Edward Vizetelly
[PHOTOS COMING SOON]
In 1878, an adventurous young travel writer named Edward Vizetelly was stationed in Athens when he first heard about the cession of Cyprus to England. Vizetelly was the son of the famous Henry Richard Vizetelly, one of the founders of the Illustrated London News. Without delay, he buckled his portmanteau (a large leather travel bag) and set off for the new British possession with a paid commission to send letters to the Glasgow Herald. Vizetelly was to remain in Cyprus for four years; from 1878 until 1882.
I am grateful that there were a handful of travel writers, such as Vizetelly, who despite their sometimes racist views, were able to provide such a wonderful insight into the past.
Over the next few weeks I will try and present a series of posts that highlight some of the main observations made by Edward Vizetelly. Here is part one.
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PART ONE
The news that the Sultan of Turkey had ceded the island of Cyprus to England in 1878 spread quickly around the Middle East and Europe. The excitement grew greater after rumours began circulating that a rich gold mine had been discovered on the island. One British tabloid even printed (rather naively), that large pieces of the precious metal were being washed down daily by the mountain streams.
A large Anglo-Indian army landed at Larnaca in July 1878 and ran up the Union Jack. The Turkish authorities were allowed forty-five days to settle their affairs and leave the island. The High Commissioner, Sir Garnet Wolseley found Cyprus divided into six districts, and so decided to leave it that way; only the Turkish governors and assistant governors were removed and replaced by English officers to serve as civil commissioners and assistant civil commissioners. Many believed that the occupation of Cyprus was Britain’s attempt to establish another foothold in the Mediterranean to prevent Russian invading Constantinople.
Edward Vizetelly reached Larnaca early one summer morning in August 1878, on board the ship S.S. CERES after a roundabout voyage via Constantinople and Smyrna (now Izmir) to pick up passengers. He discovered that the Greek Consul in Smyrna had issued 1200 passports for Cyprus in the course of a week such was the desire to travel there.
Once they arrived, the fresh swarm of immigrants eagerly scrambled into small boats around the ship, to get ashore (there were no ports in those days). There were met by a large crowd (mostly foreigners) in Larnaca who were quick to tell them to go home as fast as they could. ‘Leave this place!’ they warned. “There was nothing to do here.” Apparently, Larnaca had become so overcrowded with strangers that the cost of provisions had trebled and it was impossible to find even a small hovel to live in.
In spite of the congested state of the town, Vizetelly and a fellow-countryman succeeded in securing an empty room in a house that according to Vizetelly, ‘looked more like a stable than a place fit for human habitation’. The rent was cheap; around one Turkish lira a month.
Vizetelly soon discovered that property was a third cheaper that during Ottoman times. There is a story about a well-known Greek banker from Constantinople named M. Zaraffi, who instructed his agent to go to Cyprus with £20,000 to buy as much freehold property as he could. Many of the impoverished Cypriots were only too pleased to sell their properties to Mr Zaraffi. Amongst his many purchases, Zaraffi bought a large corner house on the Strand facing the sea for £300.
Larnaca in 1878 was humming with activity and swarming with Europeans, mostly English, who seemed to be all dressed in white from head to toe; white suits, white canvas shoes and white helmets. There was also an Anglo-Indian army of 10,000 men stationed on the island and the British flag could be seen floating serenely from all the public buildings on the island. Vizetelly even took a stroll through the camp to chat with the soldiers who were only too pleased to reveal their impressions of the island to him. They complained that ‘the bread was made with an inferior flour and that it was full of sand and only half baked. The beef, they growled, was ill-fed and dirty and there was no convenience for washing it. As to the potatoes, they were all eyes, and quantities were diseased.’
In Larnaca, Vizetelly met an intelligent Greek named Christofides who seemed keen to send petitions to the Government authorities on behalf of his countrymen. Although Christofides could speak several languages fluently, he was unable to write any of them and so, he asked Vizetelly to help him. In short, they struck up an agreement where Christofides will find the clients and Vizetelly will write up their petitions for a small fee.
