May
4
2009
Nein, nein, says Yiangoulis
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*Apologies to those who’ve unsuccessfully attempted over the last two months to post a comment and thanks to Matt Weber for bringing the glitch to my attention. For someone who spends most of his time hauling, or thinking about hauling, lobsters from the seafloor, you’re not a bad tech consultant.
Left to right: Andriani Psaras, Yiangos (aka Yiangoulis) Psaras, Georgos Psaras, Vassiliki Psaras (my grandmother), Anastasia Psaras
During my childhood years in Cyprus, my parents used to occasionally take me and my sister to visit my grandmother’s brother, Yiangoulis, and his wife, Anna. Their house, with its acres of backyard citrus orchards, was off the road to Kourion, our favorite beach, and so often we would pull off the cypress-flanked road into their driveway for a coffee and ‘glyko karidaki,’ a Cypriot dessert of whole green walnuts that have been boiled and preserved in a thick sugar syrup.
James Joyce
Despite living on a fruit farm, Yiangoulis was almost always buttoned up as if he’d just returned from some august country club beyond the lemon groves and droning cicadas. A tall lanky man, with round black wiry glasses, long delicate fingers and small sharp eyes, he didn’t look like a Cypriot (in fact, now that I think of it, he looked like James Joyce). He was a gambler and backyard magician who would offer us money if we solved one of his riddles, which inevitably involved numeric puzzles or matches arranged in infuriating geometric formations.
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