GHOSTS OF THE LEDRA PALACE
By Sheridan Lambert
Cyprus Mail, Cyprus
Dec 10 2006
WHEN the Ledra Palace opened its doors on October 8, 1949, George
Skyrianides must have been the first to hit the bar. It had been
three long years since he had broached the idea to his partners,
Giorgos Poulias, then vice-mayor of Nicosia, and Dimtrios Zerbini,
a wealthy entrepreneur from Alexandria, and two since he had been
unable to persuade the Cypriot public to buy stock in the newly created
Cyprus Hotels Limited. With investments totalling nearly £200,000 for
land and construction, when the average yearly income was no more
than £100, and the furniture and fixtures on the way from Venice,
the Colonial government’s refusal to finance the remaining £20,000
almost sank the ship.
If it hadn’t been for Zerbini’s last-minute decision to buy up a
controlling interest in the company, Skyrianides vision of Cannes
on the Pediaios might never have flowered, and the UN ended up at
the Hilton.
Anticipating the property hounds of Paphos by half a century,
Skyrianides had realised, even in the wake of World War II, that
in a world shrunken by airport hubs, tourism would soon become an
industry in itself. With many European capitals still smoking ruins,
Nicosia also had at least this advantage: it was still standing. It
is unlikely that Skyrianides’ vision entailed donkey sightings or
lace demonstrations; rather, it would have reflected the cosmopolitan
flavour of his social milieu. In this sense, too, Skyrianides had
been ahead of his time, envisioning a European oasis a ferry’s ride
from the Jordan River at a time when a layover between Cairo and
Paris still meant something.
Skyrianides and his partners are now dead, as are most people who
could tell you what colour the Ledra’s bedspreads were in 1949, so
when I was told of a man who could show me the dry-cleaning bills,
I drove straight to the corporate offices of Louis Hotels before
those memories became statistics yellowing in a shoebox.
Costas Loizou, now a financial consultant to Louis, had been the
Ledra’s first accountant, and later its manager. When I entered his
office, I could see that despite his seventy plus years Loizou would
be around for a few more. Spry and passionate, he seemed to have been
waiting for the past thirty to tell the Ledra’s story.
Spreading some old magazines out on his desk, he said, "Lyndon Johnson
stayed at the Ledra in 1962." He produced a memo from Johnson’s
visit. "He was tall and the beds were short. We had to make him a
new bed."
Reminiscing about the Ledra seemed to age Loizou backwards. He sat
down behind a clutter of articles, magazines and official documents
related to the hotel and said, "When the hotel opened its gates in
1949, they didn’t give stars, but the Ledra was considered a deluxe.
I went into the service in 1950. I remember the first bill I had to
calculate. One pound, five shillings for a room with board."
I had trouble believing this. Grinning, Mr. Loizou said, "My first
salary was £5, plus my share in the ten per cent service charge. I
could buy a lot of things with that."
Whisking through an old photo album, he stopped at a photograph of a
dour-faced man and said, "Yuri Gagarin. He was a guest in 1952." He
pointed at the photo. "I am here, and this is Gagarin’s signature."
I thought it was a pity that Johnson and Gagarin hadn’t been there
at the same time. They might have sorted things out over a highball,
and could have shared that tall bed.
"The high society was always there," Loizou said. "We had weddings,
parties, functions. We organised tea dances too. Every Sunday."
I couldn’t quite conjure up an image.
"Tea and cakes," Loizou explained, flipping through a magazine. "This
is December 1952… You see the English flag?" He flipped to another
page. "That is Nana Mouskouri." And to another.
As the starlets and dignitaries of half a century ago paraded by,
I remembered that Grivas had been plotting from the caves of Troodos
at the time; bombs were exploding in the King George Hotel on Freedom
Square. It seemed incompatible. Loizou pointed to another photo and
said, "This was our garden. The swimming pool was built in 1963."
An annus horribilis, in retrospect, when the dream of a network of
luxury hotels stretching from Famagusta to Paphos must have started
to unravel with the rest of the bicommunal infrastructure. When I
asked him about the ‘troubles’, Mr Loizou said, "In 1963 we closed
the hotel for a few days," and that was all.
It was as if in that pleasure garden cloistered by palms and cypresses
the crack of tennis balls had drowned out the first shots fired in
Tahtakalas. I wanted to entrench myself in that idyll, in between the
years of bloodshed that preceded and those that would follow. To step
across the Ledra’s threshold as it had been, a crystal chandelier
glittering above, a tea dance on Sunday.
"You know the original chandeliers came from Venice," Loizou said,
as if reading my mind. "And the furniture too. All the rooms had a
private bath. At that time it was very rare."
"The original ballroom had a sunken oak dance floor," he went on.