It was great to read Vizetelly description of the main promenade (Finikoudes) in Larnaca. ‘The Strand is a long, straggling esplanade flanked on one side by the sea, with landing-platforms here and there that are propped up with wooden poles half eaten away by salt water; on the other side stand rough stone houses, no more than a story high, with massive Roman-arched entrances and ground floor windows barred with iron. Here were located the Post office, the Port- office, the Eastern Telegraph Company, the residence of the District Commissioner, the Municipal Building, the Konak (with its Jail and Court-House), the Custom-House and the places of business of the principal English firms who had rushed off to Cyprus to make fortunes including Henry S. King & Co., F. 0. Harvey and Co., Truefitt from Bond Street, Williams and Zachariah Williamson from Constantinople and Janion from Liverpool. Also on the Strand were the principal Greek and Turkish coffeehouses, the French cafe, the English bars, and the Club, conducted by a couple of broken-down English gentlemen.’
Vizetelly soon discovered that the English in Cyprus were importing food and goods from home in vast quantities. This included many tons of tinned provisions, bacon, and hams; thousands of cases of jam, marmalade, condensed milk, tea, cocoa, coffee, chicory, spirits, wine, and beer; hundreds of barrels of soda water and other non-alcoholic beverages; large crates full of British cutlery, glass and crockery, hardware, paraffin lamps, iron bedsteads, pipes, tobacco, patent medicines, agricultural implements. The English immigrants had sponge baths each morning whereas the local inhabitants seemed to make little use of water to wash themselves and regarded soap as a luxury according to Vizetelly. “How dirty these English people must be,” one Cypriot lady was overheard to say. “They are always washing themselves!”
On the subject of food, Vizetelly explains that the Cypriots seemed content to live on ‘goat meat and pillaf, salt anchovies and olives, tomatoes and stringy cheese, cucumbers and figs whereas British immigrants chiefly relied on a hundred and one different kinds of preserved foods, from Liebig’s Extract to bully beef, which they often washed down with generous amounts of whisky and beer.’
According to Vizetelly, many of the newcomers and immigrants in Larnaca seemed bored with little to do as there was hardly any work or business opportunity for them. “In the daytime, these lost souls strolled from bar to bar, talking, singing and drinking. In the evening they went to the Music Hall in the Bazaar which was run by some Frenchwoman of easy virtue from Alexandria. They would met at the Club; or, pack together in the parlours of hotels that had sprung into existence. There, they played card games such as nap, poker and brag. They would toast the Queen and screeched famous songs about the ‘dogs of war being loose’. They drank as well as swore in no small degree.”
It would seem that the abuse of alcohol amongst the new arrivals was commonplace in Larnaca, especially in the intense Cypriot heat. There is one story about an accountant who would shut himself away with two or three cases of champagne. One night, he toppled over a low railing at the top of a staircase and broke his neck.
The only bottled beer on the island was shipped in from the well known brewery of Bass and Co. in England. The charge for an ordinary quart was one shilling and six pence., whilst six pence was asked for a glass of lager beer; Eventually the price of a glass of beer on the island went down to two pence. All provisions had gone up threefold; and yet a chicken could be bought for a little over one shilling, while the best meat, which was not good, cost four pence per pound. Bread was dearer than it should have been, but all kinds of vegetables were affordable. A lad would sell you twelve Barbary figs, and peel them, so that you should not prick your fingers, for one penny and while Cyprus wine was two pence a bottle, the price of great bunches of purple grapes did not exceed one and half pence per pound.
In the intensely hot summer of 1878, Vizetelly would prefer to eat salads for lunch consisting of salt anchovies, washed and filleted; five or six tomatoes cut in fours; six onions sliced, and two or three hardboiled eggs. Instead of vinegar, pepper and salt he would dress the salad with oil and lemon juice.
As for his perceptions of the local population, Vizetelly was less than flattering. “The Cypriots are a discontented lot of people,” he wrote. “Always growling.”
