OVER THE last week most Cypriots have watched the dramatic events unfold with morbid fascination, aware that their lives were about to change in ways not seen since the Turkish invasion.
Yesterday as the denouement approached and the island’s fate was being brutally thrashed out in Brussels, the public response was a combination of fear, anger and plain fatigue.
“Do you understand what’s going on? Cyprus is destroyed,” a 55-year-old Cypriot woman living in London said. “I’ve been crying for days now.“
“It’s all horrible. I keep watching the news. I am depressed,” 56-year-old Margarita Xenofontous said.
“No one knows what they are doing, with no exceptions,” said Christina Theophilou, a 33-year-old mother of two who is pregnant with her third.
Referring to the eurozone’s finance ministers meeting yesterday, she said that she prayed the divine light would help them “do the right thing”. Christina is not religious, but like many others, the uncertainty is bearing down on her.
“I haven’t felt so uncertain about the future since I was 13 and Cyprus was invaded,” 53-year-old nursery teacher Dora Giorgali told Reuters yesterday. Giorgali lost her job two years ago when the school she worked at closed down.
“I have two children studying abroad and I tell them not to return to Cyprus. Imagine a mother saying that,” Giorgali said. “I think a solution will be found tonight but it won’t be in the best interest of our country.”
In Nicosia’s Ledra St yesterday, coffee shops, restaurants and many shops were open for business as usual. And, also as usual for Sunday, the street was packed. There was still the woman who sells local produce on the busy pedestrian street, the pop corn stand, and there were - as ever - families with small children buying ice cream. But a sign on a mobile phone store also said, “Cash only – until the financial situation is resolved.” And across town, around 200 bank workers demonstrated outside the presidential palace chanting “Troika out of Cyprus!” and “Cyprus is not for sale!”
Many yesterday sipping coffee and chatting in the busy coffee shops said they had had enough of the news.
A group of friends in their 30s, most of them civil servants, said they were escaping from the non-stop and “unreliable” news coverage and were “trying to forget”, although one of them admitted they were not doing a very good job of completely avoiding the subject matter.
A family of four said they had laid down a new rule from Friday: “no more news”. They decided as a family to tune in today and find out the aftermath of the bailout talks. “They tell us one thing, and then another,” Marios said, sitting next to his two sons.
“Tell me anything you want, but don’t talk about the monetary crisis,” 57-year-old architect, Giorgos Fialis said in a down town coffee shop. “That’s why we are here,” he said. “We are discussing people, the theatre, anything else except (the crisis),” he said. His friend, 48-year-old Glafcos Theophylactou, a graphic designer and teacher, said that there are still “many beautiful things in life”.
Theophylactou tried to watch the news yesterday but gave up after five minutes. Better to wait until something is finalised, the two friends said.
But how can they keep away now? isn’t Cyprus’ history being rewritten?
“Without us,” Fialis said.
Cash only sign on Ledra Street in Nicosia yesterday