ABSTRACT
Nicholaos Charalambou Kanaris was born in Anavargos, a village on the west side of Cyprus about 3.5 kilometres to the northwest of the town of Paphos, on the 5th of March 1934. He was the eighth child (seventh then living) of Barbara Nicholaou and Charalambous Christodoulou. As a small child, he was primarily cared for by his maternal grandmother, Eleni, until she died when he was about six years old. Although they were poor, Nicholaos had a warm, close family. Both his parents worked to make a living from the land. They lived in a large, one-roomed house in the village; Nicholaos attended the village elementary school in Anavargos and was a good student. He enjoyed school and he found that learning came easily to him. He was determined to go to high school and passed the qualifying exams but he had difficulty obtaining the consent of his father to continue studying. He had to earn the money for school fees himself. He worked all summer and saved the money; however, shortly before the end of the summer, he was persuaded by a relative to gamble the money he had saved, and he lost it. Unable to produce the £1 necessary to pay a year’s school fees Nicholaos left the village in which he was born and walked to the market in Paphos town. On the 3rd of October 1947, aged thirteen years and seven months, Nicholaos left his home as a stowaway on the back of a bus headed to Limassol. He did not return to his village for twenty-four years. The journey that he began hanging on to a ladder on the back of a Ford Bedford transit bus ultimately took him from his parochial Cypriot village to an English mining town in the North East. In this white, working-class mining community he raised a transnational family, experiencing the contradictions of racism, deindustrialisation, and living international relations that were shaped by the shift from colonialism to postcolonialism and nationalism to transnationalism. This book takes up his story as a reflection on how the lives of minor figures offer an unexplored window into international relations. Various themes of international relations are examined through the lens of Nicholaos’ story, allowing his practice and lived experience to theorise international relations.
