By Christopher Pitsillides
British Pathé introduced international audiences to what it called Aphrodite’s Island.
The camera moved across monasteries, mountain villages, Kyrenia harbour, St Hilarion, Archbishop Makarios and the streets of Nicosia. Cyprus appeared timeless: beautiful, spiritual, Mediterranean and slightly exotic.
But the striking thing about the film is not only what it shows.
It is what it accidentally predicts.
Because hidden between the postcard imagery is a Cyprus we still recognise today: a country suspended between tourism and tension, myth and politics, beauty and uncertainty.
The footage of old Nicosia is particularly revealing. Horse carts move through the city. Copper craftsmen work patiently in narrow streets. Traders sit outside crowded shops. Everyday life unfolds without ceremony.
No grand speeches. Just ordinary coexistence.
Yet by 1965, Cyprus was already struggling with intercommunal violence, political anxiety and unresolved questions of identity and belonging. The contradiction is striking: an island marketed as paradise while quietly wrestling with its future.
Sixty years later, little feels unfamiliar.
We still sell Aphrodite, monasteries, beaches and mountain villages. But we still debate memory, division, ownership and loss. We still struggle to reconcile the Cyprus of tourism with the Cyprus of trauma.
Perhaps that is why the film feels strangely modern.
Without intending to, British Pathé captured the Cyprus we still inhabit: beautiful, divided and unresolved.
The real question is whether, in another sixty years, people will look back at today’s Cyprus and wonder why we were still living inside the same old film.
See the full 1965 British Pathé footage via British Pathé / YouTube. Link avail below:
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