didn’t grow up in a depressed environment.”

Fair enough; but the compulsion to go onstage and make light of life must’ve come from somewhere. It may well be reductive to say that Louis became a comic as a coping mechanism, especially since he didn’t start till his mid-20s – but perhaps telling jokes and facing life light-heartedly held a special significance for the young man, being the way his family had always coped with the pain in their midst.

Humour, after all, is a positive force with him, bound up with friendship and community; there’s no anger in his humour, no snobbery. Louis seems to love observing people, indeed that’s the source of his comedy. On his (rare) days off he’ll go to a big store like Jumbo and just wander around, people-watching; even here, on a grey weekday morning at Coffeebrands, he’s on the lookout for material. Check out “my friend over there,” he says conspiratorially, pointing out a young man playing backgammon with a young woman. Back in the day that’d be scandalous, even now it’s a bit unusual. After all, he chuckles, even the gesture of cupping the dice in your hand and shaking them, prior to rolling, is a bit… masculine; Louis jiggles his cupped palm briefly, evoking another kind of gesture altogether. (Never let it be said that his humour is highbrow.) I wouldn’t have made the connection, I admit. “That’s why you’re a journalist,” he replies good-naturedly, “and I’m a comedian”.

Is he really ‘the average Cypriot’? Maybe. He loves it here, and wouldn’t live anywhere else. His favourite foods are souvla and makaronia tou fournou, and “anything that has to do with meat”. (He weighs in at a hefty 125 kilos, though he claims it doesn’t show because it’s “evenly distributed”.) Then again, it might be more accurate to call him the idealised Cypriot – not the spendthrift, alienated show-off of today but an echo of an older Cyprus, rooted in community and family.

He’s not flashy. Maybe it’s because success came relatively late, as a family man, but it hasn’t really altered his lifestyle; he’s lived in the same house for 10 years, and dresses for comfort rather than to impress. His answer, when I ask what bothers him about today’s society, is unequivocal: “People used to be closer to each other. They cared. It bothers me now that everyone shuts themselves off in their little world and doesn’t care what happens, even to their neighbour”. Louis used to do political satire (not by choice; it was all anyone did in the mid-00s) but nowadays his jokes deal mostly with daily life, especially family life – which makes sense, since it’s changed so much in the last few years. His backslapping, hearty ur-Cypriot – far from being ‘average’ – carries a touch of nostalgia.

Social media has created a new, less relaxed community, making people touchy and quick to take offence. His was also the last generation when childhood happened in public, in the neighbourhood with other kids. “We didn’t just stay at home, alienated. We were social animals. We went out, we played, we quarrelled”. Nowadays it’s different, a closed world of tablets and video games; he’s even put up goalposts in the field next door, to induce his kids to go out and play, but it hasn’t worked so far. Despite (or because of) this new world, however, Louis’ life revolves around his family to a remarkable degree.

“Here’s the magical thing that I did,” he says proudly: “I work from morning till one o’clock, then again from eight o’clock onwards. In between, I’m constantly with my family”. He’ll pick the children up from school, have lunch with them, play with them; from lunchtime to bedtime, he’s Daddy, only scheduling the very occasional meeting when the kids have their music lesson. The catch is that he’s forced to work late (watching tons of TV to find clips for the show is a job in itself) – but he’s also among the lucky few who can get by on four hours’ sleep, plus a one-hour siesta, so it all works out.

It’s almost too good to be true, this amiable teddy-bear of a man who radiates unpretentiousness (conducting the interview in ‘plural’, i.e. formal Greek would be out of the question), claims to be unchanged by celebrity, and sets such store by people looking out for each other and dads spending time with their kids. Surely there’s a dark side somewhere, maybe a trace of the trauma he faced in his teens? Some may point to his unhealthy habits, all that smoking and over-eating. Some may even deplore his humour as primitive, sexist, ‘offensive’ – he adores Benny Hill, who would surely be “strung up from the London Eye” in today’s Britain; one YouTube clip has Louis showing the audience how a husband can check out a passing girl’s bum without his wife realising – but why should he care about such critics when his fans not only recognise him wherever he goes, but greet him as a friend? “People feel like I’m one of them,” he says happily.

