Cyprus and its Places of Desire: Cultures of Displacement Among Greek and Turkish Cypriot Refugees 9780755619696, 9781848858992

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To Vassos and Nefeli & in memory of Angelos Dikomitis, Ibrahim Karabardak and Lies Demuynck

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ACK NOWLEDGEMENTS

The present study has been financially supported by several funding bodies and research centres. I would like to express my gratitude to the Department of Comparative Sciences of Cultures (Ghent University, Belgium), the A.G. Leventis Foundation, the Research Foundation Flanders and SCAM-Belgium. My first and primary thanks go to Rik Pinxten who supervised my doctoral research. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Rik, both teacher and friend, for his understanding and patience. Peter Loizos, who was the main advisor of my doctoral thesis, has supported my work from the beginning, and still does so today. His work encouraged me to think about Cypriot refugees in new and original ways and inspired me to carry out the doctoral project on which this book is based. Peter has been unstintingly supportive and generous with his time and always commented on my work with enormous care and provided motivating advice. With his great sense of humour, his understanding of my personal context and his belief that my research was worth doing he gave me the stimulation to carry on. I am blessed to have been a member of the Department of Comparative Sciences of Cultures at Ghent University for almost a decade now. I would like to thank all my colleagues for their interest, guidance and especially their understanding when I left for yet another fieldwork period. Special thanks go to my colleague and friend Chia Longman who has been always there when I most needed her support.

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Many friends in academia have read parts of this book or gave insightful comments at several stages of my fieldwork. Very many thanks are due to Georgos Agelopoulos, Stefan Beck, Olga Demetriou, Mete Hatay, Renee Hirschon, Adam Kaul, Steve Lyon, Yael Navaro-Yashin, Yiannis Papadakis, Marios Sarris, Julie Scott, Spyros Spyrou, Zenon Stavrinides, Marc Verlot, Eftihia Voutira and Gisela Welz. I also wish to thank Rasna Dhillon and Tomasz Hoskins, my editors at I.B.Tauris, for their encouragement and patience. I am grateful to Carrie Rodomar for the sharp proofreading. It goes without saying that all errors, omissions and lack of understanding in this book are entirely mine. I could not have carried out my fieldwork without the help, trust and support of the Kozanlılar and the Larnatsjiotes. Without them this research would simply not have been possible. My Larnatsjiotes-relatives did everything they could to help. I want to thank them for accommodation, numerous meals and the willingness to engage with my research. I am particularly grateful to my aunts Koula Photiadou and Niki Dikomitou, my cousin Olymbia Dikomitou and my godfather Ouranios Dikomitis. Thanks also go to the relatives of my partner Vassos, especially to Angela Petridi and Lakis Argyrou, who helped in various ways. Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my aunt Ireni Dicomitou. It is no exaggeration to say that I would not have been able to carry out this research without her help and support in far too many ways to mention here. I feel great sorrow that my uncle Angelos Dikomitis passed away on 15 August 2010, before I finished this book. Angelos influenced my work in many ways and I co-dedicate this book to him. I am sure he would have been very happy with the photograph on the cover. My deepest thanks go to my friends for their constant encouragement. Special thanks to Evgenia Akrivou, Georgos Anastassiades, Leen Bartholomeus, Jan Cappelle, Ann Degraeve, Kaat Dewolf, Karen and Isolde Dewyn, Eddie d’Heere, Peter Edlind, Maria Hadjiantoni, Andri Mannouri, Kosta Pavlowitch, Athena Piki, Annemie Stuer, Ewout Vansteenkiste, Trui Verschelde, Vincent Vandevyvere, Mieke Wallays and Natasa Xenophontos. Ruben Dekeyzer and Inge Oosterlinck, our best friends in Belgium, have been inconceivably generous with their friendship and their

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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unending support when I encountered difficult times. Charlotte Pannier always helped me with her fascinating ability to sort out my confused thoughts about work and life. I have enjoyed her company more than she probably knows during the summers she spent in Cyprus. Christina Lambrou is the best of friends on whom I could always count during the most difficult times. She made me tea, pot after pot, and continuously filled my life with her magic. It is a pleasure to thank Xenios Anastassiades who has been very supportive throughout this project and was always ready to help me with all sorts of problems. Over the past decade we have shared countless dinners together and I always look forward to the next one. I met Xenia Andreou in recent years and she very quickly became a precious friend who shares the same taste for life and all things good. My warmest thanks go to five extraordinary children who force me to leave my own world of books and pencils: my beautiful godson Stan Dekeyzer and his brother Tijl, Nedy Kyriacou, Anna Pavlowitch and Lily Waldvogel. I am deeply saddened that my dear friend Ibrahim Karabardak passed away before he was able to see this book. Ibo spent countless hours showing me around north Cyprus, driving me to and from my two field sites, looking up information and answering my questions in infinite detail. His loss is greatly felt by those in the reunification movement in Cyprus. In the final phase of preparation for this book, my dear childhood friend Lies Demuynck died after a long struggle with multiple sclerosis. I have finished this book with Ibo and Lies constantly on my mind. I have no words to thank my glorious nuclear family. For my parents’ patience, advice and financial support I owe an un-repayable debt. They sustained me throughout my education and kept telling me the things that a daughter wants to hear: that was I was doing was important and that everything would be perfect in the end. My father Andreas infected me with a passion for all things Cypriot, which in turn laid the very foundation of this book. He gave me a model of how to live in peace, something to which I will always aspire. My mother, Martine Vandevelde, taught me how to be creative in her own particular and inspiring way. She always makes me attentive to the complexity of life in general and asks me the right questions at the right time, for which

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I thank her. My brother Simeon and his wife Stephanie have been of great help, in particular since the arrival of my daughter Nefeli. I love to be around my brother, especially when his insane sense of humour is switched on maximum. My sister, Elena, as she very well knows, is my best friend and has helped and supported me more than anyone else. Elena and her partner Bram lived and breathed this research when we shared a flat in Ghent. Bram was always absurdly entertaining and brought music back into my life. Elena is brilliant, beautiful and incredibly patient. My parents and siblings mean everything to me. This will always be the case, even when I live far away from them. My final thanks go to my partner Vassos Argyrou and our daughter Nefeli. Vassos knows how he has helped this book to get here. To put it mildly, two anthropologists ‘under one roof’ is a challenge, but it has been the most intense and wonderful experience. I could not have written this book in better company. Over the past decade, Vassos never once complained that my mind, and therefore many of our conversations, was peopled with Larnatsjiotes and Kozanlılar. He is the best of the best and taught me, above all, how to enjoy the simple things of life. Since she was born, Nefeli has travelled with me between Belgium and Cyprus. It has been the most wonderful (and at times very exhausting) experience. I would like to thank Nefeli for her insistence that reading no less than three bedtime stories is far more important than any research endeavour! Seeing her mother with her face in a book or glued to the computer screen so often was not easy for her but she showed unimaginable patience for her age. Nefeli is my inspiration and heartstring, and the most beautiful daughter a mother could ask for. She makes me believe that everything can be perfect. This book is for Vassos and Nefeli, with all my love. Lisa Dikomitis April 2011

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LIST OF FIGUR ES

All images supplied by the author. Map of Cyprus Map of 1919, with notes by Larnatsjiotis born in 1946 Map drawn by Larnatsjiotis born in 1953 Last stop before the customs office View of the village The village’s fountain Refugees engage in various rituals Resacralized corner in the monastery Larnatsjiotissa prays over her parents’ vandalized grave A fanouropita taken to the saint as an offering Celebrating saint’s name day Larnatsjiotes place soil on their mother’s grave in Nicosia Learning how to make hellim Lines of air-dried nor Kinship chart The sünnet party

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16 50 52 64 68 72 102 105 108 109 110 112 141 142 145 150

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PR ELIMINARY NOTES

Geographical Terms I decided not to use pseudonyms for my different field sites. The ‘place of desire’ for both my Greek and Turkish Cypriot informants is a small mountainous village located in the north of Cyprus, thirty-two kilometres from Nicosia, in the Kyrenia (Girne) district. The village is known to Greek Cypriots as Larnakas tis Lapithou. I use the Greek name of the village (Larnakas tis Lapithou or, in its abbreviated form, Larnakas) when I write about the Larnatsjiotes. This commonly used name for the village, o Larnakas, should not be confused with the coastal town Larnaca (i Larnaca) located in the southeast of Cyprus. After 1974, the village was given the Turkish name Kozan (it is also referred to as Kozanköy, köy meaning village in Turkish). When I deal with the Kozanlılar I use the Turkish name of the village. A Larnatsjiotis (plural: Larnatsjiotes) is a male inhabitant of Larnakas; a Larnatsjiotissa (plural: Larnatsjiotisses) is a woman from Larnakas. In Turkish there are no gender specific endings to names, so both a male and female inhabitant of Kozan are called a Kozanlı (plural: Kozanlılar). All place names on Cyprus have a Greek and a Turkish name. When I refer to a location I add the name in the other language in brackets. Where possible I use the English name. For example, the capital of the island is Nicosia (Lefkosia in Greek and Lefkoşa in Turkish).

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Language I have always spoken the Greek Cypriot dialect with the Larnatsjiotes. With a handful of Greek Cypriot informants, such as some of my close relatives, I spoke English. The Kozanlılar originate from a cluster of villages located in the Paphos district in southwest Cyprus. Informants who were older than thirty at the time I started my fieldwork in Kozan (in 2004) spoke the Greek Cypriot dialect very well. Many of these Turkish Cypriot refugees spoke the Greek Cypriot dialect as well as they spoke Turkish, and a number of Kozanlılar still only spoke the Greek Cypriot dialect. These respondents spoke to me in Greek Cypriot. The Greek Cypriot language that the Turkish Cypriots speak is an older, rural form of the dialect that Greek Cypriots speak today. The younger Kozanlılar, however, did not speak any Greek Cypriot and therefore we communicated solely in Turkish. There are a small number of children in Kozan who do speak Greek Cypriot, because they were mainly raised by their grandparents whose first language was the Greek Cypriot dialect.

Transliteration All the words in the Greek Cypriot dialect are rendered phonetically in Latin characters. When a word includes a digraph (such as ει, αι, οι and ου) I spell these out by following the Greek orthography (ei, ai, oi and ou). I opted not to use any stress marks. Turkish uses a modified Latin alphabet consisting of twenty-nine letters. It is important to note that some letters in Turkish have been adapted for the phonetic requirements of the language. The Turkish alphabet has a dotted i (pronounced ee as in see) and a dotless ı (pronounced e as in oven). The vowel ö is pronounced i as in bird, and the vowel ü as in führer. The three adapted consonants are ç (ch as in cheese), the ğ, which lengthens the preceding vowel, and the ş (sh as in shape). I use the Turkish alphabet when I transliterate the Turkish Cypriot dialect, even when the local pronunciation deviates slightly from mainland Turkish.

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I always use direct translation of Greek and Turkish words into English ones, but when there is no clear English equivalent I use an English word that reflects the informant’s intended meaning.

Protecting Privacy of Informants A common convention in ethnographies is to change people’s names to protect their privacy and to safeguard the informants’ reputations. I have changed all the names of my informants in a non-systematic way. The pseudonyms are common Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot names on Cyprus (e.g. Maria, Kyriacos, Ayşe and Ibrahim) but do not bear any similarity to an informant’s real name. During the fieldwork, I assured my informants that I would never use anyone’s real name and I have kept that promise. For that reason, I have, in a few cases, also eliminated or slightly fictionalized the context of an informant, when I thought it was necessary to protect their identity. For example, I might say someone worked in a carpenter’s workshop in the town of Nicosia, while in reality he worked as a mechanic in a garage in another town. The substance of the context remains; the informant was a labourer and worked outside the village. I have changed all the names of my relatives as well. Sometimes, when it is not important for the analysis, I avoid mentioning that they are relatives in order to safeguard their privacy. Conducting research with refugees raises ethical concerns because of the inherent vulnerability of conflict-affected and displaced populations. I have tried to be as sensitive as possible with Cypriot refugees and I hope I did not offend their sensibilities or betray their trust. Informed consent was acquired at the start of my research and was obtained regularly throughout the different fieldwork rounds. I am enormously grateful to all the Larnatsjiotes and Kozanlılar without whom this research would not have been possible.

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A VILL AGE IN PAR ADISE

My father is a Greek Cypriot refugee who left Cyprus two years after the Turkish invasion of 1974. He married my Belgian mother in 1977. One year later I was born in a small town on the French-Belgian border.

Wevelgem, Belgium, December 1988 We were told that ‘important people’ were coming over for dinner and that we should be on our best behaviour. My father was the foreman on the late shift at a flax factory; the visitors were his boss and his wife. I remember the woman looked like a film star with her long limbs, dazzling teeth and heavily made-up face. After the introductions we were sent upstairs and told to be quiet by an unusually stern father. My younger sister Elena dutifully went to bed, but my brother Simeon and I had no intention of sleeping. We lay down and pressed our ears to the floor trying to hear what was going on in the kitchen below. I heard my father easing the kleftiko (meat dish) out of the oven where it had been roasting for hours in a wine and tomato sauce. For some reason my parents always cooked Cypriot food when they received guests. The boss praised my mother for the delicious food and asked my father how he managed to teach his Belgian wife the traditional Cypriot cuisine. My brother, tired of eavesdropping on the adult small talk, curled up beside me and started flipping coins through the little holes in the floorboards. My father, at that time in his mid-thirties, started relating stories about his ‘village in paradise’. Mesmerized by the narrative I pressed one ear harder to the floor and covered the other to erase the noise of Simeon’s coin flipping.

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My father was a good storyteller. His childhood in a small Cypriot mountain village had been idyllic and worry-free. I listened intently as he described one particular summer afternoon, in the late 1950s, when he feared for his life. He was wandering around the village kafenio (coffee shop) one Sunday morning after church when he overheard an older villager boasting about an amazing cave full of long stalactites. Fascinated, my father hatched a plan to find the cave and investigate this mysterious phenomenon. On a blistering afternoon he set out, telling his mother he was going to play in a field nearby. My father found the cave easily and wriggled his slender body through the tiny entrance. After exploring the cool damp cave, he slithered back through the narrow tunnel only to realize that he couldn’t get out the way he came in. He tried again and again but his head was suddenly too big for the little hole. ‘Nobody knew where I was. My heart skipped several beats. After countless attempts, my body drenched in sweat, I finally squirmed through the hole, swearing I would never set out on a mission on my own again.’ The guests roared with laughter. When his boss asked whether he ever got used to the Belgian climate, my father unravelled another yarn about one exceptionally cold winter when a heavy snowfall caused ripples of excitement among the village children. He and his brothers assembled a wobbly sledge with a rusted Coca-Cola billboard. The exhilarating rush of sliding downhill on the monopati (small path) came to an abrupt halt when my father bumped into a tree and suffered a concussion that kept him out of mischief for several weeks! With desserts and coffee my father served stories of the darker years of his young adulthood, the part of his life that always fascinated his Belgian friends. They were grim tales of being a soldier in a civil war, of being displaced, of hunger, insecurity and life in tent camps. He would rarely talk about this period to his three children, but when he did he spoke in vague terms about things we already knew. By now the rain was pouring down and I had to concentrate to hear my father. He was recounting how on the day he was to finish his military service, Turkey invaded Cyprus and instead of showing up with an immaculate uniform for the official ceremony, he left the army camp

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wearing camouflage and took up his position as a tank commander. I heard his boss asking whether it was a ‘brutal’ war. My father replied with a detailed description. He told them about the bombardments that destroyed almost entire villages, about loved ones who died, the many injured friends and relatives and about his brother-in-law who is one of the many missing persons. My father also told them what haunted him every night and what pained him each time we spent our long summer holiday in Cyprus. ‘I am not allowed to go to my village. Not even for a day. Not even to pass through. I do not know if our house is still there. I have no idea how Larnakas looks like now or who lives there now.’ He explained that Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees have not seen their villages since the day they left because they are not allowed to cross the border that has divided the island since the 1974 war. ‘The only thing I know’, my father said, ‘is that they call our village Kozan now’. When Cypriots were allowed to cross the dividing line, almost three decades after the Turkish invasion, I visited Larnakas/Kozan very often and started exploring the possibility of conducting long-term fieldwork among the present inhabitants of my father’s village. I found lodgings with Murat and Fatma, a Kozanlılar family with four children. They adopted me as their daughter and I lived in their house for two fieldwork rounds (in 2005 and 2006).

Kozan, Cyprus, May 2005 Murat, my field father, was sitting on the balcony in his comfortable chair watching the comings and goings of the Kozanlılar in the street below. He shouted a greeting at Beyit who was climbing the steps to the bakkal (grocery) just a stone’s throw away. I asked Murat whether he wanted a coffee. ‘Ah, evet (yes)’ he said and continued in the Greek Cypriot dialect we normally used, ‘you are as a daughter to me (eisai san kori mou)’. I busied myself in the kitchen, trying hard to make the coffee just as he liked it. I heated the coffee very slowly and only removed the cezve (coffee pot) from the fire when the foam started to

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fill its neck. I wondered whether I had to boil the coffee again, as I had seen in other houses in Kozan, but Ayşe never prepared her father’s coffee this way. I decided against it. I poured the coffee in a fincan (tiny coffee cup) and carefully scooped up the foam. The first time I had made coffee in Murat’s house everybody had, in turns, explained to me that the layer of foam on top was bad for one’s health. This had confused me, because whenever I made coffee for my Greek Cypriot informants they praised the coffee because it had a nice thick kaimaki (foam). I was eager to sit and talk with Murat now that it was just the two of us at home. As it was almost noon, it was unlikely that a villager wanting to buy fresh bread or cheese would interrupt us. Murat sipped from his coffee and I looked out at the panorama of the village. Murat followed my gaze and asked me if I knew he had his own coffee shop some years after he had settled in the village in 1975. ‘Let me tell you a nice story’, he continued while pointing at my notebook on the low side table. Murat related some funny anecdotes about the coffee shop years. He spoke slowly, repeating details as I took notes, only stopping to nod a greeting to a Kozanlı passing under the balcony. ‘It was a nice time when I had the coffee shop. It was my second home. One morning my son Orhan, he was not even two years old, crawled all the way from our house to the coffee shop. He knew the streets so well. The whole village was our home’, Murat smiled. ‘Well, it still is. This is our village.’ I lived in Kozan to learn about their experiences as refugees, how they had coped with the trauma of displacement and most importantly how the recent changes on Cyprus had influenced their lives. From the start of my fieldwork in the village, I quickly learned that their refugee identity was not as prominent in the villagers’ everyday lives as I had hoped. Of course I had many conversations with the Kozanlılar about their past lives in the south, about their displacement and about what would happen to them in the future. It was only a few weeks into my first fieldwork period in Kozan when Murat told me, in the most colourful detail, the story of how the whole village was ‘his home’. That morning I clearly understood that for Murat Kozan was his home and that unlike Greek Cypriot refugees, Murat and the other Kozanlılar did not wish to ‘return home’ to their villages

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in the south of Cyprus. Refugee issues were not the primary concern of the Kozanlılar. It was clear to me that other matters were far more important to them: making a living, dealing with health issues, providing education or housing for their children and coping with daily problems in the village. The main anxiety that surfaced about their refugee identity was that, if a solution were agreed on a new version of the Annan Plan, they would have been displaced again because their village would have been returned to the Greek Cypriot Larnatsjiotes.

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INTRODUCTION AN ISL AND IN TR ANSITION

This book is an ethnographic account of Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees who were displaced more than three decades ago and whose lives have been scarred forever as a result.1 The central characters are ordinary people who were forced to abandon their homes and villages and had to start all over again in another part of the island. For Greek Cypriots this was the southern part, as the north of the country was occupied by the invading Turkish army. For Turkish Cypriots, it was the north where they sought refuge and the security that the presence of army provided. The study explores the collective experiences and cultural memories of refugees on both sides of the ethnic divide. In particular it examines the practices of ‘place-making’, of setting up new homes, social networks and communities, while at the same time maintaining a strong attachment to the homes, social networks and communities left behind – what I call their ‘places of desire’. The main contention of the book is that the longing for such places is both real and symbolic. It is at once an attachment to the place itself – the house, the village, the landscape – and at the same time an expression of a demand for justice, a recognition of the suffering that each side experienced. The fieldwork on which the book is based took place at a pivotal time in Cyprus’ history. It coincided with the opening of the border in 2003 and the referendum on the so-called ‘Annan Plan’, the United Nation’s proposed solution to the conflict, which was rejected by Greek Cypriots but accepted by Turkish Cypriots. Both the border

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opening and the referendum provided a unique glimpse into the lives and attitudes of Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees. The opening of the border in particular provided an opportunity to explore one of the most critical issues in refugee studies, namely, the possibility of ‘return’. What makes the Cypriot case of particular interest is that the ‘return’ of refugees from both sides of the ethnic divide was only symbolic – a visit rather than a permanent homecoming. The book explores the lives of Cypriot refugees over a six-year period and makes a substantial contribution to the ethnographic literature on Turkish Cypriots, whose culture remains understudied in relation to Greek Cypriot culture. It should be of interest to social scientists working on Cyprus, on ethnic divisions, displacement and refugees as well as to a broader audience concerned with these issues.

Brief History of Cyprus A collection of lectures on Cyprus was published in 1986 under the title Cyprus in Transition 1960–1985.2 Now, more than two decades later, the term ‘transitional’ is a buzzword both in academic writings and popular publications on Cyprus. As a matter of fact, one wonders if there ever was a period during the last century which cannot appropriately be perceived as ‘transitional’ or, using a more anthropological term, as a ‘liminal period’ in the history of Cyprus. Things are complex when one looks at historical accounts of the island’s recent history, because there are two official modern histories alive on the island: a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot version.3 Cyprus, the third largest island in the Mediterranean, has been occupied by many foreign rulers.4 In 1571 Cyprus became part of the Ottoman Empire. The island became ethnically mixed with a Muslim Turkish Cypriot minority and a Christian Greek Cypriot majority. In 1878 Britain took control of the island. In 1914 Cyprus became an official British Crown Colony. From the beginning of British colonial rule, Greek Cypriots requested union (enosis) with Greece. At that point, neither the British government nor Greece took any notice of these requests. In 1955 the armed struggle for independence from British colonial rule started. A large part of the Greek Cypriot community

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supported the campaign for enosis put forward by EOKA (Ethniki Organosi Kiprion Agoniston, the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters): a secret, armed movement under the leadership of Georgos Grivas. Turkish Cypriots, alarmed by these developments, countered that if the island were to be joined to Greece, then they should be permitted to live in a separate distinct part of Cyprus through taksim (the Turkish word for ‘partition’, suggesting the partition of Cyprus into a Greek and a Turkish state). The Turkish Cypriot armed organisation, TMT (Türk Müdafaa Teşkilatı, Turkish Defense Organization), was established in the same year as EOKA. From 1955 onward the seemingly peaceful relationship between Greek and Turkish Cypriots grew hostile.5 The first communal fighting broke out in 1958 and the first Turkish Cypriots were forced to flee their homes. The armed struggle resulted not in the desired union with Greece, but in the independence of the island under the London-Zurich agreements of 1960, with Britain, Greece and Turkey as Guarantor Powers. The birth of the new-nation state did not succeed in restoring amicable relations. The first fighting between the two communities broke out in 1963, when the Greek Cypriot president Makarios proposed amendments to the constitution. During the 1960s many Turkish Cypriots moved from their villages. The next years were marked by continual unrest and fighting resumed in 1967. The worsened inter-ethnic relations led to intercommunal violence and the threat of a Turkish invasion was first felt. Turkish fighter plans were bombing the environs of the Kokkina enclave on the northwestern coast in 1967. In the early 1970s a second EOKA (EOKA VITA) engaged in subversive activities.6 Turkish troops invaded the north of the island in the summer of 1974, following a brief Greek Cypriot coup orchestrated by the military regime in Greece. Turkey occupied 37 per cent of the territory in the north of Cyprus. Greek Cypriots living in the north fled to the south and Turkish Cypriots living in the south moved to the north. Consequently both displaced groups became refugees in their own country. Since 1975/6 there have been several diplomatic attempts to resolve the ‘Cyprus Problem’ (To Kypriako in Greek, Kıbrıs Sorunu in Turkish) both in and outside Cyprus, but no solution has been found and the island has remained partitioned. In 1983, the ‘Turkish Republic of

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Northern Cyprus’ (TRNC) was established and is only recognized by Turkey. Since the turn of the twenty-first century Cyprus has undergone tremendous changes and is consequently again ‘in transition’. As Cyprus was preparing to join the European Union (EU), the pressure was on to resolve the long-standing partition of the island. The internal climate in the TRNC and the role of the EU triggered the unexpected opening of the checkpoints along the Green Line that has separated the two communities since 1974. The Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktaş rejected a peace agreement but surprisingly allowed the opening of the Green Line to a limited amount of movement on 23 April 2003. One year later, on 24 April 2004, a referendum on the Annan plan, the proposed United Nation’s solution for the reunification of Cyprus, was held in north and south Cyprus. Turkish and Greek Cypriots voted in opposite directions, with 76 per cent of Greek Cypriots voting against the plan and 65 per cent of Turkish Cypriots voting in favour. Most Greek Cypriots felt that the proposed plan was unjust.7 The final outcome was that the ‘Cyprus Problem’ remained when Cyprus entered the EU one week later, on 1 May 2004.

Greek and Turkish Cypriot Refugees Although the experience of displacement of Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees is similar, there are also significant differences. The main similarity between the two displaced communities is that, until 2003, many never had any contact with the ethnic ‘Other’. Those Greek and Turkish Cypriots who were too young to have clear memories of the lost places and the displacement trauma or were born after the 1974 disruption. Concretely, this means that it is not their own experience but rather their parents, their extended family, the media and the education system that shape the perception they have of the other community. The first difference between the two communities is the timing of displacement. Greek Cypriots became refugees in the summer of 1974 when they fled from the advancing Turkish army. Greek Cypriots were uprooted from one day to the next and co-villagers are now dispersed over the south of Cyprus. Many left their houses suddenly without any preparation, with only ‘the clothes they were wearing’ (me ta rouxa

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pou forousame), an often-heard phrase. Almost 30 per cent of the entire Greek Cypriot community at the time, 142,000 people, fled to the south of the island and became refugees in 1974.8 These refugees did not realize they would never return to their houses and villages. They sought temporary security in the south and assumed that they would return when things settled down. Turkish Cypriot refugees, by contrast, experienced several displacements during the decades preceding their final dislocation during or shortly after 1974. The first displacements of Turkish Cypriots took place in the late 1950s when Cyprus was still a British colony. From 1958 onward Turkish Cypriots who felt threatened by Greek Cypriots left their homes and sometimes returned later. Between 1958 and 1963 about 25,000 Turkish Cypriots, almost one-quarter of the total Turkish Cypriot population, became refugees.9 This refugee movement has been thoroughly researched by geographer Richard Patrick, a Canadian officer of the United Nations Peace-Keeping Force, who observed the fighting on Cyprus: The overwhelming majority of Turkish-Cypriot refugees moved only after Turkish-Cypriots had been killed, abducted or harassed within their village, quarter, or in the local vicinity. Most refugees expected to return to their homes within a few months, and it was this assumption of an early return that often facilitated their departure in the first place. ( . . . ) Generally, the TurkishCypriot refugees moved en masse to the nearest Turkish-Cypriot village or quarter that was guarded by ‘Fighters’. In most cases, refugees fled from their homes, leaving clothing, furniture, and food behind. Most of the abandoned villages and quarters were ransacked and even burned by Greek-Cypriots. A subsequent redistribution of refugees took place when individual families left their first hostels for centres where they had relatives, or where they could be near their property, or where they heard there were better accommodation, employment and security. ( . . . ) Although it appears unlikely that there was any centralized co-ordination of the Turkish-Cypriot refugee exodus, there is ample proof that Turkish-Cypriot political and military leaders

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controlled the return of refugees to their former homes once the incidents of intercommunal violence had decreased.10 There was a new bout of severe intercommunal violence in 1967, when Turkey threatened to invade the island, but the United States, under President Johnson, intervened. During or shortly after the summer of 1974 close to 40 per cent of the Turkish Cypriot community, about 45,000 people, were relocated from the south of Cyprus to a locality north of the Green Line.11 A second difference is that although for both communities ‘1974’ became a watershed year, the official discourse of each community interprets the meaning of the events that took place in that year in an entirely different way. The official line in Greek Cypriot politics is that the displaced Greek Cypriots should one day be able to return home and that therefore a culture of memories and collective nostalgia must be preserved. Well into the fourth decade after the partition of Cyprus, the official Greek Cypriot position is that the current situation is temporary and that Greek Cypriot refugees should return to their former houses. This deeply entrenched belief was made clear in a speech given by a leading Greek Cypriot politician who said ‘all Greek Cypriots will be able to return home in the near future’ in one of the official speeches that marked Cyprus’ accession to the EU on 1 May 2004, only days after the Greek Cypriots voted ‘no’ in the referendum. In the official discourse in north Cyprus, ‘1974’ is the moment that ended the decades of suffering of Turkish Cypriots at the hands of Greek Cypriots. The Turkish armed offensive is annually celebrated as the ‘Happy Peace Operation’, which was aimed at liberating Turkish Cypriots and protected them from being exterminated by Greek Cypriots. The official Turkish Cypriot position always emphasized that the 1974 displacement to the north, and the division of Cyprus, was permanent. The Turkish Cypriot authorities have insisted since the final displacement that their new place in north Cyprus is to be considered ‘home’. In both communities there is denial about the existence of genuine refugees in the other community. Turkish Cypriots tend to describe the Greek Cypriots who left the north ‘either as paying their dues for the crimes they committed against Turkish Cypriots or as leaving because

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they chose to do so.’12 In the Greek Cypriot community the position is that the Turkish Cypriots had time to prepare their move to the north and that they knew they had to leave, therefore they are not actual refugees. A final difference is the way each community dealt with the rehousing of refugees. After 1974, the Turkish Cypriot policy of rehousing stressed the permanence of the resettlement and stood in sharp contrast to the Greek Cypriot policy that emphasized that rehousing was temporary. The property issue, now much bigger and more complex, is still the central theme in the ongoing negotiations for reunification of the island.13 The contrast between official Greek and Turkish Cypriot discourse is reflected in the position of each party on the property issues: The Greek Cypriot side advocated a solution based on full respect for property rights so that all displaced persons, from either community, would have the right to have their properties reinstated. The Turkish Cypriot side argued that property claims should be settled through liquidation by means of a global exchange and compensation scheme, meaning that no displaced persons, from either side, would have the right to have their properties reinstated.14 Greek Cypriot communities were broken up after the displacement and the refugees were dispersed over the south of Cyprus. When they arrived in the south, relatives provided lodgings or they were accommodated in prefabricated shelters, tents or schools. Several families often lived together in small and inadequate accommodation. In the first years after the displacement most Greek Cypriot refugees moved several times within the south of Cyprus, each time in search of improved living conditions. By the late 1980s all refugees had found permanent accommodation. The Planning Bureau of the Greek Cypriot state developed a housing scheme for refugees, which was part of the first Emergency Economic Action Plan.15 These housing estates, consisting of small terraced houses or blocks of flats, are known as synikismi. The census of 2001 states that 5.6 per cent of Greek Cypriots live in a refugee estate and 1.8 per cent occupy a Turkish Cypriot house. Until today three different housing schemes are available for displaced Greek Cypriots: refugees can apply for housing in one of the refugee estates,

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they can build houses on government land aided by grants, or they can buy a house or apartment with a substantial government grant. The TRNC policy tried to maintain the integrity of Turkish Cypriot communities in the resettlement process. Rural communities from the south were in most cases resettled in villages in the north to sustain continuity in both social structure and economic activity.16 Turkish Cypriot refugees were given a house according to the value of the house they left behind in south Cyprus. This was established as the İTEM law17, a ‘point system’ that specified the values of properties and compensation: People have been encouraged to think in terms of compensation for what has been lost in the south, and to create a new home in the north. In order to achieve this, the Turkish Cypriot authorities have adopted a unilateral policy on refugee property. Newly created TRNC deeds can be obtained for abandoned Greek Cypriot property on payment of an agreed number of points representing an equivalent value of Turkish Cypriot-owned property in the south. Turkish Cypriot refugees are required to forfeit their claim to what they left in the south in order to have the means in the north for getting on with the business of everyday life and fulfilling social obligations based on having land as property to cultivate, build on, sell, mortgage and pass on to children as dowry or inheritance. The transfer of ownership from the south permits property to be reintegrated into the social fabric of life in the north, thus underlining the finality of the break with the past.18 The political patronage of the ruling National Unity Party had a big influence in the assignment of properties. For Turkish Cypriots who supported the left-wing Republican Party, it was more difficult to obtain property. Also personal contacts in the land registry office favoured some Turkish Cypriots because of their strong personal political networks. For many Turkish Cypriot refugees it was a long and painful distribution process because of discussions over the value of the land left behind in the south and the development of the property market in the north. This point system, in which points could be bought, sold and donated, produced a new class of well-to-do Turkish Cypriots. Most Turkish Cypriots were happy to be safe and grateful for

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what they got immediately after their displacement. It was only later, when problems of living in an unrecognized state were more tangible, that frustration grew stronger among Turkish Cypriots and many now claim that ‘nothing has been solved’. This is reflected in the reaction of Turkish Cypriots to the division of the spoils of war: As Greek-Cypriots fled the northern part of the island, TurkishCypriots moved in and took over their abandoned properties, creating new hierarchies from the spoils of war. Some grew rich from the war, while others were unable to do so for nepotistic or political reasons; still others refused to do so on principle. ( . . . ) Amidst the euphoria of a military victory and the founding of a new state, the inequalities between those who benefited from the spoils of war and those who had not ( . . . ) seemed minimally important. But they would grow important later, beginning in the late 1980s, by which time it had become clear that the selfproclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus would not be recognized by any country besides Turkey and that the north of Cyprus would remain economically and politically isolated.19

Notions of ‘Place’ and ‘Home’ It is widely documented that displaced persons have a special bond with the home they were forced to leave and the place they lost. Even when the rhythm of daily life has returned, feelings of nostalgia, loss, fear and anger are constantly lurking around the corner for those in exile. After the dislocation, when the initial shock and dramatic tension wears off, the difficult task of ‘home-making’ starts. Exiles have to forge a relationship with the new place they inhabit since being uprooted always requires a process of emplacement. Displacement goes hand in hand with emplacement and these two concepts should be examined as a pair.20 The experience of dislocation influences the attachment to the new place that forced migrants inhabit. The conscious recall of, or the impulsive longing for the lost home, has clear bearing on life in the place of exile.21 When I wrote my initial research proposal in 2002, I intended to write an ethnographic study of the refugees of Cyprus, that is, the

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Greek Cypriot refugees, as those were the only ones I had access to.22 I decided to carry out my field research amongst the Larnatsjiotes, Greek Cypriot refugees originating from Larnakas tis Lapithou, the village where my father comes from. When I started conducting my fieldwork, in the summer of 2002, a solution to the Cyprus Problem did not seem likely any time soon. It looked like my informants would never be able to see their villages and houses again and the division felt quite permanent. I lived with the Larnatsjiotes, participated in their daily life and collected my data through interviews, informal talks, document analysis and keeping a fieldwork diary. Most of the data gathered was related to the Larnatjiotes’ memories of their village and to their present lives in the urban context of Nicosia. During that first fieldwork period, in April 2003, Cyprus was taken by surprise when the first checkpoints opened. Like many Cypriots, I rushed to the checkpoint at Ledra Palace and crossed the border to visit the village of Larnakas tis Lapithou. That first visit was a turning point in my research. In the months that followed I joined many Larnatsjiotes and other Greek Cypriots on their first and subsequent ‘return visits’. Since these were emotionally charged experiences, both for my informants and me, I did not conduct any formal interviews and rarely took notes in the presence of the Larnatsjiotes. Writing down my findings happened in the confinement of my own room, often very late at night. In the second year my fieldwork concentrated around the meaning of the border. I travelled back and forth between north and south Nicosia as well as to several villages in the north, mainly Larnakas tis Lapithou, always joining Greek Cypriot refugees on their visits to localities important to them. Eventually I was also able to accompany Turkish Cypriot refugees that I met after the border opened to their former localities in the south. In the summer of 2004, I started conducting ad hoc interviews with those Turkish Cypriots who spoke Greek or English. I was convinced that I should include Turkish Cypriot refugees in my ethnography, so I took several intensive Turkish courses in north Nicosia and Istanbul. From 2005 onwards I conducted fieldwork among the Kozanlılar, the Turkish Cypriot refugees now living in Kozan (the Turkish name of Larnakas tis Lapithou after 1974). I spent two long research periods in the village (summer 2005 and winter 2006) and travelled many other times to visit the Kozanlılar.

