Chatting with Michalis Poleos yesterday, we found ourselves back among the windmills of our childhood, from before the 1974 invasion, scattered through the orchards of Famagusta, Ayios Memnon and the whole stretch running down to the Kokkinochoria. He told me, in particular, about the windmill he used to see every morning the moment he woke up, standing in the yard opposite his late father’s house in what is now occupied Kato Deryneia. He told me about the goldfish in the reservoir that fed the big orchard, about the vine trellis out front, about the fruit trees round the back: lemons, oranges, mandarins.
The water supply to Kato Deryneia had always been patchy, right up until the villagers were driven out and the Turkish army took the place over. So the Niohoritis windmill earned its keep, sustaining several households day to day, since the water from its well was clean enough to drink.
“Free Famagusta still had quite a few windmills until fairly recently,” Michalis told me, a note of nostalgia in his voice, “though nothing like the numbers we used to have around Ayios Memnon and right through the orange groves as far as Deryneia and Paralimni.” That nostalgia, it was clear, wasn’t really about the windmills, or their practical use. It ran far deeper than that.
It struck me that in the villages of free Famagusta, plenty of children are still growing up today more or less the way we did before the invasion: playing in neighbours’ yards and on endless stretches of open ground near the potato fields and the orchards by the sea, living out, more intensely than most children ever get to, the sheer experience of friendship and belonging. Sharing whatever comes their way, good and bad. Surrounded by people they love and who love them back. Always a shoulder there to lean on. Their beds, on the scorching afternoons of summer, laid out beneath the fig tree or the mulberry in the orchard, drifting off lulled by cicadas and birdsong.
Talking to Michalis brought back a visit I once made to another friend’s house in Sotira, and what he told me about the windmill turning away in his own yard. Mint grew close by the water tank. We trod on it by accident, and the whole place filled with its scent. The smell of mint. Water glinting in the windmill’s tank. The sun sinking into the sea like some easy, unhurried swimmer taking his time. A taste of life, simple and utterly full. I left his house smiling without quite meaning to. I was on my own, but I could feel my childhood friends right there beside me, all of us ready for a dive: into the sea, or into the windmill’s tank.