There’s another, not-insignificant upside: 90 per cent of women say that making them laugh is just about the sexiest thing a man can do. ‘How can other men learn this trick?’ I implore – but there’s no trick, just observing the world around you. Louis always carries a notebook, to note down quirky things he sees people do, and tries to take an interest in everything: how some rodent reproduces in Africa, he says rather cryptically, could become the set-up for a killer joke. Next year brings a new stage in his evolution, doing stand-up in Greece for the first time – just a handful of shows, at small venues. It’s a challenge; Greeks won’t necessarily connect with the ‘average Cypriot’. Still, the plan is to be himself and learn as he goes. I can see him now, sitting in some coffee shop in Athens, eating a sandwich and chain-smoking, and looking for the comedy in everything.

After living as a man for 45 years, one transgender woman has found salvation in telling her story of transition in appearances around the world. THEO PANAYIDES meets a woman who has spent much of her life hiding in furious activity

This will not be a political piece about transgender rights. It won’t dwell on hot-button issues like the problem of ‘deadnaming’ (calling a trans person by their birth name) or the furore over which toilets they should use. I do ask a few such questions of Jessica Lynn – as you might expect with a 53-year-old transwoman who transitioned in 2010, after a lifetime of trying – and maybe I should’ve asked more, but we just don’t have time. Sitting across from me at the Crown Inn Hotel in Nicosia, Jessica talks and talks about her life – fast and fluently, in a high, rather croaky voice, talking non-stop for over three hours. I stagger out, exhausted just from listening. She, however, is just getting started, awaiting a call from British charity Blenheim CDP in about 15 minutes (they want her to be keynote speaker at a conference next year), then doing a podcast in a couple of hours.

“I’m an obsessive personality, I’m not gonna lie to you. OK? I tend to overdo things,” she admits at one point. Her story – the one she tells in such detail – has already been told 700-800 times around the world, before she tells it to me. “If you see my schedule, it’s insane. There are weeks that I speak in five different countries, on five different days”.

She’s due to depart the next day, having given presentations at a couple of local events. After Cyprus it’s Vienna on Monday, London on Tuesday, Slovenia on Wednesday, later on she goes to Tel Aviv, Portugal, Japan; before Cyprus she spoke at the University of Hull, then the University of Maynooth in Dublin, then Limerick, then Loughborough: “I gave something like four presentations that day”. She’s not always paid, nor is she being sponsored by some large organisation, though there’s a Donate button on her website (www.jessicalynn.website) and a non-profit called ‘Your True Gender’, based in her native California. This compulsive globe-trotting is something she clearly has to do, both because of her legal woes (more on this later) but also because it’s become essential to her life. Jessica used to have vices; in her 20s, she drank to excess – yet she hasn’t touched a drop in 30 years, “the closest I’ve come is kissing a guy that’s been drinking”. This is her vice now, this is her obsession; this, you might say, is her salvation. “My release is going in front of 200, 300, 500 people, and telling them my story”.

She talks openly, feverishly, intimately; when she laughs she’ll often tap me on the arm affectionately, like two old friends sharing a joke. Her diction veers from thoroughly blunt to oddly cutesy, like “coinki-dink” for ‘coincidence’; she’ll often end a sentence with “if that makes sense to you”, as if implying that it probably won’t. She remembers details, like the name of her son Bradley’s teacher when he was diagnosed with Tourette’s (she has three sons, Jeffrey and Curtis in addition to Bradley); she remembers how much everything cost, from houses to legal documents to the kids themselves (“I didn’t have medical insurance for him,” she recalls of Jeffrey, now 27 and her biggest supporter, “so he cost $5,000 to give birth to”). She recalls being brought back to life twice by doctors – not just once, but on two separate occasions – in the course of her turbulent life. She recalls having 14 employees and making over $100,000 a year (!) as an 18-year-old sign painter. We’ll get to that too, space permitting.

This is not a piece about trans rights, it’s a profile of a life which would’ve been remarkable in any case – but it’s also about trans rights, inevitably. Jessica’s eyes are blue, her teeth very white, her hands rather big for a woman. She’s a tall, striking blonde with a touch of the rock star, and has been propositioned many a time since transitioning: “I’ve had the strangest pick-up lines. I’ve had a guy say: ‘Come back and I will lick your body for 24 hours straight’.” (This was in Istanbul, where the traders in the souk really took to her: “I had a guy – I was buying a necklace for a friend, sitting there talking to him – he goes: ‘Can I just take you in the back and f**k your brains out right now?’.”) Yes; but she also used to be Jeffrey Butterworth, a contractor and cabinet-maker in southern California – and, based on the photos she shows me, an intense-looking man with curly hair and a worried expression.