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My original research, which focussed on Greek Cypriot refugees’ memories and their emplacement process, changed course suddenly and evolved into a comparative ethnography about two refugee communities who both perceive the same location as ‘home’. I was now studying the Larnatsjiotes, the Greek Cypriot community displaced from the village of Larnakas tis Lapithou in 1974 to several localities in the south of Cyprus (mainly to Nicosia) and the Kozanlılar, the Turkish Cypriot community made up of the former inhabitants of a handful of neighbouring villages in the Paphos district in southwest Cyprus who were displaced to Kozan shortly after 1974. The Larnatsjiotes and Kozanlılar have two significant things in common. Firstly, their lives have been enormously affected by the war on Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Secondly, both refugee communities have a strong attachment to the same place. The Larnatsjiotes are attached to this small mountain village because they used to live there, and consider it their place of origin and their ‘home’; and the Kozanlılar because they have been living there for over three decades and also regard this village as ‘home’. The ethnographic material I collected, both among the Larnatsjiotes and the Kozanlılar, indeed shows that notions of place, place attachment and home play an important role in the lives of Cypriot refugees. The specifics of the national conflict on Cyprus call for a close examination of how refugees are attached, or not attached, to certain places and why this is the case. Before the opening of the checkpoints, Greek Cypriot refugees, almost without exception, claimed they wanted to return to their former villages and houses. This claim, or rather the conditions under which they claim they would return, might have changed slightly after Greek Cypriots were able to visit their places of origin from April 2003 onward. What remains, however, is that Greek Cypriot refugees still cling vehemently to their refugee identity, albeit in different ways. With regard to Turkish Cypriot refugees, my findings indicate that the majority want to stay where they live now and ask for a final solution regarding the intercommunal conflict. The fact that Turkish Cypriots experienced several displacements during the past decades left them with a persistent feeling of insecurity and they believe that a conclusive solution would enable them to start giving

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their past experiences a place. The refugee predicament on Cyprus thus provides an interesting setting in which to examine notions of ‘place’ among the island’s dislocated persons. The two communities have been separated for over three decades and, until April 2003, there was almost no contact between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Refugees knew nothing about the condition of their houses, whether they were inhabited, or the state of the villages and the public places to which they were attached. Both Turkish and Greek Cypriots hold entrenched stereotypes about each other. Meetings with the ‘Other’, since 2003, were often an occasion to maintain and strengthen these popular stereotypes. Interaction between the two groups gave rise to both internal and cross-ethnic debates regarding each group’s experience of displacement and their notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’. The most common arguments revolved around ideas of ‘place’ and more specifically how the ‘Other’ connects to particular localities. Many Greek Cypriots are convinced that Turkish Cypriots do not care where they live and do not hold strong attachments to the places they come from or inhabit now. They also assert that Turkish Cypriots do not invest meaning and value in certain localities, neither to their places of origin nor to the place where they live now. They consider Turkish Cypriots inferior, calling them ‘barbarians’ (varvari), ‘dogs’ (sjili) or ‘thiefs’ (kleftes). In a similar vein, Turkish Cypriots perceive the Greek Cypriots as extremely snobbish and selfish, especially in relation to finding a solution to the ‘Cyprus Problem’ which implies a compromise about the housing settlement and power sharing. I heard Turkish Cypriots calling the Greek Cypriots gavur (‘nonmuslim’ or ‘Christian’, it is used in the Cypriot context as a pejorative term to express a dislike of those who are different). Turkish Cypriots insist that they are attached to the localities they live in now and that Greek Cypriots are not honest about their reasons for maintaining the strong attachment to their former village. Turkish Cypriots told me repeatedly that Greek Cypriots only want their house back to have as a country house or to make money out of it. I have also come across this argument the other way around: Greek Cypriots accuse Turkish Cypriots of wanting to live on Greek Cypriot property and make money from their Turkish Cypriot property in the south.

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It is clear that ‘place’ should receive focussed attention. The crux of my research revolved around how these Cypriot refugees make sense of place and how they express their attachment and belonging to different places in different ways. Human geographer Doreen Massey argues convincingly that space and place are invested with social relations that are inevitably made and remade over time, so places themselves undergo a constant process of change.23 ‘What is at issue is not social phenomena in space but both social phenomena and space constituted out of social relations, that the spatial is social relations “stretched out” ’.24 My aim is, following Massey, to counter the view of a locality as a static given. In order to unearth the static identity of the place I have studied, the village of Larnakas/Kozan, I analyze the social relations embedded in that place. What sense of belonging does the attachment to this particular village generate for the Larnatsjiotes and the Kozanlılar? As a result of displacement, attachments to place were often forcefully and brutally severed and after their dislocation refugees were faced with the heavy undertaking of emplacement. I suggest that in the case of involuntarily displaced people one cannot talk of ‘place’, ‘place attachments’ or notions of ‘home’ in the abstract. Their connections to certain places, and the different ways these are expressed need to be contextualized. Their status as refugees as well as their attempts to come to terms with this status must be taken into account. At first sight it might seem that their attachment stems from mere love of place but my findings suggest otherwise. I will interpret Cypriot refugees’ attachments to, or detachments from, specific places taking into consideration two dynamic elements, namely ‘justice’ and ‘suffering’. In his well-know essay, Religion as a Cultural System, anthropologist Clifford Geertz demonstrates that people need to be able to make sense of their suffering, especially when they feel their suffering is unjust and undeserved.25 Geertz connects this to the question of ‘evil’. Human beings feel the need to make moral judgements. Otherwise they have to recognize that they live in a world that has no moral order, a world of chaos in which anything goes. My main contention is that both Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees express strong attachments to their ‘places of desire’ because they live with an unfulfilled quest for justice. I conclude that, for both

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displaced communities, the label ‘refugee’ remains very important. Greek Cypriots emphasize their attachment to their former villages and hence their ‘refugeeness’, because they feel that their suffering has not been recognized sufficiently. At every opportunity Greek Cypriot refugees stress that they are the ‘real’ refugees on Cyprus and express this in different ways. Turkish Cypriots increasingly emphasize their refugee status because they began to recognize that the displacement of 1974 might not be the final one and that they are therefore as much refugees as Greek Cypriots. Their strong attachment to the villages they live in now can be understood in terms of this insecurity and injustice. As far as the Turkish Cypriots are concerned what has happened is justice and to be relocated again would be injustice. This explains the recently emerged emphasis on their refugee identity.

Brussels Sprouts and Cypriot Olives My personal circumstances influenced the choice of my fieldwork site and the wider theoretical framework I use in this book. Shortly after the war of 1974, my father Andreas and his brother Ouranios travelled to Crete to work in the tourist sector. The future in post-war Cyprus was uncertain and this seasonal job allowed them to send some money to their mother Olymbia who was, together with her other seven children and some grandchildren, still homeless after their dislocation. My father worked as a barman at the Knossos Beach Hotel in Kokkini Xani. One day a Belgian tourist, who drank more cappuccinos than was good for her, insisted on returning the plastic cups to the barman. This was Martine, my mother. As the story goes, they fell in love and after she went back to Belgium, my parents started an intense correspondence. My father, unable to embark on the law studies he dreamed of doing before the war, decided to go to Belgium. He still recounts how he arrived in Brussels airport with nothing but his identity card, a new checked shirt and about thirty Cypriot pounds. That sum was immediately spent treating his future mother-in-law to lunch in the posh cafeteria of the airport!26 That was how the seed of our cross-cultural family was planted. My mother tongue is Dutch; my ‘father tongue’ is Greek. My mother spoke a Flemish-French dialect with us, my father the Cypriot

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dialect and between themselves they spoke English and French. My mother sent us to Catholic schools, while my father dragged us to the Saturday classes and the Sunday liturgy of the local Greek-Orthodox church. I was raised on Brussels sprouts, Cypriot olives and halloumi (a Cypriot cheese). My parents, recognizing the cross-cultural habits in my upbringing, often joke that I am as hard-working as the next WestFleming and as lazy as the stereotypical Mediterranean. I grew up in Wevelgem, a Flemish village only a five-minute drive from the French border. As a child I experienced Cyprus mainly as a fantastic holiday destination. Nevertheless, I was engaged with my Cypriot identity and aware of the ‘Cyprus Problem’. For example, when we had to give a speech in primary school I would always speak about what happened between the ‘innocent Greek-Cypriot refugees’ and the ‘bad Turks’. The covers of my notebooks were decorated with nationalistic stickers portraying a Greek Cypriot child behind barbed wire, the slogan ‘Den ksechno kai agonizomai’ (‘I do not forget and I fight’) or the island of Cyprus on the background of a Greek flag. I am embarrassed to admit this now, but as a child I did not know any better. I had formed a picture of the situation on Cyprus from the only source available to me during my childhood: my Greek Cypriot relatives, all refugees, all biased. It was in secondary school that I started seeing things from a wider perspective. I grew tired of the three topics Belgians would take an interest in: the Mediterranean climate, the local food and Cypriot – in their eyes ‘exotic’ – traditions. I started discussing the national conflict with my father, who rarely expresses a negative opinion about Turkish Cypriots or Turks. I recall enlightening discussions with one of his good friends in Belgium, Bayram, a Turk who worked with my father at the flax factory. It was also as a teenager that I met Turkish Cypriots who were living in Belgium and through these friends I started seeing things differently. I continued to write and speak about the ‘Cyprus Problem’ for school assignments, but now I included the Turkish Cypriot perspective. When I first trained as a secondary school teacher I wrote my dissertation on Greek poetry in Dutch translation. I finished my second degree in Art History with a project on Cypriot archaeology, but still I felt unsatisfied. Cyprus had always captured my imagination, but as I grew older, neither embracing nor rejecting the ‘Cypriot’ in me, I wanted

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to understand more specific things about Cypriot society. No doubt it has to do with coming to terms with myself and giving my ‘Cypriot side’ a place. That is how I came to be an anthropologist. I stumbled on social anthropology in my search for a discipline that would allow me to write about contemporary Cypriot society and its refugee predicament. This was before anyone imagined the opening of the border and the possibility that refugees could visit their places of origin across the divide. To put it simply, my education in Belgium revolved around the important Belgian historical dates (i.e. 476, 800, 1302, 1453, 1830, 1914–18 and 1940–45), but in my own life ‘1974’ stood out as an important date. I was curious to hear what Cypriot refugees in Cyprus (and not only my relatives) said about how the events of 1974 shaped their lives and how they dealt with being refugees in their own society. When I look back at that early stage of my fieldwork through the pages of my field diaries, I was terribly preoccupied with my own position in the field. This was mainly as a result of my insecurities about the whole fieldwork endeavour. Very early on in my training I came across the work of anthropologist Ruth Behar who urges anthropologists to write in a highly reflexive way and to explore the thin line between ethnography and literature.27 She defines ethnography as ‘a strange cross between the realist novel, the travel account, the memoir, and the scientific report’.28 This appealed to me, as I have always been a bookish girl. When I go through old photographs, there I am sitting on different beds and Cypriot beaches steadfastly making notes with the tip of my tongue between my lips. My mother recently dug up some of my old notebooks. My childish spidery handwriting made me laugh, but the things I wrote about surprised me. They were the same subjects I am still engaged with: memories, experiences of home, war, refugees, and about placing myself in that picture. Inspired by Behar’s work I became engrossed in reading reflexive and autobiographical ethnographies and more theoretical works on autoethnography, often written by feminists.29 My fascination with ‘postmodern’ anthropological thinking was not a coincidence since I was struggling with my own position in the field as both an insider and an outsider in the refugee community I was studying. I am a ‘halfie’, to coin a term by Abu-Lughod, someone ‘whose nationality or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration,

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overseas education, or parentage’.30 I did struggle, and often still do, with the question of how to include my own position and experiences in my ethnography, or as Behar puts it: ‘How do you write subjectivity into ethnography in such a way that you can continue to call what you are doing ethnography? Should we be worried that a smoke alarm will blare in our ears when the ethnography grows perilously hot and “too personal”?’31 But I came to realize that the context of the anthropologist and the content of the fieldwork are often an unbalanced blend in this kind of highly reflexive account. As important as it is for anthropologists to incorporate personal data – emotions, reactions, assumptions and biases – it is equally important that anthropologists do not turn their ethnographies into personal stories with the focus on themselves. I read attentively Barnard’s warning that ‘the danger of losing the ‘other’ for the emphasis on the “self” became all too easy, as extreme reflexivity became at worst a fetish and at best a theoretical perspective (reflexivism) in its own right’.32 Two things triggered the balance of reflexivity in my later publications.33 After the first emotions involved in visiting the village and the exercise of writing and publishing articles in anthropological journals my focus shifted and I became less troubled about my own position in the field. This allowed me to focus more freely on the real topic of my writings. This does not mean, however, that I do not value the (especially feminist) urges to reflect deeply about oneself, but in this book I chose to do it less overtly. However, in the next sections I will elaborate on my own position as I find it important to make certain aspects clear before we get to the ethnography itself. I reflect on how I lived as a ‘halfie’ between my relatives, non-related Larnatsjiotes, and later among the Kozanlılar.

A ‘Vampire’ among Relatives Clearly there was not the usual distance between anthropologist and informants, since I had known many members of the Larnatsjiotes community my whole life. Whether I wanted it or not, the Larnatsjiotes perceived me as one of them, a Larnatsjiotissa, sometimes ignoring and sometimes emphasizing my Belgian roots. One balmy afternoon, in July 2002, I was talking to a Larnatsjiotis on his veranda and I was

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asking him a question about ‘his village’ (to chorio sou). He got up from his chair, paced around and said in a persuasive voice: ‘Not my village, our village, it is our village (to chorio mas)’. I remember this made me happy then, his words made me feel that I belonged to Cyprus and gave me a right to poke uninvited into these refugees’ lives and their often painful memories. Thinking about this in retrospect, it makes me uncomfortable because I know so much more now about what it means to have suffered displacement. It now feels strange to claim an identity as a Larnatsjiotissa and to connect myself to a place where I have never lived as a member of the Larnatsjiotes community. In any case, my personal interest and involvement in this community was essential to the way I collected my data, but there was also a distance between the world of the Larnatsjiotes and my understanding of it. Many of my Larnatsjiotes informants are relatives as I have a large extended Cypriot family. My father has seven siblings and countless first and second cousins. Most of them have families of their own with numerous children and grandchildren. This gave me a good start in my fieldwork adventure as I immediately had access to many Larnatsjiotes who always welcomed me warmly.34 I obviously shared more common experiences and personal knowledge with my close relatives than with non-related Larnatsjiotes. Although I did not actually conduct fieldwork ‘at home’, I could argue that in a certain sense Cyprus is ‘home’ for me. As Gay y Blasco and Wardle rightly point out ‘not only do ethnographers live at least with two worlds, “home” and “the field”, but these are themselves fragmented and multiple’.35 The stakes are high when one is conducting fieldwork at home, among relatives and close friends. One could end up alienating them, for example. A huge benefit of carrying out my fieldwork partly among my relatives is that I could live with the refugees in their own houses. On a practical level, this meant that I never had to rent a house or worry about suitable accommodation close to my informants. Research-wise it provided me with the advantage of observing the minutiae of these refugees’ lives. Participant-observation was inevitably the main way of collecting my data and living with them allowed me to experience the daily activities and conversations which only take place in the intimacy of one’s home. On the other hand I also risked bruising my

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personal relationship with my relatives and friends. Anthropologist Neni Panourgia conducted her doctoral fieldwork at home in Athens. She explains accurately what might happen when conducting fieldwork with beloved ones: One is faced with the inevitable trepidation of winning or losing one’s family or friends. If all goes well and the research outcome is to the satisfaction of family and friends, the ensuing result is a stronger, tighter relationship. But what if all does not go well and the outcome is not very pleasing to the “subjects”? There is not a chance here of the luxury anthropologists often accord themselves of not allowing a translation of their work into the subjects’ language, or of never returning to the field. The results will be known, the ethnographers will return to their “field”, someone’s feelings will be hurt, someone will be offended, certain relationships will be irreparable severed.36 I experienced, and still do, similar fears and trepidations on this research journey. I remember vividly – and my field journal reflects this – my fear of intruding too much in my relatives’ personal lives. I did not want them to feel that I was constantly ‘spying’ on them. One night, after dinner, my uncle Kostas said to me: ‘You know Lisa, you are 40 per cent Cypriot and 60 per cent Belgian’. His wife Stella mumbled that I wanted to be fifty-fifty. I paid no attention to her murmuring and looked at my uncle with disbelief. What had I said or done for him to come to this conclusion? I asked him. He roared with laughter. He did not want to answer, so I asked again. He said: ‘Exactly for this reason. You keep on asking, you never stop.’ Poor me, the naive anthropologist started explaining that this was ‘doing fieldwork’. Kostas interrupted me before I could finish my explanation. ‘No, no, you were always like this and your mother as well, so it is typical of Belgians.’ It was my turn to smile now at his conclusion. Throughout my fieldwork I was constantly reminded that I was not a ‘full’ Greek Cypriot by my relatives, and the exchange with my uncle reveals the thin line I had to walk as I questioned them. When does it all become too much for them? After all, I was probing them about

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an extremely painful event in their life histories which some did not really want to talk about very often. I found it easier to talk about issues related to their ‘refugeehood’ after the checkpoints opened. In many aspects their refugee identity took centre stage again after almost three decades of stability. They were also curious about my experiences across the border and wanted to learn as much as possible about what was happening in Larnakas. They volunteered often to tell me about their experiences of their frequent return visits. One of my aunts visited the north of Cyprus very regularly, often on her own. She liked to talk about her encounters and told me she was grateful that she had a niece who was interested in these things. She confided in me her most personal thoughts about her experiences. When researching, it is not self-evident that your informants will include you in all the intimate aspects of their lives, not even when these informants are your close relatives. I remember that on a particularly hot summer day, I escaped the stifling capital and, together with my cousins Eleftheria and Christina, we set off towards the royal blue sea. During our drive to the nearest beach, my cousins began discussing how unfair it was that we had to drive such a long time. ‘If we were still living in the village, we could have reached the beach in a mere ten minutes’, Eleftheria said. Christina turned to me and agreed passionately: ‘It is not only our houses we lost, but also the best parts of the island. It was just perfect there: mountains and sea all in close proximity’. I did not point out that Christina never actually lived there, but I got her message. I was tired of constantly being addressed as the researcher, and not just as their cousin. On exhausting days like this one, my researcher-self felt like my jailer. Later that day, on our way to a fish taverna, Eleftheria suddenly stopped the car. I did not know what was happening but the atmosphere was tense. It was something to do with the song on the radio, because Christina turned the volume up and rested her head against the seat. When the song was finished I saw that both my cousins were teary-eyed. Eleftheria said that it was a song about the villages in the north including Larnakas. I felt it was inappropriate to ask more. At that intimate moment, I did not want to be a ‘vampire’ who troubles one’s kin and consumes their blood’, to use Peter Loizos’ wonderful metaphor.37

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In 2002, when I first entered the field, I was a twenty-four-year old, single, ambitious woman who had no plans to start a family in the near future. This was in sharp contrast to many of my informants who were married and in most cases had children (and some had already grandchildren and even great-grandchildren). Loizos points out that on Cyprus marriage ‘still is perceived as the natural destiny of all able-bodied and psychologically normal adults, and parenthood ought to follow if God blesses the union’.38 It was no coincidence then that a lot of my informants – both male and female, both Greek and Turkish Cypriot – would ask me at our first meeting if I was married or if I had a partner. Greek Cypriots insisted that I should ‘take a Cypriot man’, quite often followed by the well-known expression: ‘[Take] shoes from your own place [homeland], even if they are patched (papoutsi pou ton topo sou, tjias einai balomeno)’. For such matters, ‘my place’ was clearly perceived as Cyprus. Argyrou shows through a personal anecdote that ‘single men and particularly women [in Greece and Cyprus] are not simply an oddity. They are liminal entities, almost not quite human.’39 With every encounter my family, and informants with whom I was close, asked me over and over again: when will I get married and they joked about my love for vivlia (books) and tetradia (notebooks), adding that ‘those things would not produce any children’. Even those relatives who perceive themselves as ‘progressive’ – because, for example, they do not disapprove if a couple is living together without being married – would inform in veiled terms if I was ‘getting ready for real life’. I cannot know how or if my single female status influenced my relationship with my informants. I was certainly positioned in the role of ‘daughter’, but among the Larnatsjiotes this did not strike me as odd, uncomfortable or artificial as I lived with relatives who had always treated me as a daughter, long before I became an anthropologist. It was when I lived among the Kozanlılar that my status as a single, young women pushed me into the role of a symbolic daughter. On the third morning of my stay in Kozan as I was going through the kitchen drawers looking for a spoon, Murat, my field father, asked what I was looking for. He said, ‘You can ask me anything. You are part of the family now. If you need money, you ask me.’ I was very touched because these were almost the

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exact words my own father had so often said to me, as had my Cypriot uncles on many occasions. It also made me uncomfortable, because I was uncertain about how I was expected to behave as ‘his daughter’. I had been living away from my own nuclear family for many years and did not really feel eager to assume a role that involved certain commitments and restrictions. Looking back at this experience, there were few things that bothered me about my role being arranged as a ‘daughter’. For example, I was required to have somebody accompany me everywhere I went. One of the first times I ventured out on my own, my field sister Ays¸e hurried and caught up with me at the bottom of the stairs leading to the road. I told her I was just going to the bakkal (grocery) and that there was really no need to accompany me. Ays¸e smiled and said she had to come with me as I could not walk on my own in the village. Seeing my confusion, she explained that there were many sapıklar in the village. Sapık literally means a sexual pervert, but I discovered later that the female Kozanlılar use this word for the young men who would whistle at us when we walked through the village. As it was during the day and the bakkal was in plain view from the balcony of the house I did not see her point, but I accepted it because I realized that because I was the symbolic daughter of my field family my actions would reflect on them. That I had been accepted as their daughter became evident when the oldest son of my field family was getting married and I was expected to engage in all the wedding rituals with the close female relatives of the groom. These included long hours at the hairdressing salon and posing in all the wedding pictures with my adopted family. I was more conscious of the relationships I developed with the Kozanlılar because my fieldwork experience in the village was in many ways more ‘classic’ fieldwork. I arrived in a small tight-knit community where I knew no one and whose language I did not know very well at first. I had no experience of living in a rural area where women, especially those of my field family, were expected to engage in activities completely unfamiliar to me: milking goats, making hellim cheese in the mornings and bread in the evenings and preparing food for a large family. My field diary contains many entries about the emotional energy I invested as I worried about whether I would be accepted by my field

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family and the other Kozanlılar. I felt that the first weeks in Kozan were ‘an apprenticeship to an absent master’ as Macintyre described the first liminal phase of fieldwork.40 With the enthusiastic help of my field sisters, I had also learned more Turkish by the end of my first summer in Kozan, which made me feel like a real member of my adoptive family. The established relationship as a symbolic daughter shifted when I met my partner, a Greek-Cypriot, whom I eventually introduced to my informants. Both the Larnatsjiotes and Kozanlılar were very excited about my relationship. Later, when I was pregnant with our daughter, people made positive comments and expressed warm wishes. For example, one morning, when I was three months pregnant, I was making coffee for the women. I had done this many times before, but this time one Kozanlı said: ‘You see, you will be a perfect wife and mother. It was about time that you settled down.’ Now that I had a family of my own my relationships with both the Larnatsjiotes and the Kozanlılar changed noticeably. On the one hand I spent less time with them, but on the other hand our conversations intensified and I felt I was treated more as an individual and less as an adopted daughter who needed to be taken care of. One Kozanlı told me, when I visited her for the first time with my baby daughter: ‘Now you understand what it means to have a family and to worry about them constantly’. I felt that as long as I had been a single woman my informants did not confide certain stories to me. When I became a mother I felt I was accepted as a full member of society and this consequently opened more doors and gave me access to a different set of data.

About Acceptance and Betrayal Some Larnatsjiotes, admittedly a minority, supported me during my fieldwork after April 2003, when I was visiting the north as much as possible. Many Larnatsjiotes, however, opposed me strongly and unrelentingly and tried to convince me not to be in touch with Turkish Cypriots, not to cross the border and, heaven forbid, not to go and live in the village among the Kozanlılar. There were moments that I felt totally detached from those Greek Cypriot informants. This was especially the case when many Larnatsjiotes, reflecting the general Greek Cypriot

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stance, voted ‘no’ against the reunification plan of the United Nations in April 2004. The weeks leading up to the referendum were tense: Cypriots were nervous and the talk of day revolved, everywhere, around the possible unification of the island and its implications. The focus of my original research had long since blurred as a result of the drastic changes that had taken place on Cyprus. It was in that period that the idea to live among Turkish Cypriot refugees, preferably the Kozanlılar, took shape. It never occurred to me to ‘hide’ from my Greek Cypriot informants that I was planning to live in Kozan. It would not have been possible anyway, as too many Larnatsjiotes visited the village on a regular basis. When I started informing the Larnatsjiotes about my, then vague, plans, it was as though a small earthquake had erupted in their community. Word spread rapidly and everywhere I went Larnatsjiotes wanted to know the details of my plan. My decision to go and live with Turkish Cypriots refugees in the very village from which the Larnatsjiotes were displaced provoked different reactions and shifted my position in their community. Some were angry because I chose to live among Turkish Cypriots and more importantly because I would live in their former village. As Crick points out both the ethnographer and her informants ‘exchange information; and one of the risks is necessarily the relationship itself between them’.41 The course my fieldwork was taking obviously had an impact on the data I collected from then onward. Some Greek Cypriot informants opened up more and told me new stories about their relationship with Turkish Cypriots, past and present, while others became more reluctant to share their opinions with me. There was one Larnatsjiotissa who strongly disagreed with my decision and never invited me again to her house. After I had lived in the village we lost touch completely and I heard from other informants that she still holds a grudge against me. Up to a point I can understand that my actions felt like a betrayal to her. Other Larnatsjiotes grew used to the idea and gave up commenting on my decision after they had their say about. My brother Simeon accompanied me to Kozan on my first visit to my field family’s house in July 2004. I had already visited the village many times when I accompanied Larnatsjiotes on their return visits, and I knew the village quite well. I had only met my hosts once and the encounter was very brief because they were at work at a market in north

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Nicosia. My field mother had explained in which house they lived and told me to meet her at her house so we could talk properly. Simeon and I were both nervous and the drive to the village was tense. I was anxious because I was unsure whether Fatma, my field mother, would be home and if I would be able locate her house easily. As we left the main road leading to Morfou (Güzelyurt) and passed through some of Kozan’s neighbouring villages my brother grumbled about the fact that I could not drive a car: ‘You would be much safer if you could drive. Then you could get away whenever you wanted. We would not be so worried.’ The road meandered through the fields and the dome-shaped hill that marks the start of the village came into view. Simeon remarked, checking the dashboard, that this long snake-like road was already several kilometres long, implying that the village was very far away from anywhere he considered safe. By the time we had parked the car and climbed the stairs leading to the front door, we were both drenched in sweat. Ayşe, the youngest daughter of the family, welcomed us in and pointed to the sofa. She smiled shyly and asked whether this was our house. She thought we were Greek Cypriots visiting their former house! Obviously Fatma had not told her that I was coming. I explained to her in my best Turkish that I had arranged to meet her mother here. While she busied herself in the kitchen preparing drinks, my brother whispered his concerns to me in Dutch. I noted down what he said later that day: What do our parents say about all this [me staying in Kozan]? After all, it will be them who have to deal with it if something happens to you or if you would die. What if you go missing? Perhaps you would have been safer doing fieldwork in, say, a village in an African country. I mean, you are never neutral, but here you are definitely not neutral. And what if you need help? They [our Greek Cypriot relatives] have to come from so far. You know what I mean: they have to get in their car and perhaps queue for a long time at the border before they can cross. Although I think of my brother as an open-minded person I was not surprised by what he said because it was the same message I had received from many Greek Cypriots when I told them about my decision to live

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in Kozan. Simeon was not alone in assuming that I was bound to get in some sort of trouble and that the help, if needed, would have to come from Greek Cypriots across the border. Greek Cypriots imagined all sorts of things happening to me during my stay in Kozan, which they voiced to me in unmistakable terms. I would suddenly get ill and would not have access to a doctor, I would be involved in an accident because Turkish Cypriots drive irresponsibly or, by being a Greek Cypriot, I would antagonize the locals and get into a verbal fight of some sort. I encountered many widespread stereotypes and all carried the same message; it was fine to visit the village but I should not trust the Turkish Cypriots at all and living amongst them was a big mistake. While many Larnatsjiotes may not have wholeheartedly agreed with my decision, or were simply opposed to it, all of them were very curious about my experiences in Kozan. Koula, a Larnatsjiotissa, was opposed to my stay in Kozan and made this very clear. After listing all the reasons why I should not live in the village she finished by saying: ‘You should come first to us and tell us all the thing you learned potsji (over there). They [the Kozanlılar] will tell you many things (diafora pramata). We will tell you how the situation really is’. Koula implied that they would tell me things that were not true. When I returned after a stay in Kozan I got more invitations than usual from the Larnatsjiotes. These meetings were excellent opportunities to learn more about the entrenched stereotypes some Greek Cypriots hold about Turkish Cypriots. From the outset it was clear that my Greek Cypriot informants were definitely more interested in the condition of the village (the fields, trees, significant buildings, etc.) and especially the state of their own houses than in the life stories of the Kozanlılar. The only Turkish Cypriots they wanted to know more about were the present inhabitants of their houses. To cap it all, some Larnatsjiotes felt betrayed that I decided to go and live among the Kozanlılar. They felt that this was again a matter of injustice. Under the cover of anthropology, I could do what they wanted to do more than anything else. I could live in their beloved village, their ‘place of desire’ but they could not. I understood from what they said that some Larnatsjiotes felt both betrayed and jealous.

