My Old Acquaintance is a lively and entertaining account of life as it was yesterday in Cyprus, drawn from the experiences and impressions of some of the many men and women who visited the island over the past centuries.  Sometimes these visitors were enroute to the Holy Land, others came as adventurers, travelers, conquerors, or writers.  It tells of what they saw and what they left behind, and they took away.  Through these outsiders’ eyes and through the author’s own research we see how towns and villages looked before living memory, how the local Cypriot population lived forgotten “below the castles,” and hear of enchanting scenery often cited by visitors during sometimes highly uncomfortable sojourns round the island in caravans or mule trains.  Yet, as one visitor wrote, “one cannot walk through a thicket or along a beach without tangling his feet in legend and history.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barbara Cornwell Lyssarides has live most of her life in the Middle East, mainly in Cyprus, and much of it as a journalist writing for local and foreign newspapers.