The Foreign Residents in the TRNC (TFR)

A trip to “Mavi Kösk” and Korucam

By Ralph Kratzer

Last Saturday it was time for a TFR day trip again. More than 30 members took up the offer of the club and headed on the way to the west of our island by bus.

The first destination was “Mavi Kösk”, the Blue Villa near Camlibel.

The house was built for Paulo “Byron” Pavlidis, a Greek with Italian roots, in 1957. Pavlidis was a bon vivant and if we believe in the Turkish version of his vita he was, in addition to his job as the lawyer of Archbishop Makarios, the first President of the Republic of Cyprus, also the biggest gun smuggler of his time in the Middle East.

The villa has 16 rooms on two floors and represents a mixture of Greek, Italian, Turkish and Eastern Mediterranean styles.

1974 Pavlidis had to flee from the Turkish military and ultimately died in 1986 in Italy under mysterious circumstances.

Today, photography and filming is prohibited inside the villa, but you can watch a video clip on cyprusscene.com by clicking here.

Our TFR-member Pam agreed to take over the explanation of the interior and the background stories of the individual rooms of the villa in English language.

After this exciting start into the day it was late morning that we went on to Korucam, the village of the Maronites.

Korucam, in Greek language Kormakitis, is the largest of the last remaining enclaves of the Maronites in Northern Cyprus.

The followers of this faith, a religious group within the Catholic Church, came from Lebanon and Syria to Cyprus in between the 8^th and 13^th century after they were persecuted as a Christian minority in their original homelands by the Arabs.

The population grew in the era of the Lusignans in the Middle Ages to 80.000 heads, nowadays only a few hundred of them remained in the Turkish part of Cyprus.

Ninos, a Maronite himself and our host, arranged, after initial organizational difficulties, the visit of the Folkloric Museum on site, where visitors get a glimpse of the village life of the past decades.

After all these impressions, the TFR group needed strengthening in the form of a short break at the local coffee house.

The subsequent late lunch at Ninos´ Wine Bar was accompanied by an interesting and humorous explanation of the story of the Maronites in Cyprus by an expert in the field of history.

Strengthened by delicious Kleftiko meat and grilled fish, as well as red wine and white wine from local producers, the group made its way home in the late afternoon.

Once again a successful event of the TFR.