They’ve Taken the Trees

Yerouskippou was never a particularly beautiful village. A few kilometres to the east of Pahos and slightly inland, it straddled the main road between Limassol and Paphos with a few handsome Neo-Classical buildings and a higgledy-piggledy collection of later shops and dwellings. Traffic always choked its plateia, and the Church, in a hideous attempt to enlarge its space available, tacked a twentieth century addition onto a Ninth Century masterpiece -- though it's quit difficult to find a web picture of the extension: most shots are taken from a flattering angle that excludes it.

But once the Municipality ‘took matters in hand’, everything went from bad to worse. First we endured more than a year of roadworks and diversions. (I say ‘we’ because we were living in Yerouskippou at the time and a ten-minute journey to town sometime morphed into a half-hour odyssey.) When the roadworks were completed, the new street plan became a nonsensical nightmare of no-left and no-right turns, zebra crossings that force drivers to stop in the middle of intersections, and at least one road that becomes one-way (the wrong way) just before the main road, forcing law-abiding drivers to reverse. For the first weeks of this daftness, demented traffic wardens ran thither and yon, gesticulating and even swearing at recalcitrant drivers. But they have long since given up, and Yerouskippou drivers cheerfully make illegal turns, mount the pavement, and park all over the street.

When the revamped plateia was unveiled early last summer, my heart sank to my sandals. In place of the scuffed but cheerful, well-shaded hodgepodge of kafeneia, shops, Turkish (oops, gasp, no, sorry!) Cyprus Delight factories and other miscellany, stretched a gleaming expanse of white marble and sandstone, shaded at intervals by concrete structures – mercifully stone-faced – with bizarrely curved roofs of Perspex and steel. And hardly a tree in sight. The old clump of cypresses still stands at one end looking a little like a poor relation at an upmarket wedding, and a few saplings have been carefully inserted into breaks in the marble, but the old broad leaved ficuses are gone, and any other greenery that dares intrude gets ruthlessly sprayed or pruned out of existence. One wonders who will be able to sit on the scatter of benches between June and October – even the hardiest of sun-worshipping British tourists -- the kind with skin like well tanned leather, a sprinkling of illegible tattoos, and necks and wrists encrusted with chains usually spotted chain-smoking on a sun lounger clutching a beer -- would be fools to try.

The stalls, shops, and factories on the non-plateia side of the road are all now directly open to summer’s murderous glare, and the absence of dust-filtering greenery means that tourists hoping to see the church frescoes or buy some ceramics, baskets, or Delight, get lungfuls of

particulate into the bargain.

A similar affliction has struck the promenade of Kato Paphos. Around the harbour, pines and ficus remain, but the newly renovated seafront parade has been resurfaced with dark grey granite cobbles and only a few tall scraggly palms shade the benches which could be a delight.

Imagine… late afternoon in mid-July, the thermometer stands at about 35C… you’re a tourist… you leave your room for an après siesta dip at the Municipal beach, and with wife and child stroll the promenade. You stop for an ice-coffee and take-away treat, then continue your stroll to a shaded bench that overlooks the water. You slurp and lick contentedly, people watching and taking in the view to the harbour. In the middle-distance, brightly painted caiques head seaward for an evening’s fishing, and overhead a flock of birds chatters their last song before dusk…

All that could be possible in five years if the Municipal crews get planting now. Meanwhile, keep dreaming.

Thursday

I woke up yesterday (Thursday) morning realising that I am flying to England on Tuesday, Monday is a holiday, and my passport has expired. So I got Leo off to school – the Big Ones have half-term this weekend and Zenon was not feeling well – and called Sil (my Sister In Law) at work at eight. “No problem!” She works in the District Office, and if anyone could help me, she could. “Come in when you can!” Oh, it's good to have family in the right places!

My friend Angela needed me to help her move some boxes to her new apartment today, and I had agreed to be there by nine, so at 8.30 I left the house and drove the Land Rover townward, toward a black and roiling sky that was developing a bilious green tinge. Zenon stayed in front of the t.v., and the Big Ones had not yet surfaced. No one else was heading into town. The road was eerily empty – except for the occasional oncoming driver, invariably with headlights on.

