ABSTRACT
Rising amid palm trees, prominent and improbable under the Mediterranean sun, these buildings challenge interpretation. That they served as mosques after the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus in 1571 makes them all the more complex. They looked exotic to me when I first encountered them in 1970; my effort to accommodate their complexity has paralleled the broader post-colonial concern with identity and diversity that has turned Cyprus during the intervening decades from an exotic site into a potent social paradigm.1
