ABSTRACT
The voyage to the province starts today. It is, first of all, a voyage in time. Anyone wishing to be a historian of Cyprus must first address the commonplace issue of a historiography that bears the traces of the present day. The island's recent history, normally referred to as the ‘Cyprus dispute’, would seem to have led not only to brutal antagonism but also to new terms in the history of (and in) the island. And these terms are those of the nation. Thus most available publications on the history of Cyprus are remarkable for the way they constantly reappropriate the past and rewrite history to conform to the canons of national teleology. Or to put it differently, the polarization of national current affairs reaches out beyond the borders of its original sphere (the recent context), and has taken hold of prior periods (primarily the Ottoman and British periods) so as to look for what are taken as retrospectively manifest signs of an emergent nation. Such rewriting thus presupposes that Cyprus acquired a national identity at a very early stage, at least during the final centuries of the Ottoman period if not earlier still (see Michael 2009a).
