by Nadia Marks
‘Girls need to be kept indoors in the name of decency,’ said another.
‘Love? What’s love got to do with marriage . . .’ they all tutted.
The two friends married their sweethearts a month apart, and each attended the other’s wedding. Since a wedding was the main source of entertainment in those days for the entire village, celebrations would always last for three days and three nights, starting with the night before the ceremony.
Maroula and Andreas married in 1927, on a fragrant day in early May, after the snow had melted in the highest peaks and the streams and rivers were overflowing with ice-cold water, as sweet as nectar, that would keep everyone well supplied throughout the year. The village square was decorated in preparation for the evening feast. Under the leafy branches of the old plane tree, trestle tables and chairs had been set up in line to accommodate the entire village, Greek and Turk alike, while the bride was at home with her family getting ready for the church. Andreas, too, was at his house, attended by his friends, while the shaving ceremony was performed by his first goumbaros, a custom always observed on the wedding day to confirm the trust the groom holds for his best man. As tradition has it, in Greek Orthodox weddings the groom has several best men, but his first goumbaros is considered the most honoured. He stands beside the groom during the ceremony while the other best men stand in line next to him. Throughout the wedding service the men remain by the groom’s side until at the end of the ceremony they write their names in turn on a long piece of white ribbon, to symbolize and confirm the goumbaros’ lifelong loyalty and allegiance to the groom. The same applies to the bride as her own ribbon is passed down the line from her first goumera, bridesmaid, then to the rest of the women.
Hassan knew that as a Muslim he could not be offered the honour of being Andreas’s first goumbaros; that position was given to Yiannos, Andreas’s first cousin, but he hoped that he might at least be one of the several men who participated in the ritual. To their disappointment neither Hatiche nor Hassan was granted permission by the priest to participate.
‘You are, and always will be, my best man,’ Andreas told Hassan, as they shared a glass of zivania a few days before the wedding. ‘Our faith is the only thing that separates us, my friend. We each abide by the laws of our faith but it does not get in the way of our friendship! If my religion doesn’t permit you to stand by my side in the church then, no matter, we will always stand by each other’s side in life.’
The preparation for the religious service for both Greeks and Turks, which was always accompanied by music and songs, was almost as important as the marriage ritual itself, full of symbolism denoting fertility and prosperity for the couple.
At Maroula’s house, all the female cousins and aunts had gathered to dress her. Hatiche and her mother were present, together with several other Turkish friends of the family. For some days before the wedding, Ayşe Hanoum had been applying all her treatments to beautify Maroula, as this was one occasion when her mother would have no objections. A bride must always be beautiful, smooth-skinned and fragrant for her wedding night.
When Maroula was finally ready, eyes kohled, cheeks and lips rouged, hair arranged to perfection, and helped into her wedding dress, the band started to play the traditional song that calls for all her relatives to give their blessing in turn by passing a red scarf around her waist to guarantee the new bride’s fertility.
Although not a relative, Hatiche was determined to at least participate in this ritual performed at home and not in the church, so she took her turn behind Soula, one of Maroula’s cousins.
‘She can’t do this . . .’ Soula whispered into Maroula’s ear, pointing behind her at Hatiche, ‘she’s not Christian!’ she gasped.
‘She’s not a cousin either . . .’ Maroula snapped furiously in reply. ‘She’s much more than that, she’s my best friend!’
The Turkish wedding rituals were similar to those for the Greek ceremony, based on the same intentions to evoke fertility and prosperity. On a hot day at the end of June, barely a month after the whole village had celebrated one matrimonial union, it was repeated all over again for Hatiche and Hassan. Like Hatiche, Maroula too was determined to participate in the preparations for her friend’s marriage.
The night before Hatiche’s wedding, all the women gathered together in her house for the henna ceremony, which Maroula – having never attended a bridal henna before – was anxious not to miss. Hatiche, clad in a purple and red dress and red veil, looked more like an exotic dancer than a bride-to-be, in contrast to the virginal white garments of a Greek bride.
