Silent lines and the ebb of memory: narratives of Our Wall in the island of Cyprus

Abstract

This paper moves away from ‘‘orientalist’’ visions of the island of Cyprus as the island of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, and looks at the wounds contemporary Cyprus still bears 36 years after its partition. The UN-controlled ‘‘Green Line’’ divides the island into a northern and southern side and its barbedwire and decaying infrastructure renders the violence of the partition and its traumatic consequences impossible to forget. This paper is about dividing lines and impenetrable walls separating territories and nations; it is about ways of remembering and forgetting and about possible routes of overcoming physical and psychological rifts through hopeful representations of friendly cohabitation. In particular it looks at the potential transformations of the Green Line through a reclamation project into a healing inter-communal memory space (Gritching 2010); and provides a close reading of the 1993 film-documentary Our Wall by Panicos Chrysanthou and Niyazi Kizilyürek underlining its significance and influence as counter-discourse to the silence and the re-memorialisation of the years before partition. Both the ‘‘Green Line project‘‘ and Our Wall underline the importance of memory-embedded representations in the emerging genre of ‘‘postcolonial utopianism’’ (Ashcroft 2009), as positive active tools to energise the hope for peace and reconciliation.

Keywords:

• Partition of Cyprus
• Mediterranean islands
• Panicos Chrysantou
• cinema
• re-memorialisation
• post-colonial utopianism

Acknowledgements

This paper is dedicated to the memory of much-missed Meenakshi Mukherjee who so gracefully came to hear this paper in its draft form at the Partition conference in Cardiff in 2009. I wish she were here with us to read the final version of it too.

Notes

1. Cyprus is the third largest island of the Mediterranean (after Sicily and Sardinia) and nowadays its prevailing economy resides on being one of the most popular tourist destinations of the region, attracting over 2.4 million tourists per year.

2. That is the imagination of a humanist scholar from an English department, with a keen interest in Island Studies, who grew up on another island in the Mediterranean region, Sardinia, and was educated in what is known in Italy as a “classicist” background.

3. The Cyprian Centaurs were a tribe of bull-horned centaurs native to the island of Cyprus born out of Zeus’ insemination of Gaia, the earth, after a failed attempt to rape Aphrodite.

4. A mythological figure described in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pygmalion was a sculptor from Cyprus who fell in love with the statue of a woman.

5. Between 1963 and 1974, over 2000 people went missing in Cyprus. There are 1618 declared missing by the Greek Cypriots from the fighting in 1974, and between 600 and 900 claimed by the Turkish Cypriots from both the 1963/64 and 1974 fighting (Bryant 2004, 241; Pollis 1991, 43; Sant Cassia 1996, 194–195).

6. The massacres of Murataga, Sandallar and Atlilar in which 126 Turkish-Cypriots were killed (Voices of Blood 2005).

7. Approximately 160,000 Greek-Cypriots fled to the south of the island, while 50,000 Turkish-Cypriots fled north.

8. In an effort to keep the advance of the Russians in the Mediterranean at bay, Britain leased Cyprus from the Ottomans in 1878. She later annexed the island in 1914 as a reaction to Turkey's alliance with Germany in the First World War (although the annexation was not recognised by Turkey until 1923). In 1960 Cyprus obtained nominal sovereignty over most of its territory except for about 99 square miles in the south of the island allocated by treaty to the United Kingdom as sovereign military bases.

9. The anti-colonial uprising organised by EOKA, the Greek Cypriot nationalist underground organisation, broke out on 1 April 1955 under the leadership of George Grivas. The Turkish Resistance Organization (TMT), claiming to act for the protection of the Turkish-Cypriot minority was the answer to EOKA.

10. Enosis (Eνωσισ) in Greek means union, and is the movement of the Greek-Cypriot population aiming to unite the island of Cyprus with Greece. The islands of Corfu and Crete had already achieved enosis in 1864 and 1913, respectively. The struggle for enosis continued until 1967, when pragmatism forced the president of the Republic, Makarios, to eventually drop the subject from his political agenda. To pursue enosis, the enraged more radical fringes set up the EOKA-B organisation.

11. At the time estimated at approximately 600,000.

12. From the Arabic taq[Sdot]īm, it means “division” and “distribution”. As early as 1957, mindful of the “alleged atrocities against Muslims in Crete and Thrace” (Bryant 2004, 2–3) after they gained enosis with Greece, the Turkish-Cypriots demanded the partition of the island into two separate territories as the only solution that would guarantee their interests and the safe presence of their communities on the island.

