“You can see how important pottery was to us by this fact: the archaeologists who excavated here found sixty-two thousand sherds of pottery and only one thousand other artifacts of all kinds.

“We made pottery ourselves, each family having its own designs. You can see the grace and boldness of those designs in the museum. Our pottery was white and we painted it in dark red or in brown. We had no pottery wheel, but shaped each piece by hand and fired it in small ovens.

“The designs on our pots came with our ancestors when they left Mersin in Turkey to make a brave voyage across the sea to North Cyprus. At first they were afraid, those pioneers. Their houses were half underground, and they built a ditch as a defense against attack on this precious property. But, little by little, we learned we had nothing to fear.

“Our ancestors here at Vrysi lived in flimsy houses when they first arrived. But ours, as you can see, were sturdily built. We had paved walkways between our homes so we did not have too much mud tracked in.

“We liked rectangular houses, but sometimes the lay of the land forced an irregular shape. We rounded the corners, so they were easy to keep clean, and we had lovely walls plastered with clay. We covered our floors with woven mats. Wooden pillars supported our high thatched roofs.

“We built stone benches along the walls of our houses and had storage bins made of stone slabs. A large hearth was the center of each house. At night, our one-room homes were cozy with the firelight and with the glow of oil burning in stone lamps. We made small stone figurines which were honored in our homes, but that is a religious matter, which we do not discuss with strangers.

“My people lived here for over a hundred generations, until an earthquake made the place unsafe and we moved away. For five thousand years since then, the sea has undercut our promontory. In the not-too-distant future, the sea will swallow the whole village. Then all that will remain to recall our lives will be the pottery sherds and bone needles and stone spindle whorls in the museum at Girne, North Cyprus.”

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