The room was full of colour and movement as the women arrived, all dressed in reds and purples. At one point Hassan’s mother, her head, shoulders and arms covered by a crimson and gold scarf, placed some henna in Hatiche’s palm over a gold coin and covered it in gauze and a red glove; then she softly started to sing. One by one the women joined in the singing as they sat waiting for the henna to dry. Young and old, their voices blended together in a sad melody. Unable to understand the words, Maroula wondered why on such a jubilant occasion the songs didn’t reflect the mood. Gradually the sounds became more joyful and she was told that the earlier songs displayed sadness for the departure of the bride from her parental home, but now it was time for them all to rejoice in her future nuptials.
At sunrise next day the preparations for the wedding party were already under way as once again the trestle tables and chairs made their appearance under the old plane tree in readiness for the wedding feast. Once again the entire village, Greek and Turk alike, came to celebrate the union of Hatiche and Hassan. Unlike the Greek ceremony, the Turkish wedding would not be blessed officially by the imam until the eating and drinking, dancing and singing were over. Only then would the holy man, in the presence of a few close relatives in the groom’s parental home, perform the religious rites.
Once the festivities came to an end, as custom demanded, Hassan returned to his house and waited for Hatiche to be escorted to him. Maroula insisted on being one of her attendants, so together with several other female members of the family she accompanied Hatiche in their procession through the village, the bride dressed in white lace studded with colourful beads and sequins, her head and face covered by a red veil. Musicians playing drums and pipes led the bride with her attendants to her groom and her new family.
Both brides brought a good dowry from the parents. Maroula’s father had already laid the foundations of a house for her with Andreas’s help on the little plot of land which his own father-in-law had given to his daughter as part of her dowry. Now it was his turn to help the newly-weds in typical Cypriot tradition. Andreas and his father were struggling to keep their little grocery store going, so any help from Maroula’s father was welcome. It was a modest little house made of used wood, stones and rough bricks. The bricks, a mixture of straw and mud, kept the house warm in winter and cool in the summer and in no time at all it was ready for the couple to move in; whereas Hatiche and Hassan had to continue living with his parents until her house was completed. She insisted that it had to be next to her friend’s. The only request made by Maroula for her new home was for three bedrooms because, as she informed Andreas, she planned to have many children. ‘They don’t have to be big rooms,’ she told her father and husband, ‘but so long as they accommodate enough beds I am happy.’
‘God willing, you will get your wish, my girl,’ her father said and promised to build as many rooms as their materials allowed.
Maroula was granted her wish for three bedrooms but she didn’t get her wish for the many children she had planned and hoped for; nonetheless she was more than grateful for the healthy son and daughter God did grant her and the house Andreas and her father had built for her. It was humble and compact but there was room enough for them all over the years. In the little garden that ran along the front of the house Maroula planted roses, and by the front step, a jasmine to climb around the door, which opened into an iliakos – a square entrance hall – l
eading to the rest of the house in typical Cypriot style. A huge fireplace in one corner, as in every room, kept them warm in winter.
After moving in, Maroula set about making the best of what she had, and her years of skilful embroidery and crochet work paid off in her decorative covers for the chairs, beds and tables, adding colour and warmth to the rooms. In the absence of the precious china or silverware displayed on shelves or in glass cabinets in more affluent homes, Maroula hung on the walls some of her patterned paneria, a kind of flat basket used to dry the handmade pasta that her mother prepared, which she had woven from reeds when she was a schoolgirl.
The toilet, as in all the village houses, was a hole in the ground at the end of the yard: no such luxury as the so-called ‘European’ flushing lavatories which, since the British colonization of Cyprus, were starting to make their appearance on the island. Maroula made it her first duty to wash down the floor of bare trodden earth daily with buckets of soapy water and try to keep it as clean as was humanly possible; she prayed for the day that civilization would arrive in their village.
‘I’ve heard from Andreas’s brother, that in Nicosia, when you go to the lavatory you sit on a kind of chair to do your business,’ she told Hatiche almost in disbelief while they were planning their houses.