She always knew, she says, even as young as four years old. “You’re born this way. It’s a proven fact.” Being trans is genetic but not hereditary (if that makes sense), though she did find out later that her dad, an accountant at IBM, had also been into cross-dressing, in a small way. Needless to say, Jessica’s “drive” went far beyond cross-dressing. She recalls going to her friend Michelle’s house – whose parents finally forbade the little boy from playing with their daughter anymore – to play dress-up and tea-party, “and I wanted to be her. And it did not make sense. This is in 1969-1970, nobody did that, I had no idea what it was. Why do I want to look, be, act, live like a girl?”. At seven, “when I learned the difference between boys and girls, I took a razor blade to bed and physically tried to saw off my penis”. Her parents never knew about that little incident (there was blood, but no serious damage) – but of course they sensed her inner struggle, and indeed later revealed (when she finally came out to them, in her early 20s) that they’d thought about transitioning her at four or five years old, and had taken her to see renowned sexologist Dr John Money at UCLA.

Why didn’t they go through with it? Maybe because the young Jessica – like a lot of transgender people, she says, citing Caitlyn Jenner as another example – was adept at hiding her desires in furious, workaholic activity. First she collected stamps and insects, then began playing football and discovered that, “when I was on that field for 90 minutes, I’m not thinking about wanting to be a girl. It became my next obsession”. At 15, she was the youngest player on the No. 2 non-pro team in the whole country; she had four scholarship offers, and an invitation from the Olympic Committee to try out for the 1984 Games – “but it was a coping mechanism,” she says, shrugging sadly. Football gave way to the sign-painting business, and $100,000 a year as a young entrepreneur – “but it was another coping mechanism. To deal with this turmoil, I turned it to work. It was just my way of coping”.

‘And what of sexuality?’ I ask, mindful of the fact that she’s been married twice – the first one a crazy, five-week marriage to “a beautiful, kind, screwed-up girl” when Jeffrey was going through a bad time, mourning a girl named Barbara who’d been killed in a car accident. Which sex was she attracted to?

“Men,” she says firmly. “But I didn’t understand it. Young boys have their first wet dream, right? Mine was being with a boy – and I was a girl! And it did not make sense to me.”

So how does she know she was transgender, and not a repressed gay man?

“It’s a different feeling,” she replies – then pauses, trying to pinpoint the difference: “Most gay guys don’t want to be a woman… Later on, when I started experimenting with men, I would not be a man with a man. I had to be dressed as a woman. OK? And a man wasn’t allowed to touch my penis. OK?”

That was in the 90s when she hung out at a club called The Queen Mary, a place with female impersonators in the front room and a back room for women like herself – “There’s a certain group of men who are attracted to transwomen; we call them ‘chasers’” – long before her transition but after the breakdown of her marriage to Rachel, mother of her three boys. The aforementioned Barbara, the love of her life as a teenager, was the first person she ever came out to, though of course – like Rachel, who also knew of the inner turmoil – she loved Jeffrey as a man. (Jessica was with her in the car when it was totalled; that was the first time she had to be brought back to life, the second being a suicide attempt years later.) As a man, she was always very attractive to women – even though she made no secret of her gender dysphoria, and couldn’t even get aroused half the time. Did the fluid, non-macho signals she emitted act as a turn-on – Rachel would pluck Jeffrey’s eyebrows and shave his legs, and teach him how to do his lipstick – or was it just a function of being dynamic as a person, and treating women as she’d like to be treated herself? Human sexuality is a complex thing.

That’s not the way Judge Scott Becker of Collin County, Texas saw it – and we’re jumping ahead now, coming forward to 2012 when Jessica had already transitioned, shed her penis (though she emphasises that’s a personal choice, not a necessity) and started looking like she does now, sitting across the table at the Crown Inn. “I’ve had facial surgery,” she enumerates, “I’ve had the nose done. These are all fake teeth. I’ve had my upper lips shortened, I’ve had my lips plumped up”. She’s had rhinoplasty, septoplasty, vocal-cord surgery – “they cut my vocal cords in half, stretched them, made them thinner [and] took off 80 per cent of my voice box” – to transform the deep man’s voice she’d endured for 45 years. Maybe that’s why she did so much, because she’d waited so long: “For 45 years, I hated – hated – looking in the mirror and feeling my body, seeing my penis. I just dreamed for 45 years of being a female”.

