Family Wedding -- Part 1

Earlier this week my brother-in-law married. He lives in Austria and his bride (Chilean by birth, Belgian by asylum) lives in Brussles – so it was natural that he marry in Cyprus. More specifically in the back yard of my in-laws' home here just outside Paphos.

A quick break for Family Identification (do I sound like an American television station from the '80s?). My Father-in-Law is 'Phil'. My mother-in-law is 'Mili'. My husband is Best Beloved. His younger brother is 'Bill' and Bill's wife is 'Sil' (yes, the -'il' suffix stands for 'in-law'. Clever, no?) So, I'll designate Youngest Brother (No, not as Yob!) as Li'l Bro, and his wife will get the Irish moniker Bridie. That way, we all know they're married. Li'l Bro has two teenage sons, Philip and Timi who, like my children, play themselves.

Li'l Bro and Bridie have been an item for a few years now, but it was only during the last six months that they decided to 'tie-the-knot', and to tie it here, in Phil and Mili's garden, during the holiday season that was convenient for all concerned.

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Another quick aside to glance at the usual structure of Cypriot weddings. Most occur in Church, in a ritual that takes upwards of an hour and is linguistically incomprehensible to anyone who is not familiar with Katharevousa, the liturgical language of the Greek and Cypriot Orthodox Church. Village weddings have elaborate preparations leading up to the arrival of the church which includes the dressing of the bride, the shaving of the groom, and the preparation of the marriage bed, but modern urban weddings generally skip those steps.

A reception (300 guests is considered 'small', 500-1,000 people counts as 'average', 2,000+ is a good turn-out) usually takes place in one of the hotels or large restaurants depending on the depth of the pockets of the hosts. It used to be in the town square, but modernisation has put paid to that except in close-knit village communities where everyone turns out to help: one of the nicest weddings I ever attended was that of one of BB's cousins in the Plateia of Mandria, with the whole village in attendence and a genuine warmth and interest in the happiness and welfare of the couple. At these receptions bride, groom, and both sets of parents stand, sometimes for hours, accepting hand shakes, good wishes – and piles of 'fakkelakia', the little white envelopes that each contain anything from twenty to well over one hundred euros, depending on the relationship between couple and guest.

The flesh pressing is generally followed by a buffet meal where the menu follows a predictable pattern, and only the quality varies depending on the 'toniness' of hotel or restaurant. A selection of salads (tahini, taramasalata, tzatziki, and village salad); kleftiko, or baked lamb and potatoes (originally baked for a day in clay ovens, these days more often foil wrapped and cooked in the kitchen, although a surprising number of mobile kleftiko ovens are hauled around on the backs of trucks to cater for weddings and other community functions); pasticcio (the Cypriot version of lasagne); stifado, a beef stew; some form of chicken, either souvla or baked; and rice, potatoes, or bulghur wheat. Desserts generally include cream caramel, jelly, wedding cake, and platters of fresh seasonal fruit. Every guest takes away a little wrapped sweet, often containing almonds.

Weddings play an important role in the society, community, and family here. The gatherings are so large because traditionally everyone needs to come and meet everyone else: in a conservative, primarily agricultural society, such family events were the only times that a whole clan gathered and distant cousins could meet and renew old family ties. It was also an occasion to form bonds between the partners' families, and in a community where family links are prized as business connections or for job introductions, knowing who ones 'singenis' or relatives were could be a lifeline. A large gathering is also an essential economic start for a newly married couple: each guest brings money – and every couple hopes to recoup the cost of their wedding by inviting sufficient well-wishers. This may sound cynical, but it's true, and will be openly admitted. An invite to a wedding is also a tacit contract: I will come to your children's weddings and support them, and you are expected to come to mine... In a society that has moved as rapidly as Cyprus has down the materialism highway in the two decades that I have lived here, this has burgeoned into weddings becoming ever more sumptuous social occasions, and expectations becoming ever grander.

When Best Beloved and I wed, back in the early nineties, we bucked the general trend and opted for the gradually-gaining-in-popularity civil wedding, and really rocked the boat by insisting on only twenty-five guests joining us for an evening meal at a Nicosia restaurant. Mili was distressed (“We could have had a small gathering, only 300 or so close friends and family!”), but Phil supported me (“Think of Asproulla's side, only one sister coming! How will she feel surrounded by hundreds of strangers at her wedding, all speaking a language that she doesn't understand?”) I have always blessed him for that.

So we were married by the then-Mayor of Nicosia, Lellos Dimitriades in his city-centre office with only about fifteen attendees (remember, Lee?) in a quick ceremony in English where I didn't have to promise to 'honour and obey' and BB didn't have to say he'd always 'love and cherish' me. There was something about forsaking all others and poverty and wealth and sickness and health, but it was all rather bog standard. He wore a suit, I wore a pale pink party dress from the 1950's that I had picked up in a Galway charity shop. We both said 'I do!' with smiling enthusiasm, then we were driven off in a friends BMW to the Nicosia Hilton leaving 18-month old Alex in the care of my friend Rosemary for the night. Dinner was happily casual, nice food, pleasant music, good company – and several of our guests said 'Your wedding was much nicer than mine, and far less exhausting!'

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But I digress... Suffice to say that to break the mould of Cypriot custom and invite only a few friends is unusual, and that although civil weddings are now much more common than they were a decade and a half ago, to have a civil wedding in your parents' yard is to really go out on a limb of originality. Stay tuned for the next post...