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The reactions of the Kozanlılar were very different. I felt welcomed in the village, firstly by my immediate host family and by those I met as I was finding my way around. I only remember one negative comment about my stay in the village. One older Kozanlı said to me, during one of my visits before my actual stay, that I could not stay in Kozan because he could not stay in his former village in the Paphos area. And, he added quickly, the fields were more fertile in his village than in Kozan. I felt this was voiced more as a thought about the situation on Cyprus, than as a real warning that I would not be accepted among the Kozanlılar. The warm welcome I received did not mean, however, that I immediately gained the trust of the Turkish Cypriot villagers or that I had easy access to the data I was looking for. It was not until my second fieldwork period in the village that I felt that some Kozanlılar started trusting me. During the summers of 2004 and 2005, all the villagers claimed that they voted in favour of the Annan plan (as 65 per cent of all Turkish Cypriots did). Had the plan been accepted by both sides, the Kozanlılar would have been displaced again, as the final version of the plan stipulated that the village would be returned to the Greek Cypriots. On a sunny winter morning, in February 2006, I was having coffee with a retired bank employee in his house in Kozan. The conversation came around to the reunification plan. I paraphrase what he told me: Of course we voted ‘no’. Most of the Kozanlılar did. We are not stupid. Do you think we really want to move again? Start again? As you know I am building a house for one of my sons in this village. We lived here for more than thirty years. We want to stay here and we made that clear when we went to the school [where the referendum in the village took place]. That was news to me, as I had always believed the Kozanlılar, including this informant, when they claimed enthusiastically that they had voted yes. I will analyze later what this means in terms of how the Kozanlılar are attached to their present village. What is significant here is that I realized, after a long research period among the Kozanlılar, that I had gained the trust of some of the villagers who would open up and tell me how they really felt about things.

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Structure of the Book The next six chapters follow my fieldwork (2002–2008) in chronological order. Chapter One serves as a general introduction to the Larnatsjiotes, the Greek Cypriot refugees from the village Larnakas tis Lapithou. It includes the data collected before the easing of the border restrictions in April 2003, when I was exclusively working with Greek Cypriots. This chapter deals with the Larnatsjiotes’ memories, and their longing for their lost homes. These refugees perceive themselves as victims of a great injustice, and although they now live more or less comfortable lives compared to the first years of displacement, their quest for justice remains undiminished. In the next three chapters I explore different aspects of the unexpected opening of the checkpoints along the Green Line. In Chapter Two I sketch in ethnographic detail the renewed context of the division of Cyprus. I reconstruct the turmoil of the first weeks and months after the border restrictions were eased and follow some informants on their very first visits across the divide. Since April 2003 access to Larnakas brought the Larnatsjiotes’ grievances back to the surface in full strength. What access to their village also did, however, was test the desire to return and re-occupy their houses. For the Larnatsjiotes the first visits to their village and houses were a very emotional and difficult event. The failed referendum on the Annan Plan and the reactions on both sides of the divide indicated that ordinary Greek and Turkish Cypriots were still very much embittered about what happened in the past. The border remained very much a border, both in reality and in the minds of people. In Chapter Three I analyze the return trips to Larnakas and other villages. Larnatsjiotes, and other Greek Cypriot refugees, engaged in frequent return visits and found some comfort in religious and secular rituals they performed in their villages. Although they would never get used to the sight of their altered village, making these kinds of ‘pilgrimages’ was an opportunity to reconstruct the community. The same way that Greek Cypriots undertake ‘pilgrimages’ to their lost villages, Turkish Cypriots also visit the villages they left behind. Many aspects of their experiences are similar, but Turkish Cypriot refugees

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do not seem to visit their villages, fields and houses every time they cross. The Turkish Cypriot crossings, if they are not related to work, medical emergencies or obtaining government documents, are more of the tourist type. Chapter Four draws up a balance of the first six years of border crossings through different readings of the border. The crossings have become a normalized, routinized event on Cyprus and in the year 2010 a general disappointment lingers over both communities. The border remains, for both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, a symbol of injustice but there is a significant nuance in their perception of the division. The next two chapters deal exclusively with Turkish Cypriot refugees. In Chapter Five I concentrate on how the Kozanlılar, after a thirty-year process of ‘home-making’, are emplaced in their current locality. The Kozanlılar are, like any other community, morally unified and divided at the same time along the usual lines. In short, they are settled and embedded in the place they live now. I illustrate how they reproduce a sense of community by analyzing differences and similarities in terms of livelihoods and class, gender roles and age cohorts. Although the Kozanlılar are refugees they feel at home and perceive their emplacement as successful. But that perception has been affected since the ongoing negotiations for a settlement of the ‘Cyprus Problem’ and the prospect of having to move yet again. I focus on the Kozanlılar’s refugee identity in Chapter Six. Implementation of the Annan Plan would have meant that the village would be returned to the Larnatsjiotes, its original Greek Cypriot inhabitants. The Kozanlılar’s home, ‘their place in the world’, would no longer be theirs. They would be displaced again and would have to start the long process of emplacement from scratch. It was this prospect that propelled them to emphasize that they too are refugees, and it was this insecurity that gave rise to a more acute sense of home.

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CHAPTER ONE NOTHING COMPAR ES TO OUR VILL AGE

Larnakas tis Lapithou lies seventeen kilometres west of the town of Kyrenia (Girne) on the southern side of the Pendadaktylos. Before 1974 it was an exclusively Greek Cypriot community. The neighbouring villages were the Turkish Cypriot village Kambili (Hisarköy), the mixed village Vasilia (Karşıyaka) and the Greek Cypriot villages Myrtou (Camlibel) and Argidaki (Alemdağ). In 1973 the population of Larnakas was 873. One hundred and seven pupils attended the village’s primary school that year. The data on which this chapter is based were collected during the summer of 2002, primarily among the former residents of Larnakas, known as Larnatsjiotes, who now live in Nicosia. At the time that this data were collected the Larnatsjiotes had not seen their village for nearly three decades. When I started my fieldwork among them, the opening of checkpoints on the Green Line was inconceivable, and when they were opened in April 2003, it took everyone by surprise. The displacement of the Larnatsjiotes in 1974 shattered their community. In contrast to most Turkish Cypriot refugees who were resettled together with co-villagers, the Larnatsjiotes are scattered all over the south. The Larnatsjiotes still meet regularly and are still attached to their co-villagers, but the strong village-solidarity that once existed has disappeared. Before the border opening, the Larnatsjiotes held an idealized image of their village. After April 2003, when it became

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possible to see the village again, the Larnatsjiotes were shaken by the realisation that the image they nurtured in their minds and the reality they witnessed did not match.

‘Our Desire Is To Return’ During my fieldwork in Nicosia, I mainly lived in a refugee house in Agios Pavlos, only a ten-minute drive away from the old city centre. I lived in the flat that was allocated to my grandmother Olymbia after she was displaced from Larnakas. Until she died, in 1988, my grandmother, yiayia, lived in Agios Pavlos with three of her nine children. Her youngest daughter still lives in the synikismos (refugee estate). I have some clear memories of that particular refugee neighbourhood in the 1980s. We used to visit yiayia during summer holidays. The synikismos consisted of three floors, each with three flats. The building was painted in a light shade of beige. There were brown wooden shutters and small brown railings on the balconies. Potted flowers, plants and herbs crowded every free corner of the balconies and hallways. The geraniums, lilies, carnations and sweet basil were planted in plastic pots or metal containers. The garden surrounding the building, planted with lemon and olive trees, was well tended. Jasmine and honeysuckle climbed the walls and twined around the iron gates. A long wire stretched between two trees and served as a washing line. Fresh lines of laundry populated the garden and the roof. The rooms in yiayia’s flat were tiny but functional. The kitchen was the largest room and had a massive old-fashioned fridge that made a grating noise that kept me awake at night. We arranged mattresses on the floor and the five of us, my parents and three children, slept in one of the tiny bedrooms. I remember the constant background noise from adjacent flats: chatter, laughter and the blaring sound of a radio or TV that never seemed to be switched off. The front doors of all the flats were open from very early in the morning until late at night, unless the residents were away. We knew all the tenants. I remember that Kyria (Mrs) Eleftheria from downstairs, who was always whispering a prayer to herself, would treat us to sesame sticks. Kyrios (Mr) Christakis, with his bushy white eyebrows and permanent cigarette dangling from his

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lips, taught us how to make a catapult. My brother and I would hang over the railing of the third floor and fling small pebbles with our makeshift catapults at the stray cats that lolled around the entrance. Other times, bored stiff by the obligatory siesta, we would run up and down the three flights of stairs playing tag until we were reprimanded for making too much noise. In the summer the heat was so scorching that everything vanished in the glare of white light. Mercy arrived at night when a cool breeze drove all the residents onto to their balconies or into the garden. At that time of day, just before dark, we would play endless variations of hopscotch on the pavement in front of the entrance. There were always other children around, presumably the grandchildren of the other residents. This is how I remembered yiayia’s house, but that was twenty years ago and I had not visited the synikismos often since she passed away in 1988. When I moved to the flat in 2003, the building and its residents were very different from what I remembered. The synikismos was rundown. Although the wooden shutters had been replaced by white plastic ones, the whole facade looked battered. Everything seemed so flimsy and dilapidated: the stairways, the old letterboxes, the by now rusty railings and the front doors with the paint peeling off. It came as a bit of a shock. The garden of my memory was now a dirty forlorn patch of ground with two filthy, brown, yappy dogs occupying it. The once blossoming plants and bushes were shrivelled from lack of water. In the summer there was also a rotten smell of the constantly overflowing rubbish containers. Only three of the nine flats were still inhabited by the original residents. The other refugees had died or moved out. The other two families living on our floor were noisy and neglected the common hallway completely. They kept two rabbits and a big turtle in a cage on the stairs and on the roof they kept chickens. The corridor was littered with rubbish, discarded toys and dozens of empty beer bottles. The families were working-class Maronites who spoke a mixture of Greek and Turkish Cypriot. I soon learned that these two families were related. An older couple lived in one flat and their daughter with her children lived in another. Her husband was in prison and at some point the woman had a relationship with a Turkish Cypriot man who

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stayed with her. The shrieking sounds of fighting, between the couple, the daughter and her father when he returned from a drinking binge, and the grandmother shouting at the children made the other residents of the building very uncomfortable. Because of this we all kept our front doors locked and dreaded the verbal or physical fights which usually ended with yet another visit from the police. The residents on the second floor had even put up a huge iron gate to close off their corridor from the rest of the hallway. The sense of community I remembered from my childhood summers was long gone. Over time I got used to the miserable state of the synikismos and was not afraid to climb the stairs at night. I no longer dreaded the cat that might jump out of nowhere, or the bat that flew between the only two fluorescent lights that still worked in the hallway. Nor did I pay much attention to the lump of my drunk neighbour on the steps, locked out of his house yet again. When I asked Kyria (Mrs) Eleftheria, who still lived there, how things had ended up this way, she did not answer my question directly, but reminisced about the time when my grandmother (and many of the other original inhabitants) lived there. With grief on her face, she said something along the following lines: We are now left with a very few who know what prosfygia (refugeeness) is. They have all left us. Some moved to their children’s place and some died, like our Olymbia (she crossed herself). Do you know that your yiayia would walk these steps every day several times? She would bring us our groceries and make us coffee. For me, it was good to have another Larnatsjiotissa living nearby. And now, look at this. We have all these gypsies living here. [She was referring to the two Maronite families living on my floor] They come and go and do not care about anything. And the government (i givernisi), they do nothing. They promised to renovate the building but now I hear we will have to move. That will be the second time I will be made a refugee. I want to go back to Larnakas. That is my true home. I will always be a refugee here. I had never realized that Kyria Eleftheria was a Larnatsjiotissa. As a child I was too young to know, or perhaps I was not interested when

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somebody told me. I only remember her sesame sticks wrapped in wax paper. The government now often uses the empty flats and houses on the refugee estates as social housing and allocates them to poorer families. The building where yiayia’s flat was located was one in a row of several almost identical blocks of flats. Within walking distance there are some streets lined with small matching houses that are also part of a refugee estate. They are in slightly better condition than the flats, but are still in urgent need of repair. Like Kyria Eleftheria, most Greek Cypriot refugees express an overwhelming yearning to return to their villages. ‘Our desire is to go to our house [home] (O pothos mas einai na pame sto spiti mas)’ is one of the common phrases I heard countless times. This desire is underpinned by the official state discourse which has always emphasized that the refugees’ settlement in the south of Cyprus is temporary and that its stance in negotiations would always be that all refugees should be able to return to their places in the north. The desire to return is based on an idealized, perfect past that anthropologist Michael Herzfeld refers to as ‘structural nostalgia’, a ‘collective representation of an Edenic order – a time before time – in which the balanced perfection of social relations has not yet suffered the decay that affects everything human’.1 The different ways in which the Larnatsjiotes express their nostalgia for the village are often what cultural theorist Mieke Bal coined as ‘acts of memory’: Memory is an act of ‘vision’ of the past but, as an act, situated in the present of the memory. It is often a narrative act: loose elements come to cohere in a story, so that they can be remembered and eventually told. But as is well know, memories are unreliable – in relation to the fibula – and when put into words, they are rhetorically overworked so that they can connect to an audience.2 Thirty years after their displacement, the Larnatsjiotes retain vivid and detailed memories of their pre-displacement lives, their village and their houses. The most ordinary, but probably also most powerful ‘act of memory’ of the Larnatsjiotes is the story telling about their wayof-life in the village and the description of buildings, the flourishing

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trees, the fertile fields and places of exceptional natural beauty. They passionately recall a perfect harmony in the village and celebrate the uniqueness of their place of origin asserting that ‘no other place compares to Larnakas (san ton Larnaka den eshei allo)’. The memories first evoked in conversations with Larnatsjiotes always focussed on the village as a ‘paradise’. The Larnatsjiotes would say: Larnakas was beautiful, it was perfect. Life was great back in the village and there was harmony with nature and with each other. The village had the best water, the purest air and the healthiest climate. This attitude was not unique to the Larnatsjiotes. I interviewed several Greek Cypriot refugees from other villages in north Cyprus, such as Aigialousa (near Famagusta), Agios Georgos (near Kyrenia) and Gerolakkos (near Nicosia), and their stories were similar. Their village was always the best place to live in Cyprus and if ever a solution would come they would take me there to prove it. At times, the start of such conversations was intensely emotional. Michalis, a Larnatsjiotis in his eighties, was at a loss, his eyes instantly brimming with tears as he searched for the right words to begin his story about the village: Everybody loves the place where he is born. I have memories from the moment I was born until we had to leave Larnakas. I have too many memories . . . (long silence) Friends, I went to school there, I worked in the village . . . (long silence) The whole scenery, mountains, the house . . . It was a special . . . I mean, I don’t think it was special because it was my village. It was . . . I mean, our house was at the foot of the mountains and in front of the house were the fields. It was very nice. I remember everything of the village. From the start of the village until the end. It was not only those Larnatsjiotes who live in a refugee estate who spoke with almost tangible yearning about their village. I lived in different houses within Nicosia for each round of fieldwork because I believed it was important to live with refugees from different class backgrounds, in the intimacy of their own homes. In addition to the large number of Larnatsjiotes living in refugee estates,3 some Larnatsjiotes were able to build their own houses, while others could only afford to buy a modest

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flat. However, regardless of their relatively successful emplacement in the south, the Larnatsjiotes are unified in the feeling that their real home is in Larnakas. At some point during my first fieldwork round I found lodgings in Aglantzia, a large municipality in Nicosia. My hosts were both refugees in their late fifties: Antonis is a Larnatsjiotis and Georgia is a refugee from Agios Georgios, a village located close to the coastal town of Kyrenia. After their displacement they lived in a number of apartments until 1988, when they moved into their newly built house in Aglantzia. The house is in a residential area, where most of the houses were built around the same time. It is a large detached house with a small front and back yard. The interior reflects the taste of the middle classes. It has three bathrooms with trendy tiles, central air conditioning and is decorated in a modern black-and-white style. On a particular hot summer day Georgia told me that she was glad they could now afford air conditioning. She emphasized that there was no need for it in her former village, Agios Georgos, because the continuous breeze from the sea made the scorching heat of summer bearable. During the first fourteen years after their displacement, Antonis and Georgia moved several times, from one rented flat to the next, each time attempting to improve their living conditions. In all these flats there was no air conditioning available. The central air conditioning system they now have in their house is a symbol of the fact that, despite all the financial hardship and suffering, they managed well. The neighbouring houses are similar in layout and style. These houses often have an exterior staircase that leads to a second floor that does not yet exist. Rusted metal rods sprout from the flat roofs like clusters of antennae. These will reinforce the walls of the second storey to be built for the daughters when they marry. Antonis, charming and talkative, soon became a key informant and facilitated my introduction to many other Larnatsjiotes. In our very first formal interview, a taped conversation, Antonis insisted on starting with the ‘beginnings about Larnakas’. This conversation was very similar to other conversations I had with male informants from Larnakas. These Larnatsjiotes spoke to me in a didactic and sometimes even pedantic way. I was put in the position of the student; they were not telling me about the village, in a certain way they were ‘teaching’ Larnakas to me. I often

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felt it was because I was a woman that the men spoke to me in this condescending and often pompous way. Once I became more accepted by the community after my first fieldwork period, I noticed that the men’s tone changed. When we talked about Larnakas the men would often start a discussion about small details. It was if they were competing among themselves to convince me that they remembered a particular aspect of the village best. This became especially clear in the way they spoke when the conversation was being taped. The men would speak very slowly, as Antonis did during our first interview: First, do not confuse. There is Larnaca and Larnakas. These are two different places. The town of Larnaca [a coastal town in the south of Cyprus] is the female: ‘i Larnaca’. Our village, it was the male: o Larnakas tis Lapithou. It has some historical meaning why it is called Larnakas. ‘Larnakas’ means tomb in Greek, where they put the dead. When several different files (races) invaded Cyprus, they always invaded from the seaside. Kyrenia, Karavas, Lapithos . . . They came from the seaside to get Cyprus and the Lapithiotes, the inhabitants of Lapithos. It is the village on the other side of the mountain, near the seaside. They [the Lapithiotes] came with their families to the other side of the mountain, in order to save the families. There was Larnakas and they put their timalfi (jewellery, valuables) there. You know, their precious things: gold, silver, money and their families to save them from the invaders. Then they put the dead people there [in Larnakas] as well. Those who were killed by the invaders. It [Larnakas] was a hiding place for Lapithiotes. The name is about 7000 years old. There are two or three myths about the name. The other meaning is from ‘Posidonas’, the old Greek god. He has his place in the middle of Larnakas. It was a church of old Greeks: (pronounces the words very slowly and loudly) ‘Larnakios Posidonas’, ‘Larnakios’ or ‘Narnakios’. It was a place to worship him there. That is Larnakios, Larnakas. It was a source of pride for the Larnatsjiotes that their village was also the location of some archaeological artefacts with Phoenician inscriptions.

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Many Larnatsjiotes referred to these inscriptions found on a rectangular tablet, now displayed in the archaeological museum in Nicosia, and the engravings in a rock called ‘Lacharopetra’. Archaeologists who have analyzed these inscriptions have pointed out that these refer to the local city-kingdom of Lapithos.4 Women, on the other hand, were storytellers in the more romantic meaning of the word. Once I gained their trust, they would try to speak slowly to me, but once into the flow of their story they were so enthused that they ceased to notice my presence. The Larnatsjiotisses were also keen on listing the places they missed the most, often with tears in their eyes. Fotini, for instance, very often launched into a detailed account of what she would visit if she were able to return to Larnakas: I would like to climb the Pendadaktylos again, which overlooks Vasilia, Kyrenia and Lapithos. I remember that on my right I could see Vasilia and Lapithos. All those beautiful places (tous oraious topous). I have never seen such scenery anywhere else. From the other side we could see as far as Nicosia. Imagine watching all those villages as far as Nicosia. You know, that is the first place I want to go to (ma kseris en to proton praman pou thelo na pao). I want to go up the mountain and enjoy the view again. I have never seen this anywhere else in Cyprus (Poupote allou stin Kipro en ida opou epia). Greek Cypriot refugees hold precise memories of the day they left their village. Christina was fourteen when she left Larnakas and clearly recalled that she was not allowed to take any of the things that mattered to her: We were constantly listening to the radio and we could hear that they bombed Kondemenos [a village nearby]. That was a bit scary. Everybody was scared when they bombed the mountains on top of the village and then the whole mountain caught fire. I remember everything was really red. You could see – in the middle of the night – the light, it was like day. Then we had to leave, pack and leave. I was packing small things, like my

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precious things, but I wasn’t allowed. We were thrown in a bus and sent to the Troodos mountains. We did not realize that we would never go back. I thought it was like an excursion. You know, we would be gone for some days and when things would calm down we would return. When I asked Theodosia, a Larnatsjiotissa who lives in a refugee estate in Strovolos, what she took with her on the day she fled Larnakas, she rummaged through an old wooden chest in her living room. She found a large plastic bag and handed it to me: That is the bag I took with me. I put a small blanket in it and three pampers [nappies] for my paralyzed sister [who was shot by British soldiers in the 1950s and remained disabled]. I lost everything. The only thing I have from Larnakas is the golden cross I wear around my neck. It was made by one of our goldsmiths in the village. In the summer of 2003, I stayed for some weeks with Larnatsjiotes Anastasia and Odysseas in their small flat in Lycavitos, a neighbourhood close to the centre of Nicosia. The block of flats, built in 1980, was desirable then because it is near the University of Cyprus (established in 1989). Now, three decades later, the building is run-down. The facade is stained with dark streaks of damp and crumbling plaster. Inside it is littered with rubbish in the common areas, the elevator is broken, and the windows are sealed shut with duct tape. This is mainly because most flats in these buildings are now rented out to students or migrants, who don’t stay long in one place. When I lived in that building only two of the seventeen flats were still inhabited by people who moved in during the early 1980s. My hosts, Anastasia and Odysseas, were both in their early seventies. They got married in Larnakas and their two daughters, Yianna and Xenia, started primary school in the village before their displacement in 1974. Anastasia, who worked at home as a seamstress, and Odysseas, an employee at the national telephone company, had lived only a few weeks in the brand new house they had painstakingly built in Larnakas. This Larnatsjiotes family

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was hit hard by the war, not so much because they lost their livelihood as other refugees did, but because they had invested, both financially and emotionally in building their own house. Something they never managed to achieve again. They lived the rest of their adult lives in a small flat, knowing that their large house, only a short drive away, was now inhabited by others. For more than three decades Anastasia made clothes in a small room in the Lycavitos apartment. Fortunately her husband had a white-collar job and brought in a modest but steady income that allowed them to educate their daughters. When I was staying in their house, Anastasia would occasionally still make a wedding dress for a relative or an acquaintance. She would sit intently bent over her Singer sewing machine oblivious to all the noise coming from the other apartments. On one of these occasions Anastasia gave me a detailed description of her house in Larnakas. She finished her story by emphasizing that she at least owned the tiny flat she was now living in and did not have to live for long in a synikismos. Anastasia told me that on the day she fled Larnakas, she packed a small bag with clothes for her two small children. She added: ‘As I was leaving my house I took a picture frame from the wall next to the front door’. Anastasia showed me the picture, a portrait of her oldest brother on his graduation from secondary school, which hung in a central place in her living room in Nicosia. As anthropologist David Parkin notes, ‘memories may sometimes be best inscribed in personal mementoes and formulaic behaviours [as] a kind of material antidote to what is a material loss, both bodily and in terms of possessions’.5 The Larnatsjiotes, like many Greek Cypriot refugees, have very few material things to remind them of the past. They emphasized again and again that they left their village taking next to nothing with them. My informants are deeply embittered because they do not have any tangible reminders of their pre-displacement life. They mentioned different things they would have taken with them if they had known they would never return. Some of the things they spoke of were small personal items such as a specific icon, a specific jewel or a wedding picture. Other items were more of the practical kind but no less valued because they were handmade – for instance quilts and embroidered sheets – or because they had been hard-earned such as specific pieces

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of costly furniture or china. It was in this context that the Larnatsjiotes would often stress that Greek Cypriot refugees in general suffered more than Turkish Cypriot refugees. According to my informants Turkish Cypriots could prepare their departure and take valuable items with them. Some Larnatsjiotes told me that the displaced Turkish Cypriots were not really refugees because they knew they were going to leave their villages and houses behind, and could therefore organize themselves.6 Photographs of Larnakas, depicting specific locations in the village or portraying villagers, have an extraordinary value for the Larnatsjiotes. Prior to the border opening in 2003, very few Larnatsjiotes had pictures of their village or of the important life events (such as baptism and weddings) celebrated there. The few pictures that Larnatsjiotes took with them were reproduced and circulated widely among co-villagers. Photographs of localities and religious buildings in the north of Cyprus have become familiar in Greek Cypriot society.7 In most of the Larnatsjiotes houses I visited such pictures are exhibited in central places where they can be seen. One popular picture is of the monastery Panagia ton Katharon, another is of the Pendadaktylos as viewed from the village. Even three decades after their displacement these images were deeply valued, served as mementos and generated powerful emotions. When I visited two Larnatsjiotes, Angeliki and Frixos, now living in Mandria, a village close to the Paphos airport, I came across a surprisingly large collection of pictures taken in Larnakas. After a delicious meal outside, Angeliki asked me to follow her into the small three-room house. It was dark inside and my eyes took time to adjust. She gestured towards a wall unit that housed the television and told me to have a look at the framed pictures hanging above it. Among those pictures were some landscapes of Larnakas – a view over the valley with the monastery, a mountain scene and a picture of the village’s church – which I had seen in many Larnatsjiotes’ houses. What caught my eye though, were three smaller frames with black-and-white pictures of village people in their everyday environment. Angeliki dried her hands on a worn tea towel tied to her apron, took the frames off the wall and handed them to me. The pictures fascinated me and my enthusiasm only grew when Angeliki pointed out that I knew most of the people in them, though I could not recognize them forty years

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later. Such photographs are now in demand by artists and collectors searching for images of traditional Cypriot village life. Charmed by my enthusiasm and questions, Angeliki produced an old-fashioned tin box with dozens of similar pictures, a real goldmine for a researcher. She told me she had her own camera, sent by a cousin living in America, and shot many rolls of film in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Somehow the tin box had ended up in a relative’s house in Nicosia before 1974 and thus had been saved from the war. I took the pictures outside and sat next to Frixos on the veranda where he was enjoying a coffee made just to his taste. We spent many hours going through the pictures. Angeliki gave the box with pictures to me. I later scanned the pictures and printed them for some of my relatives. Soon I began to see these very same black-and-white photos in the houses of non-related Larnatsjiotes. Very quickly these pictures had found their way into the community and now served as daily mementoes of a past life.

Maps of Larnakas While we were going through the pile of pictures, Frixos drew a map of Larnakas on a paper, pointed out where a specific photo was taken and gave me some information about the specific place. That is how I initially came to know many of the places in Larnakas: To Trouli (a dome-shaped hill marking the entrance of the village), Agia Marina (a small chapel where Saint Marina was worshipped), Lacharopetra (a rock with an ancient inscription) and so on. Many times during my fieldwork Larnatsjiotes made such drawings for me to illustrate their stories: drawings of the location of specific trees, of their houses, of the district of Kyrenia, but especially of Larnakas as a whole, as they remembered the village and the places that were meaningful to them. I kept all those little drafts as aide-memoires when I was writing up my field notes and as souvenirs of their passionate story telling. Over the course of my first fieldwork I collected many of these mental maps. Sometimes my informants would draw them spontaneously to illustrate a specific memory about their village, and at other times I explicitly asked if they were willing to draw a map and highlight the places they thought important. Drawing the maps also triggered

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a new flow of local legends about certain places. In her analysis of cultural narratives of places, Elizabeth Bird states that ‘we re-create place through historic reconstructions; we tell stories to locate us where we feel we should be’.8 I felt that working with visual data such as pictures, mental maps or drawings, enhanced my understanding of how the exiled Larnatsjiotes made sense of their place of origin. Another advantage was that I came to have a clearer picture of the village, inaccessible at that time, its layout and the location of certain places. This helped me immensely when I visited Larnakas regularly and analysed the unwritten routes the Larnatsjiotes would follow during their return visits after April 2003. I will discuss a set of six maps drawn by members of the same family, my father and five of his siblings: two women (Larnatsjiotisses born in 1940 and 1959) and four men (Larnatsjiotes born in 1946, 1948, 1953 and 1961). All the maps were drawn in my presence, except for the printed map of the Larnatsjiotis from 1946. After my request to draw a map of Larnakas as he remembered it, one uncle proudly handed me a copy of a map from 1919 produced by the British colonial administration. This Larnatsjiotis transformed this piece of objective cartography into a personal map by adding his own legend on the right side of the map. His handwritten numbers refer to the printed numbers indicating the different plots in the village. On this specific map, there are four categories of space: houses of co-villagers, public places, specific areas named after a particular feature in the landscape and the roads connecting Larnakas with other villages. He identified the houses of other Larnatsjiotes by their family names, such as Mavromati, Papathoma, Drousiotis or by his kinship to the owner, for instance uncle Gavrilis (theios Gavrilis), grandmother Finikou (yiayia Finikou) and grandfather Simeon (papous Simeon). The second category comprises public buildings and places in Larnakas: the lower fountain and the upper fountain in an area called Apithkia (kato vrisi and pano vrisi Apithkia), the church of Saint Dimitrianos (Agios Dimitrianos), the club house (syllogos) and the football field (gipedon), the bridge (gefirin), the co-op shop (sinergatiko), the old school and the new school (palaion scholeion and neon scholeion) and a large number of coffee shops (kafenedes) often identified

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Map of 1919, with notes by Larnatsjiotis born in 1946

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by the name of the owner. A third category is the indication of specific areas, using local toponyms: a hilly area (kamilostrata, literally translated ‘a road like a camel’), the area around a rock with ancient Phoenician incisions (Lacharopetra), an area with specific fruit trees (zizithkia) and a flat bounded area where they used to clean the wheat from husk (alonin). The last category consists of markers which situate the village in the wider area, indicated by handwritten numbers next to the main roads connecting Larnakas with its neighbouring villages: towards Vasilia (pros Vasilia), towards Agridaki (pros Agridaki) and towards Kondemenos (pros Kondemenos). The hand-drawn maps show the paternal house of these six siblings located in the upper part of the village, just at the foot of the Pendadaktylos. On all the maps this house is depicted in more detail than any of the other houses. They all outlined clearly the two storeys of the house, and four out of five even sketched the outside stone staircase leading to the second floor. This house was indicated on the maps as ‘our house [home]’ (to spiti mas). The Larnatsjiotissa born in 1940 already had her own house in the village, which was finished in the late spring of 1974. She identified her house by her husband’s last name. The paternal two-storey house on her map, which she named ‘grandmother’s [house] (yiayias)’, was also drawn in more detail. When I asked her why she did not add any details to her house, which was depicted as a plain square on her map, she sighed and said, ‘Did I have the chance to live in my own house? I only lived there one month. The house we knew best was the house of my mother, the grandmother (yiayia) of my children’. Other key features of the village were shown on all the maps: the village’s fountains (the vrises), religious sites (the church, monastery and little chapels), the cemetery, the coffee shops (kafenedes) and some toponyms (for instance, Lacharopetra). All of them drew an overview of the entire village, except for the youngest woman (born in 1959) who concentrated on the upper part of the village where her house was located. When I asked her why she chose to focus on that area only, she replied that this was the area she knew best. She drew the trees in front of her house as well as the little pathways leading to it. She also identified the houses of four classmates in the environs of her own house, for instance, Evdokia’s [house] whom she knew from school (Evdokias sxoleio). Three

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Map drawn by Larnatsjiotis born in 1953

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siblings marked both the old and the new school on their maps. When I asked one member of the family (born in 1961) about it, he replied that the new school was a source of pride for the Larnatsjiotes: ‘It was one of the most beautiful schools in the area with a big yard. The teachers were progressive (itan proodevtiki i daskali). Our school was big, it was the biggest (to pio megalon). It had six classes and five teachers.’ Although I could not guess at that time, the routes leading to various places and drawn entirely from memory were the ones that I would follow countless times when I accompanied Larnatsjiotes on visits to their village after the border opened in April 2003. In these return visits to Larnakas they had to face the fact that the village was very different from the idealized frozen image of Larnakas they had retained in their memories for three decades. And this was to have an impact both on their notion of home and their desire to return.

