Below is the transcript of a talk I gave at the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation on Wednesday 15 January 2025, entitled “Cyprus Mines Corporation (CMC): Society, Environment, and Politics in Early-Twentieth-Century Cyprus.” You can find the slides I refer to, which include more bibliographic information, here.
Tonight I will speak to you about mining history in Cyprus. My intention is not to give you the business history of the Cyprus Mines Corporation, which from 1913 onwards became the most significant player in the modern revival of mining on the island; that story is well-chronicled by David Lavender in his 1962 book The Story of Cyprus Mines Corporation [SLIDE]. Nor is it my intention to give you a properly archaeological account of ancient mining, as has been done so well by Lina Kassianidou at Skouriotissa and by Maria Iacovou and many others across the island [SLIDE]. Nor is it to tell a political or social history of mining in twentieth-century Cyprus, for which we can turn to, among others, Rolandos Katsiaounis, Andrekos Varnava, and Anna Marangou (whose invaluable history of EME unfortunately still remains unpublished) [SLIDE]. Nor is it, finally, even to tell a diachronic story of “the human meaning of the landscape” — the stated aim of the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project, led by Michael Given, Bernard Knapp, and others between 2000 and 2004, to whom I nonetheless owe an enormous debt of gratitude for setting on such a firm footing the study of “Mining Landscapes and Colonial Rule in Early-Twentieth-Century Cyprus” [SLIDE].
Rather, I wish to speak tonight about the ways in which all these histories and more accrete and congeal around the mine at Skouriotissa and the nearby village of Katydata. [SLIDE] Skouriotissa lies in the northern foothills of the Troodos Mountains, just ten kilometers from the sea on one side, yet within sight of snowy Chionistra on the other. This landscape is shaped by the Karkotis River, which carries fertile sediments as it tumbles down from the high mountain peaks and weaves its way through the valley of Solea, bringing water that farmers use to irrigate their fields to this day [SLIDE]. The story I want to tell this evening is of politics, that is of action in its plurality, in and around this landscape. This is a story that takes seriously the emplotments of mining history in Cyprus in the political grammars of anticolonialist revolt, imperial capitalism, identitarian “struggles,” and labour-based solidarity, but refuses to confine politics to any one of these boxes, all of which have mined this history for their own ends.
For me, such history and such action cannot have any predetermined “end.” In this regard, I think of the great philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, for whom the concept of history recalled first and foremost the Homeric “historein,to inquire in order to tell how it was – legein ta eonta in Herodotus,” that is, telling the things. For Arendt, history is premised on the interdependence of human beings and the things of the world. After all, “history” means both the events of the past, and the record of such events as narrated by human beings, each of which depends on the other. Such interdependence sustains plurality, which is the ground of politics. Yet the Homeric histor, whose impartiality Arendt so admired, is not just a teller of stories but also a judge: “the historian,” Arendt says, “is the inquiring man who by relating it [the past] sits in judgment over it.” As she writes elsewhere (borrowing imagery from The Tempest),the historian is almost “like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths […] and bring them up into the world of the living as ‘thought fragments.’” [SLIDE] It is in this vein that I have mined history myself and in this spirit that I offer a few fragments this evening of a mining history of Cyprus.
The constitution of the naturalcultural landscape around Skouriotissa owes just as much to the copper in the hills as to the river and its sediments. This much we can tell just from the toponym associated with the church of Panayia Skouriotissa, or “Our Lady of the Slag Heap” [SLIDE]. We have no record of when this church was founded; its earliest mention is from Vassily Barsky’s visit in 1735, when he recorded 3 or 4 monks living in a small monastery at the site. [SLIDE] The monastery was probably abandoned in the nineteenth century, but in 1900 we hear that the Μητρόπολη Κυρηνείας appropriated 80 pounds for repairs. But the roots of the monastery are certainly earlier, as we can tell from the column capitals used as spolia in the bishop’s house next to the monastery [SLIDE], and from the surviving fragment of a fresco on the south wall that has been tentatively dated by Athanasios Papageorgiou to the fifteenth century. [SLIDE] Perhaps the church is evidence of a lingering memory of mining that had ceased in late antiquity but was clearly part of the natural, and therefore religious, cultural, and social landscape for centuries to come — another instance of historical reuse and continuity of activity at significant sites around the island, from the ancient sanctuary-turned-sugar-mills of Kouklia-Palaepaphos to the port settlement and salt factory-turned-Sufi lodge at Hala Sultan Tekke, to name but a few salient examples.
