Because those ARE old palm trees.\u00a0 And they ARE old buildings now preserved.\u00a0 But they’re also not very old, ya know?<\/p>\n
Anyway, the ocean front street is called Athens Way… but none of the locals call it that.\u00a0 They call it Finikoudes, roughly translated as “palm tree seafront.”\u00a0 It marks the beginning of the town center — the next two parallel streets serving as the main shopping corridors.\u00a0 It’s perhaps odd to think of the town center as the sea front, but the truth is Larnaca is a sea port town.\u00a0 It always has been.\u00a0 And the focus therefore has always been on the waterfront.<\/p>\n Cyprus floats as a crossroads of three continents – Europe, Asia, and Africa.\u00a0 And as such, it made for a strategic military point, as well as a commercial strategic point.\u00a0 In the game of Risk, it would be like Kamchatka… even though\u00a0Kamchatka is a real place on the eastern seaboard of Russia, the point is that there’s a RISK game theory that whoever controlled Kamchatka, controlled the world.\u00a0 Cyprus was a linchpin and as such kept getting conquered as empires rose and fell.<\/p>\n Today it’s still a great crossroads for the seas and its marina is ever so popular with the super yacht crowd because you can moor your boat, step off onto the pier and stroll to the town center tout suite.\u00a0 It’s a great central point to use a base to explore other parts of this area and it affords maintenance options amidst the open seas.<\/p>\n The founding of the city dates to Kition, which lies about 20 minutes from the city center.\u00a0 Experts believe there’s a connection to Kittim, the grandson of Noah.\u00a0 And because of the city’s proximity to water, there’s a lot of festivals that are water based — Noah and the Flood, Aphrodite is the Sea Goddess of Greece and is the patron God of Cyprus, etc.<\/p>\n In the stone age, humankinds make an appearance on Cyprus most possibly by boat.\u00a0 But our guide said there’s not a lot to see archeologically save for the stone foundations of former “houses.”\u00a0 If you read my take on Athens, there’s only so much broken stones that are just crumpled masses that I can look at without kinda taking it for granted.<\/p>\n The copper age was ushered in because copper was apparently first discovered in Cyprus and therefore it became a rich trading post.\u00a0 The Phoenicians came with their alphabet and established their first port here.<\/p>\n There’s a lot of conquering that goes on throughout the BC centuries, but ultimately it’s the Persians who win out for a long time.\u00a0 There was an effort lead by the Athenian general to liberate the island, and he was feared by the Persians.\u00a0 Unfortunately, he was mortally wounded in battle… but his last command was to tell his soldiers to keep it quiet and make like he hadn’t died to keep scaring the Persians.\u00a0 Alas, it wasn’t until much later when Alexander the Great would take the island from the Persians.\u00a0 Still, the city loved General Kimon, and in the 1920s they erected a statue in his honor with the inscription: “Victorious even in death.”<\/p>\n Speaking of Greeks, Zeno of Citium, a famous Greek stoic philosopher, came from Cyprus.\u00a0 Perhaps his most famous quote, the kind of thing we’d retweet now as internet meme, is “God gave us two ears and one mouth, so that we might listen twice as much as we speak” (paraphrased).<\/p>\n Traveling through time like we were dusting crops, the Roman era of Cyprus diminished the role of the city of Larnaca because Rome made Pathos on the western coast the capital.<\/p>\n However… as part of the Byzantium Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, there was a big connection with St. Lazarus, the good friend of Jesus… the good dead friend of Jesus who Jesus brought back from the dead… not as a zombie but as a guy who feared being persecuted and fled to Cyprus to live out the next 30 years as an influential follower.\u00a0 In this second life, he even became Bishop of Cyprus.\u00a0 He would die, a second time, and be buried here… and atop his tomb a church was built… and then rebuilt in 890 AD using funds from the Byzantium Emperor.\u00a0 It was a quid pro quo – Cyprus gave him Lazarus’s bones, famed relics, and he built them a church.<\/p>\n King Richard III accidentally conquered Cyprus on his third crusade… but wanted to keep pushing on so tried selling the island.\u00a0 First he sold it to the Knights Templar but the local Cypriot population proved to be too much for them.\u00a0 So Richard III found another buyer — Guy de Lusignan, a French aristocrat who had just been kicked out of his Middle Eastern holdings… a king without a kingdom.\u00a0 So he took over Cyprus as his and introduced the feudal system.\u00a0 Welcome to progress, Cyprus — now the locals are all vassals and personal property is a thing of the past.