"Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time
Who countest the steps of the Sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime,
Where the traveller's journey is done;
William Blake (1757-1827)
So....it's been two months since my last blog, not for want of respite, but rather being busy, traveling, afflicted with a dry spell for topics, and attending to projects piling up on my desk. One, among the latter, has been working on my application for dual citizenship in Portugal which is progressing nicely, thank you. People greet me with a puzzled look when I tell them about this but my answer is that, in uncertain times, it's best to have a back-up plan should things go south. This is certainly not for any lack of patriotism, for I love my country more than you'd ever know. Chalk it up to my anxiety about where we might be headed. Why Portugal, you ask? I've traced my father's family back centuries to Portugal which now has a formal law that, if you can prove your family was evicted by the Inquisition, you are entitled, after a lengthy and arduous process, to dual citizenship in Portugal, and an EU passport. I'll keep you posted.
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| The flag of Portugal |
The topic of today's blog will be about our recent journey to the beautiful island-nation of Cyprus. Just to refresh what I've written about in the past, my Viennese maternal grandfather immigrated to the US in 1905 and, in 1917, went back for his little sister, Mathilde. Apparently, they journeyed on foot from Vienna to Hamburg over weeks where my now-American citizen grandfather and his little sister boarded a ship for Ellis Island. Mathilde (or Tillie as she was known) met and fell in love with a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner, Chris Hadjicharambulous in New York City. They married and they became Mr. and Mrs. Chris Harrison, with the disapproval of her observant Jewish family, the reason we never knew of this whole branch of my mom's family. In 1929, with the Great Depression, Chris and Tilly left the United States for Cyprus, the restaurant having failed like many other businesses.
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| The flag of Cyprus |
They first went to live in his village where life was very different and difficult for her. She had to "cook on wood" and learn Greek, knowing only English, German and Yiddish. It was a difficult time for her with, probably, more sad than happy days. She was eventually baptized into the Greek Orthodox Religion and changed her name to Cleo. Despite this, my grandfather continued to have correspondence with her without ever sharing it with the family.
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| Cleo (Tilly) and Chris |
Cleo and Chris had one child, Andreoniki, who, herself, had four children, three who survive today, Georgia, Cleo, and Christiana. The family eventually moved to Famagusta, a beautiful seaside resort city in Cyprus where Chris opened a restaurant. During WWII, he ran the food concession for the English troops based on the island, and this helped the family of three with ample nutrition.
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| Niki in her later years, the cousin my mom never knew she had |
Niki's granddaughter, Elena, found me by Ancestry.com two years ago. A Professor and Dean at the University of Nicosia, she was educated at Penn State and Michigan State (where she met her husband, Andreas, also a Cypriot). As a little girl, Elena lived in Kent, Ohio with her mom, dad, and brother, just minutes from where I did my Pediatrics residency, while her dad was getting his graduate degree at Kent State. Two years ago, we met Elena, Andreas, their three children (Harris, Constantinos and Cleo) and Christiana (who lives in Hamburg) in NYC and had a Sperber family reunion. We met again in Toronto last year where Elena was giving a paper at a conference. So....it was now time for us to travel to Cyprus!
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| Meeting Christiana for the first time in NYC, April, 2017 |
After months of planning, we were finally on our way. Our daughter, Brooke and son-in-law Hal, were to meet us there at the airport in Larnaca as they flew a different route than Suzanne and me.
I, initially was very excited, particularly to meet Niki, the cousin my mom never knew she had, but, unfortunately, elderly and ill, she passed away two weeks before our arrival. After a long flight through Chicago and London, we were greeted at the airport by Elena and her family and Christiana and her husband Kyriakos, along with Brooke and Hal who had gone with everyone for coffee and returned to the airport.
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| Constantinos waving at our flight in at Larnaca Airport! He is an entrepreneurial fellow who had prepared gifts for all of us, including Marc, with his new 3-D printer!! (Mine was an elephant that holds my cell phone upright!) |
The rental car was ready and fortunately Hal and Brooke offered to do all the driving for which I was thankful as the Cypriots, like the English, drive on the left side of the road, their having been a British colony at one time. We went in a caravan to Ayia Napa to the home of Cleo, one of Tilly's 3 granddaughters, I riding along with Kyriakos. She had a lovely spread of Souvlaki...pita with lamb, Cypriot sausage called sheftalia, and tzatziki with Cypriot beer (Keo)...what a treat after a long voyage! Feeling very satisfied, we arrived in Protaras at the house I had rented, walking distance to a white sandy beach with clear blue water, and with a swimming pool.
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| Our vacation rental in Protaras |
We said our good nights and settled into a much needed sleep. Christiana and Kyriakos had kindly already filled our refrigerator with provisions for breakfast! The next day was to be a big family lunch by the beach. We were greeted by the cousins of Brooke's generation. Besides Elena, there were the twin brothers who had flown down from Hamburg to greet us...Panajotis, a dentist, and Nectarios, a jet pilot, along with their cousin Thomas Raftis...we filled two big tables with two different generations. Before lunch, we took a stroll to a little church where a baby was being baptized that day, with its typical blue domed roof.
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| The little seaside church |
Lunch was a feast: a nice salad with feta cheese, olives, tzatziki and other dips and fresh warm pita bread. This was followed by platters of squid and octopus, both very tender...and then mullet fish, followed by fresh red snapper. I was in heaven.
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| Olives!!! |
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| Squid and Octopus |
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| Succulent Red Snapper! |
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| The family: (Left to right) Nectarios, Suzanne, Cleo, Georgia, Christiana, Panajotis, Elena, me, Andreas and Constantinos, Kyriakos, Harris, Cleo, and Hal and Brooke |
As we spent twelve days there, I will continue our journey in the next post. All I can say, after just one day, was that I was struck by the warmth, kindness, and welcome of my Cypriot family and my sense of closeness to them. While meeting most of them for the first time, I felt I had known them for many years!
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