Death Of The Fish Meze

‘TUNA: One of the largest of the migrating fish, the Tuna frequents northern waters during the summer months. In winter, however, it travels down to the Mediterranean and remains there, living at a great depth. In spring it comes in to the shore, spawns and departs in shoals for the north. The flesh is both tasty and plentiful, but is only to be found tinned.’

Excerpt taken from Fish Of Greece, by George Sfikas 1999

The above may sound sad and pathetic, but how true we know it to be.

Like most Mediterranean peoples, the Cypriots are great seafood lovers. And though our fishermen are not dredging up dolphin-friendly tins of diet tuna, neither are they hooking the real thing in great numbers.

The Med is quite simply over fished. Any attempt at regulating fishing quotas, net mesh sizes, hooks, lines, sinkers has been poorly enforced for too long now.

Biologists tell us that big fish like tuna and swordfish, due to their place in the food chain, carry more accumulated mercury than you can shake a ship’s thermometer at. That, however is not the reason it is appearing less and less at the end of the fish meze now is it?Paphian fish restaurant owners have been, recently, lamenting the loss of a fair proportion of their weekend Nicosia trade. At only 20 minutes from the capital, Kyrenia has drawn away the customers, who prefer to eat by the picturesque harbour. Though unconfirmed, the Express understands that a lot of the fish up there comes frozen from Zygi.

Frozen or not, the contents of the meze, both in quantity and quality have taken a bit of a nosedive no matter where you decide to fillet your fish.

Paphos is becoming notorious for its hiked up prices, closely followed, incidentally by our friends in Kyrenia. Pissouri compares well with most and Limassol offers a good range, from budget taverna to very expensive international cuisine.

Ironically, Cyprus’ saving grace is its farmed fish. Delicious bream and bass (Tsipoura and Lavraki) are always available fresh, and now crown the meze the way a freshly caught snapper or grouper used to, in the days that there was more to see underwater than a jellyfish, an Arabic newspaper and a kilometre of orange twine. Unlike the farmed salmon in Scotland, these two are safe, nutritious and very cheap.
Swordfish sometimes makes a cameo on the table, though in increasingly invisible amounts and if you go to a truly good taverna, soupies kathistes, squid cooked in its own ink, red wine and cinnamon may also lighten up your dinner.

Apart from these traditional dishes, frozen red mullet from Thailand, crabs that have stepped on anti-personnel mines and landed in the deep fryer and even more deeply fried sole, fresh from Iceland (but not the country) are now the protagonists in the majority of our fish tavernas.
Not just tourist-oriented tavernas, either. Locals complain about the price and the quality of fish, and for good reason, too.
So, what has changed things? Is it pressure from the tourist? Do the Brits want everything deep fried? Do the Germans only like crabs cooked to the consistency of bison hooves?
Are the ingredients expensive? Frozen Thai red mullet are not. They may not measure up to rare, fresh, local produce, but they could be treated with more respect than the culinary equivalent of nuclear fission.
Does a good meze take too long to prepare? Who’s in a hurry?

To give restaurateurs their due, good food does take time as well as skill. But that’s not what the meze was about. It was about eating small amounts of whatever was fresh, appetising, ready and went well with the younger Cypriot wines. If, over time we sneaked in a few imported, frozen prawns because the Cypriot ones warranted a mini mortgage before ordering, then so be it. At least they were grilled, sprinkled with olive oil, sea salt and parsley – not coated in village flour and pan-fried into oblivion.
The salad, always fresh in Cyprus, has never needed anointing with ‘crab-sticks’. (‘Crap sticks’ if their contents were to be more truthfully described).

Cyprus will never have the rich choice of fresh seafood of France, or even better, Scotland, nor will it ever come close to the cuisine of Spain, but in the meze it had a humble offering that was enjoyed by a long table full of loud relatives, bewildered guests, messy kids and end-of-shift waiters. The transition from very slow to fast food has been insidious, but there is still time to fix it, before it all goes wrong.

