Tea-trays and longing: mapping Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus onto Cyprus Michael Paraskos (Imperial College London, UK)
AS A CHILD, in the summers, my parents would take my bothers, sister and myself out of school in England early, before the start of the official summer holidays, and we would travel to Cyprus. ‘Going home’, we would call it, or sometimes with a more melodramatic flourish, ‘returning to the homeland’, although we children were all born in England, and were only really Cypriots in our own minds. Once in Cyprus, my father, the painter Stass Paraskos, would set up the famous annual summer camp he ran for artists, the Cyprus Summer School, and we would spend the hot months of the καλοκαίρι playing on the beach, swimming, eating σουβλάκι, and listening to discussions on art in the decidedly bohemian company of artists from all over the world — the likes of Terry Frost, Mali Morris, Dennis Creffield, Euan Uglow and numerous others. As the summer drew to a close, and we faced the unhappy prospect of returning to England, being young children we were invariably drawn to the tourist tat shops, with their cheap and tacky souvenirs, usually mass-produced in Hong Kong or Taiwan, in search of tangible signifiers of our obsessive desire to be Cypriot, physical things to take back to with us to what was our real home in Britain. On these souvenirs would usually be printed things like a scene of Petra tou Romiou, the alleged birthplace of the goddess Aphrodite, or the view of some monastery on the Kyrenia mountains we had never seen, or a
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