Just a few days after Maroula and Andreas had moved into their new home the village priest, Father Ioannis, came to visit. As the Greek Orthodox custom requires, a new home must be blessed and sanctified by a priest to ensure the well-being of its residents and banish evil from the house.
‘Once the good father blesses the house it will be truly yours, Maroula mou,’ her mother told her as they prepared for his arrival. She was busy undoing a string tied round a linen cloth in which she had carefully wrapped two icons as a gift for her daughter. ‘God’s blessing, and the people who live in it, is what makes a home,’ she added, just as Father Ioannis entered the open front door holding a bowl of holy water, followed by a troop of fellow villagers who were seizing the opportunity to take a good look around the new house.
‘Welcome, Father,’ mother and daughter said in unison as they kissed the priest’s hand in turn. Dipping a sprig of basil into the bowl, Father Ioannis made his way round the house, followed by the procession of villagers, entering each room to sprinkle holy water on anything and everything in his path and praying for the benediction of the home and its residents.
‘The Holy Virgin and Agia Ekaterini will always look over you,’ Maroula’s mother told her after the priest and the rest of the village had finally left. She was lighting a candle in front of a little shrine she had just made in a corner of the iliakos where the two icons that she had unpacked earlier now hung, one of the Panayia and one of the patron saint. She had brought them both from her own home and was now passing them down to her daughter, as her own mother did for her when she first married. ‘These are the essential things you need to make your home, Maroula mou,’ she said again and crossed herself. ‘Everything else comes with time. You’ll soon have more possessions than you need and you won’t know what to do with them all, especially after you’ve been blessed with a few children.’ Maroula knew that her mother was right, as she so often was, and soon she would have her best friend living next door to complete the sum of all she had ever wanted.
Hatiche’s house, due to her father-in-law’s prosperity, was built of stone instead of mud bricks, and was altogether a more impressive affair when it was completed. Although it consisted of just one storey like Maroula’s, the several steps that led to the front door gave it a grander appearance than her neighbour’s. The same basic layout applied to the structure. The front door opened into a sunny entrance hall, the iliakos, with doors leading off to the rest of the house; however, the rooms here were bigger and included a large dining room separate from the kitchen, and a living room.
The two houses differed not only in size but also in appearance. Whereas Maroula and Andreas’s furniture had been mainly handed down by both sets of parents, Hatiche and Hassan’s house had an overall Turkish interior with newly constructed furniture in the Ottoman fashion. In the sitting room low divans, covered in opulent purple and red fabrics, lined all four walls to serve as comfortable seating areas, with low brass tables in front of them to accommodate the coffee hour, which was apparently any time of day if Hatiche had anything to do with it. Multicoloured stars and crescents were painted high on the walls near the ceiling, and above the divans a wooden shelf held ornamental china and gourds that Hassan had cleverly carved in ingenious intricate designs. When light fell on the gourds they shone and glittered as if they had been filled with precious jewels. As in the home of Maroula, whose mother had made a religious shrine with her old icons, in a corner of Hatiche’s house there was now a little shrine with verses from the Quran and several wise sayings. Maroula knew the meaning of these proverbs, which had been translated for her by Hatiche’s mother, Ayşe Hanoum, when as a little girl she had first seen them in the family house. These were now passed to Hatiche, just as her own mother had gifted her the icons.
‘Let God keep away from us the man who has the face of a friend, and the heart of an enemy,’ one saying read, and another: ‘He who knows how to keep his tongue silent saves his head.’ There were several more and Maroula thought them all wise. In a corner of the dining room, as in every home, Greek or Turkish, dangled a cluster of blue stones to fend off the evil eye.
