In April 1928, ten people filed into a professional photographic studio, ready to be visually recorded for posterity. The only man among them took charge, as was customary. He described the special occasion to the photographer, agreed the price, then attempted to stage-manage the entire affair. However, the photographer had ideas all his own. As did the man’s mother-in-law. The result was a family portrait of extraordinary complexity. Now, almost a hundred years later—fully two centuries after photography’s invention—the image remains captivating, due in part to its unique composition, but foremost for its unabashed star.¹

Among the three generations on hand, mother-in-law Zoe, by far the eldest, had the most experience of portrait sittings. And sit she did. Age 63, she at once spotted the large chair, and her daughters guided her into it. Then the photographer placed the four daughters improbably along the back row standing. At opposite ends of the row, he situated the youngest of them: identical twins in matching outfits, each with long pearl strand knotted at the neck. Between the twins were the two older sisters. One stood out.

By most accounts, Angeliki was a gracious woman of refined tastes and impeccable courtesy. Though she never finished high school—compelled to marry this imposing man instead—she could converse with the highest officials and the “lowliest” farm folk with equal ease. Apart from her tendency to overspend, she managed her household activities and social gatherings with great care. Indeed, this year she had noted the happy coincidence of two big events in mid-April. Consulting her husband, she decided to take advantage of it, and she booked this appointment with the Armenian photo-entrepreneur.²

Though the family was “not religious,” they nonetheless attended annual Easter services, often in new clothes purchased for the purpose. After all, they considered this spring ritual more of “a social thing.” So the ten relatives had arrived at the studio well dressed in fashionable garments and accessories, led by the aspiring patriarch in three-piece suit and necktie. The four sisters sported trendy roaring-twenties bob haircuts, even as their mother had pinned an heirloom broach at her neckline and now clutched a purse in her lap. Furthermore, Zoe was layered in black, as expected of all widows. Everyone else wore lighter colors appropriate to the season. Also, because this year Easter Sunday fell during the same week as Angeliki’s birthday, her husband and children had surprised her with a colorful gift corsage.³

Affixed high on her jacket, near her left shoulder, Angeliki’s birthday corsage featured at least three flowers, perhaps four. As Mother’s Day also was observed in spring, the four blooms might have been chosen to signify her four children, now waiting impatiently for their assigned positions. But first, of course, there was the matter of their father. As Zoe had commandeered the chair, the photographer gamely placed a piano bench at a slight angle to it. He coaxed Angeliki’s husband onto it and convinced him to hold their two younger children in his arms. Now the photographer only needed to arrange the two older children to complete the third generation and fix the tableau—the colonial family that is the subject of this book’s first chapter.

The photographer was meticulous, pride in his art evidenced by the studio props on display. Under the light-hued rectangular rug was yet another: a larger ornate Persian carpet. A tall decorative vase stood in the rear left corner. Paneled walls at right and left, with prominent dark baseboards, yielded diagonal lines creating the illusion of deep space. That illusion was continued on the photographer’s painted backdrop, which included candelabra seemingly fixed to the wall, plus curtains falling behind them and sweeping upward from left to top center. In right and left corners, actual fabrics were draped from ceiling to floor, framing and enhancing the trompe l’oeil.

However deep, the studio proper was more than wide enough to accommodate the two remaining children at either end of the front row. In her pleated dress, matching hair ribbon, and elegant lace-up boots, the older girl gravitated to her grandmother Zoe’s side, leaning against the chair, at right. But the older boy proved much more determined than his exasperated father, even more determined than the studio portraitist himself. Refusing to stand at left, Michael insisted on being front and center.

Aggravating the father’s anxieties about his fey son, Michael got down on the rug and reclined on it. Ever the showboat, he supported himself with his right arm, as his left arm rested along the left side of his body, left hand at his bare knees. In shorts and sweater, he stretched out his legs, which extended into long socks and patent leather shoes with ankle straps. Thus did Zoe’s grandson unfurl himself across the foreground of the family portrait.

