2019
The media coverage of that violent August night often misrepresented us. Pure Heart was not a cult. We were an intentional community, all of us sharing a common purpose, but each of us free to follow our own spiritual path. Some of us believed we were a soul family, destined to reincarnate together over and over, and share our lives so we could learn the lessons necessary for our souls to evolve.
Whatever our personal beliefs, each of us abided by the community’s seven founding principles. We painted them above the front entrance of the building.
The past does not exist.
Our thoughts create our reality.
The good of the community comes before individual desires.
We believe in miracles.
To live in the light, we must embrace the darkness.
Our souls are not for sale.
One Cypriot newspaper accused us of being ignorant expats exploiting the island’s cheap property prices and low living costs. Nothing could be further from the truth. We knew we lived in a land still divided by conflict. In his youth, Charles spent many summers at his aunt’s villa in Famagusta. He was there when the invasion happened in the summer of 1974 and had to flee the approaching Turkish army. Some newspaper reports depicted him as a debauched heroin addict with ties to the British aristocracy, but, thanks to Quinn, Charles kicked his destructive drug habit decades before his death. The reports of his aristocratic connections were true.
He’d always intended to return to Cyprus and give something back to the island he loved so much. We wanted to create a utopia within this complex country. To project peace and positivity into our surroundings. To live a life untainted by the corruption of the capitalist world and its war machine.
When we started Pure Heart, everyone contributed what they could, but compared to Charles we had little to give. He didn’t care. What was money between family, he often said? He transferred his considerable fortune into the hands of Evimería Assets, a wealth management company based in Limassol, and then used the interest from his investments to keep Pure Heart going and to pay each of us a small monthly income. He told us the bulk of his money remained untouched. After his death, when his financial adviser, Michalis, paid us a visit, we discovered this was not the case.
To be honest, money had been sparse in the year leading up to his death, and we were already living on a tight budget. The winter was a cold, miserable one and there were times we went hungry. Charles told us he had a temporary cash-flow issue and that as soon as a few of his larger investments matured, everything would be fine. When he died, we discovered that as well as losing everything in bad investments, he’d remortgaged the Pure Heart property. Only a miracle could save our beloved home from repossession.
When I heard Sofia wanted to come and stay with us for a month, I was overjoyed. I’d loved her like she was my own. We all did. I knew it might be difficult for her to return to the place where Eva died, but Pure Heart was her home. In her email, she told us her grandparents were now dead, and she claimed she was feeling lost. Before taking up her duties as heiress to her family’s business empire, she wanted to retreat from the world, to be in a safe space where she could find herself again and heal. How could we refuse her?
When she first offered to pay for her stay with us, we refused. Even though she offered a generous sum of money, we said no. Sofia insisted she wanted to give something back to the people who helped raise her and to the place where she’d shared so many happy times with her mother.
We would have welcomed Sofia whether she had money or not, but, after a unanimous vote, we agreed to accept her kind gesture. After all, sometimes giving makes people feel good. Sofia paying for her stay in exchange for our help would also make her more invested in her own wellbeing and recovery.
All we wanted to do was make her feel better.