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.