Across nearly a century, from their time to ours, Michael gave us his best Greta Garbo pose.

For any school kid who ever gazed up at a world map and noticed South America and Africa fit together like pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, plate tectonics are easy to grasp. The earth’s landmasses seem to have split at the seams millions of years ago, continents ever-so-slowly drifting apart to their current stations—never mind what priests intone about god’s creation a few thousand years back. On a smaller scale, the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus formed a snug fit, an obvious earlier component, of Asia Minor, Anatolia, Middle East, or Western Asia. Nevertheless European powers again and again have claimed it, overtaken it, and controlled it, going back to crusading Richard the Lionheart and much earlier. For subsequent generations, aligning a family with a particular colonizing power constituted many a patriarch’s civic duty—or difficult decision of defiance.

The sunny coastlines of Cyprus and Turkey are separated by a mere 40 miles of water. By contrast the Cypriot capital of Nicosia is well over 500 miles from Athens, 2000 miles from London. Even so, Greek-and English-language accounts of the Cypriot past inevitably refer to Turks as invaders. Such is the course of empire, and such are the distortions of history written by the winners. Meanwhile, to this day, the United Kingdom owns two impressive chunks of prime beachfront real estate with lovely views to the south, overlaid with vast expanses of concrete—that is, runways, docks, and support structures. These military base areas are known as Akrotiri and Dhekelia, where the Union Jack still is raised and lowered to the strains of “God Save The Queen.” These royal realms are situated, no accident, adjacent to the thriving port cities of Limassol and Larnaca, now international tourist hotspots.⁴

In terms of landmass and population, Cyprus is small, belying the enormous strategic importance of its location, at the intersection of Mediterranean Sea lanes connecting East and West, global North and global South. It has strong prehistoric ties to the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. From early humans to the present day, Cyprus has experienced a staggering number of colonizations. Beginning around 9000 BCE, hunter-gatherers on the island were joined by farmer-herders from the Fertile Crescent—specifically, today’s Syria—who raised wheat, sheep, and goats. Over time, these early settlers were followed by colonizers from Greece, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, and Rome. Christians reached the island in the first century CE; Jews were expelled in the second; Muslims arrived in the seventh. After twelfth and thirteenth century religious wars staked various claims on “holy” land—killing around two million people—Venice, Turkey, then Great Britain colonized Cyprus. Since Venetians deforested the island to build their naval and commercial fleets, Turkey and Britain shored up agriculture and fisheries, as well as their own military garrisons. Not until 1960 did local leaders declare Cyprus an independent nation-state. However, many considered it an ethnarchy if not theocracy, since the first president was archbishop of the orthodox Church of Cyprus. He ruled—with brief albeit important exceptions—until 1977.⁵

At roughly 3500 square miles, home to about 500,000 people in 1950, Cyprus was comparable to the U.S. state of Delaware, though Cyprus was poor, not yet a tax haven. About half the size of Wales, Cyprus at mid-century had just one-fifth its population. A standard formulation tallied the people as 80% of Greek descent, 20% of Turkish descent, ignoring smaller minorities of Armenian and Lebanese ancestry. Unlike Michael and his family, most Cypriots found it difficult to move beyond their village or district, nigh impossible to leave the island, except as fishers or sailors. Thus, for many, it felt claustrophobic. The cultural norms were stifling, religious values overpowering—not unlike the Greek islands of Crete and Hydra, where Michael would set and shoot two films. Though foreigners frequently came and went, evidencing the cosmopolitanism of ports like Limassol and Kyrenia, they told tales of worlds inaccessible to ordinary Cypriots.⁶

Before World War II, a steamship from Larnaca to London required five days journey, including rail passages, at an obscene price quoted in pounds. If poor and working-class Cypriots—the vast majority—could not be transported to these far-flung places, they nonetheless could communicate with them nonstop. Letters and telephones, newspapers and books, movies and magazines, then radio and television all provided a sense of connection, especially to Turkey, Greece, and Britain. By the turn of the millennium, with roughly a million people, low-cost air travel enabled the tourism industry to overtake agriculture.⁷

