Cyprus: Crossroads of East and West

Well do I remember traveling to Cyprus for a week in the fall of 1993. Ottawa was just beginning to get very cool that autumn, but Cyprus was bracingly warm. I remember the trip largely because I had an emergency appendectomy six days before leaving, and feared my trip would be in jeopardy. But the surgery was swift and the recovery equally so and soon I was on my way from Montreal to London to Nicosia, where, inter alia, I toured the no man's land separating Cypriots and Turks, which was made all the more jarring and indeed absurd because it was surrounded by high-end boutiques in a rather rarefied shopping district.

A recent book treats Cyprus as a place of encounter between Eastern and Western Christians: Benjamin Arbel et al., eds., Cyprus and the Renaissance (1450-1650) (Brepols, 2013),420pp.

About this book we are told:

The present collection is the first of its kind centered on intellectual exchanges during the Renaissance period, deepening their source-based documentary study, as well as our knowledge of the island’s culture and heritage in relation to political, scholarly and religious life in Western countries.

These twelve essays by leading scholars in the field are products of an international research project on early modern Cyprus and its relation to cultural developments in the West, started in November 2009. Cyprus, an independent ‘Frankish’ kingdom from 1191 to 1473, became a Venetian protectorate, then, in 1489, a　Venetian colony until its conquest by the Ottomans in 1570. Its population was diverse and rich in religious experience　–　preponderantly followers of the Greek rite, but also Latins, Eastern Christians and Jews. Its heritage from Antiquity, as well as from the Byzantine and Frankish periods, its monasteries (which received, reproduced and produced manuscripts) and its geopolitically pivotal site on East-West trade routes attracted numerous Westerners. The cultural magnet drew deeper interests than those of pilgrimage and tourism. The continuous to and fro of Europeans, many of them Venetian, the island’s importance to economic and military strategies, and the allure conferred by　a　mythological past stimulated and fostered　a　generous descriptive and allusive literature. The present collection is the first of its kind, centered on written culture and exchanges during the Renaissance period, deepening their source-based documentary study, as well as our knowledge of the island’s culture and heritage in relation to cultural developments in Western countries.

Essays by: Benjamin Arbel, Daniele Baglioni, Lorenzo Calvelli, Evelien Chayes, Paola Cosentino, Carlo Alberto Girotto, Gilles Grivaud, Angel Konnari-Nicolaou, Enrico Parlato, Paolo Procaccioli, Chris Schabel, Evangelia Skoufari.