But the greatest evidence for the way in which the (mining) past persisted in structuring the lives of people in the present in and near Skouriotissa comes, as I mentioned, from the name of the place itself. Slag, or “skouria,” is the solid waste generated by mining activity, e.g. the smelting and refining of metal from raw ore. [SLIDE] As Vasiliki Kassianidou says, the name of Panagia Skouriotissa “is no coincidence: the church is overshadowed by the largest slag heap on Cyprus — declared an ancient monument by the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Cyprus, due both to its sheer size and because its associated mine is the only one specifically mentioned in ancient textual sources.” The lives of people in Katydata and other villages nearby [SLIDE] who lived and worked here in the many centuries between when late Roman (Byzantine) mining ceased and the Americans began their own exploitation of the natural resources, shortly after World War I, were quite literally overshadowed by antiquity — not of the typical monumental sort, as in Athens with the Parthenon, but by a monument that is if anything a testament to the daily labour of thousands of slaves who exploited the island’s resources on an industrial scale long before the Industrial Revolution.
The British knew this, too. In 1878, when the British acquired the island, one author, Frederic Henry Fisher, began his book Cyprus: Our New Colony and What We Know About It by underlining the association of their new colony with the metal, copper — once again, on primarily toponymic grounds. [SLIDE] Fisher was not sure whether it was the island that gave the name to the metal, or the metal, “æs cyprium,” which gave rise to the island. The point remained: the British had a new colony, and this colony brought to their minds the goddess Aphrodite and the metal copper. Now, at this conjuncture in the late nineteenth century, copper was gaining newfound importance as a metal of conduction: political economy, and geopolitics with it, was reformed with the advent of electrical wiring and combustion engines, both of which relied on copper. Needless to say, the British Empire itself was powered by the Industrial Revolution: the engine of empire was quite literally fed by fossil fuels. [SLIDE] Nonetheless, the British initially hesitated to exploit the mines in Cyprus, beyond recording the visible slag as Kitchener did in his 1882 survey.
It took the coming of Charles Gunther to Skouriotissa in 1913 for mining activity to really get underway. In the end, it was less the demand for copper wiring that sparked the economic boom of the 1920s and 30s and more the key role copper played in the manufacture of artillery shells and tanks. As Alexander Apostolides and Demetris Christodoulou tell us, [SLIDE] the economic growth of CMC was directly linked to the rearmament of fascist Germany in the interwar period. 1938 was the peak, with 9200 employees amounting to 5.8% of the economically active population, contributing 17.2% of GDP, and making up a whopping 62.7% of all exports. Again, the timing was no coincidence: [SLIDE] “Cypriot ore,” Apostolides summarizes, “provided crucial raw materials in which Germany was not self-sufficient: copper and sulphur. Before 1934, Germany imported most of its ore from the biggest European producer of copper sulphate, the Spanish mines of the Rio Tinto Company.” When the Spanish Civil War in 1936 cut off these supplies, Nazi Germany turned to Cyprus: CMC was one of the few Anglo-American mining companies that continued to supply the Nazi regime with copper ore for as long as they possibly could.