A Broken Community The Larnatsjiotes tried in different ways to maintain a sense of community with their fellow villagers over the three decades since their displacement. Their experiences illustrate well how communities were shattered after 1974, and that despite their efforts, the common life in the village that once held them together was irretrievably lost.9 The Larnatsjiotes are scattered all over the south of Cyprus. Some live in mountainous and coastal villages or in towns such as Paphos, Limassol and Nicosia. My fieldwork focussed on the large number of Larnatsjiotes who live in Nicosia, the biggest urban centre and the capital of the island. These urban refugees form no homogenous body; the community is made up of people from different social strata and age groups. Although some Larnatsjiotes live in the same neighbourhoods, most of the villagers are dispersed over Nicosia and its suburbs. The physical break-up of the village community is an important factor of the Greek Cypriot refugee experience. Social life in Larnakas was primarily organized around the yeitonia, the neighbourhood, but the intensity of neighbourhood life has to a large extent disappeared, given the sociability patterns of the city. The refugees often emphasize the sharp contrast between their former lives in the village and

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their present lives in an urban milieu. Christos, a Larnatsjiotis in his late fifties, told me that ‘real life does not allow us [the Larnatsjiotes] to be a close community’. He explained that because of the loss of physical proximity, the hectic city lifestyle and the development of new social relations, the Larnatsjiotes ‘have lost touch with each other (khathikan)’. Christos readily added that strong bonds between covillagers remained. For example if one needed a job done a co-villager would be asked to do it first. This was my experience too. Early on in my fieldwork I became acquainted with Vassos, a Larnatsjiotis who had his own small business. He was a carpenter and had learned his trade from his father, who was a carpenter in Larnakas. Christos told me that many of his clients were his former co-villagers: They come here and tell me they are from Larnakas. I don’t even remember some of them, because I was only fifteen when I became a refugee. I remember the people from my neighbourhood and some of my classmates. Well, some of those I do not even recognize. We all changed, you know (and he laughed while he pointed to his graying hair and patted his chubby belly). For example, your uncle came here and I did all the woodwork, the shutters and the doors, for his new house. Many of the older Larnatsjiotes send their children, who are now building houses of their own, to me. Perhaps they want a good price (winked), but it is also because we are from the same village (eimasten chorkani) and that forms bonds between people. I was surprised that my uncle asked a Larnatsjiotis for the carpentry (ta pelikanika) for his house. I tried to talk to him about Larnakas a couple of times but he would laugh at me: ‘Why do you ask me about Larnakas? I was only a kid [thirteen years old] when we left Larnakas. You should ask older people.’ When I asked him about Vassos, the Larnatsjiotis-carpenter, he confirmed: ‘Look (akou na deis), I needed the job to be done. Why should I not ask a co-villager? It is good to support the Larnatsjiotes. We all went through the same hardship and suffering.’ Since I was close to this uncle I could ask him, without being impolite, whether Vassos was cheaper than other carpenters.

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He said that it did not really matter. Vassos was good at his job, was known to deliver on time and most importantly, he was a Larnatsjiotis. I asked seamstress Anastasia, when I was living with her, whether she had a lot of Larnatsjiotisses who put orders with her. ‘No’, she replied, ‘but that is because most of the women knew how to make their own clothes. They would do it themselves. Most of my clients were ksenes.’ ‘Ksenes?’ (literally ‘foreigners’), I asked puzzled. Anastasia replied: ‘You know, Lefkosiatisses (women from Nicosia).’ Her choice of words is interesting, because it indicates that in some contexts refugees still make the distinction between Larnatsjiotes – members of their own community, often coined as ‘diki mas anthropoi (our people)’ – and outsiders, here called ‘ksenes’ three decades after their displacement. Anastasia hastened to add that for any job that Larnatsjiotes could not do themselves they would always go first to co-villagers. She gave the example of the relatively high number of goldsmiths from Larnakas who, after their displacement, opened small business in the south of Cyprus. ‘Anybody who needs jewellery or who wants to fix a broken piece will go to one of our goldsmiths (diki mas chrisoxous)’, Anastasia stated. Over the past six years I have come across many cases of Larnatsjiotes turning to co-villagers to transact business. For instance, when Antonis’ oldest daughter got married it went without saying that the photographer would be a Larnatsjiotes and that the loukoumia (a traditional sweet given to guests at the reception) would be bought from a Larnatsjiotes family who had their own company. Despite the fact that Larnatsjiotes live ‘far’ from each other now and are entangled in the web of contemporary urban life, there are still many other occasions where members of the former community meet. In particular, older male Larnatsjiotes meet each other on a frequently in the coffee shop of their syllogos (association) to play backgammon, cards or bingo or simply to have a drink together.10 One Larnatsjiotis told me he frequents the syllogos because there he can talk ‘about the old days (na miliso gia ta palia)’. The syllogos was a meeting place in a quiet street off the main Makariou shopping street. I joined Odysseas there once on a Friday evening. A couple of old men sat on wooden chairs sipping coffee, playing cards or tavli (backgammon). Odysseas introduced me to some Larnatsjiotes but I soon

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felt that this was not a good moment to chat undisturbed as preparations were under the way for the weekly tombola (bingo) evening. Soon the room was crowded with men and women, most of them over fifty, who ordered souvlakia (the local kebab) and concentrated on the bingo. Most of the time only older, male refugees visited the coffee shop. However, on bingo nights, women and a few Larnatsjiotes younger than forty would also frequent the coffee shop. The two Larnatsjiotes refugee associations organize various events, such as specific orthodox liturgies, day trips, dinners, dances and talks, which are widely attended by the entire family. The most frequent gatherings of Larnatsjiotes occur during the observance of Orthodox rituals. As Dora, a Larnatsjiotissa in her early twenties, put it to me: ‘I know the Larnatsjiotes from church things. We attend each other’s baptisms, weddings, funerals and mnimosina (memorials)’. Especially for a wedding celebration, one of the most important social events on the island, all Larnatsjiotes are invited and attendance is mandatory.11 These rituals are rich in ‘social content’12 and although the event could no longer be held in their village, by inviting as many Larnatsjiotes as possible, the host attempted to recreate a semblance of community and village life. The social world in the village was organized around the religious calendar and participation was to a large extent inevitable. Larnatsjiotes frequently narrate stories about the religious dimension of their lives in the village. They describe at length how they celebrated their patron saint’s name day (the paniyiri) and they vividly recall details about the religious sites in their village. As in Greece, Greek Cypriot communities are deeply attached to the holy personages to whom the local churches are dedicated.13 In Larnakas tis Lapithou the local monastery was built in honour of the Panagia ton Katharon (Virgin Mary of the Pure). Many Larnatsjiotes have personal experiences with her miracle-working power. Kostas, for example, told me with considerable emotion how he suddenly became paralyzed as a young child. When the Panagia appeared in his mother’s dream, she took her son to the monastery and fulfilled a vow (tama). After a while, Kostas’ seemingly untreatable condition was miraculously cured and he could walk again. Even those refugees who are sceptical about religion and the Greek Orthodox Church take a great

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interest in particular churches or icons. One evening I was invited for dinner in a Larnatsjiotis’ house because the village’s former teacher (o daskalos) had come over from England. A group of Larnatsjiotes gathered around the dinner table and when the conversation turned to the village one Larnatsjiotissa told us about a video she had seen showing Turks or Turkish Cypriots selling icons in the harbour of Kyrenia (an occupied coastal town). Information was exchanged about the state of orthodox sites in the north of the island. When our host showed us a replica picture of the icon of ‘their’ Panagia everybody, including the known sceptics, showed great interest. Refugees, whose daily life is still inextricably entwined with religion, feel at a loss in the urban environment where their saints are not worshipped and where they cannot practice their local traditions. Anthropologist Loring Danforth suggests that for the refugee community of the Kostilides in Greek Macedonia, the Anastenaria ritual of firewalking and spirit possession is a symbol of their shared identity and serves as a celebration of their past.14 Greek Cypriot refugees have no specific religious ritual that helps them deal with their loss and suffering. Larnatsjiotes organize a special annual liturgy dedicated to ‘their’ Panagia (Mother of God) and even those who would normally never attend a religious service are present. Not only do the Larnatsjiotes try to maintain a sense of community, they also attempt to recreate the natural environment of their village by growing and tending specific plants and trees they used to have in Larnakas. In her research on gardens in Cyprus, anthropologist Anne Jepson found that Greek Cypriot refugees have the urge to re-root themselves. She describes the small gardens in the refugee estates in Nicosia to illustrate her point: ‘The miniature gardens were invariably well-tended and full and strikingly similar. In them, one found samplers of village gardens and yards – diminutive renditions’.15 Trees, but also animals were things frequently remembered by the Larnatsjiotes. My father’s fascination with specific animals and trees is an example. This can be understood in Filip De Boeck’s sense: ‘Locality can be moved through space, recreated or repeated in different spaces, by planting new trees and thus creating or ‘growing’ memory, history and belonging. Physical and metaphorical roots

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can thus emerge out of any social and material landscape’.16 For as long as I can remember my father has been fixated with growing and breeding things that reminded him of Larnakas. When I was younger we used to have a ‘zoo’ (as my Belgian relatives would call it): sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, fish . . . My father used to say ‘I am going to my village’ when he went to feed the animals. Today he still breeds karaolous (snails), which he brought from Cyprus, in an old fish aquarium. He shows them proudly to our Belgian acquaintances (who are often surprised, not to mention disgusted). In our Belgian garden there are some trees that explicitly belong to my father. Nobody can touch them, not even my mother who does most of the gardening. Those are his trees: a banana tree, two fig trees, an olive tree and last but not least the grape vines he grows over our backyard terrace (as is often done in Cyprus). When we joked about his fixation with growing such things, he always replied that he could not understand why they cost an astronomical amount of money in Belgium, while they were free in Larnakas: ‘It was the cheapest food, you could find it anywhere in the area.’ I have witnessed this fixation with trees and animals among many other Larnatsjiotes. Christos, for example, bought a piece of land in Agios Georgios, a village in the Paphos district. He gave me a guided tour of his banana plantation, three hundred olive trees and a pervoli (orchard) and pointed out all the things they had once had in Larnakas. Christos also breeds karaolous (snails) and he told me that they used to ‘get them from the mountains in Larnakas’. My father and Christos are reshaping particular memories of the village. Planting specific trees, breeding karaolous, commenting on (and comparing) trees elsewhere in Cyprus can be seen as ‘acts of memory’. Until the border opened in April 2003, the Larnatsjiotes, like most Greek Cypriot refugees, held an ideal version of their village and expressed an intense desire to return. These Greek Cypriot refugees perceived themselves as victims of a great injustice, and although they now live more or less comfortable lives, compared to the first years of displacement, their determination in their quest for justice remained undiminished. I will show in the next chapters that the emphasis on their refugee identity has only increased as a result of the unexpected opening of the border and contact with Turkish Cypriots.

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CHAPTER T WO A CR ACK IN THE BOR DER

‘We never bought a house here, because our mind was always there, (o nous mas itan panta eki)’, I overheard a woman saying in the long queue. ‘Here’ is somewhere in the south of Cyprus and ‘there’ could have been anywhere north of the Green Line. The woman, clearly a refugee, swept her hand across her forehead. It was only the end of April but it was already hot and the slight breeze carried the smell of sweat and the unrelenting buzzing sound of cicadas. We were standing between two rust-eaten fences, tightly packed like kernels in an ear of corn. The Green Line was established in 1963 following a round of hostilities between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, during which Turkish Cypriots moved to enclaves.1 As Brigadier Francis Henn, retired Chief of Staff of the UN Force in Cyprus, wrote in his memoir: The agreed neutral zone was delineated on a map by General Young using a green pencil; ever since this has been known as ‘the Green Line’, a term that has passed into international usage to denote comparable territorial divides elsewhere. ( . . . ) The Green Line Agreement had been reached in December 1963, when British troops under Major General Young had been deployed to Nicosia and before UNFICYP2 was established. Although it cannot have been in anyone’s mind that the Line was anything more than a temporary expedient to separate the

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combatants, 40 years later it still existed, altered a little here and there, but for the most part unchanged from that delineated by General Young’s green pencil.3 After the Turkish invasion of 1974, the Green Line became a rigid partition line running across the middle of the island. Manned by UN peacekeepers, it consists of a variety of barricades, always with the omnipresent ‘forbidden zone’ sign. The Green Line is a de facto ‘border’, a controversial term in the Cypriot context. It is a militarized border, which runs 180 kilometres across the island and cuts the capital, Nicosia, right through its heart. The UN buffer zone, which stretches from Morfou Bay in the west to Famagusta in the east, was established in September 1974 and is policed by UN soldiers. Before April 2003 there had been almost no contact between ordinary Greek and Turkish Cypriots living on the island since 1974. Between 1974 and 2003, face-to-face contact between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and traffic across the border was limited to a few meetings between groups of professionals, journalists, youth organisations and artists that were occasionally organized by various trade unions or peace movements.4 After the turn of the century a number of Turkish Cypriots started to rebel against their long-time leader, Rauf Denktaş and the old, corrupt regime he represented. This rebellion led to mass demonstrations in the old centre of north Nicosia in 2002.5 The large-scale protests resulted in drastic changes on the island. Denktaş suddenly eased the border restrictions on 23 April 2003. An island-wide referendum on the UN reunification proposal, known as the Annan Plan, was held in April 2004. The opposition leader Mehmet Ali Talat was elected Prime Minister in 2004. He went on to defeat Denktaş in the presidential election of the unrecognized state in 2005.6 For the first time in almost three decades Cypriots could cross from one side of their divided island to the other at the Ledra Palace checkpoint. Since then a number of checkpoints along the Green Line have opened at different intervals. These are often known by names taken from neighbouring villages or the whole area. For example, the Zodia/ Bostancı checkpoint is also known as the ‘Morfou’ checkpoint, the

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name of the region west of Nicosia, or the ‘Astromeritis’ checkpoint, named after a nearby village. By the end of 2010, there were seven checkpoints along the Green Line. The possibility of crossing the border opened the door (in the literal and figurative sense) for both Greek and Turkish Cypriots to return to their former houses and villages, to explore the ‘other side’ of their divided island, to investigate business opportunities across the divide, to find work in the other community, to revive old friendships and establish new contacts, or simply to buy some goods across the border. During the first momentous days after the border opened on 23 April 2003, the United Nations’ soldiers were barely able to manage the crowds waiting to cross. One week later they had created a provisional trail snaking through the buffer zone that crossers had to follow before they reached passport control. By now, thousands of Cypriots had already returned to their villages. Every day more people were queuing for several hours to cross the border and it was not uncommon to wait for more than six hours. Some even spent the night in their cars in order to be at the checkpoint as early as possible. I craned my neck to see how far we were away from the tiny office where we would have to show our passports and fill out a visa form. The fences, divided in five sections, gave a claustrophobic feeling. Every ten metres we had to stop and wait in the soaring heat for a long time. Only hundred people at a time were allowed to move from one halt point to the next. Two young UN-soldiers were shouting that we should not push and shove ‘otherwise the kids get crushed.’ That evening I heard a Turkish Cypriot on the news saying: ‘The Greek Cypriots should not accept this. They should be free to walk through the buffer zone. This is humiliating.’ But the atmosphere was not depressing or sad, although there was huge tension in the air. Mobile phones were ringing nonstop: ‘Eimai sti grammi (I am on the Line)’ I heard all the time. People were asking each other the same questions over and over again: ‘From what village are you?’ and ‘Is it a Cypriot?’ That last question referred to the present inhabitant of their house. Most Greek Cypriot refugees had no idea whether the occupant of their house across the divide was a Turkish Cypriot, a Turk from the mainland or a foreigner. A grandmother said to the small child

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clutching her legs: ‘We are going to our house’. The boy asked: ‘Will we stay there to sleep?’ The woman replied: ‘No, we cannot sleep in our house. There are Turks living in our house’. The Larnatsjiotes have several legends about the Lacharopetra, a rock at the outskirts of their village. Some were connected to history or mythology and others to their own memories. One such legend tells that every Easter the Lacharopetra opens and a treasure can be found. Of course the rock never opened in reality, and before 2003 that is how many Cypriots felt about the Green Line: it will never open. Some refugees felt that it was safer, in all those years that they could not cross, to banish the dream of visiting their villages ever again. Now, almost twenty-nine years after the Green Line became an impenetrable border, an unexpected move of the northern regime allowed people to go to places which had been inaccessible for so long. Just as every refugee from both sides recalls the flight from their village in 1974, every Cypriot remembers the first time they crossed the border in unusual detail.7 Non-refugees also perceived the opening of the Ledra Palace checkpoint as a historic moment. Adriana recounted it as follows, her eyes brimming with tears: I had been following the events in the north rigorously. The morning of 23 April 2003 I was doing the dishes. There was an interruption of the radio programme for a news flash and a presenter announced that the checkpoint was opened and some people were already over there (potji). I stood frozen in my kitchen, I could not move. I called my husband, took our passports from the drawer and we drove to Ledra Palace. An hour later we were walking through north Nicosia. I could not believe it. It was such a good feeling. Cypriot society was soon filled with excited and opposing voices, some urging people to cross and others urging them not to do so. My impression during those first days was that Greek Cypriots younger than thirty were more reluctant to cross. Marcos, a student at the time, told me: ‘All you have is your dignity. Don’t tell me you will go to your village as a tourist, showing your passport. You should not recognize the “TRNC”. (Hesitating) But on the other hand, as an anthropologist,

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you should go. These are important changes for Cyprus.’ One of my cousins in her early twenties was equally adamant about not crossing: Patrida (fatherland) is one of my favourite words. It beams such warmth, a feeling of sweetness. I would use the word ‘home’ to translate it. You do not want to become a tourist in your own home. Do you? How can we go back for a visit? (Angry now) For God’s sake, my godfather was not hurt for a visit! My uncle is not missing for just a visit. But if you choose to go, smell the wild flowers in our yard for me. I am sure they will be wonderful this time of the year. There were also many older Greek Cypriots who thought that this was not a good way to return to their village. They were angry that they had to show identification to the northern regime and that their visit would be subject to certain restrictions. They vehemently refused to cross. The Green Line that had sliced the island in two for such a long time became penetrable. The international press, which was present en mass in the first few days, was eager to compare the opening of the checkpoint to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Although there might be some similarities, on the whole the comparison does not stand. What happened in Cyprus was just an easing of the border restrictions; the country remained divided. In addition, the easing of the restrictions did not apply to everyone. Turkish settlers, for instance, were not given permission to cross to the south. Visits to the other side were limited to one day and crossers had to be back before midnight. But more importantly, the crossers had to present a passport at the checkpoint and complete a form, which was then stamped.8 During the first year after the opening of the checkpoint, my fieldwork mainly concentrated on how Greek Cypriots dealt with crossing the border into what is variously known as sta katechomena (the occupied areas), potji (over there), sta Tourtzika (in the Turkish [areas]), stin alli plevra (the other side) or, less frequently, sta voria (the north) and sto psevdokratos (the pseudo-state). The partition line on Cyprus was transformed from an impenetrable boundary into a border which is still physically present, but can be crossed, negotiated and manipulated. In

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the years to come Cyprus would be, once again, in a state of transition because of the increasing movements across the border. Standing in the thick of the crowd I could detect various emotions among our small group of eight. On my first visit to the north, I accompanied a party of Larnatsjiotes, amongst them three of my father’s siblings: Anastasia, Odysseas and their daughter Eleftheria, Danae, Stratos and his son Alexis, and Despina. All of them had lived in Larnakas until 1974, with the exception of Alexis who was not born yet, and Despina. Anastasia was holding on to her passport for dear life, while Odysseas, sweat trickling down his face, carefully held a small plastic bag. It contained some flaounes (Easter-pastries). Anastasia sighed and asked me, pointing to the bag: ‘Do I really have to take flaounes to the papous (old man, referring to the present occupier of her house)? To see my own house?’ She had learned from relatives who had visited Larnakas the day before that an old Turkish Cypriot man now lived in her paternal house. Others had taken extra packets of cigarettes to give to the locals. Stratos was fiddling with the strap of his camera bag and Alexis, who was then ten, looked confused, as if he could not quite make out why he was caught between the fences.

Last stop before the customs office

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Danae and her childhood friend Despina were talking in loud voices, trembling with excitement, about which places they wanted to visit. ‘Do you remember the big teratsia (carob tree) in my yard? You did not dare to climb it when you visited us,’ Danae teasingly said to Despina. I was scribbling some notes in my small book, already tired of standing for such a long time. After a long three-hour wait our group was ushered to the last halt and after ten minutes the white rope, which hung loosely between the two fences, was once again removed and a stream of about hundred people rushed to the small office. Stratos collected a pile of blank papers and we wrote our details down. He pushed his way through the crowd and had our forms stamped. When we passed the last Turkish Cypriot policeman a sense of bewilderment fell over our group. We wanted to get to the village as quickly as possible, but needed to arrange some kind of transportation for the eight of us. There were plenty of taxis but the prices suggested by the drivers were exorbitant and we would need at least two cars. We ventured a bit further down past the throng to a narrow street. An old man with crooked teeth and a wrinkled face approached us. He spoke only Turkish which none of us understood, and it took a while to understand, as he pointed insistently to a battered-light blue van, that he was willing to be our driver for the day. We climbed onto the worn seats. Stratos, who sat next to the driver, showed him the small paper with the word ‘Kozan’ on it that had been given to him by a Larnatsjiotis who had visited Larnakas earlier that week.

A Transformed Landscape These dream-nightmares seemed to her all the more mysterious in that she was afflicted simultaneously with an uncontrollable nostalgia and another, completely opposite, experience: landscapes from her country kept appearing to her by day. No this was not daydreaming, lengthy and conscious willed; it was something else entirely: visions of landscapes would blink on in her head unexpectedly, abruptly, swiftly, and go out instantly.9 Like Irena, the main character in Kundera’s novel Ignorance, the Larnatsjiotes have expressed longing for the landscapes of their

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village ever since their displacement. When we were driving towards Larnakas, everyone commented that the landscape had changed beyond recognition. Two aspects were most striking and disturbing for these Larnatsjiotes: the abundance of new buildings and roads and the visible presence of the Turkish army. Once we left the centre of north Nicosia it was clear that our Turkish driver did not know exactly where the village was. Stratos, with the help of the others, tried to explain which direction we should be heading, but he barely recognized the environs. We drove on in a general state of confusion. Odysseas pointed out the transformation of the landscape: spacious squares, newly built roundabouts with massive statues, blocks of flats and plenty of ongoing construction works.10 Anastasia muttered how much everything had altered and that, in the early 1970s, the outskirts of north Nicosia were still untouched by development, with plenty of fields and trees everywhere. Although there were still many wheat fields on either side of the main road towards Morfou (Güzelyurt), I saw many large colourful nightclubs and escort bars. Despina, who is always well prepared, handed a small leaflet to Stratos. It was one of the flyers available at the checkpoint that listed the 202 villages in the three districts11 with their Turkish and Greek names.12 By translating the Turkish names on the signs into their original Greek names, the driver found the correct turning towards the cluster of villages, including Larnakas, along the Pendadaktylos range facing Nicosia.13 Several passing army trucks and the signs indicating the proximity of an army base elicited negative comments from the Larnatsjiotes, but as we drove through the village of Kondemenos (Kılıçaslan) a stunned silence fell on our group. A large army camp with soldiers on guard straddled both sides of the main street. It was clear, even to those who had never been to the north, that all the buildings inside the camps were Greek Cypriot houses which had been painted over and decorated with army motifs: busts of Atatürk, code names and countless Turkish flags. The road was full of speed bumps to slow down the traffic; our driver obeyed. It took a long time until ‘normal’ houses appeared again and it was only then that Anastasia said she saw the house of her first cousin, built in 1973, in one of the army camps. The sight of all those properties used by the Turkish army, which could not be

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visited by their Greek Cypriot owners, agitated the Larnatsjiotes as we were nearing their village. Danae wondered aloud if the army or the house-building boom we had observed on our way would have affected Larnakas. The Larnatsjiotes had to come to terms with the irreversible changes in the landscape.14 Rationally these refugees must have known that they would not find their village and the surrounding landscape in exactly the same state as they had left it three decades earlier, but emotionally they had been returning to their old village via daydreams and nostalgic stories about familiar places. Greek Cypriot refugees generally hold a fixed and unproblematic view of their former villages. That mental picture remained unchanged for the past three decades, but of course life has continued since and has inevitably altered the localities they fled during or soon after the summer of 1974. The Larnatsjiotes returned to their village with a certain image of the locality in mind. The main thing they had to face was that their essentialist perception of this locality, constructed through nostalgia, has little basis in real life.

Returning ‘Home’ The last stretch to the village led us over a long and bumpy road with barren fields on both sides. It was as if we were driving in the middle of nowhere. I saw no signs of life and I wondered if the Larnatsjiotes exaggerated the beauty of their village. Surely nobody wanted to live in such desolate landscape? On my right side I saw an army base in the distance and next to it, as I would later learn, a chicken farm. ‘To trouli, to trouli’ exclaimed Stratos and turned to his sister Danae. I saw a small dome-shaped hill covered with stones on top. Stratos turned to the driver and asked him to slow down: ‘Yavaş, yavaş’ he urged, with the only words he knew in Turkish. Anastasia asked me if I knew the story about the trouli. I had heard it many times over, but she told me again: The story about the trouli is simple. There was a woman who was grinding her wheat in a mill. While she was grinding, the wheat was piling up and it became a mountain. Her mill was on top of

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the heap. One day o Christos (Jesus), disguised as an old zitianos (beggar), passed from there and he asked for a bit of wheat, but the woman ignored him. The beggar said that the ground wheat would become earth (na ginei xoma). The woman turned and saw that the wheat had turned into soil and her mill into stone (egina petra). That is how the trouli was created (kai etsi dimiourgithike to trouli). People often re-create a place through the narration of stories. As Bird wrote: ‘the tale confirms that this piece of space actually means something, and it may also tell us who belongs in that space and who does not’.15 I knew that the trouli (troulos means dome) was a natural landmark of the entrance to Larnakas. We turned round the trouli and drove uphill on a winding dirt road. Our driver shifted to low gear but the mini-bus still struggled to climb the steep road. Odysseas said to me, his crooked finger following the shape of the road’s inclination on the window: ‘Tell your father that nothing has changed. When we used to come from Nicosia we all had to get off the village bus at

View of the village

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this point because it could not manage the steep incline with passengers on board. Those were the good days.’ I would hear similar comments every time I joined Larnatsjiotes to their village. They would point out what has remained ‘the same’ and what was altered beyond recognition. Now that we had entered the village the Larnatsjiotes wanted to see their own houses as soon as possible. Just the evening before Georgia had told me in infinite detail how her first visit to her former village had been. She had returned with six of her eight siblings to Agios Georgios, a village near the coastal town of Kyrenia. The desperation to see their houses, which I would hear in every story of the first crossings, seeped through her account. Refugees were desperate to see their former house, and would do anything to catch a glimpse of it. Georgia was shelling beans with more strength than necessary, shaking her head vigorously: By 1974 many of my brothers already had their own house in the village. We were very anxious to see all their houses again. Apparently the house of my brother Yiannakis had been sold to a French woman. There was a huge wall around the house. We could not see a thing. Yiannakis got so angry. I had never seen him like this. He took the car and bought a ladder at a supermarket nearby in order to peek at his house over the edge of the wall. He bought a ladder to see his own house (agorase skala gia na dei to diko tou spiti)! Anastasia and Odysseas were hanging out of the small windows of our mini-bus. Their house, I knew, was right at the start of the village. We passed the village school, which Danae pointed out to me, but we did not stop. It was clear that we had to locate Anastasia’s house first. Odysseas pointed out where he wanted the driver to park and we all got out of the bus for the first time since we set off from the checkpoint. I will never forget the eerie moment Anastasia opened the rusted gate, hanging loosely on its hinges, which led to her house. She hesitated a moment and then pushed the gate wide open. From the first

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glance it was clear that the house was not in a very good condition. The original blue paint on the shutters and the doors was now faded and peeling off. There were cracks in the walls and the house was very dusty. An old woman had already opened the door, as if she was expecting us. Stratos went over to talk to her. I heard fragments of their conversation, in the Greek Cypriot dialect, and then Stratos made a sign to come through. I saw that Anastasia, all the colour gone from her face, had no energy to talk to the Turkish Cypriot woman who lived in her house. The woman, seemingly oblivious to the emotional state of our group, rattled on about the house; it was too big for her and because she was on her own she could not take care of it very well. In the photographs I took that day, I see Anastasia’s pain, her consternation and her disappointment. To my surprise, she did not stay for a long time inside. She passed quickly through the rooms and then went straight through the back door into the garden. Odysseas was already at the far end of the garden, literally running from one tree to the other, commenting constantly. Although the garden itself was quite unkempt, the trees were heavy with fruit. Anastasia called her daughter Aleksandra, Alexis and me to come and help her pick mespila (medlars). She was picking handfuls of fruit, asking us all to put some in our pockets. ‘Who has a plastic bag? Who can carry some more fruit? Here Lisa, eat some mespila. Eat them, they are from my garden.’ Anastasia explained to me, while eating some mespila, that the toils, troubles and pleasures of her life in Larnakas came back to her (erkountai ola mbiso). I finally understood what the French text I had struggled with in secondary school was all about. While eating the medlars from her own garden Anastasia remembered her previous life, just as Proust, in his account of the ‘petite madeleine’, described how this plump little cake made him shudder and remember in infinite detail his Sunday morning encounters with his aunt Léonie at her Combray house.16 The Turkish Cypriot woman stood at her backdoor watching us in silence and then disappeared inside. We left soon after. It was as if a huge burden had fallen off the shoulders of our group. The atmosphere was lighter now, and everybody was commenting on the state of the houses while we were driving towards the

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village centre. Our next stop was the church where many Larnatsjiotes were baptized and later married. The church is dedicated to Agios Dimitrianos, the patron saint of the village, and was built in the early 1930s. It is a barrel-vaulted building with multi-sided apse and a belfry built in yellow stone. Its wooden doors and windows were sealed shut. The cross on top of the bell tower had been removed, as were most crosses on Greek Orthodox churches in the north of Cyprus. ‘At least our church is not turned into a mosque as in other villages’ somebody remarked.17 We were disappointed that the building was closed but turned our attention rather quickly to the church’s surroundings. Next to the messy churchyard was a little platform with three stone steps. A bust of Atatürk sat on a stone column. This elicited many negative comments. Anastasia explained that on that very spot there used to be a statue of Stelios Mavromatis, the village hero, who was hanged in the late 1950s by the British because of his involvement in the EOKA movement.18 Stelios’ younger sister, now in her early seventies, had become one of my key informants and I was sure she would ask me about her brother’s memorial statue in the village. The large building next to the church used to be the village’s syllogos (club house) where weddings and other feast were held. The Kozanlılar use the building for the same purposes, as a düğün salonu (reception hall), but it also functions as a coffee shop on a daily basis. I did not know then that I would, together with my Kozanlılar informants, celebrate the circumcision (sünnet) of a local boy at the düğün salonu in the summer of 2005. A short walk from the village centre, in a downhill street off the main road, we found the village’s fountains (vrises), which still had running water. In the fieldwork I conducted before the border openings many Larnatsjiotes frequently mentioned the vrises. In one of my very first interviews Stavros mentioned ‘the water’ (to nero) when I asked what he liked so much about his former village: ‘There was cold running water (eiche nero krio, treksimio), it was coming straight from the sources in the mountain’. Others spoke about ‘our water’ as one of the things they missed most. My informants told me several times how they had to get water from the nearest fountain and bring it to their homes. Anastasia told me that they used the plastic jerry cans,

