A throne made of sand

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains.
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias is not a poem about failure, but about the illusion of permanence. A ruler commands the world to admire his achievements, yet history leaves behind only fragments – authority without consent, power without foundations, surrounded by sand.

Cyprus today risks a quieter but no less consequential version of this fate.