History

22 Jan 1929

Alfred Westholm, a member of the Swedish Expedition to Cyprus, noted in his diary an ominous night in Cyprus

 

Alfred Westholm, a member of the Swedish Expedition to Cyprus, noted in his diary an ominous night in Cyprus:

As I was lying in my warm, comfortable bed last night, I was awakened by the window shutter banging back and forth. I got up and opened the window to close it. The storm wailed out there, and ice cold winds flung in something wet onto my pyjamas. One might have guessed that a storm was approaching already this evening, far away toward Karavostasi ominous cloud banks had rolled forth and back, threatening to eradicate every trace of the approaching spring. I dried myself off a little, and blown through and through, crawled back into bed. It was warm and cosy and I slept through until Maria came in with hot water in the morning. A fearful shouting set in: It has been snowing all night, and there will be no work today because you cannot get out, for the snow is many metres deep and it is so cold that the dogs are screaming because it has been snowing all night!!!! And so on endlessly and Maria flew back and forth in the room like a feather in the wind and threw open the window shutters so that we could witness the whole glorious thing. We could only see a few metres, so thick was the air from white, familiar snowflakes whizzing past in horizontal lines, but otherwise the scene did not much impress an old Dalecarlia man, had he not known that this was Cyprus. On this island, anyway, such things happen only once every hundred years, it is claimed.