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inherited from the English during the colonial period, to bring water to their houses. Antonis, for instance, remembers vividly the collection of water. We had a lot of water in several places [in the village]. In our house, we did not have water. When the water ran out, we had to bring the water with jerry cans from the vrises. I remember I was seven years old and I had to bring the water to wash myself or for my family and of course for my mother to cook. He shook with laughter when I asked him naively whether they had to collect water every day. ‘You need water every day! In other more advanced villages, they had water distributed to the houses, but when I was a child we did not have that.’ The visit to the vrises was a good moment, with a lot of happy exclamations. Everybody quenched their thirst and refreshed themselves several times. ‘You should drink this water! It is the best water! Drink some more!’ Anastasia even emptied her plastic bottle of water, which is a rare thing for her to do as she

The village’s fountain

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never wastes anything, simply to refill it with water from the fountains. ‘I would give all my money to have this water in Nicosia! Panagia mou (Mother of God)!’ Both the eating of the medlars in Anastasia’s garden and the drinking of the village’s water were acts of experiencing the locality in a tangible way. Our group of Larnatsjiotes noticed a lot of changes in the village, since their forced departure in the summer of 1974. Trees had been cut, plots of land were uncultivated and walls, fences and houses were now painted in different colours. They remarked on the discarded rubbish on the streets or the abandoned car rusting in a bed of dried nettles. On one facade part of a slogan painted in the typical blue of the independence struggle of the mid-1950s was still readable. ‘Look, enosis (union [with Greece)] is still written on the wall next to that door. Would you not have removed that? As a Turkish-Cypriot?’ Danae asked. Throughout the day I heard several remarks about the Turkish Cypriots we met. The Larnatsjiotes expressed a lot of anger, but never towards a particular person. They were venting their frustration through curses such as ‘malakes’ (wankers), ‘poustotourtsji’ (poof Turks) and most frequently ‘den mboro na thoro to moutra tous’ (I cannot bear to see their faces). Obviously these were not terms of endearment. Even before we went to Larnakas, we already knew some of the local Turkish Cypriots from the stories of refugees who had already crossed. The locals were mostly referred to by a nickname, indicating their age or their occupation. I had heard stories about ‘o geros’ (the old man), ‘o kounoupieris’ (the mosquito man), ‘o kasabis’ (butcher) and ‘o lafazanis’ (the one who tells stories and lies). Somebody else told me that the Turkish Cypriot living in her house is ‘polite and you know, clean’ (evgenikos, etsi katharos). One Larnatsjiotis had been particularly upset when a Turkish Cypriot told him he works ‘with the animals, with the fields and with your property (me ta zoa, me ta chorafia, me tin perousia sas)’. The members of our party were very polite towards the locals; they stopped to talk to those who initiated a conversation and waved or shouted a greeting to the Kozanlılar outside their houses. But sometimes, as soon as they were out of earshot, they said something about the looks of the person or the state of his house and yard. Aleksandra, in an interview one week after our visit, rattled on about her encounter

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with Larnakas and its present inhabitants. What she said summarizes nicely the comments I heard that day: Dirty Turks. The village was not clean. Tourkika. (Turkish) They turned the village into a Turkish village. They built extra fences. In yellow and grey! They painted the walls green. It is their culture. Do you understand? (Katalaves?) Greek Cypriots would be more concerned to keep the village clean. There would be more fields, more trees. I don’t like those people. I don’t trust them. (hesitated) I don’t know if I like them. I am afraid of them. They were given the nicest areas in Cyprus. Back in the mini bus again, we were now climbing up the small mountainous roads to my grandparents’ house in the higher reaches of the village. Stratos turned to me and said it was important for me to go there: ‘Prepi na kseris pothen erkesai gia na kseris pou pienis (You have to know where you come from in order to know where you are going)’. When my relatives talk about ‘the house’ (to spiti) or ‘up there’ (tzei pano) they hint at the house of my grandparents, their parents, even though some of them, like Anastasia, already had their own houses in the centre of the village. The house can only be reached by a small path. As we were walking down the little gravel track we saw an old-fashioned red motorbike leaning forlornly against a wall. Odysseas said it was his. Someone else replied: ‘[After] thirty years, you must be joking (trianta chronia, apokliete)’. Stratos confirmed it did look a lot like Odysseas’ old motorbike. These kinds of remarks were frequent. The Larnatsjiotes would see and recognize their tables, their beds, they would identify a low wall they built, the pigeonholes, the water reservoir, an engraving in a tree. More importantly, they would point at the houses we were passing and name the Larnatsjiotes they belonged to. Stratos was taking pictures throughout the day, more than a hundred in total, of his siblings’ houses, trees, fields and other meaningful places. Danae had already crossed some days before and told us that the old Turkish Cypriot living in her parental house was ‘a good person (kalon plasma).’ I entered my grandparents’ property. Serkan, variously referred

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to by my relatives as ‘o geros’ (the old man), ‘o Tourkos’ (the Turk) and ‘o papous’ (grandfather), was sitting in the concrete courtyard with two small boys. My first feeling was embarrassment. Although these three people were sitting outside I felt uncomfortable, like an uninvited guest entering the intimacy of someone’s home. There was a line of freshly washed underwear hanging to dry and some kids, his grandsons, were eating lunch from plates carefully balanced on their laps. Fortunately the older Larnatjsiotes started talking to Serkan, who recognized Danae from her previous visit. This gave me a chance to take in the details of the house, which we call ‘papa’s house’ in my nuclear family because it was his ancestral home. The building itself was more beautiful than I had ever dared to imagine. My grandfather had built it himself in 1938 with local mountain stones. The house has an outside stone staircase leading to the second floor with its three bedrooms. The walls were still whitewashed, although they were in need of repair. The wooden doors and shutters were in the original blue. One door in particular had an extraordinary motif carved in the wood, which I touched again and again. That is where I asked Stratos to take my picture. I knew my parents and sibling back in Belgium would study the photos I brought back in detail. I took a closer look at the only room whose door was wide open, the kitchen. There was a picture of Denktaş on the wall next to an outdated calendar and two fading pictures of, I assumed, the old man’s relatives. There was a small table in the corner of the room with a colourful plastic tablecloth. Some clothes hung on a white plastic chair. The old man did not offer to show the other rooms and nobody asked. On our way back to Nicosia, however, we wondered whether there would still be some of yiayia’s belongings kept in one of the bedrooms. When I visited the house with my father, in the summer of 2003, I had the opportunity to see the whole house inside. The bedrooms were completely empty except for a bird’s nest tucked away between the wooden beams and reed mats of the traditional ceiling. The toilet was still outdoors, opposite the stairs that lead to the second floor. It was a shabby shed with a rusty, corrugated iron roof. Danae told me that my father built it with his father. Everybody was talking to me: Danae wanted to show me specific trees and Despina urged me to talk to the old man. I could not react.

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I was caught up in the momentum of being there and enjoying the stunning view. I could not quite believe I was there and felt very emotional. This was the very house I had only been able to imagine for such a long time. ‘Mana mou, manoulla mou (my mother, my dear mother),’ I heard Anastasia saying under her breath as she stood next to me and looked out over the entire village. A long time passed before she turned and then she could not get away from the house quickly enough. I was also thinking of yiayia, my grandmother, Olymbia. At the time of that visit I was living in her synoikismos flat and I presumed that she must often have felt miserable, coming from this village and this house with its extraordinary view to be living on a refugee estate with its matchbox houses. When I took in the grandeur of this beautiful house, albeit now in a semi-derelict state, and the breathtaking panoramic view from garden, I understood better the frustration yiayia must have felt living in the small flat with paper-thin walls and little privacy. Danae, who is known to keep her composure at all times, told me that her stomach was in knots and she felt like crying: ‘It is beautiful and so sad at the same time’. We left the village behind and started driving through the mountains towards Vasilia (Karşıyaka). Our next stop was the cemetery, where my grandfather was buried, located just outside the village. Danae had warned us that the cemetery was a mess. Everything was overgrown and the graves were not visible because they were all covered by a dense layer of weeds. She had not been able to locate her father’s cross on her first visit. When we got out of the bus we saw two Turkish Cypriots working in the graveyard. They were collecting the crosses and putting them against the low walls of the cemetery. Danae raised her voice: ‘This is so strange. In three days’ time! They [the Turkish Cypriots] must receive money to do all this. They left the cemetery abandoned for twenty-eight years and now suddenly they are cleaning everything. The cemetery was a mess when I first came.’ Earlier she had also remarked that the vrises had been cleaned and that there was a strip of new asphalt in front of the church. Stratos had waved her comments away and told her it was her imagination. But seeing the two men working their way through the weeds there must have been some truth in Danae’s observations. We found the crosses

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of most of our relatives. From the cemetery you can see in the distance the monastery of Panagia ton Katharon, the second religious site of the village. When we arrived at the dirt track leading towards the monastery it became apparent that our mini-bus would not be able to manoeuvre over the stones and big holes in the rough gravel road. We climbed out of the bus to take some last pictures. I contemplated the huge, desolated landscape in front of me and the imposing mountains behind me. I felt a little embarrassed about all the times I had teased my father when he compared other beautiful scenery with that of his village. I understood him better now as I heard his voice echoing in my mind. ‘It is beautiful. Just like my village. San to Larnakas den eshei allo (Nothing compares to Larnakas)’.

Turbulent Months I accompanied many refugees, mostly Larnatsjiotes, on their first return visits and all of these journeys followed more or less the same pattern I have described above. Anthropologist Peter Loizos describes two different ways of looking at Cyprus today. He calls the first the ‘Present-Present, like a verb conjugation and mood’ in which everything is perceived as normal: Greek and Turkish names, streets, shops, monuments, etc. The second way of looking is the ‘Past-Present’ where one sees a place as it was three decades ago. ‘ “Now” looks “wrong”, not like it is remembered, it has been written over’.19 That is exactly how most refugees I accompanied on their first visit felt and this sentiment lingered for a while and was reinforced by the many conversations about their first experiences across the border. For some of the Greek Cypriot refugees, these negative feelings did not go away even after they crossed a second and third time. One way of dealing with this was to undertake frequent return visits in an attempt to recreate their lost communities. I coin these frequent return visits ‘pilgrimages’. Those refugees who did not cross again and refuse to do so until today went to their villages and houses to say goodbye. Some Larnatsjiotes told me they had to see their village ‘one more time’ before they died. Many refugees displayed strong emotions during the first encounter with their village and its present inhabitants; they were crying,

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trembling or cursing, depending in what state they found their houses and properties. I witnessed one woman collapsing as we drew closer to her house. Refugees reacted in different ways to the generally cordial hospitality from the present occupiers of their houses. People who were usually quiet chatted non-stop to hide their unease. Others who were usually talkative spoke little when offered a coffee or a tour of their own house. In June 2003 I accompanied Elenou and her family on their first visit to their village. Elenou is a short, wrinkled, feisty woman who talks, advises and commands incessantly. When we approached her house she started leaning heavily on her granddaughter. She stopped walking when she caught the first glimpse of her garden, which was full of empty beer bottles displayed in circular patterns – probably displayed this way by the neighbourhood children during their games. Elenou gasped for breath and muttered ‘Panagia mou (my Mother of God)’ continuously. Her house, still new in 1974, was in an appalling state; the paint was flaking off the walls and the shutters were only half hanging on their hinges. The current occupiers saw us approaching and welcomed us. Elenou was unsteady on her feet and all the colour had drained from her face. Somebody brought her a chair and some water. Later when we left and walked towards the village’s church, Elenou’s legs failed and she collapsed in the middle of the road. For many non-refugees too, especially the older ones, it was an emotional experience. They could now go back to the places about which they held precious memories, localities they used to visit before 1974. In those turbulent months after the easing of the border restrictions, my informants’ body language would tell more than the few words they uttered. Take for example Odysseas, who has the habit of having his dinner just after the TV news. Those days in April and May 2003 the news was entirely devoted to the historic border crossings showing many reports (refugees visiting their village or interviews with Greek Cypriots looking for their Turkish Cypriot friends and the other way around). Odysseas simply could not eat at all that first week after seeing Larnakas and the numerous TV-reports. He suffered from a bad stomach-ache. His daughter was very worried. I heard her tell her father ‘You have to cry. Just cry, so that the stomach-aches go

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away’. Some days later Odysseas sat in front of his television again. A Turkish Cypriot, who had crossed to the south of Nicosia, was being interviewed. He was holding a mirror with a wooden frame and told the reporter: ‘I come from the village Larnakas tis Lapithou. We promised years ago the Greek Cypriot owners of the house we now live in to preserve their personal belongings until they returned. I am bringing their mirror now.’ Odysseas knew that his parents, who stayed behind in that village after the war, had given some items (a similar mirror and a sewing machine) to the Turkish Cypriots arriving in their village just after the war. He called the television channel but they could not give him more information. When he called the police they advised him to go to the checkpoint himself. He left immediately and found a policeman who told him about the mirror. When Odysseas returned he sat down on the sofa with relief on his face, although his was body trembling. I sat next to him and he kept patting my leg while repeating the same sentence. ‘Can you believe it? I cried when I was talking to the policeman. I cried.’ I was told many touching stories, not only by old people, but also by young Greek Cypriot refugees, who never actually lived in their parents’ village. My cousin Efthymia sent me a text message after she visited Larnakas for the first time. ‘Everything is just as it was’. Although she had never been in the village before, she ‘remembered’ it. Anna, another Larnatsjiotis’ daughter, told me she had to struggle for breath during her first visit to her father’s village. ‘It was like being in a forest and not being able to breathe. It was the worst feeling I ever had in my life. It is like being in a place with all this fresh air, all this oxygen and not being able to breathe.’

Meetings between Greek and Turkish Cypriots A lachieopolis (lottery ticket seller) was walking up and down the line of cars waiting to cross at the Aghios Dhometios (Metehan) checkpoint.20 He bent over to the drivers, flipping the lottery tickets through his fingers. ‘Your little casinos’ (ta kasinakia sas). Only two pounds and you can win up to 75,000.’ In the south of Cyprus casinos are illegal, but northern Cyprus is packed with them, hence the lachieopolis’ reference to the gambling places.21 By the summer of 2003, the lottery

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ticket sellers had found their way to the checkpoints, as had taxi drivers and sandwich sellers. Their presence, in a certain way, normalized the checkpoints, as if they had always been there and were just another hotspot in the capital. The crossings had become part of everyday Cypriot life very quickly and were not discussed as frequently and intensively as in those first weeks. However, people would still make negative comments at the checkpoints, wondering aloud why there was still a need for a visa form or a car search. Sometimes a specific event revived the noisy discussions I had encountered in the early days of the border openings. A big issue in the summer of 2004 was whether the Olympic torch would cross the border and pass through the north during its journey through Cyprus. On Thursday 6 July 2004, a government spokesman announced that ‘the government had given its consent for the Olympic flame to pass through the occupied areas on condition that there would not be an issue of the participating athletes displaying passports and there would not be any exploitation of the route aimed at upgrading the occupying regime’.22 In the end the Olympic torch, a symbol of goodwill and peace, did not cross – an ironic result since the motto of the torch run was ‘Our flame unites the world’. ‘You see, the Turkish authorities even want the torch to have a passport’ a Larnatsjiotes remarked. Hasan, a Turkish Cypriot, was really upset by this. His brother is an athlete and the best Cypriot in his discipline so he would have carried the torch in the north. He was also upset that Titiana Loizidou (a Greek Cypriot refugee who was the first to take Turkey to the European Court of Human Rights) carried the torch in the south. He said that Turkish Cypriots were offended by this political statement, because ‘the Olympics are about sports and not about politics’. When, in the winter of 2006, the bird flu strain had been detected in some birds in the north of Cyprus control at the checkpoints was more severe. This elicited a range of jokes and annoyed comments because, as one informant put it, ‘birds can fly and do not have to present identification at the checkpoints’. The European Commission ordered an immediate freeze of transportation of live poultry and animal products across the border. During the winter and spring of 2006, cars were often thoroughly searched at the checkpoints, especially during the

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bird flu emergency, but also later when police officers started looking for cigarettes or papers relating to property in the north. People, small businesses and government offices on both sides were getting used to receiving Cypriots from the other side. At cafes and restaurants in the north prices were listed in Cypriot pounds and the currency was accepted. In touristic places signs, menus and information were readily provided in Greek (both written and orally). In the south, government offices had to deal with a large number of Turkish Cypriots applying for identity cards and passports of the Republic of Cyprus. Once they had these, Turkish Cypriots then applied for benefits (such as free medical care) or a driving licence issued by the Republic. Murat, a Turkish Cypriot in his late twenties, crossed often to the south: There is not one Turkish Cypriot who did not cross the border yet. Everybody crossed at least once to get an ID card. I took my driving test again so I could have a Greek Cypriot driving licence, which makes it easier to drive abroad. Papers from the ‘TRNC’ are not recognized anywhere except in Turkey. At least now I can travel from Larnaca airport. At the same time many private businesses in the south began preparing for Turkish Cypriot clients. One of the biggest departments stores in the south, Debenhams, quickly put up Turkish signs in all their stores. At one of my Turkish language courses in north Nicosia, I met a Greek Cypriot woman who worked as a nurse in one of the many private clinics in south Nicosia. Two years after the border opening (summer 2005), she claimed that there was a need for some of the staff to speak Turkish because the clinic received so many Turkish Cypriots.23 Many Turkish Cypriots purchased a Greek Cypriot mobile phone number so they could call people in the south more easily and be contacted by Greek Cypriots. Many Turkish Cypriots labourers who began crossing into the south on a daily basis to work, carried a cell phone with a ‘Turkish Cypriot’ number and a second mobile phone with a ‘Greek Cypriot’ one.24 There were Turkish Cypriots taking up Greek language courses and vice versa. Many people opted to pay for

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long term car insurance over short term in order to make crossing the border quicker and easier. In the large supermarkets in south Nicosia one now heard Turkish being spoken in the aisles for the first time as Turkish Cypriots ventured across to do their weekly shopping. As a result of the crossings, Greek and Turkish Cypriots established formal and informal contacts, but were any solid friendships formed between members of the two communities? My impression is that certain groups, namely left-wing Cypriots, academics and other professionals (doctors or small business owners, for example), students and working class Cypriots, were quicker to establish good contacts across the divide. It is, of course, difficult to judge whether two people are merely acquaintances because they share a common interest or whether they are establishing a lasting friendship. I have known a number of Cypriots from the abovementioned groups and their friendships have died out over the years or continued only on a superficial or solely professional level. There are, however, exceptions. Agathi, a refugee from Morfou who lives in a refugee estate in Agios Pavlos, was a frequent border crosser during the first years after the checkpoint openings. She introduced me to my field family and got to know many Turkish Cypriots in a relatively short period. Agathi met with her new Turkish Cypriots friends for coffee at each other’s houses or to go shopping together. Her husband, Petros, also a refugee from Morfou, befriended a Turkish Cypriot from north Nicosia. Both men had time on their hands because they were retired and their children already had families of their own. They met several times every week. Petros and Ayhan shared a passion for fishing and regularly set off early in the morning, with their fishing gear and home-made sandwiches, to fish at Akanthou (Tatlısu) or Agios Amvrosios (Esentepe). During the long drives to the coast, which took about two hours, they got to know each other very well. Their extended families were introduced and Ayhan became a close family friend. When he was diagnosed with cancer, Petros met him on a daily basis and arranged for Ayhan to be treated in the south, at the Polikliniki Lefkosias, where Petros knew a doctor personally. When Ayhan died, Petros was grief stricken and attended the funeral with his entire extended family. Although it was clear to me that both Agathi and Petros made some close Turkish Cypriots

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friends, they were concerned about the future. Agathi expressed her concern one morning over coffee: We can be good friends, but as long as we do not really mix and live together there will always be a certain distance. It will not be the same as say, two Greek Cypriots or two Turkish Cypriots. I mean, say a Greek and Turkish Cypriot get married. What will they call their children? Maria and Ayşe? Cypriots would often invite people from the other community to their relatives’ weddings. When I attended the wedding of a Kozanlılar there were some Greek Cypriot invitees, amongst them were the Greek Cypriot boss of the groom and Greek Cypriot acquaintances of the couple’s parents. I met many Turkish Cypriot guests at Greek Cypriot weddings as well. Invitations to weddings are not evidence of close friendship as weddings in Cyprus have a large number of guests.25 Some people asked a Turkish or Greek Cypriot to be their best man at their wedding. Michalis, a left-wing architect, asked Taner, a Turkish Cypriot doctor he met via a common friend, to be the witness at his civil marriage in February 2005. A Greek Cypriot friend, an academic, was the best man at the wedding of his Turkish Cypriot colleague in 2008. I felt, though, that these gestures were more like political statements because, in both cases, the grooms did not have frequent contact with their best man as usually is the case between best men in Cyprus. Ahmet, the son of a Turkish Cypriot refugee from Polis, lives in north Nicosia. He was very enthusiastic when the borders opened and crossed frequently to the south. Through his involvement in bicommunal movements he made some contacts with Greek Cypriots, and via networking met Greek Cypriots outside the political arena. He enrolled in a Greek course in the Engomi Gymnasium in south Nicosia because he wanted to communicate with Greek Cypriots who do not speak English. The first nine months after the borders opened Ahmet was very optimistic and often expressed his joy at having close Greek Cypriot friends. As time went by, however, Ahmet’s initial optimism faded. In the summer of 2004, more than a year after the borders opened, he wrote me a long letter:

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From the very first day the border opened Turkish Cypriots rushed to the south to see their houses. They wanted to see the condition of their properties and were curious who lives there now. I have to say that most Turkish Cypriot houses are damaged, deserted or in a very bad condition. It hurt people to see that. In the north Greek Cypriot houses have been renovated and are generally in a good condition. Turkish Cypriots were anxious, but at the same time very happy, to cross the border. You know that Turkish Cypriots would honk their horn and wave enthusiastically when they saw a Greek Cypriot car passing. I was shocked when a Greek Cypriot showed me his finger when I was driving to Limassol. Another day my car [with Turkish Cypriot license plate] got badly scratched. I heard of other Turkish Cypriots that their cars were damaged too, so this cannot have been an isolated incidence. I felt a click when I heard a Greek Cypriot saying: ‘I want peace to go back to my home.’ He was crying: ‘My home, my home, my fields. What will happen to them?’ He did not care for peace between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. He wanted some selfish, ‘unpeaceful’ peace. Greek Cypriots are not as sincere to Turkish Cypriots as they are to other Greek Cypriots. I do not think they love us. In this excerpt Ahmet cites certain widespread clichés about the ‘Other’. Greek Cypriots, according to many Turkish Cypriots, only care about getting their properties back and do not really want to live together with Turkish Cypriots. Greek Cypriots are not sincere in their friendships and do not really like Turkish Cypriots, they feel superior to them. What I observed repeatedly is that Greek and Turkish Cypriots were friendly and positive towards each other and made sure that the other felt welcomed. However, when the visitors left, I heard time and again the same negative, and even racist, comments.

The Annan Plan Exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of

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being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, India’s of the mind.26 Greek Cypriot refugees created, in the course of the past three decades, ‘imaginary homelands’, which explained the emotions (shock, surprise, joy and anger) when they did not find their villages as they had known them. With the United Nations’ reunification proposal, the Annan plan, there was a chance, for some Greek Cypriot refugees, to return to their villages in the future. The final version of the Annan plan provided for the inclusion of Larnakas tis Lapithou in the new Greek Cypriot state. The Annan Plan, written by lawyers, was first introduced in 2002, and went through several revisions before the fifth and final version was approved as the twin referenda document. It provided a framework solution to the ‘Cyprus Problem’ with a constitutional agreement for a new state at its core. The Plan proposed a loose federal umbrella state with two constituent states. The boundary between these two states would have followed the Green Line, but with certain adjustments that included the return of certain territories to the Greek Cypriot state that had large Greek Cypriot populations before 1974. The property issues would have been resolved, through complex compensation and restitution procedures, over a number of years. The main Greek Cypriot objections related to the flow of migrants from Turkey, the continued presence of the Turkish army, the status of Turkish settlers, mobility restrictions and most importantly, the property issues. Turkish Cypriots also had objections, although theirs were not as strong. They included: the possible resettlement of thousands Greek Cypriots in the Turkish constituent state, the resettlement of thousands of Turkish Cypriots when their current localities would be returned to Greek Cypriot control and the recognition of Republic of Cyprus title deeds in north Cyprus.27

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In April 2004, ‘the Annan Plan’ (to sxedio Annan in Greek; Annan planı in Turkish) and the upcoming referendum was the talk of the day.28 The government distributed free versions of the Annan plan; local kiosks were selling it; newspapers in north and south published special referendum editions; debates were organised all over the island and television channels adapted their programmes. In a live television program a professional cartoonist mocked Annan’s team for taking months and months to design ‘the plan’ (to sxedio) while he made more than forty sxedia (plan, also meaning sketch, cartoon) in no time. These cartoons were selling like hotcakes in the kiosks in south Nicosia.29 In the weeks leading up to the referendum many phone messages, emails and leaflets from the two camps (the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters) circulated widely. Two days before the referendum I received an e-mail with a rap song attached. I got it several times from Greek Cypriots in Cyprus and abroad, which means that it had spread rapidly. This song, titled Oxi sto sxedio Annan (No to the Annan plan), brought together all the arguments I heard from no-voters. It used four concepts popular in the Greek Cypriot discourse to urge the interlocutors to vote against the Annan plan. These concepts are: victimisation, interest of resources, other injustices and references to the people who died in the conflict: mas theloune na valoume apo pano to chrima (they [Turkish Cypriots] want us to give money on top), pote tha plirosoun kapii gia tin adikia (when will somebody pay the injustice) and ton iroon mas ta kokkala stenazoun sto mnima (our heroes’ bones are sighing in the grave) Denktaş, the previous northern leader, frequently urged the Turkish Cypriots not to marry ‘the old madam’. In this song it is phrased as follows: ‘It will be a fairy-tale with one detail, we will pay the bride (Tha einai paramithi me mia leptomeria, tha plirosoume tin nifi)’. What is striking is that this song compares unification to a marriage between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. This is also often done in political speeches. Since I started my fieldwork in 2002, Cypriot society had never been so alive, aggressive even, and full of emotions. Thousands of people

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participated in demonstrations, chanted anti- or pro-Annan slogans, carried placards and wore buttons or stickers. People were shouting nai and evet (yes) and others screamed hayır and oxi (no). Stella, daughter of a Greek Cypriot refugee, had a relationship with a Turkish Cypriot and both lived in Belgium at the time: Greek Cypriots think that they are better than Turkish Cypriots. The Annan Plan is a very important point of negotiation. Turkish Cypriots do not want to feel inferior anymore and they want this to be clear in political terms as well. Greek Cypriots do not want to admit that the war [in 1974] was also their mistake. They have this tendency of crying about themselves (kleontai). We have so much in common. I mean, just look at the similar expressions in our languages. For example, when somebody welcomes you into his or her house you say in Turkish ‘hoşbulduk’ and in Greek ‘kalos sas vrikame’ (both expressions mean ‘it is good to be here’). In French you just say ‘merci’ (laughs) but we say what we mean. Or even better (enthusiastic now): ‘gia sta cheria sas’ in Greek and ‘elinize sağlık’ (literally ‘health to your hands’) in Turkish. Language proves we have the same culture. In daily conversations, it was common for the Annan Plan-supporters, north and south, to point out the commonalities between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, suggesting that living together would not be as difficult as others claimed. ‘Einai ora (it is time)’, somebody kept saying in a discussion, implying that the time for solving the long-standing conflict had come. One evening, a week before the referendum, I sat down with Salih, a Turkish Cypriot refugee from Polis, who now lives in north Nicosia. We talked at length about the Plan and suddenly Salih told me to write down what he said. He summarized what Turkish Cypriots want in a list of five points: (1) Peace (2) We do not want to encounter the same bad experiences with Greek Cypriots as in the past (3) We want to live under European values

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(4) We want every kind of benefit that peace will bring us: social and economic (5) We do not want to be isolated anymore His son added, smiling but serious at the same time: (6) We hate Tassos [Papadopoulos, the then Greek Cypriot president] Emotions were running high in the month before referendum day. A taxi driver launched vehemently into an anti-Annan Plan speech as soon as I got into his car. The gist of his speech was that it was impossible for Turkish Cypriots, Greek Cypriots and Turkish settlers to live together. He repeated several times ‘Turks are hundred years behind’. Somebody else asked me ‘How will we make Turks into Europeans?’ Those Greek Cypriots who were against the proposed reunification plan stopped visiting the north when the ‘Yes’ campaign was in full swing. Annan Plan supporters tried to visit the other side as often as possible. One Greek Cypriot, who had attended a pro-Annan Plan rally in north Nicosia, was particularly upset with the female police officer at the Ledra Palace checkpoint who asked him if he had any goods to declare. He said he did not. She then pointed at his green T-shirt, with a big EVET (yes) printed on it, and asked where it came from. One day I joined Anna, a Larnatsjiotissa, on a return-visit to her village. She started a conversation, in the Greek Cypriot dialect, with Mehmet, the Turkish Cypriot man who lives in her former house. Both were preoccupied with their own fears, worries and insecurities. Although Anna supported the Annan Plan, and voted ‘yes’, she was emphasizing her fear of Turkey. She used the often heard phrase, ‘I Tourkia misi iora en pou ti Kipro (Turkey is [only] half an hour from Cyprus)’. Mehmet replied with his worries about the Greek Cypriot army. ‘Why does Papadopoulos [the Greek Cypriot president] strengthen the army? (O Papadopoulos giati fernei strato?)’ Mehmet also complained about the fact that he does not know whether he will be displaced for the third time when Larnakas is turned over to the Greek Cypriot administration in case of a positive referendum outcome. ‘Pou na mas paroun tora? (Where will they take us now?)’

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24 April 2004. My informants cast their vote. I joined some people at the voting booth. The tearful address of the Greek Cypriot president Papadopoulos and the call of the Greek Orthodox Church leaders to vote ‘no’ convinced many older Larnatsjiotes that they were doing the right thing by voting against the plan.30 On her way to the voting booth Theodosia said in desperation: ‘What I will vote? What can I vote? The priests told us to vote ‘no’.’ Relatives and Larnatsjiotes who voted ‘no’ told me immediately. Greek Cypriot informants who supported the plan only reluctantly admitted that they did. A 65-year-old Larnatsjiotissa took me by the arm and whispered ‘I voted yes, but do not tell my family’. Later that day another friend told me she voted ‘yes’; she also asked me to keep it to myself. That day I only heard the following words: ‘antidrases’ (reactions), ‘apotelesmata’ (results), ‘ethnikotita’ (nationality), ‘nikites’ (winners), ‘etimeni’ (losers). Or, ‘pia Lefkosia?’ (which Nicosia?), ‘Potha i potsji?’ (here or there?). All Cypriots were watching television, waiting for the first results. In the south, a resounding oxi (no) was the result as 75.8 per cent of the Greek Cypriots voted against the Plan. In the north, 64.9 per cent of the Turkish Cypriots and Turkish settlers voted evet (yes).

