We spent most of today at the University of Nicosia where we had the opportunity to act as students and were given lectures on the history of Cyprus as well as the Greek language. As a part of the historical presentation, we discussed the period of time from 1878 to 1960 in which the British ruled the island. It was explained that after the about 300 year rule of the Ottoman Empire over the island, the people were grateful for the British takeover as they wanted to see change. At first, they saw improvements in their everyday life and British rule appeared to be better than Ottoman rule. This change in power also allowed for greater religious diversity as the Ottoman Empire put a focus on Islam (converting churches to mosques, etc.), and with British rule there was greater freedom in practicing religion. Later in the day we discussed this in our walking tour of Nicosia as the addition of bells on top of churches came in the late 19th century as the bells were not allowed during Ottoman rule.

However, over time the people on the island became discontent with British rule and, just as the USA did, the people began a fight for their freedom. In 1931 the Cypriots attacked the Governor’s Palace officially starting these efforts. The anti-colonial efforts first had the goal of unification with Greece, but over time this too changed to a general fight for the independence of Cyprus. During this time Britain would hang who they considered terrorists (people leading the anti-colonial fight) in the early hours of the morning and bury them in prison courtyards to hide their retaliation against the Cypriot’s rally for independence. Nowadays, there is a grave for those who were killed as a part of the quest of freedom, and they are recognized and remembered as heroes. This conflict only ended when the two “mother countries”, Turkey and Greece, and the ruling country Great Britain signed a document stating the independence of Cyprus. At this time the Cypriot people instated an archbishop who had led some of the efforts against the British as the President.

Dr. Solomou mentioned early on that Cyprus is often described as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier”, and his presentation proved Cyprus to be nothing short of that. Over the course of the lesson, we discussed the 15+ powers that controlled Cyprus and how the Cypriot people persisted and retained their own identity. I found it rather interesting to learn not only about the sheer number of rulers that Cyprus fell under before its modern state but also the diversity of those groups. Its location has clear importance in its current economic and political status, but this location allowed for groups from several different continents to take control–ranging from the early Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Romans to the later Ottomans, Venetians, and British. This is what has allowed us to see relics and architecture from so many different parts of the world, and I find it incredibly neat that so much diverse history can be stored within such a small area. I also appreciated the professor’s explanation of the flag as I think it is rather interesting to understand the creation of any country’s flag seeing as they have to be both simple and meaningful. For Cyprus we learned the flag was chosen to not have any symbolic bias towards Turkey or Cyprus meaning the color is neither red nor blue and there are no images that could be considered religiously affiliated.

Our second lecture of the day revolved around the Greek language and establishing a basic foundation of words, phrases, and pronunciation. Personally, I don’t think the language has the most difficult pronunciation, but there are certainly sounds that I am not as used to which can drastically increase the difficulty of speaking. The larger barrier is perhaps the different alphabet, but from the widespread use of Greek characters for engineering applications I surprised myself with how many of the letters I did have familiarity with. Using this familiarity and the patterns I picked up along the way, I started to attempt to pronounce the Greek words without relying on the Latin-written phonetic spelling. This is something I continued to do in the afternoon, and it was rather fun to attempt. I also appreciate that we learned how to count because I like “collecting” languages I can count at least a little in–it’s not many but it was higher in the past. I feel pretty confident with remembering numbers 1-24, but as for a specific word from today I will use ημέρα οκτώ, or day 8. There might be a more grammatically correct way to say that, but for this I am pulling ημέρα (day) from our favorite greeting kαλή μέρα (good day) and οκτώ means 8. I did look up the meaning of the η because I did not understand it’s use in kαλή μέρα, but now I know it is a marker for the article “the”.