Development without memory does not constitute progress,” tradition scholar Anna Tselepou has told CNA, as she speaks about the Paphos ice factory and the role it played in the social and economic life of the city. She also criticizes what she describes as the “hasty” demolition of the building several years ago. “Paphos does not only need new buildings and modern roads. It also needs respect for its collective memory,” she says.
The tradition scholar recalls that the history of a city is often preserved not only through major events and official records, but primarily through its everyday traces — its buildings, trades, customs and the memories of its people.
One of these forgotten stories from old Paphos, she says, is the well-known ice factory — “a small but significant part of the social and economic life of the city during the 1950s.”
She draws on a reference from the book “Life and Memories from the Paphos of Yesterday” by Petros Georgiou, in which it is noted that “just a few meters from the start of Nearhos Klerides Street, behind towering cypress trees, one could gaze upon an aged building. Inside that building, in the early years of the 1950s, Kostas Theodosiou, Ioannis Agrotis, Stylianos Kattimeris and the brothers Dimitrios and Kyriakos Papadimitriou formed a unique company. They established there a factory producing large ice blocks. Whether whole or crushed, the blocks were placed inside makeshift refrigerators.”
“At a time when electric refrigerators were a luxury for most people, the ice factory was a necessity,” she notes.
The large ice blocks, Tselepou explains, served homes, shops, coffee houses and small businesses, keeping food and beverages cool during the difficult summer months in Paphos.
“It was a place of work, of daily movement and human contact — yet another part of the old town that today survives only in memories,” she adds.
And yet, she continues, “this building, laden with stories, sweat and recollections, was hastily demolished five or six years ago.” In its place, she says, “an empty field — a car park — remained, with no particular plan, no identity, no continuity with the past.”
According to Tselepou, “development without memory does not constitute progress.”
“When cities bulldoze their own traces, they gradually lose their soul as well,” she warns.
Paphos, she notes, “does not only need new buildings and modern roads. It also needs respect for its collective memory.” “Because some people, afflicted with the syndrome of ‘knowing it all,’ distort the history of our city, forgetting that future generations have the right to know,” she concludes.