The Failed Referendum 25 April 2004. I joined a family gathering at a fish taverna for Sunday lunch. Before the drinks and starters were served, before the first cigarettes were even lit, a heated debated about the outcome of the referendum erupted. In contrast to the outcome, the company was equally divided in fervent yes- and no-voters. The conversation turned ugly when Antonis (who voted no) and his wife Georgia (who voted yes) started shouting. While we were drinking our coffee at the end of the meal, the restaurant owner joined us and told me that the previous day, referendum evening, a family almost started a fight. I agree with Peter Loizos’s analysis that Greek Cypriot refugees were reluctant to discuss the issue of ‘returning back’. For both Loizos’ informants, the Argakiotes, and mine, the Larnatsjiotes, their villages would have been given back, over a period of time, to the Greek Cypriot constituent state, and these refugees could have returned home. My experience

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was that the Larnatsjiotes rarely spoke about this, and if so, only in hushed voices. Most refugees, older than forty, are firmly settled in the south. They have jobs, children and grandchildren. That they would leave all this behind seems unlikely.31 Andreas, a charismatic coffee shop owner and a passionate pro-Annan Plan supporter expressed his view to one of his regular clients: Return to what? The refugees want to return in time. They are not farmers anymore. If they would return it would be as urbanites, like people who live in say Latsia [a Nicosian suburb] now, not as villagers. They do not know anything about the soil anymore. They are not farmers anymore. Some years later, when I interviewed Andreas formally, our conversation turned once more to the Annan Plan and he used the following metaphor: Saying ‘no’ to the Annan Plan. I compare it to the judgment of Solomon who had to decide which mother would get the baby. The real mother lost at that historic moment when she said that the other woman could have the baby. But then when the judge said that she could have the child she gained everything. We should have done the same with the Annan Plan. If the Turkish Cypriots asked for five things, we should have given ten. We would have gained everything. Over the course of the next years my Larnatsjiotes informants repeatedly pointed out the injustice of the Annan Plan. They wanted more international recognition for the injustice they suffered. Many of my Greek Cypriot informants would agree with Bruno Coppieters who stated that ‘the Annan Plan was the basis for an unjust peace for the Greek Cypriots’.32 1 May 2004. Cyprus became a full member of the European Union. The main streets of south Nicosia were decorated with blue and yellow flags. Eleftheria square, adorned with bright yellow and blue posters, was the centre of the colourful celebrations. It included concerts

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by Cypriot superstars and glittery fireworks. But for many Cypriots it was not a day of celebration because the Turkish Cypriots could not enjoy EU-membership. That evening I joined Turkish Cypriots in north Nicosia at their Labour Day demonstration. They were angry. They wanted a unified Cyprus. Turkish Cypriots told me that Greek Cypriots have a completely different idea about the meaning of reconciliation, that they have a selfish mentality. Ozan folded his banner neatly when we sat down for a drink. He was silent for a while and talked while weighing his words carefully: For a Greek Cypriot ‘peace’ means: I want to go back to my home now. We, Turkish Cypriots, as a poor man, gave everything to them, Greek Cypriots. We did everything we could in order to build a common future and to have peace on this island. They, as a rich man, do not want to sacrifice anything. We put ourselves in danger under forty thousand soldiers. Yes, our economy is bad, but we did not only vote in favour of the Annan Plan for economic reasons. We did it for a common future. The failed referendum and the reactions it elicited on both sides of the divide indicated that ordinary Greek and Turkish Cypriots were still very much embittered about the past. The first year of border crossings and contacts between the two communities had not brought the kind of changes that the most positive-minded Cypriots in both communities had hoped for. The border remained very much a border, both in reality and in the minds of people. For Greek Cypriot refugees, the visits to their former villages and houses had been a very emotional and difficult event. My informants were disappointed, angry and sad that their village had been turkified and was, as they said, ‘dirty and neglected.’ One Larnatsjiotissa, Ireni, told me that her former house was not as she had expected it to be: I did not feel well. I had expected to feel happy to be home again. But I felt like a tree that had already been taken out by the roots once and was replanted a second time and would not grow anymore. I did not feel comfortable. It does not feel like my home anymore.

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When I asked the Larnatsjiotes I accompanied on their visits whether they could live in Larnakas again, now that they had seen their village after twenty-nine years, I never received a straightforward, positive reply. One person said that his former house would be his holiday house (exochiko) and that he would come whenever he had free time. Another Larnatsjiotis told me that he could perhaps live in Larnakas again on the condition that all ‘the others’ were gone. Someone else said that she would come ‘for a ride’ (gia mia volta) every so often. I agree with Peter Loizos that for Greek Cypriot refugees ‘perceptions of return seem to have shifted dramatically. They came to see the village as decisively “spoiled” and the dream of return was now chimerical’.33 Some Larnatsjiotes decided not to visit again, while others visited Larnakas on a regular basis. In the next chapter, I turn to those refugees who frequently cross the border and engage in a set of rituals in an attempt to symbolically re-appropriate their former village.

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CHAPTER THR EE PILGR IMS AND TOUR ISTS

The permissions to cross (a stamped form filled out for a one-day visa) were piling up quickly between the pages of my field journal. My daily ritual of crossing and walking through no man’s land had taken on its own rhythm since the first time I crossed in April 2003. I knew exactly how long it took to walk from my place in Agios Pavlos to the Ledra Palace checkpoint. I knew how many steps it took from the first uniformed Greek Cypriot until the last uniformed Turkish Cypriot who checked my visa and moved out of the way so I could pass the barrier. The silence in the dead zone contrasted sharply with the lively atmosphere I encountered when I ‘entered’ north Nicosia, where taxi drivers asked me in Turkish, Greek and English if I needed a ride. Just past the checkpoint to my right ‘The Border Shop’ boldly proclaimed its wares and was the only reminder that I had crossed the Green Line; the hectic traffic and the lively atmosphere in the north of the capital felt familiar. Even though some months had passed since the historic day in April 2003 when Cypriots were allowed to cross the Green Line, many refugees were still crossing for the first time to visit their former villages. Other refugees had already crossed several times and their journeys had developed their own rhythms too. The first border crossings, however, were always remarkably different from the frequent return visits. As one refugee, Petros, told me in retrospect: The first time I only went to see (epiga mono gia na do). I did not know if my house would still be standing, if it was inhabited

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and if so, who the inhabitants were: Turkish Cypriots, mainland Turks or foreigners. I wondered for so many years whether my fields and trees had been looked after. I joined a few Turkish Cypriot refugees on their first return visit and they were equally as emotional and anxious as Greek Cypriot refugees. I visited a Limassol village with a Turkish Cypriot couple who now live in Yukarı Bostancı (Zodia). Mustafa and Neşe cried when they visited their former house and Neşe stayed a long time in her former fields picking a large bunch of wild flowers. Refugees from both sides did similar things on these return visits. For example, like Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriot refugees often take things back with them: tangible reminders such as soil, plants, fruits, a stone from their house, and so on. Erden took a branch of one of the trees in his former field and planted it in his garden in north Nicosia. He told me that fellow villagers brought some of their old household things they found in the village, just like the Greek Cypriot refugees did. During the first months I stayed in Kozan the villagers asked me where I was from and where my house was. They in turn told me where they came from and how their first visit to their village was. I understood that those Greek Cypriots who thought that Turkish Cypriots did not care about their former houses and villages were wrong. Salih, a refugee from Polis tis Chrisochou, narrated his first return visit in April 2003. His account mirrors those of Greek Cypriots’ first visits to their former villages: I found my old neighbours and my friends. They were very happy to see me after thirty years. Also people whom I did not know gave me a warm welcome. It saddened me to see that they built a car park where my house used to stand. I was angry with the Greek Cypriot government. Why was my property turned into a car park? Why Turkish Cypriot property? Then I looked for the field I used to guard for hours in order to shoo away the birds that ate the watermelon seeds. I found the trees under which I used to sleep and I sat there for a while.

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Adem, a retired truck driver, who loved to talk about the Paphos village he left behind, praised the water, the trees and the landscape of his home village just like Greek Cypriots do. A couple of times, during our conversations about his village, Adem interrupted his story and started humming a song or reciting a poem, as if to protect himself from the grief that crushed him since he visited his village. First visits to their former villages were, for all Cypriot refugees, profoundly emotional and raised many questions in the refugees’ minds. In July 2003, on a warm, windless day, I accompanied Vassiliki, a Larnatsjiotissa in her late fifties, on her first visit to Larnakas. We had walked for more than three hours around the patchwork of small neighbourhoods and fields before Vassiliki knocked on the door of her house, which was located at the village’s highest point. A soft-spoken Turkish Cypriot man welcomed us warmly, but Vassiliki did not want to stay long. When we left the sun was still blazing relentlessly and the heat had seeped into our bones after the long, energy-draining day. We rested under the shade of a large chrysomila, an apricot tree, at a small distance from Vassiliki’s house. The air was pungent with the smell of over-ripe fruit and flies buzzed around our heads. An elderly Kozanlı passed, struggling with two wicker baskets laden with vegetables. The woman greeted us with a toothless smile and continued humming a folk song, clearly oblivious to my friend’s distress. Vassiliki watched the slow pace of the woman for a long time and then looked at me with sombre eyes. After that she stared at her dilapidated house behind which the mountain loomed, sighed heavily and spoke, in a whisper, without averting her gaze from the house. ‘The trees are not there anymore. There is a man inside my house who talks Turkish. My house is broken-down. I do not want to return here anymore. This is not my Larnakas. It does not feel like my village.’ I nodded, took her hand and squeezed it a couple of times. Refugees confronted the present-day state of the village in different ways. Spiroulla, who discovered that her house had been turned into a cowshed, said over and over, ‘Dhen mboro. I can’t [go there anymore]. My house became a stable (stavlos). I was ready to commit suicide (eimouna etimi na aftoktoniso).’ Some refugees decided that they wanted

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to go back to the village. Georgia, who still returns frequently, told me after her first visit: I saw the many acres of my fields. The trees are cut (ekopsan ta dentra). I noticed the condition of the houses and the village. The army is everywhere. It is the reality (i pragmatikotita). Every time I go I will cry and it will hurt me, but people should go (o kosmos prepi na pigeni). Also Salih returned to Polis tis Chrisochou on a regular basis. He befriended some of the Greek Cypriot locals and even stayed overnight in their houses. But there were some important distinctions between Greek and Turkish Cypriot attitudes towards their places of origin. The main difference between Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees is that the former mostly cross to the north to re-visit their villages, while the latter cross the Green Line for a range of activities. A Turkish Cypriot tourist guide, who organizes day trips to the Paphos area for Turkish Cypriots, confirmed this. He worked with a Greek Cypriot who owns a bus company and arranges regular trips to the Baths of Aphrodite and other sightseeing venues. By 2007, most of my Turkish Cypriot informants, both urbanites and villagers, had crossed to visit places in the south unrelated to their villages. When I raised this issue one morning at the coffee shop in Kozan, Ibrahim remarked: When you have been a couple of times back to your village the moment comes that you decide not to go anymore. 2 to 3 per cent of the Kozanlılar did not even go once back to their villages. They do not see the point. This statement ties in with the Turkish Cypriot refugees’ view that their village in the north is now their home. A second difference is that Turkish Cypriots like to visit new places and often have a drink or a meal in a local restaurant in the south. When I joined Turkish Cypriots on their visits I did not hear any political debate about ‘spending money in the south’. On the contrary, many of my Turkish Cypriot informants readily spent

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money. Three years after our conversation about his first visit Salih, we spoke about it again but this time he emphasized other aspects. He wanted to point out that Turkish Cypriots are not ‘poor’, as Greek Cypriots often portray them, and that they can afford to do what Greek Cypriots do: We left with a full bus and drove to our villages in the Paphos district. After I had seen my house, I wanted to go to the cafés in the touristy harbour of Paphos. I sat there and I ordered an expensive drink. There was a television crew present and I made sure they got a good shot of me. Greek Cypriots, by contrast, are very reluctant to spend money in the north. Even six years after the borders opened I observed Greek Cypriot refugees who had taken everything they needed with them to make their own coffee (a thermos, Nescafe, sugar, cups and spoons, biscuits and a tea towel). A large number of Greek Cypriots, refugees and non-refugees alike, also oppose taking part in any type of leisure activity in the north. As Webster and Timothy pointed out:1 The majority [of Greek Cypriots] is also against fee-based sightseeing, eating in restaurants and going to the beach. Interestingly, about one third of respondents are even against sightseeing without a fee and visiting places of origin. ( . . .) It appears that most of the [Greek Cypriot] tourists did not really act like tourists, spending money to enjoy themselves. It is clear that Greek Cypriot crossings are more of the ‘pilgrimage’ type: they go to see what has been lost, whereas Turkish Cypriot crossings, if they are not related to work, medical emergencies or obtaining government documents, are more of the tourist type, as if they are visiting another country. Turkish Cypriot border crossers seem to be more interested in meeting people, for instance old and new friends, while Greek Cypriots cross more often to visit their former villages or specific religious sites they used to frequent in their pre-displacement lives.

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‘Do the Swallows Still Come?’ There were so many questions Kyriacos wanted to ask when he returned again to Larnakas. After he became a refugee, he travelled around the world for almost three decades. Now he was back in his own house, which, at the same time, was not his house. The air was the same, filled with the smell of jasmine, and the old trees in the courtyard were packed with fruit, but everything felt unfamiliar. Kyriacos was sitting opposite the present inhabitant of his house, a Turkish Cypriot, Serkan, who could no doubt answer many of his questions. He offered Serkan a cigarette and lit one for himself, although he never smoked. He looked like a nervous teenager trying a cigarette, warily looking around, not knowing how to behave. He only asked one question in a voice heavy with emotion: ‘Do the swallows still come? (Erkountai ta chelidonia akoma?)’ Before leaving his village, Kyriacos filled a jerry can with water from the village well and picked some fruit from the trees in his fields. During the twenty-minute ride from the city to her village, Fanoulla muttered repeatedly under her breath ‘o theos einai megalos (God is great)’ while she commented on the change in the landscape over the past thirty years. When we passed the trouli, tears welled up in Fanoulla’s eyes. Although she had visited her village a couple of times since the checkpoints opened, Fanoulla was overwhelmed every time she approached the familiar place where she had lived most of her life. She quickly recovered her voice and told me which places we would visit that day. The journey was, by then, full of predictable activities. Fanoulla visited her house with the small kitchen garden, her fields on the other side of the road, the small neglected cemetery outside the village, the monastery, the main village church, two little chapels and the village’s fountain. In some places she picked up something that would serve as a reminder of her visit, including a brick stone from her house and a bunch of herbs from the monastery’s garden. Since the checkpoints opened, Georgia visits her and her husband’s village frequently. In the two localities she visits the religious sites: the local church, the monastery and little chapels. In all these places

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Georgia always performs the same ritual: she arranges fresh flowers near the makeshift ikonostasis (altar screen of icons), she dusts the icons, refills the oil-lamp and lights new candles. Georgia blesses the place and says some prayers. She kisses the foot of the icons a last time and leaves the site, which is by now thickly scented with incense. Then Georgia drives to the next place of worship and carries out the same rituals. Kyriacos, Fanoulla and Georgia are only three of the thousands of Greek Cypriot refugees who visit their villages in the north frequently. Their stories reflect practices common among refugees.2 ‘Why do you visit your village so often?’ The question hung in the air. Perhaps Petros thought my request a little strange. He pondered, tipping the ash of his cigarette thoughtfully in the ashtray. ‘It is what I need to do. I have to go back to my village now that I am allowed,’ Petros explained. He took another drag of his cigarette, and continued: The second time and all the other times I went back to my village it was because it is mine (einai diko mou). It is our heritage (i klironomia mas), our history (i istoria mas). Not only the churches and the buildings in the village, but also our holy grounds (ta agia mas chomata). It is my place (o topos mou). I go and I venerate the land of my village (proskino to choma tou choriou mou). And my fields are my heritage as well as the things [which grow] on my field (ta pramata tou chorafiou mou). You want it (to theleis), you ask for it (to zitas). From a very young age I was working on those fields. I perceive my soil as holy (ta theoro agia ta chomata mou). I will never forget these things (den prokeitai pote na ta ksexaso). Not even now, after so many years. It is mine. It was my father’s [land and village], my grandfather’s (itan tou patera mou, tou papou mou). Other refugees who regularly visit their former villages provided me with similar accounts about why they return. Petros’ choice of words, notably ‘agia’ (holy) and ‘proskino’ (to venerate), indicates the spiritual and powerful qualities he attributes to his village (and its soil, trees

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and fields). This vocabulary is common among Greek Cypriot refugees. Sometimes the village as a whole is presented as a person they miss and yearn to see and touch again. A well-known song among Larnatsjiotes, written by Theodosia, includes such a personification: ‘My Larnakas, I miss you and I will come to you again, I will come to sleep in your embrace’ (Larnaka mou pethimisa, na ksanartho konta sou, na giro na potsimitho mesa stin angalia sou). In many poems, songs and everyday stories Greek Cypriot refugees refer to the patron saints of their village church. In one of her songs Theodosia, an elderly Larnatsjiotissa, refers to Larnakas’ patron saint, Saint Dimitrianos, as the village’s pride (Agie mou Dimitriane kafhima tou chorkou mas).3 In another song, Theodosia complains that she cannot perform the religious rituals at her relatives’ graves in Larnakas. This was a recurrent grievance of many refugee women. As anthropologist Laurie Hart states: ‘Death and the fear of death are in Orthodox religious practice so important that it would be hardly possible to overemphasize the point.’ 4 Greek Cypriot refugees, mostly women, told me about other religious performances, apart from memorial rituals, they would like to perform again. They would like, for example, to look after the household and church icons and tend the little chapels in the village. Greek Cypriot refugees not only express a deep desire to minister to their village and its spiritual realm, but they also wish to engage again in seemingly ordinary daily activities that are impossible in the urban environment where they have lived since 1974. In a radio programme, broadcast in the mid 1980s, some Larnatsjiotes were invited to talk about their village. My grandmother, Olymbia Dikomitou, was one of the speakers. She was notorious for waking up at night and scribbling away in one of her notebooks. During the radio show she referred to her state of insomnia and gave an example of what she had written: ‘I [want to] walk again on my fields (na ksana perpatiso ta pervolia mou), I will touch my trees (n’angkiso ta dentra mou) and I will sit in [the trees’] shades and dream away (tha katso kai tha onirefto ston iskio tous)’. Such desires should not be dismissed as the babble of elderly refugees who have time on their hands to indulge in daydreams about their previous village life. During my fieldwork I heard many similar longings expressed by a range of refugees – men and women of different ages,

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educated and non-educated, rich and poor. One Larnatsjiotis in his late forties, who holds a PhD in Economics from the LSE, told me that he often dreams about working in the fields again and drinking the water from the village’s fountain. Through talking (and fantasizing) about the activities of village life refugees are able to maintain a link with the locality from which they are cut off.5 I consider the return visits of Greek Cypriot refugees as a form of ‘pilgrimage’: a ritual process during which these Greek Cypriots undertake repetitive, symbolic performances in their former rural localities.6 Place is a prominent characteristic of all pilgrimages; a place which is ‘different from other places’.7 In this case, Greek Cypriot refugees do not visit an established pilgrimage site, but a rural locality, which has been described to me on many occasions as a paradise-like place, an ‘extraordinary’ place. Refugees visiting their villages repeatedly ‘create’ a pilgrimage site through these very visits.8 These return journeys allow Greek Cypriot refugees to recreate a sense of belonging to a community that has been lost. Although Greek Cypriot refugees have varied attitudes towards religion and religious practice, they all engage in ritual routine when they visit their former villages. The choice of ritual, the frequency and the intensity of their performances reflect the different ways in which they exercise agency and recreate community, albeit in a partial and provisional manner. These ‘pilgrimages’, undertaken in a particular context, start with crossing at a checkpoint and are disturbing to the refugees because of the turkification of the landscape. Such is also the situation in the villages to which the refugees return. As human geographer Doreen Massey formulates it, where one wants to revisit a specific place: ‘For the truth is that you can never simply “go back”, to home or to anywhere else. When you get “there” the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed.’9 This is certainly the case for these Greek Cypriots refugees. They are only partially able to engage in their rituals, because fields and trees are damaged or gone, churches are desecrated or have been converted to mosques, cemeteries have been destroyed and their houses are now the homes of others.

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‘The House of God Feels Like My House’ The religious practices in which these refugee-pilgrims engage entail rituals that are familiar in Orthodox Christianity. These activities, performed in their former rural localities, involve the maintenance

Refugees engage in various rituals

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of religious sites, venerating the icons, lighting candles, making the sign of the cross, blessing the place, sprinkling water and praying. These performances follow the same pattern repeated by a variety of refugees in different places: middle-aged men and women attempt to purify profaned religious sites, elderly refugee women carry out their religious duties at the cemetery and individuals of all ages regularly go to worship a specific holy personage. However, these near-identical practices often carry different meanings. One of the most shocking experiences during the earliest visits, frequently discussed by the refugees, was finding the religious sites of their villages neglected and sometimes vandalised. Several refugees decided to restore the sacred character of these sites: the village church, the local monasteries and the many small chapels in the villages and around the countryside. I came across many such endeavours, some undertaken in a subtle manner and others in a more visible way. Early on in my fieldwork I met a UK-based Greek Cypriot academic. Coincidently his grandmother lived in Larnakas and was known to the villagers as ‘i dikastina’ (the judge’s wife). When I told her grandson about refugees’ attempts to restore religious sites in the north of Cyprus he emailed me soon after: In 1974 my grandmother must have been around ninety years old. She spoke ‘posh’ Greek. She was thin, frail with a long white plait. She lived in a dilapidated old house over the olive-mill, opposite the church and the syllogos. Her will requires her heirs to give some money to the old monastery of Panayia ton Katharon. I can hand you some money which you can use, when you go to Larnakas, to buy a pot of paint and also pay a Kozan villager to paint the inside walls. Is this a deal? I did not take up the offer, because some Larnatsjiotes had already started the renovation of the monastery. However, the request to donate money to the village monastery in the dikastina’s will shows the importance of local religious sites for Greek Cypriot villagers. The first case of restoration I encountered was at the chapel dedicated to Agios Fanourios, located in a cave on a seaside cliff in the

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village Agios Georgios near Kyrenia.10 This cave had been turned into a toilet; all the icons and religious paraphernalia had disappeared. It was impossible to imagine that this terrible, reeking, empty cave was once a sacred site. In the summer of 2003, some months after the borders opened, a few refugees decided to reclaim the site. They took cleaning materials and tools on one of their return visits and restored this cave, to the best of their ability to its original state. They brought icons of Agios Fanourios, fresh flowers, water, oil, candles, matches and livani (incense used during Orthodox ceremonies). Most of the cleaning and restoring, (removing the dirt from the cave, arranging the icons and flowers, lighting the candles and blessing the cave), was done by the women. The two men present were standing outside, talking and admiring the landscape and only occasionally assisting when asked by the women. It is no coincidence that women took on the major part of this work. Anthropologists working in the Mediterranean have provided detailed analyses of the involvement of women in religious activities.11 I observed another telling example of reclaiming sacred space in Larnakas tis Lapithou. The monastery Panagia ton Katharon was in very bad condition. On my initial visit in April 2003, I saw goats in and around the building. All the paint and icons were gone and the walls were covered with graffiti. The original church floor was destroyed and broken tiles were scattered among animal excrement. In the summer of 2003, Georgia and her husband Antonis decided to clean the monastery so that it would be ready for the saint’s name days, in this case the festival of the Assumption on the fifteenth of August and the eighth of September when the Larnatsjiotes celebrate ‘their’ Panagia ton Katharon (also known as Panagia Katharkotissa).12 Georgia and Antonis brought all the necessary tools from the city. They removed the dirt with a shovel and then cleaned the church of the monastery with a broom. Antonis made a little tower with the original tiles (toufla) and, as he explained, put those on the place where the ‘agia trapeza’ (the altar) once stood. They whitewashed one corner in order to have a provisional iconostasis. Antonis did not paint over one slogan familiar to Greek Cypriots, probably written by a Larnatsjiotis: ‘I don’t forget and I fight (Den ksechno kai agonizomai)’. The iconostasis is the most

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Resacralized corner in the monastery

prominent feature of an orthodox church, typically consisting of one or more rows of icons and a set of royal doors in the centre. Because there was no iconostasis left in the monastery, Georgia arranged the icons in a small recess in the wall after the paint had dried. She then prepared to bless the place using oil, water, candles, matches, incense (livani), olive leaves and small pieces of charcoal (karvounakia). Antonis and Georgia lit the candles and the kandili (oil lamp), venerated the icons and said some prayers. They left the village and returned to the city, where Georgia told her relatives what they had done: ‘Dhen mborousa (I could not [see the church in this state]). We had to clean it (eprepe na tin katharisoume). We painted [the church of the monastery] so it would be clean and ready (tin vapsame na einai kathari tsje etimi)’. The dikastina’s wish to restore the monastery had been undertaken by her co-villagers. Throughout the north of Cyprus there are many examples of ongoing attempts to restore neglected Orthodox sites, especially in local village churches which have not been converted to mosques, cultural centres or even cafés. During the past six years, Greek Cypriot refugees continued to resurrect the religious sites in their former villages. For example, I noticed that new icons and a wooden candelabrum had

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been taken to the monastery of Panagia ton Katharon. Icons regularly disappear or are found smashed or burned. When icons were replaced a second time in the Agios Fanourios chapel, refugees paid a local Turkish Cypriot carpenter to make a door so that the cave can be closed. In the monastery of Panagia ton Katharon, Georgia recently put some icons high on the wall, using a ladder she brought from the city, to prevent them from being stolen. She asked me if I knew the Turkish Cypriot muhktaris (village president). They wanted to ask his permission to remove the fig tree because its roots were destroying one wall of the monastery. The quiet presence of icons, candles and flowers, in a cleaned corner of the churches in the north, point to the regular visits of Greek Cypriots. Chapels and small roadside shrines are less visible in the religious cartography, but are as important to refugees as the more prominent churches. Many of these chapels were privately erected and maintained, hence in these places ‘the sacred is localized and individualized’.13 These small churches (eklisakia or pareklisakia) can be particularly meaningful to refugees because they commemorate specific past events in their lives. Chapels located in the villages’ surroundings may also have been built in a ‘continuous attempt to domesticate the wilderness’.14 Greek Cypriots, like Greeks, perceive their locality as ‘a divinely protected enclosure or circle’.15 I saw a refugee family restoring a small chapel in Larnakas, dedicated to Agia Marina. This ‘chapel’ (eklisaki) was merely a hole in the soil, a tiny space on the shoulder of a street, hidden under some trees a bit lower than ground level. A Larnatsjiotis removed the wooden board that obstructed the chapel. His sister cleaned the interior and arranged an icon, oil lamp (kandili) and some candles. The others crossed themselves three times and lit a candle. The practice of purifying religious sites can be interpreted in two ways. First, it can be understood as an effort to restore the spiritual unity of the village. When it became possible, refugees attempted to reclaim their community by purifying the spaces that symbolize the protection of God. Second, it may be interpreted as an attempt, in a symbolic way, to reclaim their houses. In Cyprus, as in Greece, the house is the ‘central nucleus’ of village life.16 Refugees wondered what happened to their household shrines, expressing the hope that the present occupiers

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might have saved the icons. Anthropologist Juliet Du Boulay describes the importance of the material culture of Orthodoxy in the privacy of homes: ‘What is a house without icons? A shelter for animals’.17 In the north of Cyprus, most houses are devoid of Orthodox religious features and some are now actual animal sheds. Refugees cannot change anything in their houses, because others now inhabit them. They can, however, alter the next closest thing, namely, the sacred spaces in the village. For the Greek Orthodox there is a strong link between the house and the church: ‘If the separation between home and church is emphasized in some respects (for the church is exalted as a hallowed place, and as a public realm) it is diminished in others. If holy paraphernalia are incorporated into the house, domestic rituals are also extended to the church.’18 This was confirmed by how Georgia explained her actions to me: ‘The church is the house of God and it feels like my house (i eklisia einai to spiti tou theou kai tin niotho san to spiti mou)’. In the same vein, the local cemetery can be perceived as an extension of the house.19 The small cemetery of Larnakas is located at the highest point of the village. The marked headstones were broken and scattered around. The low wall that enclosed the cemetery was falling apart and thick tangles of weeds covered most of the graves. The names on the stone crosses were barely visible. One scene I observed at the cemetery was particularly moving. I sat cross-legged on the cemetery wall watching the Larnatsjiotisses blessing the graves. Theodosia wears glasses with thick lenses and is nearly blind. She descended into the graveyard and was searching for the headstone of her parents and her brother. The others were preoccupied with the blessing of the crosses. Theodosia found the cross of her mother and her brother. She touched the letters carved in the stone for a while, and cried silently. Then she carried out her rituals: she put a little oil-lamp in the foot of the cross, blessed the grave with incense, sprayed some water and prayed.20 Carrying out this ritual meant more to Theodosia than I could possibly grasp. In one of her laments, written long before she could return to Larnakas, she sings: ‘I will burn incense on my mother’s grave and I will bring a little bit of cool water to sprinkle around (ston tafo tis manoulas mou livani na kapniso, tsai ligo drosero nero na paro na rantsiso).’ It is mainly elderly women refugees who visit the

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Larnatsjiotissa prays over her parents’ vandalized grave

cemetery in Larnakas. Several of them have told me they are grateful to be able to perform the graveside rites in their village again. Next to the actual restoring of these sacred places and carrying out religious duties at the cemetery, many refugees visited various religious sites in their village where they engaged in religious rituals. They venerated the icons, lit a candle, blessed the place and tucked some flowers next to the icons. I agree, however, with anthropologist Renee Hirschon that when Greek city dwellers visit shrines in the countryside there is no strict division between the religious and recreational aim of the visit.21 In Cyprus, refugees go, especially on weekends, for a ‘walk’ (mia volta) in their former villages and while there, they also perform a few rituals in the churches and chapels. Others undertook pilgrimages to ask for the help of a specific saint and bring an offering. In that case, the pilgrimage was undertaken because they had made a vow (tama). Many refugees, for instance, visit a well-known pilgrimage site in Karpassia, the monastery of Apostle Andreas. In the weeks preceding the referendum on the Annan plan I observed refugees at the Agios Fanourios cave praying

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A fanouropita taken to the saint as an offering

for a positive outcome of the referendum. They left a green and white banner draped under the icons: it said, ‘Nai stin Kipro’ (Yes to Cyprus). This banner can be seen as a ‘tama’ (an object exemplifying the vow). In this chapel I also occasionally saw leftovers of a Fanouropita, a cake

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Celebrating saint’s name day

made with seven specific ingredients that is presented as an offering to the saint. In May 2007, two Larnatsjiotes went as pilgrims to the local monastery to pray for their son-in-law who lost his hand in a work accident with a concrete mixer. Their devotions were intensely emotional; they were crying and asking the Panagia to grant their prayers for a quick recovery of their son-in-law. Their pilgrimage coincided with Georgia’s weekly visit. She told me that these Larnatsjiotes later called her to ask if she had been chanting hymns or if there was clergy around, because the four of them heard hymns (psalmous) as they were leaving the monastery. Georgia told them that she had not been praying aloud and that no one else was around that moment. For Georgia, this was an indication of a miraculous occurrence. I want to emphasize that although all these routines (maintaining sacred sites, carrying out religious duties at the cemetery, worshipping at a specific shrine and engaging in traditional pilgrimages) are common rituals, they have to be adjusted and reinvented according to the present circumstances. The absence of priests or church employees

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means that the refugees themselves conduct the prayer services (e.g., on a saint’s name day).

