Island Traditions

Recently the Tennessee group set off to the Old City in Nicosia to have a meze and learn some traditional dancing.

We went to Xephotos. The restaurant was nicely put together for being in the old city and the owner had put up colorful Cypriot weaves all around on the walls. When we asked about them, we learned that only older women made them and they no longer made them with so many colors.

We sat down and the servers began to bring us our meze. This meze was one of the most fantastic food extravaganzas I have ever had, and well worth the 16 Euro. A meze is a traditional Cypriot meal style where somewhere around 32 small portions of Cypriot foods are brought to you over the course of the meal. Just when I thought I’d found a favorite, they would bring out more great tasting food! They had kebobs of chicken and pork, spreads of humus, veggies, and tomatoes, mushrooms, more chicken, extremely tender lamb, Greek salad, meatballs, couscous, halloumi cheese, and a whole bunch of food I didn’t even know the name for. This meal was good, real good.

After eating enough food to sustain a small kingdom, the restaurant owner turned on some music. It was a mix of traditional Cypriot music, Greek music, and Arabic music. A young man named Paul showed us some dance steps. The basic move was one where you took one foot and stepped it behind the other while your arms stuck out like a scarecrow.

After dancing we sat and talked with the restaurant owner and asked him about the dancing we had just done. Apparently we weren’t natural dance masters, but I wasn’t too surprised, I’ve never been one to catch on to dancing right away. Traditional Cyprian dancing was more complex that what we had just done, there were dancing schools that taught it.

As we continued to talk with him I noticed how he continued to refer back to the “young people” of Cyprus. They dictated a lot of what was available at Xephotos. The owner had recently started selling hookahs for smoking, an Arabic tradition that had caught on in Cyrpus. In addition one of his other restaurants, a Mexican restaurant called Chili’s had a big screen TV where people could watch the Soccer cup and other sports. He also mentioned how up until a few years ago, Cypriot coffee was the only kind of coffee they had on the island. But once the younger generation saw how iced coffee had caught on in Greece everyone on the island started drinking it.

It made me think of how technology and internet has shrunk borders between nations. I hear such complaints in the media all the time, but this was the first time I had actually seen and realized how a culture can be drastically affected by another country’s culture. The younger generations did not want to learn how to make traditional weaves, like the ones in the restaurant, they wanted to drink iced coffee like the Europeans. They did not want to dance like Cypriots, they wanted to dance like Arabs and Greeks.

I have no fear of Cypriot culture being completely consumed however; the people here take a certain pride in knowing their heritage. The restaurant owner told us of how the people from the dancing schools would come to his restaurant to show off what they knew. In addition, tourism is a large part of the economy on the island, and those people want to see things that are indigenous to the island –like the weaves, and eat things that are native to the culture—like the meze. Thus, technology both shrinks our borders, but also fuels our desires to maintain tradition, if not for pride, at least for profit.