By 1879, Vizetelly had well and truly settled down in Cyprus. He was renting a two-roomed cottage in the village of Livadia at the time, which he described as the most unhealthy residence in the district. The English fleet had left and almost all the troops had been withdrawn after being racked by fever. By now all the immigrants had left Cyprus too, many selling their effects to help to pay for their voyage home. Several merchants had closed their doors and most of the boozing dens, along with the Music Hall in the Bazaar, had shut up shop. “The rush to Cyprus had been a mad spree,” writes Vizetelly. “A spree that had run riot while it lasted, among soldiers and sailors and the five or six hundred nondescripts walking about the streets with cash in hand and nothing to do.”
In Livadia, Vizetelly settled down to breed poultry and to plot a patch of rough earth with daffodils. At harvest time, his rooster and hens would take off in the early morning and walk half a mile or more away to feed on the grain scattered about in the fields, never failing to return at sundown with the master rooster leading the way home. In the Spring, swallows would fly through the open door and window of his cottage, to build their nests in the corners of the living room. Two or three great rugged-coated lizards, a foot or more long, lived in the eaves of the roof, and would occasionally show themselves to bask in the sun.
Vizetelly too, caught a fever which reduced him to bare bones. One day when Vizetelly was laid up in bed with the fever, his landlord arrived with the local village priest. “My light slumber was disturbed,” he writes. “They seated themselves, one on either side of my bed, and asked me how I felt. They thought I was going to die. I could hear them saying as much, one to the other in Greek.” Suddenly, Vizetelly felt the priest’s hand slide under his pillow. Although fever-stricken and weak, Vizetelly realised what the priest was after and quickly pushed the sock containing all his wealth, around £18 out and away from the priest’s reach.
Thankfully, the infusions made for him by the local Cypriot peasants from the young leaves of the lemon-tree, had a beneficial effect and Vizetelly slowly recovered. He packed up his chickens into baskets and with baskets and furniture loaded on top of his landlord’s cart, he made his way back to Larnaca.
We are told that Colonel White of the Royal Scots was chiefly responsible for cleaning up the town. He was the civil commissioner for Larnaca in 1879 and issued edicts such as ‘no more offal in the Bazaar and no more rubbish-heaps in the streets.’ He ordered that the streets be repaired and well-lit at night with petroleum lamps. They were to be swept and washed each day. He also insisted that the streets of Larnaca should be named. As the story goes, an illiterate Maltese painter was commissioned to do the work. This poor fellow could hardly read or write; but his perseverance and self-confidence paid off. Although his efforts were described as childlike he succeeded in painting big Latin letters for the thoroughfares of Larnaca with names as Victoria Street, Wolseley Street, Beaconsfield Street, White Street and the Strand.
Larnaca in 1878 had no proper slaughter-house so Colonel White commissioned two French builders from Egypt, named Thial and Jean and a French butcher named Beynet from Marseilles to erect the slaughter-house.
To pay for all these innovations and developments, Colonel White levied taxes on the townsfolk of Larnaca. This was illegal, but that didn’t trouble him. He dismissed the traditional Council of Elders of Larnaca along with their Mukhtari (headman) and appointed Dr. Heidenstam to take charge of all municipal affairs. Heidenstam had the authority to levy rates and taxes and to fine anyone who neglected to pay. Traders and shopkeepers were made to pay an annual tax between two and ten pounds depending on the nature of their trade. Within a very short space of time Heidenstam, who became known simply as ‘the Doctor’ yielded a profit of a few thousand pounds. This enabled him to build a substantial private residence in the European style on the road to Nicosia.
Heidenstam had qualified for the medical profession in Paris and was married to a remarkably pretty Greek girl from the Ionian Islands. At the time of the occupation, he held the position of Health Officer in Larnaca under the Turks. When the English arrived, they discovered that Heidenstam was one of the only people able to speak English, Greek, and Turkish, and therefore proved to be invaluable to the authorities. In fact, Heidenstam could speak six languages besides his own, but could not write them all correctly, and among those in which he showed some weakness was English. He required a secretary, and found one in the person of a pleasant, gentlemanly young Jew named Raphael, who had come out from Portsmouth, where his friends followed the trade of tailors.
There were no Jews in Cyprus previous to the occupation. Vizetelly writes “the Jew cannot live among Greeks, they are far too smart for him, just as an Armenian is too clever for a Greek.”