‘This is a Place of Miracles’ Another set of ‘rituals’ performed during the ‘pilgrimages’ is entirely related to the material culture and natural elements of their villages.22 Even though these acts are also performed by devout refugees who regularly visit the religious sites, they are more passionately enacted by refugees, like Petros, who explained that he frequents his village because it is ‘his place’ (o topos mou). These ‘pilgrims’ follow an unwritten fixed route, visiting places that are meaningful to them. Consequently, the whole journey is turned into a ritual and the sequence of actions is repeated each time they return to their village. One essential stop was at the village’s fountain (vrisi). The Larnatsjiotes collected water for themselves and for co-villagers who could not come. They brought jerry cans, small containers and plastic bottles to fill up with ‘their water’. They usually spent some time at the fountain, washed their faces with the water, drank and collected it. For them, this is not just ordinary water; it is assigned a spiritual meaning. Back in the city, they offered guests ‘water from our village’ (nero tou choriou mas). When I attended a meeting in the leftwing syllogos (club house) located in the old town of Nicosia, one of the women served water from Larnakas taken from a huge jerry can in the kitchen. Everybody present had a glass of water to drink before they ordered beer and local spirits. One Larnatsjiotis told me, in 2002, that he would only die in peace if he were able to drink again from the village’s fountain: ‘I will drink from the fountain and my soul will rejoice (na pio nero apo tin vrisi na efxaristhi I psichi mou)’. In addition to water, they also collected fruits, herbs and flowers from their former gardens and fields. Refugees that I visited in Nicosia showed me other things they took back from Larnakas: a brick from their house (petra apo to spiti mou), a piece of wood and an old picture they were given by the Turkish Cypriot inhabitants who found it when they moved in. When I joined Danae on one of her return visits, she showed me around the

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Larnatsjiotes place soil on their mother’s grave in Nicosia

places that were most memorable to her: the fields she used to play in, a picnic spot in the mountains, her old school, the houses that were once coffee shops, etc. When we arrived at her paternal house, she was disappointed that the old carob tree (teratsia) had been cut. Danae collected some soil in a jar from the spot where the teratsia once grew (the

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roots were still visible). She kept part of the soil in her refugee house and brought the remainder to her mother’s grave in the cemetery in Nicosia. Danae explained: ‘It is a part of me, a part of my past life’. I encountered a similar practice when I accompanied Kyriacos to his village one afternoon. He took me to the local cemetery and showed me his father’s grave. Kyriacos did not engage in any religious actions, but picked up a handful of dirt from the graveyard and put it into a plastic bag.23 Like pilgrims who bring a keepsake from their journey, refugees take things from their village as a reminder of their visit. That afternoon Kyriacos’ eyes gleamed when he guided me through Larnakas. He told me stories about specific places, referring to them with their old names: farangas, Lacharopetra, mantres, etc. We often stopped to inspect a tree. He told me whose tree it was and how, as children, they stole karidia (walnuts) and other fruit. For a while we watched the village’s shepherd and his flock. Kyriacos told me how much he missed the jingling of the goat’s bells. He constantly complained about the city: the fruits are not sweet enough there and the water has no taste. There are not enough open fields and the trees are worthless compared to the village’s trees. Kyriacos snapped dozens of pictures, declaring that ‘this is a place of miracles’. Several times he even taped, with his cell phone, different sounds in the village: the running water at the vrises, the birds’ songs near the monastery and the goats’ bells. ‘I would tape the complete silence’, Kyriacos said as we rested at the kaminatzia, a quiet location we reached after an hour of climbing up a steep mountain path.24 I have seen pictures taken by refugees that are now displayed next to the few old photographs they took when they left. Nikos has a picture of the grim pile of stones where once his house stood. Danae regularly shows her friends pictures of trees, rocks, fields. Refugees requested that I take ‘a good picture’ of their house for them. It is clear from the above examples that these Larnatsjiotes rarely perceive the village’s material culture through one sense alone. By engaging in several performances these refugees create a complete sensory reawakening of the village’s materiality. Greek Cypriot refugees do the ordinary things they used to do when they were still living in the village (e.g., collecting water,

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picking fruits and walking through their fields). Now, these activities are no longer ordinary. They have become rituals that can be conceptualized as ‘acts of memory’, even if performed in the actual locale they want to remember. The ritualization of these sensory-affective performances can be seen as ‘nostalgia’, as a strong desire to reenact experiences. One evening, I observed two brothers in front of a computer screen with a huge pile of pictures next to them and dozens of others spread out on the table. They were discussing the different localities in Larnakas, pointing them out on Google Earth, enlarging the maps on the screen until they became blurred, and noting on the back of the pictures the name of the location and sometimes the name of the Greek Cypriot owner. I have witnessed several occasions where refugees extend, in a certain sense, their journey to the village by turning their attention to the tangible reminders of their visit once they are back in the city. They rearrange the flowers with utmost care, drink the water, cook food with the bay leaves they collected, eat the fruit, watch the video footage and look at pictures. In that sense, the ‘acting out of memory’ continues long after they left the village.

Pilgrims and Tourists Greek Cypriot refugees attempt to recreate the religious and cultural cartography of the village through these ‘pilgrimages’. The sense of continuity and community, which is less apparent where they live, is to a certain extent re-established in the rural locality where refugees coincidently meet. The movement between their present houses in the south and their villages allows them to exercise agency and recreate community. However this can only be done in a fragmentary manner, because they have to return to the city. Depending on their attitudes towards religion and religious practice, the rituals vary from familiar religious routines to ad hoc rites. The religious cartography of their villages has changed (little chapels have disappeared, churches have been desecrated and all other religious paraphernalia are gone), so these refugees have reconstructed the symbolic geography of their villages through their return visits.

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Those refugees who engaged in frequent return visits found some comfort, as they told me, in the religious and secular rituals they performed in their villages. Although they would never get used to the sight of their altered village, undertaking these kind of ‘pilgrimages’ is an opportunity to reconstruct its social space. Anthropologist Elzbieta Gozdziak argued that ‘the spiritual context of human suffering should provide a foundation for understanding and responding to the suffering of refugees. ( . . . ) Rituals play an instrumental role in trauma healing’.25 That they were able to carry out religious and secular rituals helped the refugees’ come to terms with the new reality of being able to cross the border and visit their villages. Although I have not observed a similar frequency of return journeys undertaken by Turkish Cypriot refugees, there are undoubtedly Turkish Cypriots who cross the border more than once to visit their former villages. But unlike Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots do not seem to visit their villages, fields and houses every time they cross. They are eager to explore other places in the south and always take the opportunity to make stops in other villages and touristic places. In that respect, Turkish Cypriots are more ‘tourists’ than ‘pilgrims’. An important difference between Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees concerns their children. The sense of freedom and permanence of their new home in the north has been transmitted to the children of the original Turkish Cypriot refugees, and this is reflected in the fact that they know little about their parents’ lives in their villages in the south. For instance, during my fieldwork I asked Sema who recently moved to Kozan after she got married to a Kozanlı, whether her parents were refugees. She told me her father was from Limassol. I asked whether he was from the city or from a village. She told me he was from a village near the city of Limassol but she did not remember the name (neither the Turkish nor the Greek name). Sema added that I should ask older people if I wanted to know details, the implication being that younger people are not very much concerned about the past. Such is also the case with the four children of the family I lived with in Kozan. Unlike Greek Cypriot youngsters, they could not tell me a lot about their parent’s lives in the village in the south. This

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indifference was certainly reflected during return visits. Some young Turkish Cypriots did not join their parents on visits to their former villages, or found it a rather boring experience when they did, and certainly did not express the kind of strong emotions as their Greek Cypriot peers. Take for instance Osman, a Kozanlı teenager, who told me his father took him to Paphos after the borders opened. He said: ‘It was emotional for my father. I found it boring. There are only a few houses there. There is nothing there.’

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CHAPTER FOUR UNDER ONE ROOF

In the beginning, the traffic was so dense that there was no space between the cars at the checkpoints, and the people waiting to cross had to fight their way through passport control to get a visa. The rush and excitement of the first crossings are now long past. Over the past six years, the number of Greek Cypriots crossing the Green Line has decreased by almost fifty per cent (from 1,123,720 in 2003 to 708,656 in 2008). The number of Turkish Cypriot border crossers has more or less remained the same (1,371,099 in 2003 and 1,298,325 in 2008), reaching a peak of 2,222,199 in 2005.1 Between 2003 and 2008, the first six years of border crossings, the average number of crossings per annum was 2,605,230 with the highest number of crossings in 2005 (3,542,098) and the lowest in 2007 (1,718,341).2 The number of Turkish Cypriots crossing to the south has always been, and remains, much higher than the number of Greek Cypriots crossing to the north. The highest number of foreign crossers, i.e. non-Cypriots, are British citizens, followed by Germans and Greeks.3 The first border crossing was historic, life changing and also confusing for many Cypriots. Later, crossing the border became part of the Cypriot experience and shifted from an exciting, emotional event into a routine affair. I present here three specific readings of the border, which reflect the most common practices I encountered between April 2003 and December 2008. However, I want to point out that my readings do not exhaust the range of perspectives and possible interpretations. I also want to stress that it is not my intention to divide Cypriots

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into definitive groups characterized by static opinions on the border (crossings). These category boundaries are porous, and as time passed both Greek and Turkish Cypriots renegotiated the border and dealt with it in different ways. Although Cypriots do not recognize the border as legitimate, this refusal is expressed in different and often paradoxical ways, and each of these ways reflects wider positions on the prospect of unification as well as attempts to recreate shattered identities and communities. Encountering the ‘Other’ across the border seems to have resulted in the strengthening rather than the breaking down of the ethnic stereotypes Greek and Turkish Cypriots hold about each other.

First Reading: Dilemma of Crossing One of the reasons that there are fewer Greek Cypriots crossing compared to Turkish Cypriots is that the former are more ambivalent about the border. Greek Cypriot policy itself maintains a contradictory attitude towards crossing the Green Line: on the one hand, Greek Cypriots are discouraged from crossing, because this implies political recognition of the regime in the north; on the other hand meetings between Greek and Turkish Cypriots are encouraged as a way of preparing the ground for future unification.4 Non-crossers justify their decision by reciting the many impediments at the checkpoint: they have to show their identity card, complete a one-day visa form stamped by border officials and buy special car insurance from one of the Turkish Cypriots companies there. The refusal to spend money in the north and to show identification in their own country reflects a common way of thinking among many Greek Cypriots. The argument is that in doing so one supports the Turkish Cypriot regime. Marios, for instance, put it this way: ‘I pay the car insurance of forty pounds but I will not eat or drink in the north. I pay the minimum to see my house and my old neighbourhood.’ Crossing as ‘a tourist in their own country’ – an often-heard phrase in the Greek Cypriot community – would imply recognizing the illegal Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Fifty-seven per cent of Greek Cypriots do not cross because they do not wish to show identification at the checkpoints.5

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Some individuals cross often but curse every time they arrive at the checkpoint. They comment on the Turkish flags and feel annoyed by the many uniformed Turkish Cypriot representatives at the checkpoint, but it does not stop them from crossing. Others are equally bothered by all the hurdles but overlook them because, in their words, ‘our need (anangi) to go is too strong’. Here is how Manolis explained it to me, using the metaphor of theatre for the checkpoints: I don’t feel anything, because it is a piece of theatre they are playing, without an audience. Nobody says ‘well done’ (pezoun theatro choris na exoun theates, kanenas enlalei ‘mbravo’). If I had to pass in front of a machine, it would be the same (an itan ena aftomato, to idio mou ekane). I encountered many Greek Cypriots who are still debating with themselves whether they should cross. Maria, a refugee from Famagusta, is a psychiatrist. She told me in May 2007: ‘I did not go to my village . . . yet (sighs). I think I will be very disturbed by it. I am sure I would feel down for months. I will be the one they will have to treat for depression!’ Others hesitated for months, even years, but then decided to cross. Theodoros did not want to go to the north because of all the bureaucratic impediments. He explained to me many times that he wanted to go, but he could not because he felt it was not right to ‘ask permission from the Turks’ to visit his mother’s village. On a summer day in 2005, news was spread that a miracle (thavma) had taken place in one of the monasteries in the north. A paralysed Greek Cypriot could walk again after he visited the monastery. Theodoros decided to cross: I took my passport and I drove to the Ledra Palace checkpoint. Nobody knew I was going to cross. I needed to do this by myself. I walked in the old town of Nicosia. It was a good experience. I will go and visit my mother’s village soon and I will take up my uncle’s invitation to go for a day-trip in the north with his Turkish Cypriot friend. Theodoros still goes for day-trips to the north, crossing the checkpoints early in the morning. He knows the town of north Nicosia

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inside out and even bought an old bicycle from a Turkish Cypriot trader he befriended. Theodoros’ brother still insists that he will not cross for the same reasons his brother recited for two years: It is not that I don’t want to go there. I don’t have a problem going there, but I don’t think it is right for anybody to ask me to sign anything, to show anything or to put me in their computer. I want to have the right to go there, not somebody who allows me to go there. My own extended family reflects the dilemma of crossing well. Some rushed to the checkpoint as soon as crossing was possible. Other relatives waited for a period, needing time to get mentally ready for the encounter with the places they fled thirty years ago. Still others have adamantly refused to cross the border. Apart from the checkpoint bureaucracy, there is another reason that makes it difficult to cross, especially for refugees. Almost all of the Greek Cypriot houses in the north are occupied by others now: by Turkish Cypriot refugees, mainland Turks and in some cases by foreigners who bought the houses from Turkish Cypriots. Refugees have to knock on their own front door and ask permission to enter their house; they can only visit their house and this reality causes them great anguish. There are Greek Cypriots who do not understand why their fellow villagers do not want to go. According to them, they have to take the opportunity to see their houses and visit, at least once, the place they were forced to leave in 1974. Yiannis put it to me as follows: I believe that every normal human being has to go back to the place where he comes from. I travelled all over the world and I feel I will grow old, perhaps even 126 years (laughs), but even then I need to be buried in my village. I am a cosmopolitan, but I want to be buried in the place my great-grandparents are buried too. Greek Cypriot crossers and non-crossers share one conviction though: they do not recognize the border as a legal boundary. But there are

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paradoxes and dilemmas involved in both cases. By not crossing, people acknowledge the existence of the border, while the refugee crossers need the border in order to makes sense of their status as refugees. Turkish Cypriots, on the other hand, seem to have fewer problems with crossing the border but some also feel ambivalent. Ahmet, a Turkish Cypriot engineering student who followed news about the crossings closely, claimed in February 2005 that: Turkish Cypriots do not hesitate to cross, no matter what political orientation they have. We all crossed, without faltering. Everybody crossed at least once, in order to get an identity card [from the RoC]. Moreover, Turkish Cypriots cross very regularly for all sorts of reasons. Most Turkish Cypriots I have met since 2003, both urbanites and villagers, have crossed at least once. Turkish Cypriots cross mainly to work, shop, study, receive medical care and for leisure. During the first three years, Turkish Cypriot crossings increased every year (from 1,371,099 in 2003 to 2,222,199 in 2005), but then they decreased rapidly (1,638,734 in 2006 and 1,116,990 in 2007).6 This change is reflected in the interviews I conducted with Turkish Cypriots during that period. In the spring of 2006, one Turkish Cypriot, who used to cross very often, expressed his view on the border as follows: I lost my motivation to cross. I do not want to cross to the south anymore. It annoys me that some of my Greek Cypriot ‘friends’ (made sign of quotation marks) did not even cross once. I crossed to get an identity card, to see friends, to travel from Larnaca airport and to buy things. I have to say that the Greek Cypriot yoghurt is more tasteful than ours (laughs). We do not want more checkpoints to open. We see the border as a security. I heard similar comments from the Kozanlılar during my fieldwork in the village. Although many households in Kozan depend on the man’s income from his manual work in the south (as builder, painter,

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carpenter, etc.), I heard a lot of skeptical remarks. One sunny morning, in July 2006, I was chatting to some men who were sipping their coffee in front of Kozan’s bakkal. Someone introduced me to Mete, who had sparkling white teeth and looked intently at me over his half rimless glasses. He looked quite different from the other Kozanlılar at the coffee shop. He had lived abroad, was married to a German woman and had two children by her. After divorcing some years ago, Mete married a Kozanlı and now lives in the village. It was the only time I got the chance to speak to him and our conversation quickly turned to the border crossings. He spoke confidently in English and paused often so I could take careful notes: ‘It is not nice that you feel the borders. In a European country you should not feel the borders. I am a Cypriot. I hate borders.’ About half an hour later he said something that caught my attention: ‘Of course we feel safer on this side of the border, given everything that happened’. This was not the first time I heard Turkish Cypriots speak about feeling safe. Murat told me several times that, ‘although things are better now because we are free to go anywhere we want, it is good the Turkish army is still present. In the same vein we see the border as a form of security.’ When there was talk of opening more points of entry, such as the Ledra Street checkpoint (opened on 3 April 2008), I heard many Turkish Cypriots remarking that there was no need to open up more ‘gates’ (kapılar).7 At the same time I frequently heard complaints about the crossing procedures at the checkpoints.8 Like the Greek Cypriots, many of my Turkish Cypriot informants want to cross without impediments. The main difference between the two groups is that Greek Cypriots demand the permanent elimination of the border. One frequently seen graffiti slogan, ‘Our borders are in Kyrenia [a coastal town in the north]’, illustrates this. My Turkish Cypriots informants, by contrast, always emphasize the need for a tangible and visible security. This ties in with their communal past of fear and insecurity. ‘Greek Cypriots do not understand why we feel safer with the presence of the Turkish army’, Fahri explained on one occasion: Greek Cypriots have not been through the same long-term suffering as we did. I was displaced several times. I lived in enclaves,

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tent camps and in an army base. I want to feel safe on our side (bizim taraf). It is very good that we can cross now but we need the Greek Cypriots to understand why we want to stay here [in his village the north] and cannot move back to Paphos [where he comes from]. Research on the Turkish Cypriot legacy of their displacement confirms that ‘collective memories of war assume paramount importance for the future of a war-torn society such as Cyprus. Indeed, differences in the remembrance of what happened form one of the biggest obstacles for the efforts at rapprochement.’9 It was my informant Salih who phrased most poignantly how he sees the situation on Cyprus and its future: ‘Cyprus is a house with two rooms (iki odalı bir ev) where Turkish Cypriots live in one room and Greek Cypriots in the other. As a result of our past experiences, I believe that it will be better for both parties to stay like that.’ It is no coincidence that Salih used the metaphor of a house to describe the division of Cyprus. Houses are an important symbolic asset in Cypriot society, because a successful person is somebody who owns his own house. Turkish Cypriots would like to live under one roof with Greek Cypriots, but in separate rooms. What is clear is that the Turkish Cypriots would like to retain at least a notional border, an area in which they run their affairs, just like the two rooms in Salih’s metaphor. My data shows that Turkish Cypriot urbanites cross the border more often than villagers. I do not want to generalize this observation for two reasons. Firstly, there are no statistics available detailing where Turkish Cypriot border crossers live, and secondly, I only conducted fieldwork in one town (north Nicosia) and one village (Kozan). A practical reason that these city dwellers cross more often is perhaps because they live relatively close to a checkpoint, whereas Kozan is located much further away from a crossing point. The second reason, according to my village informants, is that they do not have time to cross. Many of the Kozanlılar have jobs as cheese makers, bread makers, farmers, shepherds, drivers, factory workers, etc., in or very close to, the village itself, which takes up most of their day. Most of the female Kozanlılar older than thirty-five, were housewives, although

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they contributed to their household by selling their own produce (such as home-made cheese) or helping others (e.g. taking care of each other’s children). When I asked Bahire, the local butcher’s wife, in March 2006, how many times she had crossed, she replied: ‘I crossed once. I went to south Nicosia with my husband.’ Bahire emphasized that she went without her daughters and that she does not want to go anymore. I asked if she had a RoC ID-card and she shook her head. Sema, mother of two young children, heard us talking and explained to me: My husband crosses every day to work in the south (güney’de).10 He does not want to cross in the weekends. I would like to go to Troodos mountains (Trodos dağları) again. I have been once and it was very nice. I would like to go for shopping in the south but it is all too expensive over there. Another woman turned to me and said: ‘When should I go anyway? Do I have the time?’ An older couple, Beyit and his wife Ceylan, have crossed five times since 2003. His nephew, a UK-based Turkish Cypriot, took them four times to Tera, their former Paphos village, every time he was on holiday in Cyprus. The last time he joined about fifty Turkish-Cypriots who visited the Polis area for a one-day excursion on a Greek Cypriot bus. My field sister, Ayşe, who studied in north Nicosia, crossed only a few times, although she was in the city every day. I asked her why she didn’t cross to shop or to have a coffee as her urbanite peers often do. She explained that she has to make sure she catches the bus back to Kozan and that she has no friends who do these things. After some months in the village, I observed that most of Ayşe’s friends come from neighbouring villages. We would visit them in their houses or they would visit Ayşe in Kozan. Moreover, after having observed her busy schedule – combining her studies with many household chores and making cheese to sell at the markets – I understand that Ayşe does not have much free time to drive to north Nicosia, cross at one of the checkpoints and go for an afternoon shopping or a snack with her friends. Turkish Cypriot urbanites, by contrast, cross often for such everyday activities. One can hear a lot of Turkish in south Nicosia’s main shopping streets, malls, cafes and

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restaurants. Ahmet told me that north Nicosians cross for day trips on a regular basis. They often organize an excursion, or have a meal in a restaurant in the south. During the most recent Şeker Bayramı (‘Sugar Festival’, a three-day celebration of the end of the Ramadan) many north Nicosians crossed the border in order to spend the day in the south.11 Villagers celebrate religious holidays in a more traditional fashion, by sharing a meal with relatives at home. Ahmet pointed out that the sense of community in north Nicosia is much looser than in the villages and that, as a consequence, city dwellers do not engage as frequently in such family reunions. For Turkish Cypriots, crossing does not pose the same sort of ethical dilemma as it does for Greek Cypriots. Graffiti slogans, such as ‘Tourists or refugees?’, used to castigate Greek Cypriots who cross, will not be found in the north of Cyprus. A second conclusion is that for Greek Cypriots, the border is illegitimate, and the only acceptable thing from their point of view would be to remove it. Turkish Cypriots would like to retain a notional border that for them symbolizes a form of security.

Second Reading: ‘Shopping the Border’12 Many Cypriots, but mainly Turkish Cypriots, cross the border to engage in ordinary activities of everyday life: to work, shop, visit doctors, and use other services. For the first few years after the border opened, some Greek Cypriots, primarily working-class women living close to one of the checkpoints, engaged in weekly shopping across the border. One of their favourite places to buy groceries is the Tuesday market in Gönyeli and the nearby supermarkets. I joined Agathi and Charalambia on several such shopping trips. They chatted with Turkish Cypriot traders about their goods and about everyday things. Agathi’s husband, Petros, took his morning coffee at the local coffee shop while the women compared, in colourful detail, the prices of the goods with those in the markets in south Nicosia. Chattering loudly, they checked out a watermelon or a bunch of grapes. When I asked them why they go through the trouble of crossing in order to shop, Agathi replied that

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if she goes there the Turkish Cypriots ‘would see things in a better way (to vlepoun me pio kalo mati)’. She told me it is the right thing to do – establishing relationships between Greek and Turkish Cypriots – and used the word ‘friendship’ (filia) a lot. And indeed, Agathi befriended some of the female sellers. On another occasion she told me that she would buy goods there, cigarettes, petrol, fruits, when they are cheaper (tha agoraso an einai pio ftina). Many Greek Cypriots do not agree with the practice of cross-border shopping. As one of them explained in an interview: My relatives go to a supermarket ‘over there’ (potsji). If they serve me anything that comes from there on the table, I will not touch it. Until there is a solution. Only then it will be ok that trade exists. I will not eat anything from there, apart from when they collected some oranges from our fields, our trees, for free. In addition to grocery shopping, Greek Cypriot cross-border shoppers go to Turkish Cypriot hairdressers, beauticians and dentists. They praise the service – Turkish Cypriots allegedly invest more time in each client – and the cheaper rates. From the winter of 2005 onward, two years after the border opened, I noticed a decline in the number of Greek Cypriot cross-border shoppers. The women complained that the prices went up and that it was not worth crossing anymore. My field family in Kozan told me they noticed that there were not as many Greek Cypriot buyers anymore in the markets in the north. Long after the weekly cross-border shopping stopped, the two items that my Greek Cypriot informants continued to buy in the north were cigarettes and petrol. When I visited Andreas’ village in the Morphou area with a party of six, he stopped to buy two cartons of cigarettes. He tore one of the boxes open and gave us each two packets to put in our handbags. Andreas hid the other box in the glove compartment of his car. Greek Cypriot men would also cross the border to frequent the casinos and private nightclubs. This practice generated many negative comments among Greek Cypriots. One woman told me: ‘Arostia einai (it is a disease [to gamble or visit brothels])’. As I already pointed out, gambling establishments are forbidden in the south of the island.

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When I drove at night along the coastal road near Kyrenia I saw many Greek Cypriot cars parked in the huge lots in front of the casinos. In December 2006, there was an article in a Greek Cypriot newspaper about a Greek Cypriot who had even gambled his own taverna (restaurant) and he lost. A couple of Greek Cypriot friends told me another casino-related story: At the funeral of a Greek Cypriot man there appeared four bodybuilder-like men in black suits who insisted on carrying the coffin. Nobody knew who these men were, not even his close relatives. It turned out that these men were bouncers in a Turkish Cypriot casino and they wanted to pay their last respects to their good client! Turkish Cypriots also cross the border for economic reasons. Many Turkish Cypriots cross to shop at the big supermarkets in the south. This is not because the goods are cheap – on the contrary – but because there are many goods, mostly European brands, which they cannot find in their local shops. One of my Turkish Cypriot language teachers, a 25-year-old upper class girl, told me: ‘I want to buy clothes from Zara and Mango! My mother buys perfumes and nappies from the brand Pampers. All these things we cannot find here. Although we support the Denktaş regime, we cross in order to buy those goods.’ In June 2007, the Greek Cypriot supermarkets were still full of Turkish Cypriot shoppers, but the number decreased from then on. In the spring of 2009, Mustafa explained to me that in the recent years more international chains had opened in north Nicosia and Kyrenia, and more international brands were now available. Mainland Turkish businesses obtained licenses to sell brand name goods and opened branches or exported their products to north Cyprus. Mustafa emphasized during our conversation that some Turkish Cypriots still cross to the south to shop as a form of protest at the political and economic situation in the north. ‘They want to show their disappointment and dissatisfaction because things have not changed drastically enough.’ When I stayed in Kozan I was asked to bring many goods from the south. At our daily coffee meetings, the women marvelled at the

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deodorant I used. They asked me to bring it, as well as tampons and many other toiletries with me. I also brought Greek Cypriot brandy and other alcoholic beverages that I knew my host liked. Many diabetic patients in the village asked me to bring medicines and needles. Ceylan, an eighty-year old Kozanlı, suffered from diabetes and needed to check her blood sugar on a daily basis. She used a glucose meter that somebody brought from the south. The alcohol pads, sterile finger lancets and test strips were purchased in the south. Turkish Cypriots also cross for treatment at the private clinics, specialized medical centres and especially the general hospital, where, unlike many Greek Cypriots, they are entitled to free medical care. Before the border opened Turkish Cypriots would go to Turkey or the United Kingdom for specific operations or treatments, or, in certain urgent cases, they were treated in the south. Many of my Turkish Cypriot informants explained that access to a variety of doctors and clinics is one of the most significant benefits of the border openings. The main reason that the number of crossings from the north is significantly higher is that a large number of Turkish Cypriots are employed in the south. Women work at hairdressers and as cleaners. Turkish Cypriot men work mainly at construction sites and petrol stations. Every day, around four in the afternoon, the queue at the Ledra Palace checkpoint is packed with Turkish Cypriot workers going home. All the sons and sons-in-law of my field family in the village worked in the south. They would wake before dawn to drive to the checkpoint. Once across, they go all over the south to work as painters, builders and carpenters. At the the beginning I only heard positive comments about their work; they were pleased they had found work – complaining there were no jobs for them in the north – and were on very good terms with their Greek Cypriot employers. Their employers visited them on Sundays at their houses in the north and attended their engagement and wedding parties. In an interview in July 2006, Ali, a sturdy villager in his mid-thirties, explained that they are paid different wages according to seniority and position: We work more or less eight hours per day. We leave Kozan at six in the morning. Sometimes we have to leave earlier, depending

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on where we work in the south. We start working at about seventhirty and finish around three o’clock. My younger brother Orhan earns 35 Cypriot pounds per day, because he works already two years in the south. The fiancée of my sister, Zafer, just finished his army service last month and joined us recently [working in the south]. He earns 28 Cypriot pounds per day. I earn 40 Cypriot pounds per day because I am a skilled workman (usta). A year later (autumn 2007), however, I began to hear more and more criticism from the Turkish Cypriot community. Fatma, mother of three sons working in the south, grumbled about the working conditions in the south. I paraphrase what she told me: Two of my sons found work now in our areas [north Cyprus]. You know, the work was dangerous and they were not well insured. People were dying: some Turkish Cypriot fell off the scaffolds while working. There were too many accidents. I think it is better they work on our side. Only my youngest son still works over there, he did not find a job here yet. In 2009, about 5000 Turkish Cypriots crossed the border daily to work in the south. Of these, only 2800 were registered with a trade union and received social insurance payments. According to Türk Medya Kıbrıs, the number of Turkish Cypriot workers in the south used to be higher in previous years.13 Another group of Turkish Cypriots who cross the border daily are those who study at private English schools or at one of the private English language universities, often with a RoC scholarship. The main difference between Greek and Turkish Cypriot behaviour is that crossing for economic reasons is seen by the overwhelming majority of Greek Cypriots as a political act that legitimizes the illegal regime.14 In 2010, I encountered very few Greek Cypriot cross-border shoppers. No Greek Cypriots seek employment across the border. Many of my Turkish Cypriot informants were very positive about the benefits that the opening of the borders brought, such as (free) medical care, specific consumer goods, employment and schooling. Not all

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Turkish Cypriots take up these opportunities, but there is a strong feeling, expressed to me on several occasions, that part of the suffering of their isolated community has now eased. The behavior of Turkish Cypriot border crossers might seem uncomplicated and innocent, but this activity has a political significance as well. For many Turkish Cypriots being able to cross the border marks the beginning of the end of their economic isolation.

