It is not often you come across a book that promises everything you want it to be and does not disappoint. Such was the case on reading Colin Thubron's 'Journey Into Cyprus.' It describes the writer's trek through Cyprus in the spring and summer of 1972. There is a dreamlike, reflective melancholy throughout, intertwined with historical insight and touches of humour.
As the book unfolds and as the writer traverses the island, you feel you are walking with the writer yourself and with every step something new is revealed, something knowledgeable and informative, snippets of facts about the island that you didn't know before.
The thoughts and insights of the writer carry you away, to another point in time, a different period of the island before the tragic events of 1974 and it is with this knowledge, that you are reading about and witnessing an island before catastrophe, that it is all the more veiled with melancholy and reflection.
Thubron wanders through forests, mountains, rivers, villages and towns and he meets colourful personalities along the way. Often these chance encounters are peppered with humour such as his meeting with Chambis who believes he is a descendant of the Arcadians- " Of course we are Greeks,' said Chambi, but of a separate kind" or the tragic-comic encounter with the Turkish tomb robber who wants Thubron to purchase ancient artifacts -"On the table were fragments of Roman glass...The old man held one up to the light. He was spry and brown as a monkey. 'One pound,' he said. 'Will you buy?" In one humorous moment where he is invited to eat with a family, he experiences eating 'strouthos,' a bird which he soon discovers is far from chicken- " The skull fell off the neck with a tiny clatter. I scraped away a little of the chest and ate its dark, high meat."
There are also more sobering accounts such as his meeting with Christos the schoolmaster, who was tortured by the British because of his involvement with EOKA and the writer is shocked by his revelations as he shows him around the prison cells he was kept in and concluding that, "It seemed now that I was naive not to have believed it before. In every people, when angry or afraid, there is a quality which can be distorted into brutality. In my own, perhaps, it was a lack of sensitized emotion."
Beauty and ugliness intertwine in the narrative, as he describes the harsh landscape of the copper mines which had "taken on a mutilated synthetic look," in direct contrast with other places such as Akamas with "its flush of green [which] was entrancing, and a host of butterflies were tumbling about the trees." Often he is high up looking down with reflective thought as he experiences when he visits Stavrovouni Monastery on a star-filled night - "Below us cities and villages, by day invisible for haze, glimmered out of the darkness: Famagusta, Nicosia, Limassol, the bracelet of Larnaca on its bay; while to the west the Troodos mountains were piled with scattered sparks like a fairground canopy."
As Thubron reaches the northern tip of the island, he is all the more entranced by its beauty and history and as his journey ends, he reflects on Cyprus and its compexity. As a writer and traveller Thubron witnessed Cyprus in its last years of peace. He travelled around the entire island before partition and destruction. He experienced a unified Cyprus, so mesmerizing and authentic that by the end of the book you are left with a feeling of longing, a deep wish to see Cyprus unified once again and like Thubron, be able to walk the same path as his - no borders, no checkpoints, just freedom of passage around an island which is still waiting in the midst for that day to arrive again.
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