My Old Acquaintance: Yesterday in Cyprus by Barbara Cornwall Lyssarides

I came across this book, during one of my visits to Nicosia and the Moufflon Bookshop which sells many books about Cyprus. This particular book by Barbara Cornwall Lyssarides, wife of the late Cypriot politician and member of Parliament, Dr Vassos Lyssarides stood out immediately. It is written with compassion and love for an island she calls "my old acquaintance" and was originally published as part of a series in the 'Cyprus Weekly' newspaper where Barbara was a contributor.

Each chapter recounts a different element of Cyprus' colourful past, the foreign visitors to the island and the impressions they had on visiting our shores. While reading, you come across references to travellers such as Denis Possot who, as is explained, was "a priest of Coulomiers in Brie, who had left home with friends in 1532 on a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre." He describes the apparently strange animals he came across such as the unusual sheep with "six or seven horns" and "plentiful fowls, doves, partridges and hares," as well as the " venomous snakes, vipers, serpents and scorpions [which] were abundant."

Another traveller Felix Faber, a Dominican monk from Germany stayed for a long time after an eventful voyage where there was a fight on board the ship between a Knight and a Latin Bishop, "a dispute over extra legroom." As Barbara writes, "Only two Cyprus towns had impressed Faber- Nicosia and its royal palace and numerous churches and convents and the Salines, near present-day Larnaca, whose yield from the Salt Lake helped to enrich the Queen of Cyprus" (Caterina Cornaro).

Another interesting account is that of the Australian archaeologist Diana Wood Conroy, who while excavating Kato Paphos in 1998, noted that, "I've noticed how ruins attract flowers as if the debris of so much past life formed a kind of natural fertiliser."

The book also includes accounts of personalities which shaped the island, such as the very humorous account of Sir Garnet Wolseley, who led the takeover of Cyprus from the Ottomans in the 19th century and who was "intolerant, grumpy and disliked foreigners." He pushed for many changes, such as legal system and land tax reforms and "on immediate dredging for a new harbour at Famagusta and a minimal road system along with drainage of the malaria-breeding swamps" but these had "to be stalled for lack of funds at the time."

Another Englishman, John Thomson, who was a master photographer explored the island in 1878 and reflected "that the island had once been a renowned commercial centre in the Levant, and the fate of this seemingly exhausted place saddened him."

There is also a very interesting chapter on the Armenians who settled in Cyprus and built a community after fleeing Ottoman Turkey. They were "specialised craftsmen or tradesmen in the old country, [who] eventually set up workshops in Cyprus."

Another chapter focuses on the history and development of Agia Napa from a small "seaside village" and it's development during Lusignan times to the "stunning tourist boom" after 1974.

As Barbara Cornwall Lyssarides describes in the introduction, her book is "a testimony...to a nation's ability to withdraw into itself, an instinctive form of passive resistance, perhaps to protect its identity through its social and religious armour. How many times, after all, must a nation be asked to re-define itself?"

Her extensive knowledge and research, which make up this book is valuable in its insights and informative narration about a "yesterday in Cyprus" which should be preserved for future generations, so that they can better understand the Cyprus of today.