13. Born out of the radical side of EOKA.

14. On 15 July 1974 some sections of the National Guard troops (aided by members of the EOKA-B, backed by the Greek Military Junta), organised a coup d’état to overthrow the president of the Republic, Archbishop Makarios III, who however managed to escape and leave Cyprus for the United Kingdom and later the United States. On 20 July, Turkish troops landed in Kyrenia (today's Gyrne) in the north of the island to protect the Turkish minority. Three days after Turkey's military intervention, the Military Junta in Greece collapsed determining the failure of the coup in Cyprus and Makarios’ return. On 14 August, Turkey's ultimatum to implement a federal state based on a population transfer was rejected by the Cypriot Prime Minister, Glafcos Clerides, and on the same day a new Turkish attack began. Within a month, Turkish forces had taken over one-third of the northern region of the island (about 37% of Cyprus's total area).

15. The TRNC declared its independence in 1983.

16. The two British Sovereign Base Areas were established in 1960 as part of the deals granting Cyprus its independence from the British Empire.

17. A giant flag of Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus are painted over the side of the Pentadaktilos Mountains and are visible from many areas in the southern side of the island. When crossing to the Turkish side at the Ayios Demotios/Metehan car crossing in Nicosia, they stare quite intimidatingly at you, mesmerising your eye and attention.

18. Those of the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

19. Representing about 2% of the total population of the island.

20. Since joining the EU, Cyprus has experienced an increased presence of Asian and Eastern European economic migrants together with refugees from the Middle East, a consistent number of international students enrolled in its several universities in the south. Retired westerners and private investors are also changing the demographic character of the island. In the North, Anatolian Turks, Ethnic Muslim Kurds and Arabs mainly from Turkey have slowly replaced the original population displaced after partition.

21. The partition of Cyprus gets a mere mention in Stanley Waterman's essay, in William and Kofman, and in Bianchini's essay, in Bianchini et al (2005).

22. At the time of Partition, contrary to the Turkish minority in Cyprus, the Protestant minority in Ireland and that of the Israelis in Palestine held the majority of power.

23. Joe Cleary claims that Ireland's and Palestine's constant coverage on international media is to be ascribed to the pressure put on the international community by the wide Irish, Jewish and Palestinian diaspora communities (Cleary 2002, 48). Cyprus’ large diaspora communities do not seem to have the same influence on the international community.

24. As with most of the Mediterranean islands, Cyprus’ history has been marked by a heavy succession of different waves of colonisation by the dominant powers of the time. Colonised by Greek settlers in the Bronze Age, it was subsequently conquered by the Assyrians, Persians, Phoenicians, by Ptolemaic Egypt and the Romans. The division of the Roman Empire saw the island becoming part of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, until the twelfth century when it was conquered by King Richard the Lionheart, on his way to the Second Crusade. For a short while it was owned by the Knights Templar, who, after buying it from the Lionheart, promptly returned it to him. The island was then bought by Guy de Lusignan, the Crusader King of Jerusalem, which led to 300 years of Frankish rule over the island. This ended in the late fifteenth century when, through marriage – and for some through murder too – the island came under Venetian control through Caterina Cornaro. Just over 80 years later, in 1571, the island was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. It continued under Ottoman rule until 1878, when responsibility for the administration of the island was passed to Britain, in exchange of a promise of support in case of an attack by the Russians. The British used theisland to defend their strategic interests in the Middle East and protect the route to India through the newly built Suez Canal in nearby Egypt (1869).

25. In the twelfth century, Richard the Lionheart made it the gateway from which to launch the second crusade. Three centuries later, the Venetians understood the importance of possessing such a strategic commercial hub in the Mediterranean and managed to secure it over the Genoese, until in 1571 the Ottomans captured Cyprus and settled the island with “janizeries”. Contemporary ambitions to politically control the island by English, Russians, Turks and Americans have not yet subsided.

26. Its northern and southern limits are the lines where the belligerents stood following the ceasefire of 16 August 1974, as recorded by the United Nation Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (see UNFICYP n.d.).

27. Green is the sacred colour of Muslims and Islam, and in most western cultures green symbolises hope and rebirth.

28. Wainwright was able to take amazing pictures inside the buffer zone in June 2010, which are available for everyone to see on his website (Wainwright 2010).

29. Among which were UNFICYP, the United Nations Development Programme, the Reconstruction and Resettlement Council, a number of academic institutions and environmental and citizen non-governmental organisations. The project has been recently presented publicly at an international conference attracting the attention of the media (Heller 2009).

30. Many daily chores were left unfinished in the hastily abandoned houses.

31. In this respect it is important to remember that the feature-film was partly funded by the German television network TRE International ZDF and broadcast in Germany.

32. The Ipekci prize for “Peace and Friendship” is awarded in memory of Abdi Ipekci. Outspoken supporter of democratisation in Turkey, he was a distinguished Turkish journalist and former Chief Editor of “Milliet” newspaper, and was assassinated in 1977 by the Turkish terrorist organisation “Grey Wolves”. The prize is awarded every two years by a joint Greco-Turkish committee to politicians, artists and academics from Turkey and Greece that have contributed towards a better understanding between the two peoples.