Today we finally went to the University of Nicosia (UNIC). The university is really close to our hotel so the bus ride to UNIC was not too bad. We made it and went to a classroom. The lecture rooms were named after famous people like Da Vinci, Plato, Aristotle, and I thought that was pretty cool. Dr. Solomou gave us a lesson on the history of Cyprus. The British took over Cyprus in 1878 from the Ottoman empire peacefully under the circumstances that Britain offered the Ottomans protection from Russia. This helped the Ottomans not get taken over by Russia and also prevented Russia from advancing and becoming an issue for Britain to deal with. At first, Cypriots were happy to be out of Ottoman ruling, but then they did not like the way that the British were treating them. The Cypriots then tried to burn down the governor’s house to make their mark and start fighting for their independence, but the British found out and stopped them. As a result of this, the British enacted martial law and declared that anyone that would act against the British would be named terrorists. The British also had a lot of influence in other aspects like architecture, government (like the town hall in Nicosia Centre) and even on what side to drive on. Eventually Cyprus did gain its independence in 1960.
I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Solomou’s lecture today. Not only did he go into the history of Cyprus, he told us new information that we did not know and also put other information into a new perspective. The first new thing that I learned was about the Cyprus flag. Once Cyprus gained its independence, it needed a flag that would not offend either sides of Cyprus or give one side too much power. For content, they decided to put the whole country on it so that neither side had too much power and also the country is small enough to do so. Another thing was the color. They could not use red (for Turkey) or blue (for Greece) so they ended up with orange. The orange can be interpreted in many ways. One way is that the flag is orange due to the fact that copper was found in Cyprus long ago. The other way is the soil and how orange it is. This was very interesting to learn about. The other interesting thing was about the decline of great empires. Dr. Solomou said that the cycle of civilization will have to decline eventually unless they develop properly to keep up with the growth. I knew that all empires fall, but I never really thought about how they could develop in such ways to prevent the declination. Overall, the lecture was really interesting and enjoyable.
Lastly, we had a Greek lecture that went over some basic words, phrases and numbers. It was a very fun and interactive lecture. We learned how to say more forms of how to greet people (kalimera for morning time/day time, kalipera for afternoon/night time, and kalinihta for right before you sleep). We also learned how to say how are you (ti kanis?) and that a semicolon (;) in Greek is a question mark. A few things that stood out to me were how to emphasize certain letters in the speaking of a word that is shown where to by the accent in the word. Another thing was how the language that the Cypriots speak is a different dialect that is closer to ancient Greek than Greek used today in Greece. Smaragda, on of the global semesters chaperones, told us that in Cyprus, children are taught mainstream Greek, but they use the Cypriot Greek in their everyday lives which is very interesting. Last but not least, I found that Greek is a three-word-order language. This means that if you switch the order of some words, they still retain the same meaning. As someone who speaks two languages fully and is learning two more, I understand that this is very common between languages, but does not fully apply to English. Sometimes, moving around the words can mean something very different than the original meaning. This does occur in other languages, but it still is more common in English to not work well than other languages.
After the lecture and lessons were done, we had lunch and then went on a walking tour of Nicosia. We saw many old buildings that were from different time periods and even saw the border. After the tour was done, we explored more of the open market, had dinner and called it a day. Can’t wait for tomorrow!