Cypriot Saints and Sinners – An Irishman’s Diary about St Hilarion and Lawrence Durrell

In Christian calendars, today is the feast-day of St Hilarion, born in 291 AD, near Gaza. He sounds as if he had a sense of humour. Given his name, he might even have become the patron saint of stand-up comedians. But no. He seems instead to have been a very serious sort, who spent much of his life fasting in the desert, and generally avoiding all pleasure.

Shaved

According to his biographer, Hilarion’s daily diet consisted for a time of half a pint of lentils, moistened with cold water. Then he switched to dry bread, with water and salt. And only after suffering health effects, including failed sight, did he ease up to the extent of adding a little oil to his intake. He slept on rushes, shaved once a year, and never changed his clothes until the old ones disintegrated.

In his hunger, he was continually beset by visions of food. But other appetites haunted him too. Painters have usually portrayed him as being under siege from naked Venuses, flaunting themselves while he adopts the classic “Get behind me, Satan” pose. Despite all this, he somehow to lived to be 80. Pretty good for an early Christian.

Conceit

His name aside, he left at least one gift to humorists. During his struggles with self-denial, apparently, it helped him to visualise his body as an animal. To this end, he called it his “ass”. And for the 18th-century Irish comic writer Laurence Sterne (himself a clergyman), the temptation was irresistible. In his bawdy novel,

Tristram Shandy

, Sterne borrowed Hilarion’s ass conceit for one of his characters, and exploited the double entendre for all its worth.

Touring Northern Cyprus a few years ago, I went searching for St Hilarion’s Castle, a hill-top ruin that occupies the site of his former monastery, where he died in 371. Alas, it was closed, or so the Turkish soldiers blocking the road told me.

Castle

I would have been happy with an external view (tourist literature claimed its setting had inspired the Disney castle). But the view was closed too. The soldiers suggested I return in the morning. Which, as I didn’t explain, was impossible. I was on a day-trip from the Greek part of the island. So I never did see the castle.

That was a side-trip from the day-trip, in fact. The main reason I was in that corner of Cyprus was to visit the village of Bellapais, made famous by another writer with the first name Lawrence, in this case Durrell. He spent years there in the 1950s, idyllic at first, then increasingly fraught as the island moved towards independence. And he recorded his experiences in a book called Bitter Lemons, which is also the name on the house.

The latter now attracts a steady stream of visitors, mostly English-speaking. But Turkish occupation, combined with Durrell’s colonial image (he was broadly pro-Greek, although his primary loyalty was to the British government, which employed him), have limited exploitation of his fame.

Shade

Like most tourists, for example, I sought out the “Tree of Idleness”, under which villagers sat daily to drink coffee and talk. But the locals have never identified it. Or maybe they didn’t try too hard, since the village square has more than one cafe with a plausible tree outside. And shade of any kind is valuable in Bellapais. When I was there, the temperature was 40 degrees.

I don’t remember St Hilarion featuring in Durrell’s memoir, nor any other saints. The hero, insofar as the book has one, is Sabri Tahir – “Sabri the Turk” – and he was more a sinner, albeit a charming one. A local fixer, according to Durrell, he played a central role in the purchase of the writer’s house.

Cobbler’s wife

This involved negotiating with the extended family of its then proprietor, a cobbler’s wife, and as described, the episode was indeed hilarious.

By way of closing the deal, Sabri needed to isolate the owner. So at the crucial moment, he spirited her away (we would call it kidnap), provoking a high-speed car chase, and completed the deed-signing before her relatives could object.

It was clear that Sabri was a man of many irregular dealings. He continued to be for decades after Durrell’s book, although they seem to have become more serious with the passing years. In 1990, he survived a car bomb. In 1996, another attack left him in a wheelchair. Four years later, aged 76, he was shot dead by the Turkish mafia.