Paphos

June 02, 2025

"The first thing you need to know about Cyprus is that everything is Hotel. School is Hotel. Restaurant is Hotel. Home is Hotel." ¹

Leptos Estates owns everything on the island, as well as NUP, so naturally NUP is in a hotel. Because Leptos Estates is in the business of making and running hotels. Given that, it was not that strange to find the former CEO of Yandex giving a talk on AI and mathematics in a ramshackle, moldy hotel in Paphos, but it certainly was not expected.

The talk itself had relatively milquetoast content (at least by scaling standards), but the more interesting anthropological aspect of it has to do with its attendees and post-remarks. Everyone who attended (except me) was Slavic. There were no native Cypriots in the lecture hall.

Part of this is downstream of the ongoing Russification of Cyprus. Yet Paphos is ostensibly one of the two last Greek bastions of the country (the other being Nicosia, the capital), and given the great selection pressures on the listeners it is unlikely that this is the primary contributing factor.

In fact, NUP (Neapolis University Pafos) contains a contingent of self-exiled faculty members from the Steklov Mathematical Institute, who have constructed a remarkable mathematics computer science and AI program in the middle of touristic hell. Students live in hotels in the off-season, and in on-campus dorms during the summer.

I don't really understand why the lecture was conducted English? No one spoke in anything but Russian afterwards: the Jetbrains developer contingent as well as the students were either Russian, Ukrainian, or Russian Israelis. The course itself is also taught in English, to keep up pretenses I suppose.

Paphos smells like India. I suspect this has to do with the marked lack of certain gasoline additives that decreases its olfactory pungency, or perhaps the shared high humidity. Its cost of living is comparable to that of Western European nations.

Aphrodite's birthplace is a temple ruin. It is common to utilize the leftover limestone rubble for one's own purposes.