Many Jews went to Cyprus in the general rush of 1878. Those who understood the languages of the Near East found employment as interpreters. There is a rather sad story however, about a young Jewish boy who came from England with the intention to set up a business on the island but died shortly after his arrival. The orthodox Greeks would not accept his body for burial, nor would the Mohammedans or the Roman Catholics. As for the few Protestants on the island, they had neither clergy, churches or cemeteries. Two friends of the deceased, (perhaps frustrated by the lack of sympathy from the local religious groups) decided to bury his body themselves. He was interned somewhere near the seashore, where it was dug up during the night and devoured by pariah dogs.
Vizetelly made many friends during his time in Cyprus including people in high places. This is how, in 1890 he became the private secretary to the Mayor of Larnaca, Dr. Heidenstam. At the time he was receiving a handsome salary of £10 a month which was still pittance compared to the £500 a month the High Commissioner, Sir Robert Biddulph was receiving.
Apart from writing letters, medical and legal reports Vizetelly was also contributed articles to the now famous Blue Books.
While Vizetelly was working for the office of the Commissioner, he witnessed many criminal proceedings in court and even attended a public execution. “The Cypriots are deft handlers of the knife,” he once wrote. “These weapons are concealed in the sash girded about their loins ready to be whipped out and plunged into the victim after a drunken brawl. Sometimes they are used in a cold-blooded assassination on a street corner; for instance, an outraged husband may stab and kill his wife’s lover or a brother may avenge a dishonoured and abandoned sister. Unfortunately, there are usually no witnesses to these crimes; it seems that no one can tell you how or why a corpse came to be found by the side of a road.”
One such trial was for Mavro Savva (Black Savva) so named because of his dark complexion. After being taunted by a Turkish Zaptieh, Mavro Savva lashed back at the policeman with his knife and killed him. Apparently, he already a reputation as a bad character; half smuggler, half thief and was involved in many crimes in Cyprus and abroad, in Greece and Asia Minor. The murder of the Zaptieh was not his first crime, but he was a Cypriot Greek who had killed a Turk. This was a very serious offence. After stabbing the Zaptieh, Mavro Savva fled and hid for three weeks in a sort of cavern at the bottom of somebody’s garden. One day, his friends were spotted taking him food and he was captured and sentenced by Judge Phillips to be hanged. The local Greek Cypriots however, caused such a stir and petitioned the Queen, the High Commissioner and Lady Biddulph that in the end, Mavro Savva’s sentence was commuted to ‘life in prison.’
Another time, an officer in the police (a Jewish man), had a knife plunged into his back as he walked along the esplanade. The blade found the victim’s heart. He somehow managed to stagger to a drinking saloon, kept by an Englishman named Craddock, where he dropped down dead in the bar before he could utter a word. The crime was described as a husband’s vengeance, but although the police made every effort to bring the murderer to justice, they never succeeded.
There were other similar cases described by Vizetelly in his letters to the Scottish press. One story tells of two brothers who had visited the market in Scala, where they drank more thick black wine than they should have. On their way back to their village late at night, after their drinking binge in Scala, they quarrelled on the road, and one stabbed the other to death with his knife. The murderer writes Vizetelly was, ‘tried, convicted and sentenced to death. No power on earth could save him, for the authorities, exasperated at the frequent use of the knife, had determined to make an example of him.’
Vizetelly attended the poor man’s execution. “I shall never forget the scene at the public execution in one of the courtyards of the Konak. A lofty scaffold with a cross beam on two perpendicular poles had been erected in a corner and made to come on a level with a first floor window for the convenience of the authorities. The public had been admitted to the courtyard, and when the place was filled, the great ponderous gates were swung in and bolted shut. At the bottom of the yard stood a row of low black huts. Suddenly, the door of one of these huts was flung open and Paul Blattner, the police lieutenant from Nicosia, two Zaptiehs, and a priest wearing priest a long black gown and a stove-pipe hat escorted the poor manacled prisoner across the courtyard to his doom. Without assistance, this Cain who had slain his Abel in a fit of drunken aberration, shuffled along in his high boots and baggy breeches, bellowing for mercy at every step and with a flood of burning tears streaming down his face.
