Maronite Cypriots Erotic

The Maronite Cypriots are a Catholic minority on an island otherwise split between Orthodox Christians and Muslims. For centuries they have kept a form of Arabic alive while living among Greek speakers. Their ancestors came from Lebanon and Syria in several waves. The largest wave is linked to the Crusader period, after the Lusignan dynasty took Cyprus in the 1190s. They belong to the Maronite Church, an Eastern Catholic church in full communion with Rome, and its liturgy still uses Syriac. On the island they have their own archbishop, based in Nicosia.

Under Venetian and then Ottoman rule their numbers shrank. Villages emptied, and families drifted into Orthodoxy, Latin Catholicism or Islam. By modern times the community was centered on four villages in the northwest near Cape Kormakitis: Kormakitis, Asomatos, Agia Marina and Karpasha. The 1960 constitution classed Maronites, along with Armenians and Latins, as a religious group. They chose to belong to the Greek Cypriot community, voting in its elections and sending a nonvoting representative of their own to parliament. The 1974 Turkish invasion is the break that defines living memory. All four villages ended up in the north, and most families moved south to Nicosia, Limassol and Larnaca. Asomatos and Agia Marina were turned into military camps. A small, aging population stayed on in Kormakitis.

Their language is Cypriot Maronite Arabic, which speakers call Sanna, a name usually glossed as our language. Long separation from the Arabic-speaking world and close contact with Greek have changed how it sounds and filled it with Greek loanwords. Almost every speaker is also fluent in Greek, and children raised in the southern cities often pick up only pieces of Sanna. Cyprus recognized it as a minority language in 2008. Revival work, including summer programs in Kormakitis, is trying to slow the loss.

Since crossing points on the dividing line opened in 2003, Kormakitis has come back to life on weekends and holidays. Families drive north from the cities, open up their old houses and fill the church of Saint George on feast days. For a community of only a few thousand, these trips do a lot of the work of staying a people. Saints' days, village patron feasts and the February feast of Saint Maron keep a shared calendar going, even though daily life now happens somewhere else.