The myth of distinct continents is easily put asunder when we consider that Cypriot’s northern neighbor Turkey straddles Asia and Europe and its southern neighbor Egypt overlaps Asia and Africa. More significant still are the individuals and groups who repeatedly cross over these territorial and metaphorical divides. The big construct known as the West, for example, takes in many elite and middle-class persons of the global South or East: The Orient. After all, who brokers these military deals? Who parcels out the properties? Who buys and sells provisions? Who draws up the contracts? Who translates from the local idioms into the colonizers’ language? The Queen’s English? Who sends their offspring to the metropole or, failing that, its finer imperial outposts for a “proper” education? In the prevailing tongue and accent, customs and manners?⁸

One such family in Limassol was called Cacoyannis. Among an island society given to fine distinctions, Angeliki Efthyvoulos came from a higher status family than her fiancé Panayiotis Cacoyannis, whose forebears were traders, selling horse feed and other supplies to imperial troops and locals. Still, Angeliki’s husband-to-be was ambitious. While she learned music at the piano, he took a correspondence course in the 1910s from Chicago’s La Salle Extension University, an early large-scale provider of distance education. Though U.S. regulators questioned La Salle’s designation as a university, no one doubted the determination of P. Cacoyannis, as his upstart law office styled him. With his La Salle Bachelor of Laws degree, he had begun his professional ascent.⁹

At the outbreak of World War I, the British Empire took Cyprus—already its protectorate—from the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Since Greece would join Britain and its allies in combat against German, Turkish, and other enemies, a wartime marriage between two Greek Cypriots violated no national or racial taboos. Nor was Cacoyannis too old for Angeliki, at just over five years her senior. So the wedding went ahead. A sixteen-year-old bride on 8 November 1915, Angeliki was well above the marrying age for girls in turn-of-the-century United States, for example. Before 1920, the vast majority of state age-of-consent laws permitted adult male sexual intercourse with female children, such that a daughter could be transferred by marriage from a father’s to a husband’s household at the tender age of ten—seven in Delaware. After her wedding in late 1915, Angeliki bore her first child, a son, just after New Year’s 1917. But Louis lived only three months. Overcoming their sorrow, the newlyweds tried again, and Angeliki gave birth to daughter Ellie in December 1918, as the Great War ended. Again, given the correlation between teen pregnancy and infant mortality, Ellie died just after her first birthday.¹⁰

In the 1920s, their odds improved, and the family flourished. Stella was born healthy in 1920, followed in rapid succession by Michael in 1921, Yannoulla in 1923, and finally George in 1924. So the family portrait commissioned in 1928 celebrated much more than a secular Eastertide, Angeliki’s birthday, or Mother’s Day for Angeliki and elder matriarch Zoe—whose four daughters on the back row represented scarcely a third of her offspring, with many others joining the diaspora in southern Africa. Most of all, the photographic portrait of ten subjects solidified as it commemorated this large extended family’s latest nuclear family in Limassol.¹¹

With their plunging necklines and short hair, if not short skirts, Angeliki’s sisters seemed liberated flappers—uncoupled and unencumbered. By contrast, Angeliki was pinned with the sexist nuclear-family labels of housewife, homemaker, and hostess. Nonetheless she took considerable comfort in the notion that her husband and her children were destined for greatness. As the four siblings grew up, they grew close—and competitive. According to Michael, his “father was not very involved in the family,” leaving the bulk of parental duties to Angeliki. To be sure, he earned money for their food, clothing, shelter, and education, as well as nights out for himself, sometimes accompanied by their mother. In that last sense, earnings “were wasted, everything was spent” on parties and revelry. For many years, the Cacoyannis family did not own their own home, but rented “the upper floor of a duplex house.”¹²

