Hi, I’m Peter, and I was born and named Panayiotis but known as Panikos Christou, son of Eftychia, in a small Cypriot village in the early 1940s. Grew up like all the other kids in the village, except my father was abroad for twelve years, from 1950-61. From ages 6-18, I worked with Mum and an uncle (Mum’s older brother) in the fields; plowing, watering, planting, and harvesting produce. Also picking whatever the trees could give us for our own use or sell in the city markets (carobs, olives, oranges, mandarines, lemons, and almonds). I was also in charge of herding a small number of goats.

I lived the life of a Cypriot villager until the age of eighteen when I migrated to Australia.

Because of my experiences until the age of eighteen in Cyprus and my life in Australia since 1961 and my profession as a public accountant and mixing with all different people from around the globe (mainly migrants from mainland Greece and Cyprus), I was moved to express my feelings in lyrical form.

I hope you enjoy my poetry, which was written for my own peace of mind, but a small, selected number of friends and relatives have read some of my poems and were moved to insist that I share them with the wider world.

There are poems in Greek, Cypriot-Greek, and English on this site.

Opa!

(Above photo is of my childhood home in Cyprus.)