Cyprus Mail, Cyprus
Feb 7 2010

Georgian, the most beautiful race

By Hermes Solomon
Published on February 7, 2010

ARE WE blinded by our purported origins, blind as Homer the turtle,
who had his eyes removed as a punishment for getting caught in a Greek
fisherman’s nets?

Interestingly, Ban Ki-moon, on his recent visit to Cyprus, did not
once refer to us as Greek and Turkish Cypriots. `I’m here to show my
personal support to the Cypriot-led talks to reunify the country,’ he
said.

And much to the dismay of the south, he crossed the Green Line and
treated Mehmet Ali as Demetris’ equal, inscrutable Oriental that he
is; Caucasian he certainly isn’t!

The concept of a Caucasian race was developed around 1800 by Johann
Friedrich Blumenbach, a German scientist and classical anthropologist,
and named after the peoples from the Caucasus region, whom he
considered to be the archetype for the grouping. He based this
classification on craniology and wrote:

`I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both
because its neighbourhood, and especially its southern slope, produce
the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian. And, because all
physiological reasons converge to this, we ought to place the
autochthones (birth place) of mankind in that region.’

This classification is highly controversial today and rejected by many
academics and political activists, who view any system of categorising
humanity based on physiognomy as 19th century racism.

You cannot tell a book by its cover, but you can make an educated
guess at someone’s race by his looks. In Cyprus we are brown eyed in
the main, then green/grey and finally some few blue, mostly olive
alongside the ruddy and fair skinned, the rotund outnumbering the slim
and the short outnumbering the tall; auburn hair colour predominates
discounting the dye hard light beige of most of the island’s `classy’
women, who believe the lighter the colour the more north-western
European they look. There are those, like my good friend, who claims
manner of dress can distinguish most any nationality…

But in truth, we cannot deny any amount of adulteration of our so
called Greek/Turkish origins: Semitic, Roman, Egyptian, Frank,
Genovese, Venetian and now British, yes, British. Many second and
third generation Anglo Cypriots are married to one. I was. My brother
still is and we have eight children between us. Such are we a mix of
different peoples that my claim to Greekness abides solely in the
church.

The Church of Cyprus, part of the wider Greek Orthodox Church, is an
autocephalous body within the communion of Orthodox Christianity. It
is one of the oldest autocephalous churches, achieving independence
from the Patriarchate of Antioch in 431AD. Its founder, St Barnabas
was from the Holy Land, and Antioch is near the modern city of
Antakya, close to the Turkish/Syrian border.

Due to millennia of crossbreeding, our so-called Achaean origins
(3,000 years ago) have been diluted to give us a president who looks
anything but Greek and a leader of the House of Representatives whose
father was of Armenian extraction ` Armenia being a part of the
Caucasus, producing the second most beautiful race of men.

History depends on who writes it and from which angle one reads it.
Affirming our uniquely Greek or Turkish origins requires a stretch of
the imagination only found in Cyprus. And just what do we mean by
Greek, the Glory that was or the bankrupt nation that is? And by
Turkish do we refer to Kemal Ataturk’s reunification of a country and
its people or today’s human rights fiasco?

What’s wrong with being simply Cypriot, a race of mixed tribes
emanating mostly from Asia Minor and the Middle East?

Had the Phoenician, Hittite or Assyrian civilisations gone on to be
more renowned than Ancient Greece’s, would we be claiming our origins
as Lebanese or Syrian? At the time of Our Lord, most of the coastal
regions of Asia Minor and the Middle East spoke a form of Greek, yet
none claim Greek origin today.

When, a year or more ago, a prominent Cypriot football club went to
Athens to play a return match against a prominent Greek club, Greek
supporters were heard to shout, `Go home, Turkish donkeys!’ or words
to that effect. Strangely, I did not take exception to my fellow
countrymen being called Turkish ` but donkeys…?

I have twice visited Olympia and stood mesmerized by the statue of
Hermes sculpted by Praxiteles, a third larger than life-size and
perfect in every detail. Wish as I might to resemble my namesake, I
look nothing like him. My mother, who chose this unchristian name,
suffered from delusions of grandeur.

Great names from the past do not make great men of their present day
owners, and a nation’s true origins are indefinable. All is forever in
a state of flux. There was a time when we were all monkeys and the
planet a single land mass.

Cypriots today claim their religious origins proudly, but Greeks and
Turks we are not. By perpetuating this illusion we brought about the
partition of the island.

Perhaps our polemical Archbishop Chrysostomos II might wish to comment…

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress