A Time For Harmony...

Limassol has always felt like home in comparison to other Cypriot towns. The feeling of returning to Limassol after a short or long visit to another part of the island, is unparalleled.

I always return and feel at home, as we near what is now a seaside landscape of high rise luxury apartments, which to me are enticing, attractive and exciting.

Limassol is a cosmopolitan town and each community, whether it be Russian, Ukrainian, Israeli, Lebanese or other, somehow intermingle harmoniously with eachother.

After 1974, all hopes were put on Limassol after the loss of Famagusta. To some, including the writer Joachim Sartorius, it seemed as though there was a panic and rush to replace what had been lost in the war. The pain and loss of displacement were pushed into Limassol post 1974.

He explains in his book 'My Cyprus', that he visited Limassol which he found "uninteresting, repulsive even ugly." He then explains the reasons. "After the loss of Varosha, the Greek Cypriots had concentrated all their resources on Agia Napa and especially on Limassol, steering business and tourism into this formerly sleepy harbour town with furious determination. The endless seafront street had been entirely blighted by vast chain hotels, cheap restaurants, casinos, amusement arcades and hastily erected apartment blocks. In these heaps of concrete, I had thought to myself on my first visit, you could see all the clearer what the island had forfeited in such a short time: harmony, sweetness, lustre. And what she had won: the sovereignty of beauty abolished and replaced with a new, cheap prosperity, which had no regard for light or landscape."

Those positive words: Harmony, Sweetness, Lustre. Those negative connotations: cheap prosperity, no regard for light or landscape and I agree to an extent that Limassol has a lot of work to do, if it is to regain its former identity pre-1974.

Efforts are being made at the moment for Limassol to become European Capital of Culture for 2030. They are contending with Nicosia and Larnaca among other places. Will they succeed in making Limassol European Capital of Culture?

There is a deep love for this town by its older inhabitants, especially the ones who remember it before the war, but in my mind, there needs to be an acceptance of how quickly things are changing in Limassol. It is not possible to return to pre-1974. Both the past and the future need to somehow be embraced harmoniously, if there is to be any form of progress.