The marble plaque is improbably particular. The Greek inscription, from 2013, reads: “On this beach, on 9 January one thousand years ago, Aphrodite stepped onto the shores of Pafos.” A hulking rock formation marks the spot the place the Greek goddess of love is alleged to have emerged off the coast of Cyprus in a flurry of sea spray and spume, posing bare, not less than in response to Botticelli’s Fifteenth-century rendering, on an enormous scallop shell. She has lengthy demanded deference on this sun-hardened island at the far-eastern edge of the Mediterranean—the historic temples at Palaipafos, Amathous, and Kition, the place she was as soon as worshipped and has been downgraded over the ages into the bare-chested Aphrodite statuettes offered in memento outlets throughout the land. As the solar rises over distant hills (sluggish and unhurried, as is the Cypriot method), throwing her birthplace into reduction in opposition to a gray-hazed horizon, I forged a silent problem to the notoriously capricious deity: Can you assist me fall again in love with this place I as soon as referred to as house?
I grew up not removed from right here, in Cyprus’s second-largest metropolis, Lemesos, or Limassol. My English father and Kenyan Indian mom arrived in the late Seventies and by no means left. A saucepan-shaped mass 140 miles lengthy and 62 miles vast, Cyprus is the third largest island in the Med, after Sicily and Sardinia. But by my mid-20s, it had began to really feel small. Like I did not fairly belong. Surrounded by sea, I grew stressed, even resentful. So I left for Dubai, an inconsequential footnote in a protracted historical past of outward and inward migration.
Cyprus’s strategic location has attracted a lot of undesirable admirers over the ages: the Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Romans, Arabs, Byzantines, Crusaders, Venetians, Ottomans, and British all handed by way of, after which, in 1974, Türkiye invaded and continues to occupy 36% of the island, rendering Lefkosia, or Nicosia, one of the final remaining divided capitals in the world, eternally altering the Cypriot psyche. The result’s a knotty, fractured id. Cyprus is a member of the EU however not fairly European. It is Greek-speaking and -leaning however not half of Greece. Though many will attempt to deny it, it feels undeniably Middle Eastern, nearer geographically to Beirut or Amman than Athens or Thessaloniki.