Mediterranean light: Greece, Cyprus and the philhellenism of Albert Camus

“The world in which I am most at ease: Greek myth”. 

- Albert Camus

 

Summer thoughts gravitate to Cyprus and Greece. For many, travel was impossible this year. But that longing for homeland is often better expressed by an outsider. No-one describes it better than a Frenchman, Albert Camus. 

 

Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) was one of the finest writers of the Twentieth Century, winning the 1957 Nobel Prize, aged 44.  

 

Born in Algeria, he moved to Paris and joined the French Resistance in the Second World War. He worked on the outlawed newspaper, Combat. He wrote novels, plays and journalism. He enjoyed football, as goalkeeper for Racing Universitaire d'Alger, 1928 - 1930. 

 

Mediterranean culture

 

A 1937 lecture defends Mediterranean life, under threat from joyless northern Europeans. He called it 'nationalism of the sun'. 

“In Mediterranean culture”, says Camus, “people express themselves in harmony with their land - no higher or lower cultures.

“The Mediterranean links over ten countries, whose voices boom in singing cafes of Spain, ports of Genoa, docks of Marseilles; this strong race along our coasts are of one family. 

 

When travelling in Europe, and you go toward Italy or Provence, you breathe a sigh of relief seeing these casually dressed men, this colourful life. I spent months in central Europe, Austria to Germany, wondering where that strange discomfort weighing me down, the muffled anxiety in my bones, came from. Then I understood. These people were buttoned right up to the neck. They didn’t know how to relax, didn’t know joy. 

 

A shared way of appreciating life – we feel closer to someone from Genoa or Majorca than to someone from Normandy or Alsace. A Mediterranean scent we need not express, we feel it through our skin. A triumphant taste for life – courtyards, cypresses, empty noon squares, siesta. Living, coloured, concrete civilization” 

 

Greece: 1955 and 1958

 

There’s a dizziness in his writing on Greece - “a source of light I’ll keep at the heart of my life”.

 

“The Aegean carries the scents of my homeland, Algeria.  I feel the Greek heart. Its inhabitants, full of rich natural juices, shine like silver on the leaves of olive trees”.

 

He wrote to Eleni Kazantzakis: “I always nurtured much admiration and affection for your husband’s work. Nikos Kazantzakis deserved the Nobel Prize a hundred times more than me”. 

Camus was right, Sartre was wrong

 

Politically, Camus was equally profound. Asked about Algerian unrest, he responded: “People are now bombing the trams of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those trams. If that is justice, I prefer my mother.” 

 

For him, the enlightened Left. No noisy associations that Jean-Paul Sartre (his friend) had with violent movements of post-war Europe. 

 

Camus understood the great murders of the last century, and like Orwell, condemned them, against the fashion. He campaigned against the execution of collaborators who had killed his own friends.

 

Cyprus

 

“On Aphrodite’s happy island, I have admiration and affection for this Greek population. Barbarian Europe needs them, to create a new civilization again”.

 

In 1956, Camus wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth appealing for mercy for Greek Cypriot Michalakis Karaolis, aged 22, an EOKA freedom fighter, struggling for Cyprus’ independence.

His letter, for “L’enfant Grec”, questions the supposed moral superiority of the British that doesn’t prevent them from hanging resistance fighters. 

His appeal wasn’t heard. Karaolis was hanged on May 10^th, 1956. He is buried in the memorial graveyard, at Nicosia’s Central Prisons.   

 

Camus is worth reading. Try: The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague and The Rebel.

 

 

James Neophytou