Not Just Brits and Urban Reconstruction

According to the Independent, you can ‘do’ Pafos in 36 hours, and the Telegraph recommends just two days in this Mediterranean European Capital of Culture of 2017. Most travel guides will list off ways to see a city in a day or two, and airlines ceaselessly send us deals for weekend breaks. The present age is one in which extreme space-time compression combines with capitalist notions of labour productivity that make our time precious, reducing opportunities for slow travel. It is the age of the whistle-stop tour.

The Independent recommends a two-day trip in this year's European Capital of Culture

Pafos is not a city for whistle-stop tours. Trying to see it all in two days will leave you with a fleeting impression of a place under construction, with a centre you cannot find and locals you have not seen. Everything appears to be an ‘inauthentic’ tourist trap – you later realise this is because tourists are deliberately directed towards the ‘Tourist Area’ around the harbour, Kato Pafos.

Every day here has changed my opinion of Pafos; I would even say each hour here, depending on the activity (although this essentially contradicts my argument’s premise). Upon arrival, after a three-hour-long flight that left Schiphol at 6am, we naturally headed straight for the beach. Down a long, busy road, across a roundabout (you have to dash; there’s no pedestrian crossing on the left side), and out onto the clear, blue Med. Immediately, you’re surrounded by Russian and British tourists, running and jumping off the concrete sea wall. And when you move on to find a sandy spot to lie down, you’re told you have to sit on a sun lounger (and pay for this luxury). All around you are fancy hotels with pools and wrinkled sun-seekers sipping cold wine.

Back in the town, every other building seems to be under construction, skeletons with no outer walls. New residential complexes must be the highest source of income for advertising companies, and many appear to be empty. Cyprus Property News confirms this observation, writing that a 95% increase in the construction of housing between 2001 and 2010 left a massive overhang in the number of properties and a crisis of empty homes. Local property developers, who could not repay loans to Cypriot banks, triggered a financial crisis in 2012-13. The government now appears to be offering a combo-deal on second homes: buy one, get free citizenship.

Skeletal apartment blocks dot the cityscape, as seen from the Axiothea Hotel

Varosha is Cyprus’ ghost town, but by the end of the first day I would have said Pafos is, too. Looking for an evening meal, we were stopped in our tracks by construction fencing and excavated roads, beside which were deserted shops and closed restaurants, chairs left outside.

Pafos is still under construction for the year’s cultural event, and work is only expected to be completed by the end of the year. Turn one corner and you can end up in the middle of a building site; go the other way, and you’re in front of a brand new property with a sea view and private parking. A man looks out of the window of his house on one of the torn-up streets – if people aren’t moved out of their homes during the construction, they breathe in the dust as work progresses at snail’s pace.

The two newspapers mentioned above do not address any of these issues, generally recommending that visitors stay away from the old city, around the harbour and the Archaeological Park. For them, Pafos’ history is its ancient Greek and Byzantine grandeur, while its present is the sea, the sun and the sand. Traditional life is found in villages outside the city.

One third of the permanent residents of Pafos are foreign nationals, from Britain, Russia, China and Scandinavia, meaning that the population is split into many linguistically and culturally fragmented groups. The city is also split into two sections, the Ktima (the old town) and Kato Pafos (the new town), with the harbour-side new area more popular with tourists and foreign investors. Not only does the city feel discontinuous as a result of the empty properties, construction work and mismatching zones divided by large roads, but people themselves are also divided into the local and transitory.

According to Pafos2017 director Georgia Doetzer, Pafians have increasingly moved down to harbour-side Kato Pafos. She hopes that the European City of Culture event, stimulating urban regeneration, will bring permanent residents of Pafos back into Ktima. Whether this will improve the continuity of the city is yet to be seen, and so far the revamped streets seem mostly deserted, shop windows touting new fashion items and sunglasses staring dejectedly back at no one.

Outside a minute’s walk’s radius of this scene, life seems to return to the city. To the west, doors left open display the inner lives of locals, lounging in their living rooms or sitting together around a table. And to the north, larger houses are signs of a colonial past, streets widen out and flowers give colour to the dusty roads. A whistle-stop tourist would likely have missed this display of ‘real life’ in Pafos, succumbing to the feelings of 'unfinishedness' and inauthenticity promoted by the two-day tour. 

Changes were made to place names on 22/06/2017, as suggested in a comment.