But we digress (it’s that kind of story). The relationship with Rachel flickered back to life even after the marriage was over, surviving on and off for about 18 years – and they were still living intermittently as a family even in 2012, years after a California judge had awarded Jeffrey full legal custody of the three boys. A complicated arrangement led to Rachel being in Texas with the kids while Jessica was completing her transition – but it turns out there are two stories here, not just the life of a transgender person but a story of family breakdown and legal shenanigans that’d be compelling even without any LGBT angle.

Rachel sued in Texas (a state where judges can overrule a previous custody decision in another state), demanding the removal of Jessica’s parental rights with regard to Curtis, her youngest son. Ms. Lynn has “taken one of the most selfish acts a parent can take, changing her gender,” claimed the other side, and the judge – following a trial where everything was made as difficult as possible, possibly to the point of being discriminatory – firmly agreed, decreeing that Jessica should never again see her son and that her name be struck from his birth certificate. Devastated, she turned for help to a Texas law office run by a transgender judge, but was disappointed. “They said there’s not much you can do about it,” she says sadly. “They said ‘Go out there and start talking about it’, and that’s what I did. And that’s what brought me into speaking.”

So here we are, six years and hundreds of speeches later, a story that’s now been told to thousands of people and may even (she says) become a movie, a deal being imminent with “a really known producer in California” – but also a significant story in other ways. A story of a life spent, maybe not in denial but certainly in distraction, looking for ways to dodge her constant feelings of self-loathing and dislocation: forays into alcoholism, cocaine addiction, suicide attempts, abortive relationships with the wrong gender. A story of an obsessive personality whose life revolved for years around a single, unspoken obsession – and now revolves around another, unsatisfied one. A story, too, of a transgender person who, for all her angst and “dark periods”, lived in a place that was generally sympathetic – then met the other, conservative America (“the Trump America,” as she puts it) and was instantly execrated. That’s the bigger, political story.

This is not a political piece, which is probably just as well. Is it really true, as Jessica says, that “about 80 per cent of transgender people know by the time they’re five years old”? Do children so young have such a firm grasp on gender? Is it true, as she says, that a child should transition at a young age because, even if they change their minds later, you can just “stop the hormones, put the boy back on testosterone and he’s going to come back, 95 per cent [of the time], as a normal boy”? It’s important to know the facts on these issues – but of course other pundits spout the opposite views (which of course she dismisses as fake news), so who to believe? What do ‘man’ and ‘woman’ mean, anyway? (“Physically I feel comfortable in my body now. OK?” explains Jessica. “I like to look feminine. I like to wear heels, I like to look nice, I like to smell pretty. That’s my thing.”) The subject has become so politicised it’s almost intractable, at least for casual observers. Even the precise numbers of transgender people are up for debate: 0.3 per cent of the population according to UCLA, 1-2 per cent according to activists.

Maybe; but the fact remains, indisputably, that transgender people exist – even in places where they tend to be invisible. “Coming here to the university yesterday, one of my first questions was: ‘How many people here know a transgender woman?’,” says Jessica. “Two classrooms yesterday, nobody raised their hand. I was in Ukraine, 100 students, nobody raised their hand. You go to California, everybody raises their hand! You go to New York, everybody raises their hand!” She chuckles briefly at the comparison. “But I know you have ’em!” she adds pointedly; “It’s not the water in California.” She’s right, of course – and her story can only open doors, even if she tells it partly to salve the pain of being deprived of her child, the latest twist in a packed, whirlwind journey. I leave her to it, sipping coffee and checking her phone as she waits for the next appointment.

To walk, day after day, is a wonderful way to clean out one’s mind of all the debris that collects over the years a man who has spent 15 years walking round the coastline of England and Wales tells NADIA SAWYER. He is now planning to follow it up with a shorter trip around Cyprus

 Christmas is in the air, which for many means in addition to everything else there is the turkey to wrestle with – a rather thankless task made somewhat merrier by recalling the amusing scene in Merry Christmas, Mr Bean, where the protagonist loses his watch inside the bird and ends up with it on his head. A scene that also flashed through my mind when I met Chris O’Grady, a diminutive Englishman, dressed in a quintessentially British tweed jacket, who looks a little perplexed and out of place in Nicosia’s old city. But any comparison to the hapless and often non-verbal TV character stops right there as my interviewee gets straight down to the business of recounting his life story, without me even asking the first question. He is in Cyprus to help raise money for the Friends’ Hospice in Paphos by giving an illustrated talk about his 15-year walk around the coastline of England and Wales. More of his hiking adventures, but starting at the start he tells me of his childhood. Rowan Atkinson’s description of his famous Bean character as being “a child in a grown man’s body” somewhat resembles Chris as he reverts to his younger self and vividly, yet eloquently, transports me back to his childhood in another country some 50 years ago.