In the backyard of Hatiche’s house, Hassan had proudly built their very own hamam. Working with his father and learning the trade as a tailor was proving to be very profitable, so he was able to provide well for his family. The hamam was an enviable addition to their home: most people made do with the communal bathhouse in the grounds of the village mosque. Most Turks liked to make use of it at least once a week, and on days which were allocated for women only, most of the female population of the village would gather the children and visit the bathhouse for their weekly ablutions. Until the age of five, boys would accompany their mothers too; after that they were taken to the baths by their fathers.
Turk or Christian, everyone was allowed to use the bathhouse and although many Greeks didn’t deign to go, Maroula and her mother would often join Hatiche and her mother on ladies’ days. But once Hassan finished building the hamam next door there was no more need for that; the two families had their own private bathhouse.
‘You can never get as clean as you do after a steaming in a hamam,’ Maroula’s mother would try to explain to her friends who frowned upon the practice, considering communal bathing unsavoury. ‘It’s a hundred times better and more efficient to sit in the hot steam of a Turkish bath and have a good scrub than heating water and washing in a tin bath in the kitchen,’ she’d tell those who criticized her. She knew well enough how most people bathed; only one or two families in the village were privileged enough to have a separate room for ablutions.
The pact made by the two friends from an early age, that when they married they would live side by side and continue to support each other, had eventually come to pass and nothing mattered apart from their families and their loving friendship. Giving birth to their two boys close together was also something that Maroula and Hatiche tried to orchestrate for themselves – and manage they did!
Maroula was the first to announce that she was pregnant, followed by Hatiche a month later. The saying that ‘they knew each other from the cradle’ could not have been more apt for the two boys. Lambros was born in the first week of May 1928 and Orhan followed in early June; in fact, their mothers always loved to tell them how their first spoken words were each other’s name.
When baby Leila was born about a year or so after the boys she was adored by everyone. Lambros and Orhan would toddle about while their mothers sat in the sunshine for their mid-morning coffee, shooing away the hens that circled around the baby’s Moses basket. It was on one such morning that Hatiche told Maroula she was sure she must be with child as she had just seen it in her coffee grounds.
/> ‘Look!’ she shouted. ‘It’s clear as the midday sun that you are pregnant, and what’s more it’s a girl!’ Maroula leapt to her feet and hugged her friend. She needed no convincing; she knew that if Hatiche had said so it was so. Her friend had been well tutored by her own mother in the art of reading the cup, and what she predicted often came true.
‘Our girls will grow up together like my Orhan and your Lambros,’ Hatiche said, reaching for her friend’s hand.
‘God willing that it will all go well,’ Maroula replied, making the sign of the cross for good measure, knowing too well how many pregnancies ended badly. Only a month ago their neighbour two houses down had died while giving birth to a girl, leaving the newborn and three boys motherless, and that wasn’t an isolated case; many women still perished in childbirth. The village doctor was always kept busy, the nearest hospital was miles away near the coastal town of Paphos, and medical emergencies were often fatal. Death was unfortunately something both young and old were familiar with in the village.
‘Inşallah,’ Hatiche replied, and stood up to go and fetch some homemade lemonade and walnut glygo to celebrate her prediction. She knew that from all the fruits preserved in syrup, walnut was Maroula’s favourite and she had a new batch made that year from her mother’s tree. Sitting on her own while Hatiche was inside, baby Leila asleep in the basket and the two boys at her feet, Maroula felt almost certain that she could feel the new life growing inside her.
‘Maşallah, my friend,’ Hatiche said, returning with a tray carrying two portions of glygo, lemonade and sweet bourekia for the boys. ‘You are strong and healthy, and you’ll give birth to a beautiful girl as easily as you did with Lambros.’
As the two friends sat in the warm spring sunshine with their children around them, all was well with the world. Life so far had been good to them both. Maroula reached for her lemonade with a sigh of contentment and the boys tucked into their bourekia, covering their faces with the powdery icing sugar. As Hatiche bent to pick up her baby and place her on her breast their idyll was broken by an eerie sound that was all too familiar to them. The lamenting wail from a neighbour whose husband had died some weeks earlier was carried to their ears by the breeze, reminding them that sometimes one person could receive joy while another, pain.