Nicosia [GP:Nicosia], 42 degrees.

Free day today. This morning a group of us met and wandered over to the Archbishop Makarios III Cultural complex to visit the Byzantine Art Museum. It’s almost unsettling to look upon icons over one thousand years old – the realization that belief systems that still guide the world were in place as firmly then as now is staggering. It’s a bit sobering.

On the way, we wandered by accident through the municipal market which comes alive on Saturdays with vendors selling farm-direct produce in the parking lot and throughout the complex. I took several snapshots in the marketplace, watching the black-clad yiayias haggle over every penny with customers, before I headed inside.

Coming out of a vendor selling household goods was a short woman in a powder blue shirt. She was barely five feet tall, very elderly, with eyes that sparkled as she talked. I greeted her with a standard, “Good morning” [Kalimera].

She perked up and responded, and asked me if I was Greek.

“My family is Greek,” I said, continuing in that language.

“Your family? Your father?”

“My grandfather and grandmother,” I said. She corrected me slightly, because I used the masculine article with the word grandmother. She then responded in Greek, and I nodded, not really knowing what she said. I caught the words “to idio enai,” which means “it’s the same.”

“You understand me?” I nodded. “What did I say?” she asked in English.

I shrugged, slightly embarrassed. “I thought you sounded Greek,” she said, shuffling away.

“But not Cypriot?” I asked – I’ve been getting that a lot here. I sound like a mainlander.

She stopped and her attitude changed. She frowned and swatted at her face like shooing away a fly. “Cypriot,” she sighed. “It’s not good to be a Cypriot. Before, we were like this,” she put her hands together – “Greeks and Turks. We live, we work, all the same. Now, the Turks come, and it’s no good anymore.” It took me a moment to realize she mean the Turks from Turkey in 1974.

Then, her eyes watering, she said, “My mother is Greek, my father was a Turk. Nobody liked me. Now my mother is dead, my father is dead, I have no husband, no children. It’s only me. I’m all alone. What can I do?”

I had no idea what to say to that. I didn’t know how to react at all. “It’s OK,” she said. “Thank you for listening to the rambling of an old woman,” she said quietly and shuffled off.

What does one say to something like that? “Well, gee, sorry to hear your life pretty much sucked from the moment you were conceived. I’m going to go take my expensive camera and my ticket home and go look at pretty things in a museum now” doesn’t seem to quite cut it.

Of all the experiences I’ve had on this island, I think this is the one I’m going to remember for the rest of my life. I almost feel obligated to remember this woman’s story and carry it with me when I go.

Tags: byzantine_art, cypriot, Cyprus, greeks, Nicosia, turks