Born in London in 1960, Chris spent most of his young life in Bournemouth until, at the impressionable age of nine, he was sent to boarding school in Cheltenham, where he says, “I discovered my independence from my family. Being a boarder, seeing Mum and Dad once every two or three months, coming home for a holiday and heading away again, defined the person I am,” he recalls.

Indeed, so independent was he that, at the tender age of eleven, he set eyes on a young blonde girl “across a crowded playground” and immediately knew that he had fallen in love. “She looked like she had just walked out of a movie,” he reminisces, speaking fondly of the fellow pupil who would later become his first wife.

When she left school to train as a teacher in London, Chris followed her to the city and enrolled on a business studies course, though his intention had been to study fine art. Nuptials followed, and four children thereafter but after 17 years of a seemingly happy working and family life in the Vale of Evesham, his marriage suddenly ended. “Sadly, when I appraoched 40, she decided that she didn’t want to be with me anymore,” he admits.

With his responsibilities for the children falling mainly at weekends, Chris found himself with a lot of spare time and, as he puts it, “I rediscovered my adventurous spirit”. So, in January 2000 to mark his 40th birthday he took a week off from his job as a printing rep and walked the Cotswold Way, a 100-mile long footpath along an escarpment in the Cotswold Hills. It was during this lonely journey that he seems to have caught the wanderlust bug. “I’ve got the adventurous gene, the one that makes you want to test yourself,” he concedes.

The city of Birmingham symphony orchestra chorus

Over the following ten years he would begin what would become a walking odyssey around the entire coast of England and Wales, creating the subject matter for his recent talk in Cyprus. Describing this haphazard trek in one of his flyers as going around the edge of the ‘sceptred isle’, he references the phrase in William Shakespeare’s play, Richard II, which reads: “This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars… This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”.

Coincidentally, it would be in the quarterly magazine called This England that Chris would pen his article entitled To Be a Pilgrim about his walk along the Via Francigena which he undertook in 2010 to mark his 50th birthday. The Via Francigena is an ancient pilgrim route that starts in Canterbury, England, and then goes into France, on into Switzerland, up over the Alps and ends in Rome. Starting his journey in Pershore, Chris trekked through these four countries for four months, staying with friends and strangers along the way, often begging for a bed at night, but always, as he records, “being blessed with a place to rest my head”. One of these kindly souls turned out to be another adventurer of sorts: Michel Fiolek, a rocket engineer who worked for the European Space Agency.

“Walking with that never-ending contact with the earth and gentle progression ensures that all opportunities for human contact are taken,” Chris wrote, as I smile at the subtle irony of him meeting a man whose job it was to ensure that the launch vehicle, Ariane, would actually escape from the earth’s surface.

Indeed, the lengthy article is a brilliant read, with Chris beautifully capturing the geography and spirit of his walk. “To walk, day after day, is a wonderful way to clean out one’s mind of all the debris that collects over the years. Walking becomes a means of achieving a meditative state,” he wrote. Did any religious faith support him emotionally during his journey? “I am a Christian, but I struggle with religion because it is very complicated and it has lots of power struggles and I don’t understand it,” he tells me. “But I believe in, more than anything, the kindness of humanity… and the goodness… and that really is what the trip was about, to prove that the world is a good place, that you can be so bold as to ask for help”.

Indeed, Chris would meet other like-minded folk on his 1,200-mile journey and would conclude at the end of his article that “all of us saw in each other the same independence of mind, combined with a hint of madness in the eyes that bound us together as real pilgrims”.

Spending nearly a decade as a single man and a solitary walker seems a bitter pill to swallow after an unwelcome divorce and his well-meaning male friends would offer friendly encouragement and advice on what to look for in a woman, such as checking out her shoes before asking her out, which is probably quite good advice if you are an avid walker. But a more heartfelt suggestion came from one of his oldest friends: “Chris, if you ever find someone you think you are falling in love with, make sure she is musical,” he advised, both men having been keen choristers at school.

Chris currently performs in one of the world’s most famous choirs – the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) chorus. Once again, my mind strays to thoughts of Mr Bean and his hilarious renditions of O Mio Babbino Caro and All Creatures of Our God and King – I can’t help myself, that initial image is embedded in my mind!

