I realize on this trip, and in what way, how much life has passed and it is hard for me to say: I have aged. Also some time ago, one summer of 1966, I traveled to Cyprus with my friends Francesc Artigau and Ramon Comellas in my dilapidated Dos Caballos, disembarking it by crane in the humble little port of Limassol, coming from Piraeus.
The capital, Nicosia, was already divided between the Greek and Turkish sectors. Going down its Ledra street, in the walled enclosure built by the Venetians, the old cathedral, converted into a mosque, stood out in the background, beyond the green line guarded by soldiers from both sides, and UN soldiers. Access was tightly closed. So I tried to convey the emotion of this torn city (Nicosia is still the last divided capital in Europe) in reports that I published in our newspaper.
In 1974 he returned to Cyprus, already as a correspondent, to write about the failure of the coup against the president, Archbishop Makarios, who, directed from Athens by the junta of colonels in power, tried to unite the island with Greece, the dream of enosis, which provoked the military intervention of Turkey. Kyrenia, the Greek enclave in the north, was occupied by the Turkish army. The road that connects the beautiful city with the capital was a battlefield. This is how he described it in 1974: “It was a delicious town that before the war, at the foot of the Pentadactilos mountains –the second mountain range of the island–, surrounded by olive trees and old abbeys built by Franks and Venetians such as San Hilarión and Bellapaís , where British writer Lawrence Durrrell made his home. He enjoyed a very good reputation among foreigners. Many Britons, artists, civil servants and retired soldiers had chosen it to live”.
In the summer of 1974, the Turkish governor of the town allowed a group of foreign correspondents to visit several hundred Greeks who had taken refuge in fear at the Done hotel, on the shores of the Mediterranean. They told us that before they always lived in peace with the Turks of the town.
I have returned to Kirenia, Girne, in Turkish, along the same road, now going through Greek and Turkish police controls, I have visited the hotel restaurant, where you can pay with Turkish pounds or with the long-awaited euros from the Greek area. The highly isolated Turkish Cypriot republic is only recognized by Türkiye. The living standards of the two areas are very different. The less vibrant Turkish area is warmer and more welcoming. Around the Red, where the sharp white crescent stands out, Orthodox churches turned into museums or disaffected, cornered by old mansions with bougainvillea and oleanders. He did not want to leave Kirenia without visiting Bellapaís, near whose Gothic abbey Lawrence Durrell acquired his house, whose adventures in acquiring it he narrated in his splendid Bitter lemons. I went down and up the hill without finding it. Useless to ask anyone, it was siesta time in the Levante and the streets were deserted. About to give up, I read about the facade of a mansion Aci lemon Sodak. It was, without a doubt, where the writer lived when he worked in the British information office before independence, and where he wrote the first book of the Alexandria Quartet. I was able to return to my hotel despite the fact that no one from the beautiful town of Bellapaís knew how to tell me where he was. The glory of the writers!