Evening at the Red Park

These days I do a lot more driving and a lot more hanging around. And not the kind of hanging around where you can just park the car and read: at least twice a week I am hanging around for an hour or more with the Little Ones at dusk while the Big Ones do TaeKwanDo.

Last Tuesday, by the time the Littles’ class had finished and I had dropped off the Big Ones, I had done all the town errands and was a bit at a loss for entertainment. Zenon and Leo were no help. “I’ll just stay in the car,” was Zenon’s contribution, and Leo said “I want pizza!” Neither was an option, so I said: “We’re going to the Red Park!”

A chorus of groans met this suggestion. “Then we’ll have to change out of our TaeKwanDo suits!” and “It’s getting dark, no fun!” But Benevolent, I may be; Dictator, I am. So I said: “Tough! That’s where we’re going. Change your clothes in the car.”

The Red Park is Yerouskippou village’s municipal park. Large and grassy, with landscaped gardens, slopes, paths, and a footbridge, it also has a kiosk/cafeteria (always closed when we are there), playground equipment (painted red, hence our name), benches for sitting, and a water fountain. Before we moved out to the sticks, we used to have Zenon and Leo’s birthday parties there: there were flat places for football, cricket, or games of tag, woods and bushes to hide in, even an amphitheatre for showing off. Its drawback from May to September is a shortage of shade. The trees are still small, so to enjoy Yerouskippou park in the summer, you need to go before nine or after five-thirty.

We found the parking lot nearly full, and Zenon and Leo tumbled from the car – all complaints suddenly silent. At least fifteen families were enjoying the evening at the park: swinging on the swings, climbing the frame, sliding. Two separate games of kickball were happening, and skateboards and bikes whizzed around the concrete area.

The boys headed for the swings, close to a group of three women, two toddlers, and a baby. We exchanged smiles, the gold teeth of the older woman flashing as she looked up at me. One of the toddlers wandered toward the path of Zenon’s swing, so I scooped him up and returned him to his mother, and I realised that the group was speaking Arabic. I hadn’t twigged at first because, although the older woman was dressed ‘ethnically’ the two younger ones were in Western dress. Most of the Syrian women here wear the conservative Muslim head scarf.

Over at the flat area, a Russian mother and her son were playing kick-ball while Babushka watched and called occasional encouragement. Some Ponti kids were playing on the line swing, a Cypriot thirty-something was encouraging his four-year-old daughter up the slide, and an English mother was trying to stop her two sons from braining each other with lightsabres. As I watched them all, I reflected on how the demographics have changed since I first set foot on Cyprus just over nineteen years ago.

The population then was almost purely Greek-Cypriot. A foreigner’s land purchase had to be approved by the Council of Ministers. Some foreigners (mostly English, many former military) had retired here, and some intermarriage, again, mostly with English – or English-speaking foreigners had taken place. Those (mostly) women had assimilated. Before the ‘nineties, you simply couldn’t manage without Greek. Guest workers were Philippinas – nurses, cabaret ‘artistes’, and home-help, but Cypriots, both men and women, still did menial jobs.

Things began changing. Sri Lankans appeared – the women working as housemaids, the men as shepherds, drivers, cleaners. Then came the Russian invasion: as the Soviet Union crumbled, more and more Russians, many of then wealthy, set up businesses and homes here. Syrians came to work on the building sites, and Pontic Greeks arrived to live – their Greek passports assuring them a right of residency. When I helped with ambulance cover at the rugby match, I ran into our Nepalese worker, and he introduced me to Paphos’ Nepali community which lives in a complex of rooms at the rugby pitch. The latest wave of house- and field-help has been from Vietnam, and it still gives me a slight sense of cultural dislocation to see three or four women in their traditional conical hats, squatting in a field of onions or walking in the market place. You can find a Cypriot house-cleaner, baby-sitter, or field worker for neither love nor money.

When we joined the European Union in 2004, Brits arrived en masse. Suddenly, they could work and buy land. Because there were so many of them, and so many British businesses, learning Greek was no longer necessary: they could buy land, build a house and decorate it, shop, give birth, educate their children (privately), and watch t.v all in English. The one thing that they couldn’t do in English was die. The State still deals with death, and formalities are the same whatever the nationality. Doctors and police speak good English, but the bureaucracy is still Byzantine.

Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic States joined at the same time. New languages were heard. Leggy blondes appeared on the streets, in cafes, married to locals. In 2006, 26% of marriages that involved a Cypriot in the government-controlled part of the island were to a foreign partner. When Bulgaria and Romania came into the EU two years ago, even more foreigners flooded in. The economic downturn has seen some retreats – particularly of fly-by-night British who thought that they would make a killing here, then were hit by recession and the loss in value of Sterling. But by-and-large there is still a good-sized community of out-of-towners.

Hence the polyglot mixture at the park. This new multi-culturalism can’t be bad: we all have to live on this planet, the better we know each other and the more things that we realise are common, the less likely we are to kill each other. Syrian and Russian children sharing classroom space with English and Cypriot kids will only lead to greater understandings… won’t they? I’m glad that my children will have international friends. Taste foreign food. Learn foreign tongues.

Just now, like last Tuesday evening at the park, the situation seems pretty idyllic. Maybe I’m just naive, but I hope it stays like that.