At Angela's we loaded the van but decided to leave the trip until later – unloading cardboard boxes and schlepping them up an outside staircase in a downpour is no one's idea of fun. I got to Evzonas Photography for passport photos just as the first drops fell, and fifteen minutes later when I walked out again, the rain was still holding off, though the sky was very dark overhead and lightning flashed ominously. I called Zenon to tell him that there would be a storm, that it would be bad, and that he might lose electricity. “If you get scared,” I told him. “Wake the Big Ones. And if you really need help, Papoose and Yiayia are at home.” He wasn't bothered. Harry Potter has to deal with lightning, too.

I raced across town to the District Office, and of course couldn't find parking within 500 metres.

Sil works in the Old District Office – as opposed to the New Monstrosity next to the Courts. Her building dates from the Colonial Era – massive stone plastered white, with dark green wooden shutters, high ceilings, and graceful pointed Cypriot arches. I found her in a cubicle “Hey, you've been promoted! Got an office to yourself...” the last time I'd been in she was sitting behind a long desk with several colleagues. “Don't let it fool you, it's the same old stuff!” said she, handing me forms for a new passport and an i.d card. I started to fill them out, alternating between the Greek and the Turkish to figure out what information to put in which boxes. Then she took them from me and filled them in speedy Greek. Thank goodness! I can write Greek, but my letters look like a second grader's, and I get confused with the two O's and the five E's, so my writing tends to be a lengthy process.

She grabbed an umbrella. “Ela! Come on!” and off we went, through the labyrinth of corridors and courtyards, dodging the splashing down spouts, and into the cashier's room.

There ensued a lengthy conversation about the rain – no one's complaining, despite the massive inconvenience that twelve days of wet weather causes in a fundamentally arid land. We're all so pleased to see the water, that I've yet to hear any gripes, except about the road works. But that's another story. Then there was a long debate as to whether my Greek surname on my new documents should be spelled with a C in English to match the rest of the family's, or a K to conform to the EU rules about phonetic spelling in Greek. I would have chosen a C (my current passport spells it with a K) like Best Beloved's, but our air tickets had already been issued and the spelling was with a K. “You can change again in ten years time when you apply for a new passport!” Sil said. “For now, you'll have to be the only one of us to use a K.”

Then off to another office where the Lady in Charge told us that the documents would be ready on Tuesday. “But she travels on Tuesday and Monday's a holiday. Why not do them today?” Sil asked. We left with a muttered promise of tomorrow before lunch, and fortunately met a friend of Sil's who works in the same office on the way out. “By this afternoon, and you can take them with you after work,” he promised. Sil said she'd deliver them this evening when she goes home. Phew!

She splashed off to another office, and I headed through the gathering rain to the Land Rover. I had just reached it when the hail began.

The hill down to the post office was, literally, a river. Then I had to thread my way through the canyons of the Kato Paphos road works, at time sinking past the hubcaps in muddy water, profoundly glad that I was not in the white Toyota. How the Boy Racers manage with their low-clearance sportsters and expensive body-kits, I have no idea.

Yerouskippou, the last village before Paphos proper when you're coming from Limassol, has been enduring road works as it's central artery and village square are being renovated for well over a year. A couple of hundred metres are done at a time, necessitating long detours through narrow residential streets to left and right, and massive inconvenience to shopkeepers and residents within the stricken zone. The final stretch is undergoing treatment at the moment, and the roads that have been chosen to host the diversion are suffering badly from the rain and the heavy lorries. Only one lane is passable at a time, sometimes only on the footpath. Each time the trenches are filled in with sand, torrential rain scours them again, and the gutters are full of fist-sized rocks that have washed down from the banks and hillsides.

Inevitably people try and circumvent the detours and cut the wrong way down the one way stretches causing back ups, horn blowing, and raised and gesticulating fingers. This is where I like the Land Rover. It's bigger than almost anything else on the road – except the two Hummers in town – and when impatient young bucks rev their souped-up engines and try to intimidate me, I can occupy my rightful place on the road, smile serenely, and wait while they reverse. We did that twice on the way home.

As I was writing this yesterday evening, I heard a knocking on the window behind, and saw Sil, backlit by the glare of her headlights. “All done!” she said. “Have a good trip.” She dodged through the still-falling rain drops back to her car and I turned to Best Beloved. “Sunny in London, is it?”