By Kathy Martin…
My great friend Aynur Rigby, in mid-August, told me she was coming back to Cyprus and suggested that we arrange another gathering of members and friends from the Frozen Cypriots group (for people who still don’t know all this means is that we are trying to keep alive the memories of Cypriots, from all around the world, who love this little island in the Mediterranean).
She suggested a weekend this time to allow those members who have weekday jobs to be able to join us. We settled on Saturday 15th October, once again choosing Alesta’s Bar and Kebab House in Girne/Kyrenia.
Within a very short time of the event being lauched, we had about 10 confirmed people, including someone that I am really looking forward to meet, namely John Zacharias Michael-Theophanous from Paphos, have been his friend on FB since about 2014 and, as he works, he was unable to come to our May events!
By the time the day dawned, we were expecting about 30 to 40 people, some just for a drink and others for lunch.
Levanta and I arrived at 12.00 and it wasn’t long before the group from South Cyprus joined us, namely Sheila (the driver) and her husband Graham Heald (met them at our meeting on 24th May) with John Zacharias Michael-Theophanous (we had a huge hug, what a delightful person he is in the flesh, so to speak!), his Columbian friend Claudia Hurtado De Middleton who lives near him in Paphos and mutual friend Valerie Ann Giles. Personally, I was very excited to eventually meet John, as we have been long time friends.
It wasn’t long before others joined us and the volume of noise escalated as excited greetings and conversations took place around the room.
We had a lovely mix of local Turkish Cypriots (TC), TC visitors from the UK and Australia, Greek Cypriots (GC) from South Cyprus (I guess to be politically correct I should just say Cyprus, as we live in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus BUT this was NOT a day for politics to enter the room!) and a group of British people who have chosen to live on this beautiful island.
Eventually we stopped talking for long enough to order our food and the system of ordering our meals separately worked very well as at the end, every individual bill was settled.
We had people coming and going all the time, some staying for a quick hello and others coming after they had finished work etc!
Chris Elliott, from Cyprusscene came and joined us and reassured him I was going to do this write up, which saved this extremely busy man from writing yet another report.
Eventually at about 16.30 everyone had left Alesta’s restaurant, the group from the South had plans to visit Girne/Kyrenia harbour, as a couple of their party had never had a chance to see this most idyllic of harbours.
The general consensus of opinion was that we would love more of these group meetings to happen, so here is an idea for any Frozen Cypriots, wherever you live there is NOTHING to stop you arranging a group meeting.
Just do as we did and find a place large enough to accommodate a group and announce your event on the group page and, as the saying goes, “Bob’s your uncle” i.e. it will happen!
Eren Erdogan from Melbourne had arranged a meeting in Lefkoşa / Nicosia on 6th October, which was extremely well attended!
So, please Frozen Cypriots, wherever you live in the world GO FOR IT!
Here are the links to the first two meeting of the Facebook Frozen Cypriots group on Thursday 19th May (only published on my own blog pages, as I was very much a novice blogger back then!) and Tuesday 24th May, which we held at Alesta’s restaurant in Girne/Kyrenia, at lunch time.
To read previous blogs
Wish we had known about this meeting – we would have joined you!
It was mentioned on the Frozen Cypriots group several times! If you are not a member you can ask to join!