Journey Into Cyprus
SynopsisPlot
This is the account of a unique journey -- a six-hundred-mile trek on foot around Cyprus in the last year of the island's peace. Colin Thubron intertwines myth, history, and personal anecdotes in a quest from which the characters and places, architecture, and landscape all spring vividly to the reader's eye.
Story
About this book
Journey Into Cyprus is Colin Thubron's account of a six-hundred-mile walk around the island of Cyprus, completed in the final year before the political crisis that divided the country. Thubron, a British travel writer known for long solo journeys through difficult terrain, covered the distance on foot, recording the people, architecture, and landscapes he encountered along the way.
The book moves between layers of time. Thubron weaves observations of contemporary Cypriot life with the island's deep history and its older mythological associations. Villages, ruins, churches, and coastline appear in close detail, and the people he meets along the road become part of the narrative alongside the physical terrain. Because the journey took place just before the Turkish invasion of 1974, everything Thubron describes carries a particular weight of timing. Some of the communities and places he visited were about to change drastically or disappear entirely.
Cyprus sits at a crossroads between Europe, Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean, and its cultural layers reflect Greek, Ottoman, Venetian, and British influences. Thubron's walking pace allows these layers to surface slowly, village by village, as he crosses the island.
