By Heidi Trautmann
Zeytinlik, the historic village of Templos – there
used to be the horse farms of the old Templars –known as the most important
centre of olive growers and their production – had held its 12th
festival in the old traditional way in the first week of October. There were
similar festivals in the older times, smaller and just for the village people,
but they also represented a welcome opportunity to celebrate, to make music and
dance and to eat from the many stands that did good traditional dishes. The
festival also means for us, the owners of some olive trees, that time has come
to pick the olives for oil and or for preserves. However, this year, I fear,
the harvest will be very poor, so we had the opportunity to get our
requirements of pickled olives for the year at the festival, the many stands
with inviting looking jars full of green and black fruit.
The programme over the week long festivities included
dance shows, poetry recitals, competitions of all sort, and for the young ones
live music bands in the evening. An area was reserved for the kids to play and
climb and jump, but for many visitors the food stalls were like a magnet. I
bought for us some börek with spinach and meat and some sweet lovely somethings
powdered with icing sugar and half a kilo of hot sugar almonds.
I had come for a special reason that was to meet the
authors Serpil Yalçin and Ali Nesim. Ali is an old friend, who usually displays
his books on this occasion, stories and legends of Zeytınlık, as he was born
here, but he did not so this year. I met him at the stand of his daughter in law
who had come here for the ‘House of Cooperation’ in the buffer zone of Nicosia,
to distribute information material on the various activities they do to promote
bi-communal getting togethers, competitions and exhibitions but also
educational programmes.
The other author I had come to visit was Serpil Yalçin;
she is a news speaker at BRT and has published six novels and two poetry books.
The novels are all biographies of people, including her own and of her father.
They are all in Turkish. I am told by
some of her fans surrounding her that her books are exceptionally good. A
couple I came to talk to at her stand was from Australia, they had left Cyprus
in the times of war and settled first in Cape Town for some years and now in
Australia.
The big event of the evening for me was meeting with
the Greek guy, traveler and messenger of love, friendship and peace, Halkios
Kypros, whose name and message is in everybody’s ears and mind, having read
about him in the newspapers recently. He is walking around the world with his
Diary of an Angel in which he collects comments, poems, drawings by artists he
meets on the many ways he walks. At the moment he is on his way around the
island of Cyprus and I will shortly write about our talks in a separate issue
of Cyprus Observer.
So you see, the Olive Festival is not only to smell
the olive leaves burning, taste the many olive products and many other
delicious things of really good quality, but it has become a meeting point for
cultural minded people of all nationalities.
There was a moment of electricity failure for about
half an hour; while I got a little nervous for the stand owners and the success
of the fest, the people remained calm and brought out their flash lights and
cried out with joy when it returned. You see, with so little you can make
people happy.
See some pictures here and the rest of them on my
website.