When I first began this blog about a week and a half ago, I hadn't intended to devote so much of it to Cyprus. But the extraordinary events that started the very next day have effectively taken over this blog--at least for now. I myself am a Reformed Christian, but with paternal roots in Orthodoxy. This may seem an unlikely journey, but the link for many people is the American Academy in Larnaca, Cyprus, once associated with the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America, the Covenanters, who also operate Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. It is the American Academy that brought a number of particularly Greek Cypriots (but also members of the small Armenian community) into the Reformed and Presbyterian orbit.

My father attended this school in the mid-1940s. Not every one who attended wound up in the Reformed camp. Often parents would send their children there because English was (and is) the medium of instruction and it presented a good way to immerse them in what is effectively the world language.

Over the years I've come across a number of Cypriot ex-pats who once attended the American Academy. The institution still exists, and I saw the building from the outside during my visit to the island in 1995. But, sad to say, it does not appear to have retained its christian orientation, judging from the website. Moreover, the RPCNA website does not mention it either, although the denomination still seems to have a mission in Cyprus.

I've recently discovered that a former student of mine, now teaching at Eastern University, has a colleague whose roots are Armenian and Cypriot and whose father was a classmate of my own father's more than half a century ago. Small world indeed.