The condemned man had to ascend a lofty flight of stairs to reach the noose at the end of the journey, but even that effort he accomplished without assistance, still bellowing as he took one step after another, and approached nearer and nearer to eternity. A Welshman named Phillipson, a ganger on the roads, acted as executioner for the nonce, and Cobham, who had superintended all the arrangements with minute care, performed the duties of Sheriff. When the hideous drama was at an end, the crowd was let out and the gates Konak slammed shut again. After the sun had set, there came wailing and gnashing of teeth outside the jail, and a hammering at the gate for admission. It was a poor old hag, a forlorn mother, poverty-stricken and wretched, who had lost her two boys by violent deaths within a short space of time, clamouring for the hanged man’s clothes.”
END OF PART 1
Today’s post is mostly based on information I have derived from Vizetelly’s book, ‘From Cyprus to Zanzibar’ which was published in 1901 as well as a few British newspaper articles that were written about Vizetelly around the turn of the last century.
PART TWO
“The Cypriots are an excitable people.” writes Vizetelly. “They are always ready to join in any action if their leaders persuade them to.”
From his time in Cyprus from 1878 until 1882, Vizetelly had witnessed many protests and civil unrest. On one occasion when he happened to be in the Bazaar in Larnaca he noticed all the shopkeepers, apart from the Maltese, suddenly putting up their shutters, as if panic-stricken, but without any apparent cause. When he inquired for the reason, he was told that someone had shaved off a priest’s beard. The townsfolk gathered in their hundreds and along with their leaders, stormed off to the residence of the District Commissioner to complain. Vizetelly discovered that the priest in question had chopped down a tree ignoring the new Forestry Laws that had been brought in by the British. He was arrested and sentenced to a short term of imprisonment. In accordance with prison regulations, his unclean hair and beard were shorn off. The prison authorities were unaware that the hair of an Orthodox priest is sacred. To appease the angry crowd the Commissioner apologised and declared that if any more priests were ever locked up, their hair and beards were to be left alone.
While Vizetelly was working for the Commissioner in Larnaca he befriended a Cypriot named Nicolas Roussos. Together they developed a weekly news-sheet titled Cyprus Times that was printed at the office of Henry S. King and Co. This paper was entirely dependent on subscribers but only a few Cypriots gave their support. “All Cypriots are poor,” says Vizetelly “They are not careful with the little money they possess. Besides, they seem to show a preference for the newspaper Neon Kition.”
To meet the deficit on his newspaper and earn a living, Vizetelly began to teach English to the locals. “I had several youths who come to me three days a week to take private lessons. One is named Dandolo who maintains that his family was descended from the illustrious Venetians. Another pupil is Mr. George Goussio, who had superseded Mr. Küss at the Anglo-Egyptian Bank.” The Cyprus Times served as a sort of advertisement for the English classes that Vizetelly was conducting.
In the final two years of his stay in Cyprus, Vizetelly was renting a house in Larnaca which was somewhat dilapidated, owing to the owner’s poverty. “The worst part of the building,” states Vizetelly “was the flat roof which was covered in green barley and grass in Spring. This was a pleasant pasture to some goats and an Easter lamb that were hoisted up there every morning and taken down at night. In autumn and winter, would get thoroughly soaked and let in rain. Frequently have I been aroused from my sleep by a thin stream of water falling through my mosquito curtain onto my face and bed-clothes. On some occasions I have had to move my bed more than once during the night to find a weather-tight corner.”
Vizetelly also complained that Cyprus was a useless possession for the British. As a naval station the island did not possess a single port, nor were there any natural inlets that could be converted into ports. He explains that Famagusta, the ancient Salamis, was especially vulnerable if a hostile fleet would ever decide to attack. “We should have planted our flag in Souda Bay in Crete,” he writes, “and left Cyprus alone. We would have gained a splendid harbour and a strategic point in the Mediterranean of inestimable value, commanding
the entrance to the Aegean Sea.”
