The Changing Face of the Old Town of Paphos

The Changing Face of the Old Town of Paphos

There she is; walking in the heat of the sun across the renovated Kennedy square located in what is called ‘The Old Town’ of Paphos. In her colourful plaid dress, Erica, a 28-year old Cypriot-British woman meets us in the shadow of a grant, luxurious store filled with designer glasses, showcasing the newest release of expensive Prada eyewear. We got in contact with this wonderful lady yesterday unintentionally; when both her father and my friend Andrea and I were ordering our Kebab from a local food store around the corner of our hotel. “We are students from Amsterdam currently here for the European Capital of Culture initiative”, we said after he invited us to join his table. “Really? But then you have to meet my daughter, she is an organiser of a couple of the ECoC’s events”. One minute later we got Erica on the phone, and we decided to meet up around noon the following day; that today. Andrea and I were invited to join a meeting at Kennedy square with one of her interns; Leila, a student architect of Neopolis University, the only university located in Paphos. Together with Leila and a couple of her peers, Erica is organising a dance performance in the public spaces of the Old Town of Paphos, attempting to encourage locals to reflect on heterotopian spaces of the city, spaces that have multiple layers, meanings, or relationships to other places than what may appear at first sight. The first example we came across on our small tour entailed a parking space in the center of the Old Town; surrounded by graffiti it functioned as a path to an orthodox Christian church, yet it had become inaccessible to cars due to the recent pedestrianization of the shopping center. By means of dance performances, Erica proposes directions to give these sites a renewed identity.

            As we walk through the scheduled route that the dance performance is supposed to follow, starting from Kennedy square to three streets higher up, Erica and Leila go over the spaces that will be used for the public dance. The dances are to be improvised by 18 carefully selected performers from all over the world; yet, the performance has to reflect historical elements related to the historical and cultural past of the local area. This is planned to involve life-sized popular games of the Cypriot past, such as backgammon or playing with marbles, but also the expressions and bodily gestures used by locals in telling their historical narratives of The Old Town. And so, “every time we come here, we discover new things” Erica says, which is subsequently used to express the experience of the area through dance, a form of communication that she believes is universal and supersedes human differences – be they of ethnic, gendered, educational, or any other kind.

One place that particularly represented this quest to collect memories about The Old Town of Paphos is located at the end of the street Kosta Georgiou – also remembered by local shop owners of the street as “The Street of Angels” during the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. A rather interesting building is located here; it stands out from its surroundings. Erica notices that the white square balconies, characteristic of one of the styles of the British colonial architecture during Britain’s dominion in Cyprus (1878-1960) are in contrast with the round shapes of the buildings and newly renovated square that surround the building. 

Peeking through its semi-open doors we observe a handful of aged men sitting at a round table playing a card game. “This is a betting place”, Leila says. “Only men are allowed inside, no women”. She then explains that is not always the case; it used to be, but nowadays you can just walk in, and if you do “they will just ask you where you are from or who your father is”. And indeed, only a few seconds later we were invited to come in. A man in a neon-bright t-shirt – who seems to be the owner of the place – kindly gestured to us to join him at his kitchen table, his “office”, he says jokingly in Greek. For the sake of concision, I will refer to him as Mr. Yellow. Interestingly, Mr. Yellow’s rounded gestures towards the seats next to him are similar to the movements Erica’s father made yesterday to invite to us to join his table at the Kebab place - did I just observe a Cypriot cultural habit?

       The interior of the building had a unique style; vintage furniture was surrounded by wooden walls that were – here and there – decorated with a painting or a pornographic poster. It used to be a Turkish coffee shop. In this room, five men were observing us from the round table near the back-entrance; one is situated on a burgundy velvet upholstered couch against the wall; and a woman was offering us iced coffee frappes in the kitchen part of the space. 

Whilst I moved to Leila to ask for translations, Erica was engaged in an intense conversation with Mr. Yellow. In turn to her attempt to gather information about the history of the streets we had walked through, Mr. Yellow tells us with passion about what he remembers about "The Street of Angels", a street that was once one of the most busiest streets of Paphos, and how it and the surrounding area has changed drastically.

    Kosta Georgiou (or "The Street of Angels")

             Currently, many of the buildings in the once vibrant street pictured above are left empty and unused. It pertains to a socioeconomic problem. Mr. Yellow explains to Erica that the rent, what could have been 50 euros, has risen to 650 because of street renovations over the last couple of years. It is a question of ownership. The old owners left because of the renovation, and were afterwards told that they could have it back, only if they would now pay ten times the price. And so, many places have been abandoned because residents could not afford to live there anymore. With the regeneration of The Old Town, involving pedestrianization and transformation of public spaces into modern meeting spaces (which interestingly did not take into account that locals and visitors might prefer shadow during the 12 hours of heat the sun provides a day), local shop owners had high expectations that things would change. They had hoped that the changes to the area would again generate movement, visitors – that it would perhaps bring back the vibrant atmosphere that the Old Town was once well-known for. Unfortunately, we were told that tourists often leave Paphos without paying a visit to the area, and indeed, during the various times we visited the Old Town the streets are largely empty. 

In these changes, Paphos 2017 was not the driving factor to the changing face of the town; plans were nearly 20 years in place, yet, the year-long cultural initiative did create an extra motive to change the city. Hopefully, the price these local residents had to pay will be part of a change towards long-term economic and cultural development of the Old Town of Paphos.