Across a longstanding cosmopolitan mix of religions, languages, races, and ethnicties in Cyprus, gender and sexuality were ordered along binaries consistent with globalizing trends. Oppressive gender norms sent middle-class men into the public sphere of employment, leisure, and political participation, with P. Cacoyannis serving on the British colonial Executive Council, relegating women to dutiful daughters then wives, working mostly inside the home. They took on the responsibilities of childbearing, childrearing, cooking, cleaning, purchasing and mending clothes, managing education and extracurriculars. Men enjoyed great sexual license in both premarital and extramarital contexts, while women suffered under dominant representations as virgin or whore: chaste bride then honorable mother, or fallen woman. This heteronormative sexual double standard for women—permitting men to forever sow wild oats while chaining women to one lifelong monogamous marriage—was of course unsustainable. Exogamous marriage, outside one’s own cultural group however defined, also generated anxiety, ostracism, and hardship. Further queering these norms, LGBTI people faced enormous obstacles and persecution, from birth to—often early—death. The Cacoyannis family crystalized these values, even as Michael tested them again and again.¹³

In the late 1920s in Cyprus, sacred and secular realms grew in tandem and often in opposition, depending upon a constellation of factors such as language and ethnicity. Sunni Muslims tended to speak Turkish, Orthodox Christians Greek, Protestants English. Lebanese and Armenian also were spoken. Enterprising Armenians such as the portrait photographer attended their own Eastern Orthodox Church, whereas most Lebanese were Maronite Catholics. What was a non-believing family to do? Many chose to tolerate the pious, play it by ear, and go through the motions. For this particular family, that meant speaking both Greek and English, identifying as Κακογιάννης and Cacoyannis, as well as attending Easter and Christmas services at the Church of Cyprus. First grade classes for Stella, as she reached the age of six, commenced at Terra Santa School, which—as its name suggested—considered Cyprus a part of the contested Middle East “holy” land. This Maronite Catholic girls school was situated on St. Andrew Street, named for the apostle, brother of Peter. As in Catholic dogma Peter’s successor is the pope in Rome, so too in Orthodoxy Andrew’s successor is the patriarch in Constantinople, aka Istanbul. Perhaps more important to Stella, her school was conveniently located just one block from their rented home on Otto and Amalia Street, named for the mid-nineteenth century king and queen of Greece. This was the multifaith, multiethnic, multilingual mix into which motion pictures intervened in early twentieth century Cyprus.¹⁴

For Michael, the Cacoyannis’ upper floor apartment on Otto and Amalia Street was ideally situated, because it stood across the street from an open-air cinema. As good luck would have it, the apartment’s balcony, with narrow-gauge child-safe wrought-iron railing, provided a view of the screen. Luckier still, stern Cacoyannis père returned home late from the office or club, and in any case, he largely ignored the children, while Angeliki sometimes indulged them. So as Stella learned to read by day, Michael—just over one year her junior—came to consciousness with movies at night. Indeed, the two activities overlapped. After school, Stella let Michael “help” with her homework, not that she needed it. Then the two went to the balcony to watch and listen to so-called silent films. For Stella and Michael, early childhood education extended from formal schooling to sneaky movie-going.¹⁵

As soon as they were out of the crib and comfortable in a bed, Yannoulla moved into Stella’s bedroom and George moved into Michael’s—three years separating the sisters, three years separating the brothers. So from age six or seven, watching a film for Michael and Stella represented an escape from the younger roommate, time apart, to sit together in the dark under the stars, to be guided through a story, and to become absorbed if not enthralled with the actors and their characters. Then of course, there was the music and dancing. Sister and brother listened to the latest international trends and mimicked them, as Michael belted out new show tunes at the family piano. Weekend afternoons, with or without their mother’s permission, Stella and Michael attended matinees at indoor venues too, including Benjamin Gunzberg’s Cine Rialto, constructed in the early 1930s as the latest of Limassol’s six cinemas.¹⁶

Before talkies, studios expected exhibitors to screen silent films with musical accompaniment, either live or recorded. Live performances were more common, and the most palatial picture houses were fitted with a pipe organ and orchestra pit. Some studios circulated song recommendations from standard repertoires and even suggested particular sheet music. Tiny e...