As luck would have it, at a Christmas party at his friend’s house, just three months before his Via Francigena walk, Chris would meet the lady who would become his second wife, a classical music agent who has managed international vocalists, ensembles and instrumentalists, and Chris (not one to let the grass grow under his feet) asked her to marry him within four weeks of their meeting.

She continued her support by meeting up with Chris on several occasions during his Via Francigena walk and he reciprocated the commitment by marrying her on his return. In fact, if Helen Shapiro’s song Walkin’ Back to Happiness had been played at their wedding reception it would have been an apt and fitting tribute to their union.

Together, they relocated to Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, and, using their joint skills and knowledge of the printing and music industries, are currently producing two annual information brochures both called Chamber Music Plus which provide details of hundreds of classical music concerts in the central and northern regions of England, while they are planning to add a third. Chris is also undertaking his various talks (with 50 booked in 2019), which brings us back to the winter of 2018 and his Cyprus gig.

Called over to a table after his pre-dinner soliloquy at the Kamares Club in Tala, he was informed by four people that he had inspired them to walk around the coast of the island and invited him to join them. “I would prefer to do it on my own,” he tells me. ”If you are in a group of people, you are inward looking, but if you are on your own, or if there is just two of you, you have a much greater chance of something interesting happening”.

So the plan is for his wife to stay with her mother, who has been living in Paphos for the past 23 years, while Chris circumnavigates the island on foot in a clockwise direction. In fact, it was his mother in law’s late husband, Stephen Willis, who was the founder president of the Friends’ Hospice Foundation, the charitable institution Chris’ recent talk benefited. Chris estimates his Cyprus journey will take four weeks and he plans to write about it in a journal along the way.

At this point he produces a brown, leather-bound book and gleefully opens it up for me to see. Once again my impish thoughts turn to Mr Bean and the infamous library scene where he vandalises a vintage manuscript. However, I silently chastise myself as Chris has saved the best until last. Handwritten in black ink, with detailed illustrations, this is a gem of work that contains not only his own scribblings, but those of the people he has met during his various walks and escapades. This latest journal begins in March 2017 when he walked along the Essex and Kent coastlines, but previous versions include his other walks undertaken between 2002 and 2017, including those along the South West Coast Path which runs from Poole Harbour in Dorset to Minehead in Somerset, a distance of some 630 miles. The journals are full of tales, funny and sad, some of which the storyteller Chris relates to me in his soothing bass voice. I also enjoy the romantic manner in which he describes the meeting and courtship of his beloved wife, at a time when he was least expecting it.

“I truly believe that every day you should believe that everything you are hoping for will happen,” he says.

It is not often one gets to meet an adult man who talks the talk and walks the walk and sings to boot, but Mr O’Grady does all three of these things with a child-like wonder – and old-fashioned decorum – that only a much-loved Mr Bean could possibly emulate.

Donations to The Friends’ Hospice, Paphos can be made online at paphoshospice.org/donations/

For one of the island’s most successful movie directors – gaining commercial success with only his second film in ten years – film is all there ever was in his life. THEO PANAYIDES meets an unglamorous man focused on the end goal who has nonetheless enjoyed the journey

If you want a reminder of how punishingly hard it is to make it in the film industry, consider this. Johnny Kevorkian has wanted to make movies ever since he was a child; it’s all he’s ever done, a goal he’s spent his whole life pursuing – yet even now, at 43, his CV as director only runs to two feature films, plus a handful of shorts. His new film, Await Further Instructions, is his first in 10 years, since The Disappeared in 2008.

At the same time, however, London-based Johnny is among the most successful Cypriot-born directors in the world. The Disappeared, a spooky British thriller with a starry cast including Harry Treadaway (from Mr. Mercedes) and Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films), was successful enough – but Await Further Instructions has soared to a whole other level, not just released to cinemas in the US and UK but also included in the New York Times’ weekly critics’ picks, a rare accolade for any movie, let alone a genre movie. “A British family turns on itself when a mysterious substance seals its home in this genuinely upsetting horror-sci-fi hybrid,” wrote the Times – and, given the paper’s reach and influence, it’s not far-fetched to claim, as Johnny does, that any film included in its Picks automatically becomes “the film of the week in America”. The man sitting opposite me in a Costa Coffee in Nicosia is quite a heavy hitter.

