Name of the game
YOU may be reading this in Çatalköy, Alsancak perhaps, or in my case Karşıyaka. Well, we’re all “illegal”. Better make sure you are in Agios Epiktitos, Karavas or Vasileia, or you could face a huge fine or even three years in jail!
Our offence? The use of geographical names not registered by the Republic of Cyprus. Happily we all get away with it, but an MP in the South has dragged up this stupid piece of legislation to try to punish organisers of the Cyprus Rally.
Giorgos Perdikis, a Green, is pressing the South’s interior minister to “take measures” against them for using maps with Turkish names for some areas in the North. The minister, Constantinos Petrides, said that indeed, some of the names on the rally website were not from the “official dictionary of geographical names”. This applies to all maps, books and documents, digital or conventional. Aaargh!
It is doubly galling for our Greek Cypriot friends because the event is sponsored by the Cyprus Tourism Organisation and shown by state broadcaster CyBC.
Throughout the world, place names can be problematic. I am always slightly irked when I hear BBC newsreaders and reporters showing off with localised versions such as “Beijing” for Peking and “Mumbai” for Bombay. Who says? Nobody in Britain speaks of “Sevilla”, “Wien”, “Roma”, “Den Haag” or “Kobenhaven”, let alone “Hrvatska”, “Polska”, “Magyargorszag” or “Ellas”. With the Indians and Chinese, it’s pure PC.
For the Greek Cypriots though, it’s all deadly serious. How dare Turkish Cypriots use, er, Turkish names. In their minds, they still control the whole island and, one sweet day, will surely reassert their rule.
And yet, for nearly 45 years, they have never ceased their rhetoric of “illegal state” and “occupied territories”, and where has it got them? “Back to Kyrenia”? They are further away than ever. If the person sitting on the other side of any negotiating table refuses to address you with the name by which you wish to be known, then it’s a non-starter.
Still, they are welcome to keep popping over to fill up on petrol IT’S the same for some unfortunate members of the Cyprus State Symphony Orchestra who have been branded “reprehensible” over there for daring to agree to perform at Bellapais Abbey. The artistic director, orchestra leader and other musicians face disciplinary action and may well lose their jobs.
“Music is the universal language of mankind,” said the great American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Not in Cyprus, it ain’t. But the beat goes on, according to the UN — STILL obssessed with getting the Cyprus talks back on track, while the Greek Cypriots demonstrate over and over that they have no real interest in living in harmony with their neighbours. OLDER Cyprus hands used to tell me how, in the early ’70s, the late Peter Sellers whizzed around Girne in a mini-moke, popping into the Harbour Club for a drink. Eventually, while researching an article, Cyprus in the Movies, for Living magazine, I discovered this was all quite true.
It was actually 1973 when the great comic actor arrived on our shores, to make a movie called Ghost in the Noonday Sun. Unlikely plot: a shabby pirate kills his captain, then relies on his ghost to recover his buried treasure.
Never heard of it? I’m not surprised. Sellers was a notoriously unstable character, difficult to control at the best of times. But during the filming of some early scenes, a drunken Cypriot captain smashed his “pirate” ship into the wall of the town’s harbour. Sellers duly fell out with director Peter Medak and led a cast mutiny intended to sabotage the film. He succeded and it was never released.
You may find the odd clip of this true disaster movie on the internet. It seems to have consisted mainly of Sellers and Spike Milligan jumping up and down, shouting in cod Oirish accents.
I’m telling you all this because the story has now remerged in the shape of a documentary, The Ghost Of Peter Sellers, about the making of this calamitous comedy, which still haunts director Medak 45 years later.
It’s been receiving plaudits at early showings at the Venice Film Festival — and it provides an opportunity to wallow in nostalgic shots of Girne and Alagadi.
Next week it will be shown in Athens, then at the Raindance Film Festival in London on October 5 and 6 and the DOC-NY festival in New York in November . . . and also available soon, no doubt, at a DVD shop near you.
(One funny thing did come out of this cinematic shambles — an off-shoot Benson & Hedges commercial filmed at the Customs house on the harbour. You can find it on YouTube.) THE saga of my injured leg continues but I don’t anymore have to go to Girne Hospital every day, having discovered the Lapta Health Clinic.
Here the TRNC has an excellent idea going: village ambulance stations doubling as walk-in clinics for minor injuries. There are staff on duty during normal hours for mother and baby care and the like, but with trained paramedics standing by, you may also turn up, like me, for bandaging and injections.
It probably wouldn’t work in the big cities of the UK, but what a good way to take the pressure off hard-pressed hospital A&E departments.