Ruth Keshishian of Moufflon: a walk she planned in Agios Andreas becomes an evening in her memory

Friends of Ruth Keshishian, whose name was tied to the Moufflon bookshop in Nicosia for decades, will meet at Dance House Lefkosia in Agios Andreas from 6.30pm on Thursday 22 October for an evening in her memory. Called A Cascade of Messages for Ruth, it gathers recollections, stories and messages from people who knew her in many different fields.

The idea came from Yianna Tsolaki, a critical heritage curator, who set out the plan in an interview ahead of the evening. She and Keshishian had arranged to walk together through Agios Andreas, where each had lived at a different time, to look at what the streets hold of private and shared memory. Tsolaki was abroad, and they had agreed to go once she came back. Keshishian died suddenly in August 2025 and the walk never took place. Its theme now shapes the programme, and most of the speakers' memories are tied to the neighbourhood.

For Keshishian, Agios Andreas was the place of her childhood and teenage years, and the place split by the division of Nicosia in 1963. For Tsolaki, who also grew up there, the dividing event was the Turkish invasion of 1974. The leafy district still lies on the city's dividing line. Tsolaki chose speakers who could each describe a different side of Keshishian, and said she hoped to widen the project to others later.

The bookshop and its readers

Moufflon was founded by Keshishian's father; she ran both the bookshop and the Moufflon publishing house. When she died, the Deputy Ministry of Culture said her death left a gap in the island's cultural life that no one could fill. Tsolaki remembers her as a bookseller who "looked for a spark of curiosity in anyone who came into the bookshop", and who steered researchers, artists and general readers alike towards titles old and new on the history, archaeology, politics and art of Cyprus.

Among those books were the accounts of foreign travellers to the island. Richard Pococke spent October to December 1738 in Cyprus and published plans of Kition and Salamis. The Florentine Giovanni Mariti lived on the island in the 1760s; a recent piece follows his years at Larnaca. Claude Delaval Cobham, Commissioner of Larnaca from 1879 to 1907, translated Mariti's Travels in the Island of Cyprus in 1909, and a year earlier had brought out the Excerpta Cypria, extracts from eighty writers in twelve languages. Tsolaki describes reading such accounts beside work by Cypriot and foreign scholars as the way Moufflon's customers learned to weigh one view against another.