Blossoms and Baking...

Following an age long tradition on Thursday, I went to my grandparents to make  flaounes, savoury delights made with cheese, eggs, flour and raisins. It was a lengthy process beginning on Wednesday night, breaking eggs to put in the cheese mixture and making the dough, leaving it overnight to be ready for the following morning.

In the morning I went to the bakery and bought some tachinopites, a sweet made especially for fasting and which goes well with a cup of coffee. At my grandmother's the garden smelt of orange blossoms early in the morning, a scent I always associate with Easter. After making sure the dough and cheesy mixture was ready we began making the flaounes. These savoury delights will be eaten after fasting has ended on Saturday morning after Holy Communion. I nibbled on a piece of tachinopitta as I watched my grandmother carefully roll the dough into a thin round shape and my aunt fill it with the cheesy mixture, ready on a tray to be baked. I took my share home and baked it, brushing beaten egg and sesame on each individual flaouna before popping them in the oven for an hour. The house smelt sweetly as the flaounes cooked merrily in the oven.

Thursday night at church was the reenactment of the Crucifiction and it is the custom to wear black. The bells chimed mournfully, the icons covered in black cloth. Yesterday was the Epitaph. We went to Sfalaggotissa Monastery where nuns chant the verses in unison. The Epitaph was decorated with white roses and candles, the scent of the roses mingling with incense and the slow burning of the candles on the Epitaph. When it was time the Epitaph was lifted and taken round the chapel. You are supposed to go under it as it goes round.

 

This morning's service was the first Resurrection. I had gone from six in the morning, the chapel still with the nuns' silent prayer. The morning was overcast with the chance of rain, when the nuns lifted the black cloth from the icons and banged the wooden seats announcing the Resurrection. It was touching, bringing a tear to the eye, the small chapel packed with people, waiting to take Holy Communion.

 

Tonight is the Resurrection when everyone goes to church at midnight and holds a candle to announce that Christ has risen from the dead. Afterwards we eat egg lemon soup with chicken and crack red eggs which we have painted. Thus the fasting and baking ends and everyone has the opportunity to enjoy a good souvla on Easter Sunday.

This year's Easter  was especially moving as a church in Famagusta was allowed to have a service after fifty years. Cypriots flocked to take part giving a much needed ray of hope to those waiting for a miracle of peace and reconciliation in Cyprus.

At the Kafeneion...

My grandfather turned eighty-six last week and I paid him a visit. He seems to take pride when he has his grandchildren surrounding him. My grandfather was a carpenter by trade. Before the invasion he had his own carpenting business in Morphou. Following the invasion he lost eveything but still managed to keep up his trade in the small refugee quarter of Linopetra, making furniture for the families of the neighbourhood. I even remember him coming to England and redecorating our kitchen and when we repatriated back to Cyprus, he made my mother three coffee tables, mirror frames and a large cabinet to keep the good china in.

All that was a long time ago. Now my grandfather is fully retired and every morning he drives his little moped down to the local market and buys whatever my grandmother has written on the list, fruits, vegetables, meat and fish. Another pastime which he sticks loyally to is going to the kafeneion, the local coffee shop. Men of his age assemble there and gossip, talk politics and sport and anything else of interest and play cards and backgammon. They can watch television and drink their tasty Greek coffees.The kafeneion for my grandfather is a place where he can socialise and belong and as he has explained to me, it also has a hidden political agenda. Each kafeneion in the Linopetra area and elsewhere is affiliated to different political parties. So a right winger will never go to a left wing kafeneion. It seems surprising that such a small and divided island would have such strong political ties, which would run into daily life but such is the case.

You would think that these small, quaint kafeneions are beginning to die out. In fact they are re-inventing themselves into more modern equivalents in the old parts of the towns. Young people now enjoy playing cards and backgammon and gossiping while drinking their frappes or sticking to tradition and having a Greek coffee. However they will never have the same feeling as the kafeneion of old with its local charm and its uniqueness. The old kafeneion will always represent a bygone era of Cypriot history. So much discussion has gone on in the kafeneions of old. World wars, coups and invasions have been announced and recorded and spoken of again and again. Young men are now old, like my grandfather and they sit pensively in their affiliated kafeneion remembering the past, a past with both joy and sorrow, a past of struggle and a hope for reconciliation.