Nature of Cypriots in the Light of 19th Century Travel Literature

Abstract

This study explores the impressions of the 19th century travelers on the nature of Turkish and Greek Cypriots by focusing on their relationships with each other, their personal characteristics, and their attitudes towards foreigners and visitors. Since the focus of the study is the nature and culture of the Cypriots, Cypriots' characteristics, distinctive features, attitudes towards travelers, moods and mindset are presented comparatively in the light of travelers’ reflections in their written accounts. The data were elicited from primary and secondary sources. Primary sources in this context refer to the published books of the 19th century travelers to Cyprus while secondary sources constitute the studies on the issue in the relevant literature. All books written by travelers to Cyprus in the 19th century were perused to find the data related to the nature of Cypriots and their characters over a period of a year. The collected data were then coded and classified to reveal the themes, namely hospitality, friendliness, family loyalty and docility. Being a type of content analysis, conceptual analysis was conducted in data analysis. Since almost all studies on the 19th century Cyprus travel literature are related to the political and religious dynamics of 19th century Cyprus, this study is thought to fill a gap in the relevant literature by shedding light on the socio-cultural aspects of Cyprus. The results revealed that the Cypriots were quite hospitable towards the travelers since the travelers acknowledged that they felt properly welcomed. Friendliness, helpfulness and docility were found to be other features exhibited by Cypriots in the traveler accounts. The other highly praised characteristic was found to be devotion to home and family.