One might think that this is a clear case of how mining in Skouriotissa places Cyprus in a political conjuncture, one of an emerging entangled industrial capitalism, where distant geopolitics dictates the fortunes of small countries (then, as today, as in antiquity). Yet, although significant in its own way, this is not the story of politics and mining I want to tell. [SLIDE] Cyprus’ destiny does not lie in its “insular nature”; rather, the very geography of the island is always in flux. As Antonis Hadjikyriacou has argued in his landmark recent study Χερσαίο Νησί: Η Μεσόγειος και η Κύπρος στην Οθωμανική Εποχή των Επαναστάσεων (Θεσσαλονίκη: Ψηφίδες, 2021), “geography is neither obvious nor self-explanatory”; “the meaning of geography changes in space, in time, and in the geopolitical framework.” Cyprus, Hadjikyriacou tells us, is “not exactly an island nor exactly a peninsula, at least in the framework of a conceptual geography; the division of the word’s etymological components [that is, χερσόνησος = χερσαίο νησί] conveys this dual character of its interconnection with the continental region and the relative autonomy that the separation by sea makes possible.” Through the example of Cyprus, Hadjikyriacou wants to make the essential point that “the historical context changes the meaning of space.” Yet this does not mean that geography is dissolved into a hall of mirrors of representations: Cyprus is neither just constituted by narratives nor is it simply its natural geography, its unchanging “island nature.” What, then, is the meaning of Cyprus’ geography — of Cyprus Insula, as the exhibition asks us to consider, or of its mining history, as we might specify it for the current case — for politics, society, and culture?
With the remainder of my time, I want to present three case studies, drawn from oral history and newspaper sources, that might begin to allow us to rethink the politics and geography of Skouriotissa and of mining history in Cyprus more generally. [SLIDE] First, I want to recall a sunny day in January 2022, when I visited Lefka with a Turkish-Cypriot guide, Cemal, who had worked for CMC from 1962 until 1974. Like many other young people on the visit that day, I was surprised to hear Cemal Bey speak to us in fluent Kypriaka. When asked, he explained that he had been born in Arodhes near Pafos, where Cypriot Greek was the lingua franca, just as it was for the miners who worked for CMC. Cemal attended the English School in the 1950s, which allowed him to get a higher position in CMC than his father, who had been a simple laborer in the mines. Standing in front of the open pit in Lefka, Cemal explained to us the environmental destruction CMC’s activities had wrought on the area. But what struck me most was the complex, yet surprisingly positive attitude Cemal had to CMC. Of course, it is because of CMC that nearby Lefka is even today contaminated with waste byproducts; but it is also because of mining that many villagers in the area had access to decent housing, schools, the Cyprus Railway, and healthcare for the first time. “Workers were paid their salaries every 15 days,” Cemal said, with satisfactory wages (after the 1948 strike in particular) that led to a period of prosperity that he thinks Lefke even today cannot match. “Its disciplined management was perfect,” Cemal said in a 2011 interview with Haber Kıbrıs. [SLIDE] “CMC, mini bir hükümet gibiydi”; “CMC was like a mini-government.”
This is not the first time I came across this sentiment in my research. Consider the testimony of Michalis, another CMC mine worker: “Όι, επεράσαμεν πολλά ωραία… No, we really enjoyed ourselves. Σαν την CMC, σαν την Cyprus Mines Corporation λέγεται, δεν έσιει άλλην εταιρεία στην Κύπρο. Like CMC, like Cyprus Mines Corporation that is, there’s no other company in Cyprus. Τόσον καλή, τόσον συσταρισμένη, τόσον … με αρχές. Such a good company, well-organized, with principles…” [SLIDE] This second example comes from the oral histories that were collected by Marios Hadjianastasis as part of the aforementioned Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project [which I am immensely grateful to Hadjianastasis and to Michael Given for sharing with me]. Michalis (a pseudonym I have given in accordance with the project’s policy) was born in Evrychou in 1925 and grew up in great poverty. He went on to work for CMC for 27 years. In the interview from 2003, Hadjianastasis asks Michalis about the landmark 1948 strike. But Michalis’ reply is not quite as political as expected — or, better put, not political in the way expected. At least with regard to this postwar, post-strike period, Michalis is quite nostalgic: he speaks of getting the best wages in Cyprus, the introduction of a 40-hour workweek, and the company building proper houses with electricity and running water. With these relatively good working conditions at CMC, Michalis says, “για μας ήταν σωτήριο”: from Tillirka to Pitsilia, from Zodhia to Akaki, CMC was their saviour. Michalis speaks particularly nostalgically of something he called “The Welfare” (“το Γουέλφαιρ”), which gave milk to infants and established schools and camps.
