A Cypriot Kind of Glimpse

you can’t go there, the police warned me I’m just looking I said and firmed my feet on the ground kept stretching my head towards Evagorou Avenue to get a glimpse of the municipal market’s façade,
the Agora of Varosi, a place of the commons

a diagonal look from the Singer shop corner and my mind trespassed the forbidden zone, a Cypriot kind of stretching over all kinds of borders rusty barrels, barbed wires, dark holes and dead ends to get a kind of glimpse of possible bridges to unite the long-desired return with the future re-settlement

the agricultural mosaic of the city that market was then, the main supplier for the local public and the foreign now, you can’t go there the police repeated my head returned to its unstretched posture, checking if I can lean on the wall at the same corner to stay a little longer at this junction of memory and wonder

fresh groceries from the villages still smelling of wet soil a mixture of spicy herbals, sweet fruits, crunchy roots the souvlaki smoke pulling shoppers in to satisfy their hunger, the fountain at Afxentiou Street, was there to cool the summer heat and the sweat of intensive labour, an oasis in the city I wish I could take as shelter

you can’t go there —

imagining the Agora revealed the aromas of my memory I listed them one by one, like ‘my favourite things’ imagined at the times of disappointment and grief like in the musical from the 60s ‘The Sound of Music’, it used to play at Hatjihambi, the cinema in ruins only darkness is on show now, light is long-awaited

the source of enlightenment was the public library shining on the artworks too in the upper-floor gallery, the cultural and intellectual mosaics of affluent life
formed then to bring this city ahead of its time, the war came and shattered this trajectory progress shines today on the shards of the broken

hope collectors safeguard the remnants of mutual care mutual understanding of loss, injustice and open wounds, ‘in culture we trust’, we trust in a shared sense of Cyprus, over the rusty barrels, barbed wires, dark holes, dead ends a Cypriot kind of glimpse of the shared sense of the future

can we go there? —

Nafia Akdeniz