Not that you’d know, necessarily. There’s no entourage, no publicist checking his watch in the background, nor is our setting especially glitzy. We opt to sit outside, where it’s quieter; it’s a wet and grey Thursday afternoon, the garden area rain-sodden and almost deserted. It’s so cold that my hand, holding up the tape recorder, goes numb within minutes, then the weather gets worse and rivulets of water start to drip through the awning. “I’m being rained on!” laughs Johnny good-naturedly, shifting in his chair and turning up the collar of his jacket. You have to say he cuts an unglamorous figure, a moon-faced 40-something huddled against the cold and taking little sips of a soya latte (he’s not vegan; he just likes the taste). Someone watching us might struggle to discern why exactly this person succeeded in an industry where thousands of others try, and fail, every year.

So why did he? Impossible to say, at least in a couple of sentences; still, a few hints emerge during the course of our conversation. ‘How would you describe your personality?’ I ask at one point – a question most people tend to sidestep or find bewildering, but Johnny has a ready answer. “Very stubborn,” he replies. “In terms of just getting something done, making sure it gets done. Which can sometimes be a problem, because you lose sight of everything else – but just, you know, seeing the end goal”.

His background includes a detail which he recounts quite casually but which seems, in retrospect, quite unusual. He was born in Cyprus, but the family emigrated to Australia when Johnny was three; they stayed for 12 years, then returned (‘they’ including his parents, brother and sister, all of whom are still living here) when the boy was in his mid-teens – but in fact Johnny only stayed for nine months before moving to England, where he completed his education (he ended up studying Film at the University of Westminster) and stayed on, trying to get a foothold in the film industry. Why did he move? “I couldn’t live here,” he replies. “Because I wanted to do film, from a very young age – and there was nothing here”. It’s true there wasn’t much of a film industry in Cyprus in the early 90s (some would say there still isn’t) – but it’s not like a 15-year-old would be making movies anyway; surely most kids would’ve stuck it out for a couple of years? I presume he was unhappy, for whatever reason (he didn’t speak Greek, for a start) – but perhaps it was also a case of being so stubbornly focused on his “end goal” that he couldn’t stand the thought of being sidetracked. His will must’ve been quite relentless.

He seems both intense and very pleasant, in the way of a naturally intense person who’s learned the importance of being pleasant. Once he gets going, he talks so fast he sometimes stumbles over his words. ‘Do you ever lose your temper?’ I ask, and am quite surprised when he answers with a firm “Yes!”.

I wouldn’t have thought so, I admit.

“I know, that’s the thing,” he replies with a shamefaced smile. “It flips, like that. On-set I don’t, but it does happen a few times, on the set I can really lose it”. But only for good reason, he adds quickly, “I wouldn’t be nasty to people” – and indeed he’s very careful when it comes to business relationships, making sure not to offend. He tells me of an agent he used to have in his 20s (a rare thing for a young filmmaker; apparently the agent approached him on the strength of some well-received early shorts); it didn’t work out, but there’s no hard feelings and “I still keep in touch with them”, he says, making sure to use the neutral pronoun so as to protect the agent’s identity. It’s the same with a production company he co-founded and eventually had to leave (production had stalled, which is partly why it took 10 years to make his second movie); he’s not really in touch with the other co-founders but it’s fine, “we didn’t fall out or anything”.

Relationships are everything in the film business – indeed, in any business. The secret of success, in any field, lies perhaps in getting what you want while making others feel that they too are getting what they want. But there’s something more in his case, another balance that demands to be struck.

Johnny’s a commercial filmmaker. Unlike many Cyprus-based auteurs (who tend to make dramas on social issues, including the much-maligned Cyprus problem), he makes genre movies, notably horror; Await Further Instructions starts as a family drama – it’s a bit like Get Out, last year’s American hit, with a young man bringing his British-Indian girlfriend to his crypto-racist family – then twists into something more fantastical. Being commercial means being pragmatic, and he’s very aware of “the audience side”, i.e. making films that distributors will buy – but being a filmmaker also means having a vision, and sticking to it even when everyone else is convinced it’ll fail. In a word, it means being stubborn.

Here, perhaps, is the biggest reason why Johnny Kevorkian succeeded where most people fail: he refuses to be ruled by self-doubt. “I just get on with it,” he tells me. “You kind of kick yourself and go ‘Stop feeling sorry. Just keep going. You know you can do it’. ’Cause, you know, there’s a lot of bad films getting made out there, and people are making them. You think ‘If they’re doing it, why can’t you?’. I think it’s all about being very resilient and bullish. I think that’s the key, really.”

