"And my father got a pension from the British army," Mehmet said appreciatively, adding a complication to the intricate history of this place, which Lawrence Durrell called "a confluence of destinies."

That part of the story became more eloquent when we stopped in Bellapais, where Durrell lived and began Justine, before recording his Cyprus stay in Bitter Lemons. The writer's long rectangle of a house—whitewashed and restored by its British owners, with the carved old door that he loved intact—sits on a steep hill above a quiet village. It must have been still quieter before a number of villas went up between his place and the town square, where he could sip an ouzo near the Abbey of Bellapais, one of the loveliest small monasteries in the world. Durrell's tranquillity ended with his leaving the island, his life in danger, in 1956. It was the time of EOKA, the guerrilla movement seeking enosis, the incorporation of the entire island into Greece.

In 1923, Britain had taken Cyprus as a colony from the Turks, whose empire was dismembered after they fought on the losing side in World War I. Since 1878, the British, anxious to protect the Suez Canal, had had a treaty with Turkey enabling them to govern the place.

In the 1950s, EOKA, led by ethnic Greeks as well as Greek mainlanders, fought the British until a deal was created for the island's independence in 1960. Greek and Turk Cypriots managed a frail cohabitation under the presidency of the feisty Greek Orthodox archbishop Makarios, until, inspired by the colonels who had staged a coup d'état in Greece, a handful of Greek Cypriots tried once again to annex the island to Greece. About a week later, the Turkish army landed and occupied roughly a third of the island, while Greeks in the north ran for their lives to the south and Turks ran likewise, in the opposite direction.

Four cypresses planted by a local who befriended Durrell soar skyward in the center of the partly ruined cloister of the Crusader Abbey of Bellapais. With its high broken arches, the cloister is more assertively monumental than the humbler ones where monks ambulate at their prayers in Western Europe. From the bay windows of the refectory, an indigo sea can be seen lying at the foot of the mountains.

The peaceful abbey belongs to the Christian presence on the island, which can be traced to the days when saints Paul, Barnaby, and Lazarus proselytized here. Other than holy men, this island smack at the crossroads of East-West trade has drawn conquerors and marauders since prehistoric times. In Nicosia's not-to-be-missed archaeological museum, small but of world quality, sculptures, tools, and lovely earthenware bear witness to a civilization that goes back six thousand years and beyond—to Mycenaeans, Syrians, and Persians, among others. Alexander the Great's heirs made the island part of the Ptolemaic empire, whose capital was Alexandria, in Egypt. The Byzantine Greeks, with their Orthodox Church, succeeded the Ptolemies and covered the island with the lovely domed monasteries that survive. The Crusader Richard the Lion-Hearted wrested Cyprus from these Eastern Christians, and the island was ruled by relatives of the onetime Roman Catholic king of Jerusalem before it fell into the hands of the Venetians for nearly a century, until 1571. That year the Turks laid siege to Famagusta with fifty thousand men, attacking a fort ferociously defended by eight thousand troops loyal to General Marcantonio Bragadino. The general, having wrought slaughter among the Turks, finally surrendered on the promise of clemency. Instead, Lala Mustafa Pasha flailed him and put him to death using the worst tortures imaginable. His agony may have become part of the karma of the island since then.