Friends and collaborators of the late Ruth Keshishian, whose name was linked for decades with the Moufflon bookshop, will gather at Dance House Lefkosia in Nicosia on Thursday, 22 October, for an evening built around a walk she planned but never took.
The event, ‘A Cascade of Messages for Ruth’, was conceived and curated by Gianna Tsolaki and grew out of one of her last conversations with Keshishian. The two had planned to walk together through Agios Andreas, the Nicosia neighbourhood where each had lived at different times, to explore the personal and collective memories tied to the area. The walk never happened, but the idea is now at the heart of the evening.
At Tsolaki’s invitation, Keshishian’s friends will take part in a shared, imagined version of that walk, each bringing their own memories of her and of the neighbourhood through personal stories and reflections.
The event draws on the critical cultural approach of Tsolaki’s work. It presents Agios Andreas, an area marked by the division of Nicosia, the ceasefire line and the historical shifts that shaped the city, as a place to revisit memory, identity and people’s relationship with place. In this framing, walking becomes a form of ‘material resistance’, a practical reclaiming of the relationship with land and space in the face of colonial legacies, division and exclusion.
Taking part are friends and collaborators of Keshishian alongside figures from culture, the arts and letters, including Arianna Economou, Vasuhan BX, Gabriel Koureas, Garo Keheyan, Chris Konnaris, Mary Plant, Natia Anaxagorou, Sevina Floridou, Stella Evangelidou, Stephanos Stephanides, Hourig Torosian, Nouritsa Mattosian, Haris Pellapaisiotis, Konstantinos Oikonomidis and Diana Wood Conroy. The evening will also feature photographs by Andreas Drousiotis and music by Tasos Papamichael.
The Moufflon bookshop
Moufflon was founded in 1967 by Keshishian’s brother, Zirayr Keshishian. After his death, she returned to Cyprus from Edinburgh, where she had been studying and working, and took over the shop with her parents in 1995.
Stocking books in several languages and a large collection of new and second-hand titles on Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean, many of them out of print, the shop became a point of reference for readers, researchers, archaeologists, academics and people working in culture.
Moufflon also published 26 titles of Cypriot interest, covering literature, archaeology, history, Byzantine studies, museology, medieval Cyprus, ancient theatre and the visual arts, as well as English translations of Cypriot publications. It was a pioneer of artists’ books in Cyprus, commissioning works from Cypriot artists and seeking out early work by leading artists and poets.
The press release describes Keshishian’s knowledge of Cypriot history and literature as almost encyclopaedic. She knew the books on the shelves, in the boxes and in the shop’s distinctive stacks, and could steer visitors to publications and sources they would struggle to find elsewhere, something reflected in the messages that followed news of her death.
Details
The event takes place at Dance House Lefkosia, 25 Parthenonos Street, Agios Andreas, 1105 Nicosia. Doors open at 6.30pm and the event starts at 7pm. Entry is free.
For more information, call 99 573420 or 99 486772.
