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Georgian, the most beautiful race
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OpinionsARE WE blinded by our purported origins, blind as Homer the turtle, who had his eyes removed as a punishment for getting caught in a Greek fisherman’s nets?
Interestingly, Ban Ki-moon, on his recent visit to Cyprus, did not once refer to us as Greek and Turkish Cypriots. “I'm here to show my personal support to the Cypriot-led talks to reunify the country,” he said.
And much to the dismay of the south, he crossed the Green Line and treated Mehmet Ali as Demetris’ equal, inscrutable Oriental that he is; Caucasian he certainly isn’t!
The concept of a Caucasian race was developed around 1800 by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German scientist and classical anthropologist, and named after the peoples from the Caucasus region, whom he considered to be the archetype for the grouping. He based this classification on craniology and wrote:
“I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighbourhood, and especially its southern slope, produce the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian. And, because all physiological reasons converge to this, we ought to place the autochthones (birth place) of mankind in that region.”
This classification is highly controversial today and rejected by many academics and political activists, who view any system of categorising humanity based on physiognomy as 19th century racism.
You cannot tell a book by its cover, but you can make an educated guess at someone’s race by his looks. In Cyprus we are brown eyed in the main, then green/grey and finally some few blue, mostly olive alongside the ruddy and fair skinned, the rotund outnumbering the slim and the short outnumbering the tall; auburn hair colour predominates discounting the dye hard light beige of most of the island’s ‘classy’ women, who believe the lighter the colour the more north-western European they look. There are those, like my good friend, who claims manner of dress can distinguish most any nationality...
But in truth, we cannot deny any amount of adulteration of our so called Greek/Turkish origins: Semitic, Roman, Egyptian, Frank, Genovese, Venetian and now British, yes, British. Many second and third generation Anglo Cypriots are married to one. I was. My brother still is and we have eight children between us. Such are we a mix of different peoples that my claim to Greekness abides solely in the church.
The Church of Cyprus, part of the wider Greek Orthodox Church, is an autocephalous body within the communion of Orthodox Christianity. It is one of the oldest autocephalous churches, achieving independence from the Patriarchate of Antioch in 431AD. Its founder, St Barnabas was from the Holy Land, and Antioch is near the modern city of Antakya, close to the Turkish/Syrian border.
Due to millennia of crossbreeding, our so-called Achaean origins (3,000 years ago) have been diluted to give us a president who looks anything but Greek and a leader of the House of Representatives whose father was of Armenian extraction – Armenia being a part of the Caucasus, producing the second most beautiful race of men.
History depends on who writes it and from which angle one reads it. Affirming our uniquely Greek or Turkish origins requires a stretch of the imagination only found in Cyprus. And just what do we mean by Greek, the Glory that was or the bankrupt nation that is? And by Turkish do we refer to Kemal Ataturk’s reunification of a country and its people or today’s human rights fiasco?
What’s wrong with being simply Cypriot, a race of mixed tribes emanating mostly from Asia Minor and the Middle East?
Had the Phoenician, Hittite or Assyrian civilisations gone on to be more renowned than Ancient Greece’s, would we be claiming our origins as Lebanese or Syrian? At the time of Our Lord, most of the coastal regions of Asia Minor and the Middle East spoke a form of Greek, yet none claim Greek origin today.
When, a year or more ago, a prominent Cypriot football club went to Athens to play a return match against a prominent Greek club, Greek supporters were heard to shout, ‘Go home, Turkish donkeys!’ or words to that effect. Strangely, I did not take exception to my fellow countrymen being called Turkish – but donkeys...?
I have twice visited Olympia and stood mesmerized by the statue of Hermes sculpted by Praxiteles, a third larger than life-size and perfect in every detail. Wish as I might to resemble my namesake, I look nothing like him. My mother, who chose this unchristian name, suffered from delusions of grandeur.
Great names from the past do not make great men of their present day owners, and a nation’s true origins are indefinable. All is forever in a state of flux. There was a time when we were all monkeys and the planet a single land mass.
Cypriots today claim their religious origins proudly, but Greeks and Turks we are not. By perpetuating this illusion we brought about the partition of the island.
Perhaps our polemical Archbishop Chrysostomos II might wish to comment...
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Giorgios Papandreaou from Κύπρος / Kıbrıs comments:
I have to agree with Mr. Soloman and several other writers below. We are - and should take pride in being - Cypriots, not Greeks or Turks. Our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on, were all born in Cyprus and were of centuries-old Cypriot descent. Cyprus has never been part of Greece or an ancient Greek city state. It has been colonised and taken-into Greek empires, but Cyprus was also consumed into the empires of the Phoenicians, Persians, Egyptians, Ottomans and Arabs. Surely we are a mix of these colonising peoples too? Either way, we are still Cypriots. We should be proud to say that we come from Cyprus and should emphasise our unique Cypriot culture, which is different from that in Greece, Turkey and the Arab world. Why should we ignore our heritage to want to become part of the culture of a different country? Why should we be ashamed? I will never be ashamed to tell people the country of my birth, and my parents' birth, and my great-great-great-grandparents' birth, the Eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus. I am not Greek or Turkish, I am Cypriot.
ben dover comments:
Nick _ generalisations about a race of people - didnt anybody tell you its wrong to generalise?? dont base your opinions of the English on some chavs (do you know what that word stands for??) who have upset you - There are a lot of decent English people quietly going about their everyday lives who dislike chavs too so dont lump everybody under the same banner.
And of course i dont think your genetic theory is exactly right old boy - DNA samples show that Greek speaking Cypriots are strongly allied to the levantine area of northern Africa,and there are similarities in DNA between Greek speaking Cypriots and Turkish speaking Cypriots ..And wasnt a lot of Greece and Spain once part of the ottoman empire? not all statues in Cyprus and Asia minor are in greek - ever been to the world heritage site in Pafhos?? its Roman. Even in the UK there are statues and artifact that have Roman writing on them - so that theory proves nothing...