He shakes his head, warming to his theme as the rain patters on the awning above us: “I’ve seen so many people in this business that start off and they – it’s not even, like, financial pressure, it’s about doubts! – and they – they just give up. Honestly, just give up. I’ve seen it happen so much. It’s almost like there’s a race and they’re, like, dropping off, and you just think ‘Wow’. You know, last person standing. It’s a fascinating thing.

“Again, a lot of it is about self-doubt – ’cause people always tell you, you can’t do it. That’s the common theme in this industry, ‘You can’t do it’… But if you listen to that, then I think you won’t do it. [Whereas] if you listen to your inner self and go ‘I can do it, I will do it. I’ll prove you wrong’ – then you do it. And that’s it. OK, it’s not always going to work,” he adds, as if wary of leaning too hard on a ‘Hollywood ending’ – but persistence is key, and would certainly be his main theme if he were giving advice to aspiring filmmakers. “If in three years’ time you’ll be like ‘Oh actually, I’m bored of this’, then don’t waste that three years,” he warns. “Because I’m telling you now, it’s not for everyone.”

For him, as already mentioned, it was always the main thing. It’s all there was, and all there ever has been. What would he have done, if the film career hadn’t panned out? “Maybe become a chef. I love cooking!” he replies unexpectedly – though of course cooking is a lot like making movies, “you gather the right ingredients and everything has to work together”. As to why the idea was so attractive to him as a young child… well, therein lies a year’s worth of therapy – but it may be significant that Johnny was intensely shy as a kid, and had real trouble speaking in public. “I wouldn’t get up and talk, I couldn’t even talk in class in front of people”; he had serious anxiety attacks, and would “throw a sickie” rather than speak a line in the school play. More importantly, the issues continued even into adulthood. Even as late as 10 years ago, when he made The Disappeared, it gave him panic attacks to get up and talk at festivals (“People said to me, ‘You’d better sort it out, you’re going to be doing a lot more of this’”). Even now, though he’s largely overcome his reluctance and can talk about films easily enough, he tends to demur when it’s anything more personal. “If somebody said to me ‘Can you do a speech at a wedding?’, that kind of stuff, I’d be really struggling with that.”

Armchair psychology is never the best idea – but the word ‘control’ comes up again and again in our conversation (“I had lost control,” he laments of that ill-fated production company; “I can control a bit more now,” he says, of how the success of Await Further Instructions has changed his life). Extroverts always imagine that shy people are shy because they’re timid, or fearful – but shyness often comes from the opposite impulse, a powerful need to control the world which, being unfeasible, curdles instead into withdrawing from it. Given Johnny’s assertive personality (and perhaps the secret confusion of being neither Aussie nor truly Cypriot), making films may have offered a way to gain the assurance he craved as a young man; a film, after all, is an ecosystem – its own little world – and the director is the one in control. He’s good with actors, but “you’ve also got to be firm,” he tells me; they can’t be allowed to take over. At one point, I ask what he’s like socially – and he cheerfully admits he’s “a bit dictator-ish”, tending to be the one who leads a group (suggesting they go inside if it gets too cold, say) rather than meekly follow the pack. “That’s the director in me. In a good way, not in a horrible way! I’m not a horrible person.”

So then why does he keep making horror films? But it’s probably not because of some deep-seated dark side, merely because they’re commercial. Johnny’s pragmatic, as already mentioned (his dad’s an accountant, which may have instilled a healthy respect for profit and loss), and he talks very pointedly of making successful films – not just adding to the multitude of movies that come out and “get washed away by the rain,” he says wistfully, his metaphor possibly inspired by the downpour that continues to drip on his jacket.

Meanwhile, he tries to enjoy life – because that’s the thing if you’re going to spend 43 years in pursuit of elusive success, you have to at least enjoy the journey. He works hard, 18-hour days in many cases (he’s one of the lucky few who can function on four hours of sleep) – but he also enjoys a drink, he’s a foodie as well as a chef, watches loads of films (being a BAFTA member, he can visit any UK cinema for free) and is also something of a cigar aficionado. Best of all, he knows it won’t take another 10 years to make his third movie; following the success of Await – especially in the all-important US market – he’s been inundated with scripts and will hopefully shoot something this year, not to mention a mooted venture into TV series. Things are looking good for Johnny Kevorkian – and it’s taken a while, but that’s the film industry for you. “I enjoyed the journey,” he shrugs. “I’ve had experiences… It’s a great thing to do, I think.” He sets off in the rain, the one thing even film directors have trouble controlling.