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On a quest for roots in occupied Cyprus June 25, 2007

Dina Kyriakidou, who was born in Cyprus, has worked as a correspondent for Reuters in Greece and the Balkans since 1989 and is now the chief correspondent for Greece and Cyprus, based in Athens. In the following story, she recounts her journey to her grandmother’s home town in Turkish military controlled and occupied northern area of the Republic of Cyprus.

Occupied Kythrea, Cyprus > Armed with vague childhood memories, printouts of Google Earth maps and hand drawings of streets that might no longer exist, I crossed into the Turkish occupied and military controlled north area of Cyprus in search of my grandmother’s home town. It was a journey to the birthplace of a larger-than-life woman whose memory I cherish, to the house my besotted grandfather built for his 17-year-old bride in 1928.

“When you marry, find someone handsome because you’ll have to look at him for the rest of your life,” my barely literate but very practical grandmother advised me when I was 10.

She died aged 90. That was before 2003, when the crossing points on the U.N.-patrolled green line that splits the Mediterranean island opened, allowing Greek and Turkish Cypriots the first glimpse of each other in nearly 30 years. The Nicosia checkpoint was not the busy spot I remembered from previous trips. Lethargic officials now sat in white booths, waiting for the occasional car to pass.

“The honeymoon is over,” said Mete Hatay, a Turkish Cypriot researcher for the Oslo-based International Peace Research Institute, my companion on this trip. “Fewer and fewer people cross over every day. Reality has overtaken curiosity.”

I’ve lived my adult life away from this island and this journey is not hard for me. But I know that people on both sides of this divide, which has defied decades of international peace efforts, still nurse open wounds.

For many of the 200,000 Greek Cypriots refugees who fled in 1974 when Turkey invaded the island after a Greek military junta staged coup, with some Cypriot minor assistance aiming to dispose the then Archbishop Makarios, the first President of the Republic of Cyprus, it is a heart-breaking experience, especially when they find their ancestral homes occupied by invaders Turks.

“For the Turkish Cypriots, moving to the north was more like migrating to freedom, not the tragedy it was for the Greek Cypriots,” said Mete, whose grandmother comes from the free south area of Cyprus.

About 30,000 Turkish Cypriots were also displaced, forced with lots of unkept promises by their leader Rauf Denktash, after inter-communal fighting in 1963, shortly after Cyprus declared its independence from the British in 1960. As we drove through the divided capital of Nicosia, the last divided capital in Europe, it became clear the occupied north, recognized only by Turkey, had seen few benefits from the Republic of Cyprus’s accession to the European Union in 2004.

In the south, luxury showrooms, hotels and restaurants abound in a tourism-driven economy. In the north, shops sell fashions of past decades and provincial casinos are the main attraction for the few foreigners who venture here. Star-and-crescent flags are everywhere. One is painted on the Pentadaktylos, Five Fingers, mountain, its huge form outlined with flashing lights.

We reached the occupied town of Kythrea, 15 km (10 miles) northeast of Nicosia. It’s name has been changed by the invaders, in Turkish as Degirmenlik, water mills. The bleak, crumbling town was foreign to me. Gone were the animals grazing in green fields and farmers picking oranges and olives that impressed me as a suburban child visiting relatives. Most houses appeared deserted and the land abandoned.

The large Greek Orthodox Church of Holy Mary Chardiakiotissa was built with the island’s trademark yellow sandstone in a gothic-orthodox style mix. The bell tower is now adorned with speakers for the muezzin’s call to prayer. Nearby stands the simple, white, two-storey house where my grandmother arrived as a bride, where my mother and her siblings were born. I knocked on the door but there was no answer.

“The people who live there are Turks from the Turkey’s coast,” said a neighbor, Ramazan Kaldirim, whose family came here at Ankara’s orders, from a village near the Black Sea in 1976.

I told him I have no claim on this house, sold after my grandfather died in the 1950s. I am connected to it only through stories of happy matchmakings and tragic deaths, of children’s mischief and friends’ kindness during hard times. We also stopped at my uncle’s 19th century house to admire its carved stone entrance, now padlocked. He lived here until 1974 when Turkey invaded and occupied the town, and he drew for me the maps of my mission. Back in Nicosia, he asked me if his house was still standing but barely looked at the snapshots I show him. “I know what my house looks like,” he told me.

Article by Dina Kyriakidou. Copyright by Reuters.