As to the fertility of Cyprus, Vizetelly is particular scathing. ‘Three-quarters of this island is an arid wasteland where practically nothing grows. The corn crop always fails, owing to a lack of rain at the proper moment; for while it pours in torrents in autumn and winter, spring and summer are accompanied by prolonged drought. The grain rarely attains sufficient weight to make it a marketable produce. All Cypriot grain is light. The farmer, to his dismay, can grow nothing else. Moreover, the cotton is as bad as the grain. For Cyprus to thrive then two things are essential to bring prosperity to the place: a much more extensive cultivation of the vine and storage of water to permit artificial irrigation when required. A further advantage would be reaped by using sinking wells and water-wheels as suggested by Sir Samuel Baker, for the island has no rivers and in summer its few watercourses become dry. It is a pity that Cyprus mules are not extensively bred since this pack animal is vital in transporting exports such as carobs, cocoons, sponges, antiquities and terra umbra. They are also useful beasts of burden in our little wars.”
When an immense multitude of locusts swooped down on the island in the summer of 1880, the High Commissioner, put into force an old Turkish law compelling every inhabitant on the island to deposit in the hands of receivers appointed by the authorities, a specified quota of locusts and locusts’ eggs.
At times, the articles that Vizetelly published in his Cyprus Times paper created a stir amongst the locals, especially if they felt he was insulting them. One evening, he was nearly mobbed by a band of a hundred rascals, ready for anything, as he put it. “The ruffians marched up to the coffee-house beside the sea where I had been sitting with Dr. Heidenstam, to hoot and holler at me. But the police were on the alert. A young lieutenant named De Jongh came and escorted me and Heidenstam out of the coffee-house.”
Fearing for his life, Vizetelly spent the night sleeping on the floor of an office that belonged to Mr. Brayshaw, a friend who was also the manager of the Eastern Telegraph Company in Cyprus.
By early 1882, Vizetelly had quite enough of Cyprus. In February, he packed his bags and boarded the first steamer off the island for Egypt.
The Cyprus Times paper that he had begun with Nicolas Roussos ceased production much to relief of the other newspaper editors on the island and I am sure many of the local inhabitants who although they could not read, were often disgusted by any translation of the articles within.
“The city of Alexandria is a delightful relief,” writes Vizetelly, “compared to the backward, poverty-stricken little island I have just left. There, (in Cyprus), from year to another my ears were assaulted with the constant wail of disappointment and discontent from the locals. Then there were the droughts, the plagues of locusts, the failures of crops and the bitter protestations against the Government. In winter there were torrential rains and throughout the prolonged scorching summer the soil became hard as iron. Here, at Alexandria, the busy polygynous population seemed as happy as the day is long.”
At times, Vizetelly tried to justify his stance on Cyprus by stating that the poor island had been ravaged and neglected by the Ottomans for 300 years and so, by the time the British arrived, it was financially impossible to repair the damage.
No doubt Cyprus has profited by British rule. Roads were made and kept in repair, an efficient postal service was introduced; and while the various towns were connected by telegraph, the island was also connected to Europe by the introduction of cable.
According to Vizetelly, public security on the island had improved and justice distributed with an impartial hand. The inhabitants had free Municipalities as well as a voice in legislation. He does admit however, that the inhabitants were never content and that the root of their dissatisfaction lies in their poverty or perhaps the disappointment that England did not fill their pockets with untold gold.
The island at that time was costing the British Exchequer £30,000 a year to govern. Then there was the enormous tribute of £93,000 paid annually to Turkey. Up until the turn of the century (1900) it is estimated that Britain had paid nearly two million sterling to the Sultan.
Edward Vizetelly was one of six foreign correspondents who were commissioned to cover the British occupation of Cyprus. The other five were Archibald Forbes for (The Daily News), St. Leger Algernon Herbert (for The Times), John Augustus O’Shea (for The London Evening Standard), Samuel Oliver (for The Illustrated London News) and Hepworth Dixon (for several provincial newspapers).
In the future, I hope to investigate these other correspondents and write a short article about each of them. Thankfully, there are sufficient letters and articles written by them and written about them. One thing is for sure – the British, were particularly good at keep records and writing about history.