Bike Lame

Will Paphos ever take to pedal power?February 2004

In my late 20s, about 200 years ago, on a weekend trip to Amsterdam with my flatmate, I found myself parting with hard earned Sterling to hire a bicycle to get about town. If we were at all apprehensive about jumping on a bike after all the years we avoided them or anything vaguely healthy, our misgivings soon evaporated into the Dutch evening sky as two leggy beauties called us over to join them on what we assumed would be a cycle ride around the city. Or, whatever.
Not even our overactive imagination could ever see us taking part in a cyclists’ demonstration. Suddenly, there we were rallying against cars using central Amsterdam, stricter pollution controls and heavier fines to be levied on those that failed to adhere to Holland’s strict environmental guidelines.
As we watched ourselves on the local news at ten on the TV later on that night, the TV cameras were pointed at the ‘rent-a-bike’ signs on our baskets, emphasizing the impact the proposed no-car policy could have on tourism. Two tourists fighting for the rights of the Dutch cyclist and the good of the urban environment.Could you ever imagine that situation in Paphos? For a start, the numbers would be reversed, surely? I can see more visitors demonstrating for safer cycling than Cypriots. In fact, are there any Cypriot cyclists in Paphos? Do they meet in secret under the cover of darkness? Is it safer then?
It’s certainly not safer to ride around the so called cycle lanes, is it?
The unblinking traffic-terrorised tourist that pioneers the route will find him/herself confronted with parked cars, skips, wheelie bins and, ermm, oncoming traffic…Is there really any likelihood of a Paphian getting on his bike for a 200 meter trip to the kiosk? Not if he can drive his car up to the counter to pay for his Royals is the general concensus, I’m afraid. Even though we’ve painted parts of our roads pink and pretty powder blue and lined them with loose paving blocks as a gesture to the accession of the European Union, we haven’t followed this with any national education programme to promote cycling in any way whatsoever. Our local municipality has shown little imagination in instigating any bicycle use in Paphos. School kids are more likely to travel to school by customized, farting moped rather than mountain bike – little hope then that the new generation will have a healthier outlook than the current one. In fact, whoever had the foresight to lay out 300 concrete paving blocks around the football stadium needs to be taken aside and quietly set in concrete himself before he gets his hands on any more pen and paper and plan our general demise. Can you imagine what a deranged football fan can do to another one with one of these? He can press him like a wild flower and put him in an album, that’s what.Therein lies the problem, of course. Tradition and culture ridicule the use of pedal power here in Cyprus. Would it be suitable for your bank manager to get his local branch wearing an aerodynamic helmet, bicycle clips and a day-glo waistband? Not such a rare sight in the streets of Chelsea or Frankfurt perhaps, but in Paphos, it simply will not do. Not when you’ve got a burgundy BMW all turtle-waxed and a parking space all to yourself in the basement.
In fact, the only local I’ve seen around town looked more than slightly insane, riding what can only be called a rectal probe (there was no seat) with 12 wing mirrors, 6 horns, an assortment of bells, tassles, reflectors and rotating lights.

We are not the most active of Europeans, that’s for sure. Diet and healthy nutrition is confined to women’s magazines, we like to smoke in confined spaces and we don’t understand why others may object, we eat too much red meat and our idea of exercise is taking the kids to the cinema or going to the harbour for a frappe.
OK, that’s exaggerated, but the tide’s not exactly turning, is it?
You may argue that our gyms have never been busier, but I would suggest this is more in search of the body beautiful rather that a healthier lifestyle. Nothing wrong with that you say. Well, why not cycle around town rather than on the spot?

We have pedestrianised ‘Bar Street’ in Kato Paphos, so maybe the time has come to encourage us to make our hearts healthier by really enforcing no car zones.
And if you’re going to cheat, don’t get a taxi – get a rickshaw.

Fiti 1984

Listening to the slow, rattling voice of a mourning villager.

Sitting in the shade in Fiti, where all the men and women are struggling to stay awake. They talk of the inevitability of death, the beauty of it, even. Being old is being dead they say. Death itself is a re-birth.

A very old, blemished and cataracted man sits shyly with knees arkwardly together. He is listless and blank, but probably thinking. Too tired to give or take advice and too old to care, but putting an overall picture of everything together.

Young kids with cropped hair carry elastic slings and loose buckshot in the pockets of polyester shorts. Bubblegum too big for their cheesy grins.

The motorbike engine still rasps in my bones and head. It snaps and crackles at rest from the journey through the mountains in this heatwave. Like a young marathon runner, shaking and slightly delirious.

Pigeons fight for space in the shade of the small, high  windows in the mukhtar’s house opposite this coffee shop. Shit-stained and delapitated shutters swing on rusted hinges, pushed by dry wafts of August air. A breeze that dries the fields and weeds, cooling the pachyderms, silent and jerky in the premium shade. You can see their hearts beat through translucent skin.

The lizards’ movement is that of the people of Cyprus. They hang on to neighbours’ railings, marking their cheeks on the criss-cross grills, listening, talking, picking at the peeling paintwork, exposing the past. Sometimes this sparks a chain of events, a precarious, fragmented memory.

When Elli’s railings were green I was still filling my pockets with marbles and pouring playground dirt into my open knee cuts, fascinated by the viscous pus I could later squeeze out.

Elli’s son was, to us, clearly retarded. A fact we celebrated with the cruel, juvenile satisfaction of young Bamboula boys.

His name was Chrysos. He once jumped from the low garden wall of my grandparents house, trying to somersault through the air and land on his feet. Eagerly we watched him plummet to the pavement, the back of his head cracking the brittle paving stone.

Now, Elli’s railings are red and Chrysos is a basketball player. A good one, too.

I start my bike up and leave Fiti and think about Elli and the green railings, four years before it all happened. Along with thousands of others I was escaping an invading Turkish army. But something, somewhere has obstructed any vivid recollection of the car journey from Kyrenia to Limassol. All that remains is the crackling sounds of a calm but inexperienced radio announcer telling us ‘the Archbishop Makarios is dead’, the black and white newsreeels of armoured vehicles searching, finding and destroying Greek-Cypriot strongholds in the shimmering Mesaoria plain and alien paratroopers falling from above, too many silhouettes to count.

And the picture of the captured men, kneeling in front of the Anatolians with their hands on their heads.

Everything changed after that.