"The marble around it came from Greece. Now I don’t know what they
have. Plastic? Carpets? And there were two frescos, one of Venice
and the other of the Castle of Kyrenia, by Angelopoulos."
I neglected to mention the UN sewage fountain I had seen a week ago
and asked about the Ledra’s celebrated orchestras instead, and was
glad I had.
"Ah! The bands were famous! We used to have an arrangement with a
famous impresario, Mr Artin Bahadourian, an Armenian. They killed him,
you may have heard."
I hadn’t and wondered why I should have.
"They killed him because he was rich, and they knew he had diamonds.
He had offices here in Nicosia. In Beirut, in Baghdad, everywhere. We
always brought an orchestra to the Ledra from the Casino du Liban
in Lebanon, or to the Chanteclair. We were co-operating with the
Chanteclair, a very famous cabaret, but a family cabaret."
"And the bar?" I asked.
"Yes, we had a lovely bar at the Ledra."
I mentioned my recent excursion there, and my disappointment. I might
have mentioned the invasion of Nanking to a Chinese.
"Now! Yes! But not then. I was there too recently and I was very sad.
I was crying actually. Now they’ve spoiled it. They painted it black!"
Loizou showed me a picture of a homely, smiling barman in a white
dinner jacket. Beaming himself, he said, "This is Stelios, our famous
barman. They have written many articles about him. Stelios was the
one who invented the brandy sour."
I had heard this story, and asked if it was true.
"Yes! Stelios told me personally. The story is that King Farouk
was staying at the Forest Park Hotel in Platres. The Muslims aren’t
supposed to drink liquor, so they asked Stelios to make King Farouk
a drink which should look like a fruit juice. He tried various things
and finally arrived at the brandy sour, which is brandy, lemon squash,
soda and water. Stelios was a good man."
He must have been. A saint really, to have suffered the presence of
so many boozing international reporters for all those years. Closing
the album, Loizou said, "You have probably heard of Savvas, the
hall porter."
A character straight out of Casablanca from what I understood, or
possibly the inspiration for one, Savvas had been every reporter’s
best friend, a sort of bag-toting canary who probably knew which side
of the bed King Farouk slept on.
"They said Savvas should have been the first Minister of Information.
He had connections everywhere. But he also did some tricks."
Loizou grinned slyly. "You see, at that time journalists couldn’t
send telegrams directly. They had to send them by taxi to the Cable
and Wireless Office. Savvas used to read them."
"No one suspected him?"
"Finally everybody knew, yes. He was also a very good man.
Unfortunately, he played the horses."
The Ledra’s affairs grow cloudy in the late 60s. The Zerbini family
had fallen on hard times after Nasser ousted Farouk in 1952.
Eventually, they wanted out of Cyprus Hotel Ltd., among whose many
holdings was the Ledra Palace. When no Cypriot takers stepped forward,
they sold their interest to British-owned Trust House Forte, which
led to a belated public outcry in Cyprus – what if the British sold to
the Turks? – and Makarios, the patriot, intervened. With a loan from
Barclays Bank, Louis Hotels and the Archbishopric each bought half of
a 67 per cent interest in the company. But, as Mr Loizou explained,
a hat can’t fit two heads. Two years later, Louis sold out to the
Archbishopric, and in 1978, the newly elected Archbishop Chrysostomos
bought out the remaining 33 per cent after agreeing to leave the
ownership of the Ledra alone in the hands of the original shareholders.
And so today as the Cypriot tourist industry founders again, as
retirees from Devonshire settled in Peyia are learning to fish
from their living rooms and Nicosia’s Laïki Geitonia looks more
like downtown Karachi, there is some comfort in the thought that the
Ledra, protected on two fronts, by sentimental interests and heritage
initiatives, may open its doors again one day.
>>From somewhere within the frescoed ballroom, Mr Loizou resurfaced
and said, "I have the menu from August 15, 1960, the founding of the
Republic. I looked for the original piano, but couldn’t find it. The
UN said they had thrown it away."
Apropos of this, I asked about the registers. Loizou sighed.
"Unfortunately, I don’t know who took them. It may have been the
Canadians."
I promised to look into the matter, revelling at the thought that
the blameless Canadians might have filched them.
Loizou said, "Ask them. Just don’t tell them they stole them."
I promised that too, and left with a copy of the Cyprus Tourist
Development Office’s Hotel Guide, dated 1951, which I opened in
the lift.
Population 488,000 – 80 per cent Greek, 18 per cent Turkish, 2 per
cent Other. Steamship services from Marseilles via Genoa, Piraeus,
Alexandria. Cyprus wines: Delight of connoisseurs for hundreds
of years. Cyprus fruits and hand-made lace: world famous. Cyprus
hospitality: warm and genuine.
–Boundary_(ID_sgRjcibC+4Sl/JglCbwpTA)–