Cyprus is a place that, particularly over recent months, is beginning to dismantle the
scaffolding of political deadlock that has blighted the country for the past thirty
years. The Turkish invasion of 1974 happened only thirteen years after Cyprus had
gained independence from the British, and so the process of creating itself was
abruptly and violently truncated. Life, of course, goes on, and this thesis broadly
examines some aspects of that life through one very quotidian aspect of that
continuity - gardening.What follows brings the practice of gardening, and gardens as cultural artefacts into
the forefront of anthropological consideration. It also uses gardens as a starting point
to build on the rich anthropology of Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean. Avoiding
the niche that Cyprus inhabits as a political 'problem', the analysis acknowledges its
liminality by dint of its physical location between three continents, and at least two
'zones' of anthropological theorising: namely the Mediterranean and the Arab
World. A temptation to regionalise is resisted. Account is taken however, of local
essentialising, which was a distinctive feature of the fieldwork. With EU expansion,
the question of where Europe begins and ends is as political a preoccupation as it is a
preoccupation of anthropological theorising. In one form or another, the discourse
around the relationship with Europe has been present in the Greek world for a long
time, and persists in Cyprus, and this is a thematic thread that runs through the thesis.
Over the past twenty to thirty years, the south of the island has vigorously promoted
itself as a holiday destination, and the main income for Cypriots is from tourism. The
debates around the impact of tourism are examined both through the contests over
the 'environment' and over what is the 'authentic' Cyprus. It is argued that the
authentic Cyprus is happening in spite of the heavy use of pathos (bathos) in some political rhetoric that exploits the trauma of the invasion and subsequent events, and
the thesis engages with this rhetoric. This authentic, ordinary Cyprus is found, for
example, in the intimate gardens that refugees have created; in the abandoned
vineyards that surround so many of the villages because of mass migration to the
cities; and in gardens created as expressions of self, of status, or of ideology