It is important to remember that until 1948, the Government of Cyprus had essentially no provision of healthcare or social services (or electricity or running water in most places, for that matter). The British began investing in Cyprus only after 1947, and especially in the 1950s, when investment in the island began to grow first because the Empire lost India in 1947 and then because of the Suez Crisis of 1956. Thus, it absolutely makes sense that CMC was “like a mini-government”: it is through and because of CMC — albeit with an important role played by the unions and strikers — that the rudiments of what would become a welfare state began to be set up. Here, I want to be careful not to fall into the narrative of the “white man’s burden” that CMC itself propagated, most notably in the 1962 company biography by David Lavender [SLIDE]. Harvey Mudd himself, the president of CMC, was very satisfied that his corporation became a leader in “welfare.” In 1942, Mudd wrote: “The Welfare Department has been very efficient and helpful and I now get more satisfaction out of their work than anything else we are doing on the island except insofar as we have been useful to the Government and Army.” It is quite striking to hear such purported concern for “welfare” from a man whose overriding business interest was, after all, the exploitation of men and of the earth under brutish labor conditions. After all, Harvey Mudd is the same man who six years later, after the 125-day-long strike of 1948, would pride himself on conceding almost nothing to his workers. [SLIDE] And yet: the story of that strike, which began 77 years ago to the day, would become a legend, at least among some quarters of the Cypriot Left who longed for a common history of struggle, a founding myth of the Cypriot working class that is common to both Greeks and Turks; for a later generation, CMC, for all its shortcomings, would become another monument, this one for a lost chance, a path not taken for the political evolution of the island in the 1950s and beyond.
To end, I want to return to the landscape of Skouriotissa, to another layer of this palimpsest of memories and narratives that have gathered around this remarkable place — this time through the eyes and words of the great Cypriot poet Costas Montis. [SLIDE] In 1936, then just 22 years old, Montis wrote three articles about Skouriotissa and CMC as a correspondent for the newspaper Eleftheria. In an article entitled “Two Mountains of Copper that Sustain Thousands of People,” [SLIDE] Montis writes: “Above the serene sea of Xeros, where the winds coming down from Troodos just barely do not reach, stand Mavrovouni and Skouriotissa. Two treeless mountains, the one and the other, two mountains of copper which had life blown into them by a company, the Cyprus Mines Corporation from Los Angeles, California. The faithful companion of Mavrovouni [Karadag] is Turkish Lefke, and of Skouriotissa the beloved Kalo Chorio [Good Village]. Drowning, both of them, in the greenery, you listen and you hear every dawn and dusk how many pleas and how many cries are made for a lemon tree to take pity, for a compassionate olive tree to climb up the neighboring bare hillsides, which are singed by the sun of the summer. But of no avail…” Montis sat for an interview with JL Bruce, who invited him to visit the galleries of the mines himself the following day. [SLIDE] And so he did: “When you are suddenly given the chance to see with your own eyes, to feel with your whole body, pushing your face in to smell deeply something which you dreamed and desired to know, then you don’t look at anything else, you don’t pay attention to anything other than your watch, which moves its hands so slowly to show the hour of delight. The mine … There where man drags himself around like a worm, denying himself sun and air to find or not find again the hole opened which will bring him back to life… The mine… That which became a curse and accusation, myth and (hi?)story.” What Montis gives us is his own vocabulary for articulating the meaning of mining history in Skouriotissa — a political meaning, to be sure, and a human meaning too, but also one where the human becomes like a worm in their brutalization, where narratives of modernization and welfare, labor and capitalism, are folded into a landscape about which stories and histories never cease to be told, like a spider weaving its webs around the darker corners of the earth: “το μεταλλείο, αυτό που το θέατρο κι ο κινηματογράφος, το μυθιστόρημα και το τραγούδι έπλεξαν αραχνιασμένους πέπλους γύρω από την σκοτεινή του ύπαρξη. Το μεταλλείο…” I want to leave you here with this evocation of a politics of place in its plurality that embraces the richness of the landscape — social, economic, natural, cultural, and much more besides — that makes Cyprus what it is.