\u00a0 Sigh.<\/p>\n The Venetians would take control <\/span>some 300 years later and made Cyprus a trading superstar.\u00a0 Thanks to their obsession with protecting their investment, defensive walls and forts were established throughout the land… most notably in Nicosia (which I’m hoping to see later on).\u00a0 More walls were built.\u00a0 More walls.\u00a0 The more things change.<\/p>\n Despite all that defense spending, the Turks would muscle in and take over anyway.<\/p>\n During the Turkish Ottoman Empire rule of Cyprus (1571-1878), all church bells were banned because it interfered with the Islamic call to prayers.\u00a0 Bell towers were toppled… which is why in the photos below the bell tower has a different color scheme.\u00a0 It was rebuilt after the British took administrative control of Cyprus in 1878.<\/p>\n The reason the British took over was because Cyprus feared the rising influence of Tsarist Russia in Turkey and beyond.\u00a0 They cut a deal with Britain that they’d take over the administration of Cyprus in exchange for protection… nice country we got here… it’d be a shame if anything happened to it.<\/p>\n Flash forward to 1960 when Cyprus gains its independence.\u00a0 And then flash forward to 1974 when the Turks invaded Northern Cyprus.\u00a0 They claim it was because Cyprus was leaning toward merging with Greece proper, and the Turks therefore had to protect the 18% of the island population who were Turkish Cypriots.\u00a0 I suppose it’s where Putin got the idea for invading Ukraine.\u00a0 Anyway, at the time it was universally condemned and Northern Cyprus became a rogue nation.\u00a0 All Greek Cypriots living in the north fled to the south as refugees.\u00a0 All Turkish Cypriots living in the south were advised by Turkey to go North.\u00a0 In a weird “temporary” land swap, which is entering its 46th year, the forfeiture of property had local governments grant the northern Greek Cypriot refugees access to the now unoccupied Turkish Cypriot houses in the south.<\/p>\n In 2003, the first checkpoints between the rogue North and Cyprus was established… and yet today after four plus decades, 40,000 Turkish troops have continued to occupy and “guard” Northern Cyprus.\u00a0 It is a serious geo-political problem.\u00a0 The people themselves per usual are not the issue.\u00a0 It’s the “power elite” who continue to exploit differences and “otherness” and “extremists” as grounds for walls and separations.<\/span><\/p>\n I scribbled down one concluding word as I tried to work out the details of this complicated matter:<\/p>\n Crazy.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The Greek Orthodoxy Religion is big in Cyprus… with minority religions also kinda, sorta respected.\u00a0 Our guide kept talking about despite tensions on the global stage between foreign powers, the local people are all Cypriots.\u00a0 But she kept making distinctions between Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots and between the local church and say the one still operating mosque or the Armenian church that all seemed like curiosities rather than aspects of the community.<\/p>\n But apparently in Greek Orthodoxy, candles are big — it’s believed that an effigy offering burned in the church can be helpful.\u00a0 Some people who are seriously ill ask for a life size candle model of themselves be made so that it can be burned in the church and they might be saved that way.\u00a0 Different ailments in different parts of the body make for different candle representations — hands, feet, you name it and they’ll dip it in wax so you can burn it.\u00a0 New parents might ask for a baby figure candle to burn in the church to pray for good health for their child.\u00a0 Wandering into one of those candle shops was the stuff of horror movie nightmares.<\/p>\n Viewer discretion is advised.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ready?<\/p>\n I wrote down two words after walking out of that place, a location I could pitch six different serial killer lairs to my writer friends.\u00a0 Those two words:<\/p>\n Super creepy.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n It feels off to finish this here because I actually am enjoying Cyprus.\u00a0 But we don’t always get to write the endings we want…. sometimes we just write the endings as they are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Context is everything. So when the free walking city tour began and our tour guide pointed to various buildings and palm trees along the sea front walkway, I thought I knew what she meant by “these things are very old.”\u00a0 I had just come from Athens where the Parthenon is some 2500 years old.\u00a0 And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35073\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/20191113_095005.jpg\")
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