Hadjimihalis post is much more concise, intelligent, correct and reasoned not a sneering rant. Are you sure you are French???
Hadjimihalis from Cyprus comments:
Well done, Hermes Solomon! I couldn't agree with your article more.
Cypriot people should take pride in being Cypriots, not Greeks or Turks. Simply because different communities on the island (including the Maronite and Armenian) speak different dialects and practise different religious doesn't mean that we are ethnically that different.
How is it that Greek-speaking Cypriots, for instance, are supposed to be "pure" or "ethnic" Greeks? Many people seem to forget that people lived in Cyprus prior to the Achaean settlement, and that these "Eteo-Cypriots" and Achaean Greeks intermarried with other migrants from the Middle East for many centuries. Greek-speaking Cypriots look and behave nothing like Greeks, so why are we sometimes branched under the same name?
As for comments below regarding the immorality of discussing Cypriot genetics: surely it is more immoral to ignore aspects (often very large and visible aspects) of our genetic and cultural heritage simply because they are deemed unattractive? Do some Cypriots strive towards being purely Greek and European, rather than having pride in being Cypriot and Middle Easter, simply because it sounds more civilised and fashionable in a conversation with non-Cypriots? The view of Cypriots having "pure" Greek extraction is not only over-exaggerated, but also shows how racist against the Middle East some people can be.
"Where are you from?"..."I'm Greek".
Do some Cypriots hate Cyprus so much that they have to imply that they come Greece, a separate country miles away, rather than Cyprus?
Hadjimihalis from Cyprus comments:
Well done, Hermes Solomon! I couldn't agree with your article more.
Cypriot people should take pride in being Cypriots, not Greeks or Turks. Simply because different communities on the island (including the Maronite and Armenian) speak different dialects and practise different religious doesn't mean that we are ethnically that different.
How is it that Greek-speaking Cypriots, for instance, are supposed to be "pure" or "ethnic" Greeks? Many people seem to forget that people lived in Cyprus prior to the Achaean settlement, and that these "Eteo-Cypriots" and Achaean Greeks intermarried with other migrants from the Middle East for many centuries. Greek-speaking Cypriots look and behave nothing like Greeks, so why are we sometimes branched under the same name?
As for comments below regarding the immorality of discussing Cypriot genetics: surely it is more immoral to ignore aspects (often very large and visible aspects) of our genetic and cultural heritage simply because they are deemed unattractive? Do some Cypriots strive towards being purely Greek and European, rather than having pride in being Cypriot and Middle Easter, simply because it sounds more civilised and fashionable in a conversation with non-Cypriots? The view of Cypriots having "pure" Greek extraction is not only over-exaggerated, but also shows how racist against the Middle East some people can be.
"Where are you from?"..."I'm Greek".
Do some Cypriots hate Cyprus so much that they have to imply that they come Greece, a separate country miles away, rather than Cyprus?
Myrner from London, UK comments:
Just like a computer, a human consists of software (his mind, operating according to the rules of his culture and education) running on hardware (his body, whose features depend on race). As a marker of uniqueness and quality, software is seen as the more important of the two, which is hardly surprising since the hardware is pretty standardized across the board. This was the prevalent view from antiquity till today, with a brief interlude in the last couple of centuries when certain Northern European ethnic groups sought to turn things upside down, claiming that (their) hardware stood head and shoulders above that of all others.
ben dover comments:
Cyprus - one race seperated by two religions.....
John Alexander from London comments:
Andreas: well said. I was going to start writing something similar about this Nazi obsession with race, genes and DNA; but then saw your comment, which succinctly deals with the author's confusion; his use of racist terms and language to prove he is not a racist. Being a Greek is a matter of shared culture and history, not shared blood.
Andreas comments:
You, like some others, have fallen into the trap of genetics, which is highly racist. All people upon this planet are a mix of their neighbours with the glaring exception of Europe being the Finnish (following your deregatory stance it's probably because they are the ugliest, which is one of the most immature arguments I've ever heard).
Neither the Greeks were/are a pure race since they often took/take husbands or wives people from foreign races. Neither the Turks are Turks. Most of them are of Arabic, Armenian, Greek or Iranian origin with only a tiny minority having turkic DNA. Mainland Greeks are a mix of Arabic, Slavic, Greek genes. Do you think your English spouse is 100% Anglosaxon? How sad.
What makes Greeks Greeks or Turks Turks or for that matter why there Greek and Turkish Cypriots is of course the language and religion. What makes anyone a member of a nation is his language and culture. Not his genes. Such rherotic implies nothing less or more than plain Nazism.
I'm suspecting that you are still living in a world where you think that everybody in Cyprus speaks English fluently and I'm sure at one point you will suggest the adoption of English as an official language and the abolition of Greek and Turkish. All in the name of forming a Cypriot nation.
There are many other common points between Cypriots and the fact that you have failed to identify only enforces my view that everything you write is bollocks.
John from Larnaca comments:
Once again, Hermes tells it as it is.
Just how Greek are Greek Cypriots?
With the the ability we now have to determine ethnic origin by DNA testing, I shudder to think what would result from a mass DNA profiling of the 'Greek' Cypriot population.
Of course, it could never happen.
The Archbishop would excommunicate anyone who dared to suggest it.
SABAN from Girne comments:
I agree with you about the Physical beauty of the Geeorgins. The Georgian Women were favourate concubines in The Ottoman Sultans' Harem in Istanbul.
I also agree with Oguz from Famagusta regarding the treatment by the GC'c
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