Third Reading: Stereotypes Across the Border Ceylan, an eldery diabetic from Kozan, is a small, wrinkled woman with bright blue eyes and skin tanned from a life of hard work in the fields. She was born a deaf-mute. The first time she came over to the house where I was staying, my field mother explained that I was a Greek Cypriot by tapping her index finger on her nose and making a wave gesture. When Ceylan repeated the gesture after pointing towards me, my hostess explained that this means ‘Greek Cypriots’ because ‘Greek Cypriots have a big idea about themselves’. One morning over coffee, Ceylan and her husband Beyit explained to me some of their other gestures – always brief and fleeting movements of their hands. One sign was to pinch her nose as if there was some kind of stench in the air, also meaning ‘Greek Cypriots’. Her husband explained that Ceylan’s former neighbours in her Paphos village were Greek Cypriots with a pig farm. Also when she crosses her two fingers in the shape of a cross she indicates Greek Cypriots. When her fingers make a crescent shape she is talking about Turks or Turkish Cypriots, the shape of a cross indicates Greek Cypriots. Some signs were private between her and her relatives, but the sign of ‘those with their nose in the air’ is known by many of the Kozanlılar and I often heard that ‘Greek Cypriots are pretentious, they think they are everything’. Both Turkish and Greek Cypriots hold entrenched stereotypes about each other. These are apparent in everyday language and in cartoons. Now that Cypriots could cross the border and actually meet the ‘Other’, I noticed that the stereotypes I heard over the past decades were now reinforced rather than dispelled. Meetings with the ‘Other’ were often an occasion to maintain and strengthen popular stereotypes. Negative

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comments about the Turkish Cypriots were rife. The most common refrain was that ‘they are behind’ (poli mbiso) compared to the Greek Cypriots. Yiannis, a Greek Cypriot refugee living in Germany, told me what he thought when he visited his house in the area of Varosha (Maraş) for the first time: ‘Where is the hate? Where is this thing we are afraid from? The killers?’ During our conversation he repeated up to seven times ‘Nothing changed’ and ‘It is as if I waited for my friends to come out of their houses to play football’. But when I asked him about his contact with the local Turkish Cypriots and Turks he said that they annoyed him: ‘They do not keep their houses clean. They are behind. It was like I travelled with a time machine and went thirty years back in time. The inhabitant of my house was so proud to show me his fridge and the new flush toilet (niagara). Can you imagine?’ Greek Cypriot refugees firmly believe, and continuously reproduce the cliché that Turkish Cypriots neglect fields, trees, houses and whole properties and that they do not care where they live; ‘they just live’. Also younger Greek Cypriots reiterate this stereotype. A twenty-year old Greek Cypriot told me about her grandmother’s visit to her former village: She was very sad because when she was living there the fields were evergreen (ta chorafia itan kataprasina). Now none of the inhabitants cares about the environment (kanenas apo tous katoikous den asxolitai me tin fisi). They do nothing. They just live there (apla katoikoun). My grandmother was happy and emotional. She cried at times from joy and other times from sadness (eklege pote apo chara pote apo lipi). But there were, and still are, amicable meetings between Greek and Turkish Cypriots too. Panikos, a non-refugee in his early sixties, often donates blood and was called one day to do a blood transfusion to help a Turkish Cypriot boy. He referred with pride to this in one of our interviews: I went to the general hospital at seven in the morning. I was brought into the operation theatre where there were two beds. The boy was already on one of the beds and I had to lie down

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on the other one. It felt good to be able to do this. You see, my blood has very good qualities. (laughs) After the operation the boy’s parents came up to me. They did not stop thanking me. The mother wanted to kiss my hands but I refused. I did what I had to do. They invited me several times to go to their house in the north. On a later occasion I asked Panikos whether he took up the invitation, but he did not. He told me he had been a couple of times to the north but did not like the fact that he has to show identification at the checkpoints. I asked him whether he had any Turkish Cypriot friends and he told me he had some acquaintances he met through his work. Panikos explained that a Greek and a Turkish Cypriot can never be as close (demeni) as two Greek Cypriots or two Turkish Cypriots because ‘it is too much trouble to cross at a checkpoint in order to have a coffee together’, as Panikos phrased it. I, too, have the impression that there are many contacts between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, but strong, solid friendship between Greek and Turkish Cypriots are rather exceptional. In addition to the fact that old stereotypes were being revived, I also observed new clichés developing on both sides. These related to how ‘the Other’ dealt with the opening of the border. Greek Cypriots would say that most Turkish Cypriots were only interested in the benefits of the Republic of Cyprus. A stereotypical complaint would be that Turkish Cypriots were not only able to use Greek Cypriot properties, but they now asked for more on top. I rarely heard Petros talking negatively about Turkish Cypriots, but when it came to money and economy he was very bitter and repeated what I often heard from other Greek Cypriots. He told me that what bothered him most (afto pou me pirakse perisotero) is that his most fertile field was now left uncultivated. Instead of making a living from the field, as he used to do, they leave it bare and ‘then they complain they do not have any money’. Turkish Cypriots would generally comment on the Greek Cypriot refugees who want their houses and properties back. They were typecast as greedy and selfish. According to many Kozanlılar, Greek Cypriots are also pretentious and, like Ceylan, they used the same hand gesture

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to indicate this. In an interview in 2008, Ahmet portrayed Greek Cypriots this way: My father always warned me that I am too much of an idealist. He tells me that I am thinking in a very rosy way and that I will loose my passion soon. He was right after all. At first, I enjoyed crossing the border to meet my new Greek Cypriot friends, but now I am annoyed with them. It is always me who had to cross. Some of my ‘friends’ did not even cross once! It gets on my nerves that Greek Cypriots assume that Turkish Cypriots do not care about their lost properties and they believe we will not claim our houses. Greek Cypriots are always whining: ‘My home, my home, my fields! What will happen?’ They are so selfish. We also care for our lost houses and show interest in them. But the thing that upset me the most is that a lot of Greek Cypriots, even my friends, they call me Ahmetis. My name is Ahmet! There is no need to ‘Greekify’ my name. I am not Christakis, Vassilis or whatever . . . . They want me to become like them, they do not except me as I am. In addition to the differences, my informants on both sides often mentioned the similarities between the two communities. Ahmet, and many other Turkish Cypriots like him, told me: ‘Greek and Turkish Cypriots are copies of each other’. Anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis relates an incidence where a Turkish Cypriot tells him he would never have guessed he was a Greek Cypriot: ‘Oh, but you look just like us’ his informant said.15 During my fieldwork in Kozan, the villagers often said that Greek and Turkish Cypriots are the same. Statements that emphasized the differences between Turkish Cypriots and mainland Turks occasionally followed such remarks. One morning as he was flipping through a local newspaper Fahri told me: ‘I just read about a baby in Turkey that was used in drug trafficking. Can you believe that? Turkish Cypriots would never do that. Turkey has so many bad things. Turkish Cypriots are much better, we are Europeans after all.’ Greek Cypriots use the notion of ‘Europe’ to distinguish themselves from the Turkish Cypriots who, as one educated Greek Cypriot informant

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put it, might ‘look at first sight like Greek Cypriots’ but ‘are more like Turks than Europeans’.16 Stereotypes of resemblance and difference are very often found in the imaginations of ethnic pairs involved in a conflict. This phenomenon has also been observed among Israelis and Palestinians and Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats. Such perceptions of similarity and difference are often ‘employed for making categorical distinctions or facilitating arguments about the Self and the Others.’17 The ethnic stereotypes that Greek and Turkish Cypriots held about each other prior to the border openings are still very much alive and, if anything, have been strengthened by the contact between members of the two communities. Although there are many examples of positive contacts across the border, both Greek and Turkish Cypriots feel a lack of understanding for their position. In the following email received on 27 March 2006, a Turkish Cypriot informant summarized his view of the border: I hadn’t been aware of the similarity of the life and the people in the southern part of our island. It has been almost five years after the opening of the ‘borders’. Actually, I do not feel comfortable while crossing the border. Because your freedom in your own country is subject to limitation and you are not treated in the way you expect at any checkpoint, especially at Kermia [the Agios Domethios checkpoint]. I feel disturbed by the officers either looking strangely at me or trying to check me or my car due to their ‘responsibilities’. On the other hand, I can easily understand the feelings of a Greek Cypriot who does not want to show his/her ID or passport because I have the same feelings. But I cannot understand the resistance of many Greek Cypriots to visit the other half of their country. This means that some people are rather selfish and prejudiced and that the ‘border’ exists not only across the island but also in the minds of the people. I think this approach is not helpful for understanding each other better and the reunification of our island. I believe that people on both sides are unfortunately very reluctant to demand an immediate solution because they got used to live with the ‘border’ and the

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status quo on the island which points out that the opening of the ‘border’ was never enough! I still have some hopes left but people should change their mentality first so that we can all realize our dreams on this beautiful island . . . Why should we suffer more in order to see that we should start to act wisely?

A Symbol of Injustice The border remains, for both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, a symbol of injustice but there are significant nuances in their perception of the division. For Greek Cypriots the border symbolizes the suffering of a large part of their community, namely those who became refugees after 1974. The partial opening of the border has not fulfilled the Greek Cypriot quest for justice. On the contrary, many Greek Cypriots perceive the opening of the border as adding insult to injury. Although they can now cross they can only do so as ‘tourists’ in their own country. Greek Cypriot attitudes towards the border are unified by a common theme. Whether they have taken up or resisted the opportunity to cross the border, none of the actors involved accepts the legality of the border. Greek Cypriots refuse to recognize the division of their island as legitimate. However, the different ways in which this refusal is expressed are significant. Those Greek Cypriots who refuse to cross deny the existence of the border but, in a certain paradoxical sense, they reproduce it: the border is illegitimate but they refuse to cross it. This refusal to cross is also an acknowledgement of the existence of the border. The small number of Greek Cypriot cross-border shoppers, ‘recognize’ the border, but in a way that denies it: there is a border but they ignore it by crossing to do everyday things that do not normally require crossing a border.18 The Greek Cypriot refugee-pilgrims ‘recognize’ the border because, through it, they recognize themselves as refugees. Crossing the border allows them to emphasize this identity and recreate the community they have lost. Yet at the same time, the emphasis on their refugee status and lost community points to the illegitimacy of the border. Since 2002, Turkish Cypriots have continuously expressed deep discontent with the economic and socio-political isolation of their

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community. As a result of the border opening, their social suffering as a community has partly eased because they can now access things that they were previously denied. The suffering of their community prior to the division of Cyprus was caused by Greek Cypriots. This was neither sufficiently recognized by Greek Cypriots nor by the international community. Since the resounding Greek Cypriot ‘no’ vote in the 2004 referendum, Turkish Cypriots believe that a notional division of the island should be maintained, and that each community should run its affairs in its own area. In the Turkish Cypriot community there are no ethical objections to crossing the border. This does not mean, however, that they accept the legitimacy of the border as it is now. For Turkish Cypriots, the opening of the border signified the beginning of the end of their long-term isolation. It offered many opportunities for Turkish Cypriots: employment, education, access to certain consumer goods and most importantly official citizenship of the Republic of Cyprus and the European Union which was reinforced in the form of documents such as ID cards, passports and driving licenses. Turkish Cypriots also perceive the border as problematic and illegitimate because they have to go through the process of showing identification at the checkpoints. However, unlike the Greek Cypriots, most of my Turkish Cypriot informants argued that it would be good if a notional border remained in place. They want to live under one roof with the Greek Cypriots, but in two separate rooms of the same house.

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CHAPTER FIVE THIS IS OUR VILL AGE

The present inhabitants of Kozan come from different villages in the Paphos district, mainly from Akarsu (Akoursos) and Çakırlar (Tera), but also from Beşiktepe (Melandra), Uzunmeşe (Tremithousa), Dereboyu (Evretou) and Tatlıca (Zacharia).1 The Kozanlılar, therefore, originally come from a rural area in south Cyprus and were resettled in 1974 in the rural environment of Larnakas, which was renamed Kozan shortly after their arrival. The resettlement of the Kozanlılar took place in accordance with the policy in the north which attempted to maintain the integrity of communities in the resettlement process. In 2006, the number of Kozanlılar was 461 (225 men and 236 women).2 Before 1974, roughly 750 Larnatsjiotes lived in the village. The Kozanlılar, like any other community, are morally unified and divided at the same time along the usual lines, in terms of occupation and class, gender roles and age cohorts. Although they are refugees they are settled and embedded in the place they live now. At the time of my fieldwork (2004–2006), there were very few mainland Turks living in the village. Researcher Mete Hatay listed Kozan as a ‘native village’, i.e., a village ‘inhabited exclusively (minimum 90 per cent) by “native Turkish Cypriots”.’3

Livelihood Strategies On my first morning in Kozan I rose early. I was already sitting outside, at the back of the house, when it was barely six. That was the first

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and only time I woke up that early during my stay in Kozan. At the end of a long working day, during which I tried to keep pace with the energetic Kozanlılar women, I was knocked out. I hardly ever managed to stay awake for the midnight gathering on the balcony after we finished the bread making. By the time late-night drinks were served, I was ready for bed. I never understood how the villagers, and in particular the women I hung out with, had so much energy day after day. But that first morning I was too excited about being in the village to linger in bed. My field parents, Fatma and Murat, had already left for the market and their daughter, Ayşe, was still asleep. I sat on one of the worn sofas at the back of the house thinking how blessed I was to be in this beautiful village doing fieldwork. I had been determined to carry out fieldwork in Larnakas, as I always called the village in my mind, because I wanted to have my own memories of the place and not only the second-hand, nostalgic ones passed on to me by my Larnatsjiotis father and relatives. I was facing the yellowish-red coloured stone of the Pendadaktylos (Beşparmaklar). This mountainside, with a natural beauty so lush that makes it hard to look away, is the theme of many Greek Cypriot refugee poems and songs. I was woken from my reverie by Ayşe who suddenly appeared, rattling the car keys and asking if I wanted to come with her. After she manoeuvred out of the narrow parking spot, I asked her again how old she was. Perhaps I had misunderstood that she was barely seventeen? She laughed heartily and told me that she had just celebrated her seventeenth birthday. Ayşe pointed at the steering wheel and told me that her father had taught her how to drive the new jeep. ‘Who else would go and fetch the milk?’ she asked rhetorically. We headed in the direction of Karşıyaka (Vasilia), the next village, to pick the milk up from Kasim, the shepherd of the village. I proudly said the Turkish word çoban (shepherd), but Ayşe corrected me and said that they called Kasim a havayncı (animal herd) and a sütçü (milkman). Kasim’s goat pen was located outside the village, close to the monastery of Panagia ton Katharon, on a dirt track off the main paved road. The barn, ringed by old trees, was located in the middle of a desolate plain facing Nicosia. It consisted of one large redbrick building and some shabby shelters. The buildings and part of the nearby plot were fenced off with corrugated tin panels, large

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pieces of discarded wooden boards and rusted wiring. Kasim greeted me warmly. He had come the previous evening to welcome me in a kind-hearted manner. During the course of my fieldwork I grew close to his family. Kasim, who was at the time in his early forties, never tired of telling me stories of his childhood in Akarsu (Akoursos) in the Paphos district. The ground in front of the barn where he was milking a small white goat was covered with old, threadbare rugs and large pieces of worn canvas. There was no milking stand or stanchion to put the goat’s head through. Kasim simply sat on a wooden crate, carefully collecting the milk in a green plastic bucket. His strong muscled hands smoothly milked the goat in one sitting. Elif, Kasim’s daughter, was gathering the other goats for milking. She asked me, with a twinkle in her eye, if I wanted to come in. Elif, although only eight years old, was clearly experienced at handling the jumpy goats. She ran about among them in a pair of girly white slippers, catching the next one to be milked and bringing it to her father. Four big yellow jerry cans were lined up outside the fence. Ayşe and Kasim loaded them in the trunk of the jeep. We climbed in the car and waved goodbye. On the way back Ayşe explained that her family makes cheese four times a week and that Sevilay, Kasim’s wife, uses the goat milk for cheese production on the remaining three days.4 For every production round Fatma’s family buys four bidonlar (plastic jerry can) of milk from Kasim. One bidon contains 20 litres of milk. Ayşe would make the cheese in the morning, with the help of Sema, her sister-in-law. In the evenings, Fatma made a second batch of cheese, while the other family members made the bread. In addition to Fatma’s family and Sevilay, I encountered five other Kozanlılar families who engaged in the production of hellim. They all had a little room in their house, or a small outhouse, where they made the cheese. These were all equipped with the necessary tools: massive cauldrons and heating vessels, large gas rings, stainless steel tables, big slotted spoons, drainage containers, several sieves, round metal trays, plastic cubes and a refrigerator. Bahire, the butcher’s wife, used a separate building as her workplace, within walking distance from her house, which contained more supplies and bigger tools than the other tiny workshops in Kozan. She shared the workshop with her neighbour Hatice.

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The cheese makers (who are called hellimci) were all women. Very often their daughters, even as those as young as Elif, would help in the daily routines of hellim making, which would take about two hours per production round. The milk, predominantly from goats, but also from sheep and cows, was bought from Kasim or the shepherds from the nearby village of Alemdağ (Agridaki). The cheese production in Kozan is still ‘embedded socially as a gendered activity, and as a practice based on communal collaboration’.5 The collaboration is no longer based on sharing the pool of milk production of the individually owned animals, but in sharing the task of hellim making between several female members of one family.6 I observed that occasionally neighbours would also lend a hand if only one woman was making the cheese. Ayşe took the first bidon from the car and carried it with ease to the back of the house where, in one of the added outhouses, the hellim was being made. I took the next bidon, almost tripping over from its unexpected weight, and staggered behind Ayşe. At around ten in the morning we started production. I wondered how Ayşe and Sema, who had joined us, felt about my bumbling presence, always in need of advice and instructions on how to do things, like making hellim, which seemed to come naturally to them. My endless stream of questions appeared to amuse them, and after a while they spontaneously pointed at the tools we were using, naming them in Turkish. Two kinds of cheese are made in Kozan: hellim (in Greek halloumi) and nor (in Greek anari).7 Ayşe and Sema poured the milk in a large cauldron and Sema added rennet to instigate the curdling process. When the curds were set into soft cheese we removed them from the whey and pressed them into small plastic cubes. The hellim was then re-cooked and later sprinkled with salt and dried mint. After that we folded the cheese into its distinctive shape. Finally, the hellim was stored in the big refrigerator in the corner of the small workplace. Ayşe added some milk to the leftover whey and heated it to boiling point, continuously stirring it with a big spoon. Sema then skimmed the crumbly curds from the surface of the whey with a colander. We placed them in small containers for further drainage. Finally, Ayşe cut them into pieces. Habitually, everybody around would be offered some fresh nor,

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Learning how to make hellim

a real delicacy often mixed with carob syrup or honey. Most of the nor was air-dried in nylon stockings which were hung on a washing line. You would often see long lines of air-dried nor in the courtyards of the cheese-making families. Dried nor becomes a hard grating cheese which is preserved in a cool place and lasts for a very long time.

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Although Ayşe and Sema were making the cheeses with confidence, there was a girlish nonchalance in their actions. Strict hygiene rules were not followed by my two teenage friends. For instance, I did not see them wash their hands before we started the process and it was occasionally interrupted for a cigarette break (Sema) or preparing coffee (Ayşe). Elif, Kasim’s daughter, often joined us during the summer holidays and while chatting non-stop, she helped us now and then by pressing the curds or folding the cheese, without checking whether her hands were clean or not. This was in contrast to the more professional approach of Fatma and Bahire, who had a stricter hygiene regime and finished the whole routine much quicker. Larnatsjiotes who saw the drying nor in stockings during their visits to the village, would often comment negatively: ‘Is this how they dry the anari? In nylon socks? After they wore them? We used kouroukla (a white, transparent cloth made of very thin threads) or small baskets to dry the anari. We were very clean.’ This is another example of how some Greek Cypriots stereotype Turkish Cypriots as dirty. Critique on the village-based producers

Lines of air-dried nor

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finds support in the discourse of large Cypriot dairy companies. Welz and Andilios cite the technical director of one such plant who commented on the lack of hygiene of the small-scale cheese producers: ‘We are talking about nasty bacteria – salmonella, listeria, Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus cereus. You eat one halloumi and you die.’8 I never heard such concerns voiced by the Kozanlılar or other Turkish Cypriots who prefer the village-style hellim made on a small-scale. This is in congruence with the findings of anthropologist Gisela Welz: This ‘safe’ halloumi [produced by big companies] devoid of risk should be expected to instil what in today’s economy is called ‘consumer confidence’. However, for large portions of the Cypriot population, ‘safe’ halloumi does not connote ‘good’ halloumi. Rather, domestic consumers often avoid the industriallymanufactured product if they can help it, finding its taste bland and of little appeal.9 The Kozanlılar use their homemade cheese for their own (extended) families, sell it to co-villagers and take large orders from Turkish Cypriot urbanites. Some families, like Fatma and Murat’s, sell their produce on the market in north Nicosia and other towns. My host family had another small-scale enterprise: the local bakery. The bread was sold to Kozanlılar who came to the house for their daily loaf, very often late in the evening just as the fresh bread was being taken out of the oven. Fatma and Murat also had a large delivery round in Kozan and the neighbouring village of Alemdağ (Agridaki). More bread was sold, together with the homemade dairy products, at the local markets which they frequented more or less every weekday. The family had invested in three wood-fired ovens which were lined up at the back of the house. They produced three types of village bread (köy ekmeği): the round sandwich bread (ekmek), sesame rusks (peksimetler) and traditional buns (çörekler). It was Fatma whom the Kozanlılar called the baker (ekmekçi), and she herself identified with it, although the actual bread production was really a task shared by all the family members. The bread making process

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started during dinner and finished late in the evening. Dinner, for approximately nine people, was habitually prepared by Ayşe, Sema and Fatma. It was eaten in shifts of three persons at a time, inbetween the evening hellim production, preparation of the dough for the different kinds of bread and the lighting of the ovens. The two sons of the family, Ali and Orhan, who both held day-jobs as labourers in south Cyprus, were responsible for collecting the wood (bunches of dry sticks), lighting the fire and making the workshop ready for the bread making. After about an hour of pre-heating, the embers and the ash were swept out or pushed to one side of the oven. The preparation and kneading of the dough took place in the larger of the two outhouses. Usually it was Fatma and Orhan who would add all the ingredients into the big kneading machine which was powered by electricity. Ali would shape the dough into large round loaves, wrap them in thin white cloths, like tea towels, and place each loaf in a small plastic basket. Ayşe would take the baskets from her brother and align them on a wooden plank in the workshop. Once there were enough baskets lined up she would shout for Orhan who would quickly come and carry the wooden plank outside. He set it loosely on one shoulder, balancing it with his hands, and carried it to the area in front of the oven. After a seemingly short rising time, a make-shift assembly line was quickly made when the first baskets arrived: Ayşe and I sprinkled flour on the loaves of bread, Sema took them out of their baskets and made an incision around the bread with a sharp knife and put them on the end of the shovel held by Orhan. The men would then insert the bread into the oven with swift, experienced movements, using long handled shovels. Both brothers were well aware of their skilled handling of the long shovels and often sang, smoked a cigarette or teased the women around them, never losing the rhythm of the assembly line. Around that time, other villagers would come round to the back of the house, bringing their children along. They would sit on the old sofas conveniently placed near the ovens and chat while the members of my host family worked, sweat running down their faces from the heat of the ovens and the intensive speed with which they accomplished their tasks. Fatma, in the meantime, ran between the two

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Kinship chart

outhouses, checking on the bread production and simultaneously making another batch of hellim. The procedure would start all over again for çörek, made of braided strands of dough, and peksimet, which was made from excess bread. In addition to the Kozanlılar who sold their homemade products, like cheese and bread, there were also some local farmers who sold the produce from their fields and trees, to both their co-villagers and at the local markets. My impression was that the neighbouring village of Alemdağ (Agridaki), which I visited often, had more villagers living off of their fields than the Kozanlılar, who generally had jobs outside the agricultural realm.10 Within the Kozanlılar community there is a well-developed division of labour. There are unskilled labourers, skilled manual workers, farmers, white-collar workers (e.g. civil servants, insurance agents, bank employees and other office workers), teachers, policemen, soldiers and small business holders (such as the baker, the butcher, the bakkal (grocer), the coffee shop owners, the barber, the beautician and a restaurant owner). My field family illustrated the diversity of livelihoods very accurately. Two family members have a job in the city: Mustafa is a civil servant and Neşe works in an insurance agency. The two sons and one

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son-in-law work as labourers outside the village, in different localities in the south of Cyprus. It is important to point out that Orhan and Zafer are unskilled manual workers and Ali is a skilled worker with a higher income. The youngest daughter is studying in north Nicosia to become a primary school teacher. Ayşe’s ambition is to become a teacher and have all the advantages that a civil service job offers. Two women, Sevim and Sema, are housewives but are both involved in Fatma’s small business by helping with the cheese and bread production. There was certainly a complexity in the local livelihood strategies. Firstly, Kozanlılar held different jobs at the same time and secondly, they changed jobs more than once in the course of their active working lives. A good example of the former is the fact that many villagers were involved in cheese making. The sales of hellim, bread or produce from local crops, provided a small supplementary income to the household budget. The extra income was often badly needed because usually only the man had a job with a steady income. It was a rule rather than an exception that households in Kozan had several sources of income. Ömer, for example, (62) worked as a truck driver (kamyon söförü), but was a farmer (çiftçi) too. The villagers also readily changed jobs for different reasons: higher income, health issues and changed family situation. Murat, for example, was employed in the army for twelve years. Then he worked in a bank until he retired at an early age. At the same time, he owned a local coffee shop for some years. Since his retirement he has helped Fatma by delivering bread and selling their products at local markets. His pension was thus supplemented by the income from the cheese and bread sales, two small enterprises mainly run by Fatma. Beyit, a neighbour of my field family, has worked his entire life as an unskilled labourer, mainly in the fields. Since he officially retired, Beyit has become Kozan’s postman (postacı). He installed a desk in the small front room of his house and delivers the post, which arrives at his house, to the villagers. It should not come as a surprise that there is often a differentiation of social class in the village, which does not always reflect the economic status of the family. The local class structure and social complexity in the village is a second division in the Kozanlılar community.

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Social Distinctions Elif ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, followed closely by her six-year-old brother Hasan. Elif hugged me and started playing with my hair, making tiny braids, while Hasan shyly handed me a card. I looked at him quizzically and he softly said that it was an invitation for his sünnet (circumcision) party. ‘Of course I will come’, I replied and asked him what present he would like, unaware that conventional gifts at such occasions were money, gold or jewellery. Hasan’s eyes lit up and he told me, very slowly, articulating the words one by one: a remote control toy car. He cupped his hands into the shape of a car and pretended to be playing with a remote control. He completed the show with car sound effects. I agreed and turned my attention to the invitation, which was poorly printed on hard cardboard with bold black-andwhite lettering and a picture of a little prince on a horse. Together with Elif, who loved to play my Turkish ‘teacher’, I read the text out loud:11 Oğlumuz HASAN Dıyorkı (Our son Hasan says) Sünnet erkekgliğin temeli (circumcision is the basis of masculinity) Göreceğim beni seveni (I will meet the people who like me) Acele kes doctor amca (Hey doctor cut it quickly) Karşılayacağım gelenı (I need to welcome the people who are visiting me) ANNEM Sevilay BABAM Kasim (mother Sevilay and father Kasim) Yer Kozan köy spor kulübü düğün salonu (Venue: Kozan’s Sporting Club Wedding Hall) Tarih: 12 Ağustos 2005 CUMA (Date: Friday 12 August 2005) NOT. 9 Ağustos 17:30, da Kozan koyde atla gezdırıleek (Note: on 9 August at 17h30, he will be carried around on a horse in Kozan) Hasan was still playing with his imaginary toy car while I struggled through the text. Suddenly he pulled my sleeve and shouted ‘Lisa, pil pil!’ (Lisa, battery battery!). Hasan did not trust my understanding of

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Turkish and usually addressed me in monosyllabic words. He obviously knew a remote controlled car would be useless without the batteries. Hasan’s modest sünnet invitation contrasted sharply with Ali (son of Fatma and Murat) and Neşe’s chic wedding invitation. It had a picture of the couple on translucent paper attached with a golden ribbon to the actual invitation with coloured embossed print. The text read: Mutluluğun anahtarı elimizdeyse, Kalbimize giden yol sevgide ise, Duymak istediğimiz iki kelime ise, Tüm dünyaya haykırarak söylüyoruz, Biz evleniyoruz. Düğünümüze sizleri de bekliyoruz. Fatma ve Murat Ayşe ve Münür (Ekmekçi) (Şoför Okulu) 4 Ağustos 2005 Saat: 20.30 - 23.30 Gönyeli Yalçın Park NOT: Nikah 20.15te salonda kıyılacaktır. 19.15te Kozanköy ve Dikmen’den minibüs kalkacaktır. If the key to happiness is in our hands, If the way to our hearts is through love, If the things we want to hear are those two words, We are exclaiming to the whole world, We are getting married! We are expecting you as well at our wedding. Ayşe and Münür Fatma and Murat (Driving School) (Baker) 4 August 2005 Time: 20h30 to 23h30 Gönyeli Yalçın Park NOTE: The official marriage ceremony will be held at 20h15 in the hall. At 19h15 there will be a minibus service from Kozan and Dikmen [Dikomo]

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The social class hierarchy was apparent not only in the invitations, but in many aspects of both events: the location, the dress code, the photographer and the behaviour of the main actors. In order to illustrate class distinctions in Kozan, I will analyse the wedding (evlenme töreni) of Neşe and Ali and the circumcision ritual (sünnet, short for sünnet töreni) of Hasan. All Turkish-Cypriot males are circumcised, generally between the ages of 5 and 9 and overall before the boy turns 11. Traditionally, this was performed by a sünnetçi, assisted by male family members, at the boy’s house. At present, both in cities and villages, a doctor performs the circumcision in a clinic. My Turkish Cypriot informants in north Nicosia told me that most circumcisions in their families were performed right after birth. As for the second ritual, for Turkish Cypriots getting married is an ultimate life-goal, just as it is for Greek Cypriots. The change in status from single to married cannot be underestimated in Cypriot society. Consequently, the wedding day constitutes, for both the couple and the parents, an important moment of pride, display and achievement.12 Three days before the sünnet party (when the actual circumcision takes place), Hasan was paraded on a horse around the village adorned in a white prince-like costume, including the typical hat, cape and staff. This procession showed continuity with the traditional celebration of the circumcision ritual. These parades are still popular in Turkish Cypriot villages but are rarely seen in the city. One urbanite informant distanced himself from this ritual by stating that such a procession is ‘really something for peasants’. I arrived early at the düğün salonu, where everything was already laid out for the party. The celebration took place in a big square behind the building where a makeshift stage was set up. Hasan, wearing a white gauze nightgown, was lying on a lavishly decorated bed. It was a simple wooden bed made up with white and gold sheets, ringed by a colourful bow of balloons and plastic roses. Hasan’s white prince costume was displayed at one side of the bed and two chairs, for his parents, were put on the other side. Some village children, dressed up for the occasion, gathered around Hasan, laughing. Hasan kept his cool and had a small stiff smile on his face most of the evening. I didn’t know if he was still in pain from the actual circumcision or if he was

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The sünnet party

just overwhelmed by all the attention. Elif was jumping up and down trying to be helpful by constantly re-arranging the pillows on Hasan’s bed. She was dolled up for the occasion, wearing make-up and shoes with tiny heels. Her pastel green dress was a miniature of her mother’s outfit. Sevilay was visibly nervous, checking whether her hair, tucked into a classic bridal bun, was still in place. She was heavily made up and her dress was very much like the kind Cypriot bridesmaids wear. Kasim, who looked even more anxious than Sevilay, was wearing a pair of black dress trousers, a starched white shirt and a tie in pastel green, which matched the dresses of his wife and daughter. The Kozanlılar started arriving and sat in little groups on the white plastic chairs spread around the square. Three musicians, with keyboard, hand drum and violin, installed themselves in a corner of the square. In spite of the small fan placed between them sweat was streaming down their faces. Kasim, used to long hours of solitude whilst shepherding his flock, was standing on one side of the bed. His body language revealed that he was very uncomfortable being in the centre of attention. Kasim became visibly distressed as the musicians played the first traditional tune. Hasan got up from the bed and was paraded, in-between his parents, around the square. He walked

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awkwardly in miniscule beige slippers, keeping his head straight so his prince’s hat would not fall off, holding hands with Kasim and Sevilay. Hasan, now returned to the bed, was ready to receive gifts and compliments for his bravery. Kasim and Sevilay then walked to the middle of the square where they danced a slow dance, very similar to the opening dance on a wedding. They looked ill at ease and their discomfort was reflected in their body language. When the music changed to a more upbeat popular rhythm other villagers joined them on the dance floor. I queued with the other Kozanlılar to greet the parents and offer Hasan his present. When I came closer to the bed Hasan’s eyes focused on the present I was holding. He immediately ripped off the paper when I handed it to him and caressed the toy car as if it was a small pet. Hasan put it next to his pillow where it stayed the whole evening. When the dancing was in full swing the music stopped abruptly and the lights went off. It was an electricity cut, something that happened regularly in the village. I saw that this was causing huge distress for Kasim. Some villagers appeared with kerosene lanterns and a little later a generator was located and the party resumed. It was only now that the well-to-do Kozanlılar arrived at the düğün salonu. Fatma and Murat appeared very late, as befitted their higher status in the village. The modest and nervous behaviour of Kasim and Sevilay was in sharp contrast to the self-confident ease that Murat, and even more so his wife Fatma, displayed on the wedding day of their son Ali. Just as they had arrived late at Hasan’s sünnet, they had arrived late at the different locations where the wedding preparations and celebration took place. All of these were held in north Nicosia, none in the village itself. Fatma had arrived at the last moment at the hairdressing saloon where the bride, Neşe, and the other women (sisters, sistersin-law and her mother) were getting ready; their hair was done, they were made up and they were getting dressed at a trendy hair salon in the city. When Fatma rushed in so late the hairdresser had to focus all her attention on her in order to get her ready on time. The whole party left for the photographer’s studio without Fatma, who was not ready yet. Ali arrived and complimented his bride-to-be and all the other women. The couple was getting visibly nervous because of the

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absence of Fatma and Murat, but did not express any agitation when they finally arrived. Pictures were taken and it was again Fatma who was directing the show, making suggestions about who should have his or her picture taken. It was also Fatma and Murat who insisted I should be in some of the family pictures. I protested because I felt uncomfortable posing next to Ali and Neşe. I had gotten to know them well, but was not as close to them as I was to Sema and Ayşe. The fact that Murat and Fatma wanted me in the pictures was significant. I learned during my fieldwork that it was not only as a gesture of hospitality that they had invited me to live with their family. The ability to offer such hospitality also pointed to their social status in the village. Taking in a foreigner was a confirmation of their connections outside Kozan. Murat told me on more than one occasion that he would like his youngest daughter Ayşe to keep in touch with me: ‘It is good for her to have relationships with people from abroad’. I had attended many weddings of town dwellers in Nicosia and Kyrenia (Girne). Ali and Neşe’s wedding party did not differ from those occasions, either in location, food or drinks. The choice of Gönyeli Yalçın Park, a popular venue in Nicosia for wedding receptions is in itself a mark of class distinction. The arrangement of a minibus to pick the Kozanlılar and Dikmenler up from their villages and bring them to the city shows the affluence of the hosts. And in case anyone missed these markers of status, the wedding invitation would reiterate them by mentioning the professions of the couple’s parents (driving school owner and baker). No profession was indicated on the sünnet invitation of the shepherd’s son, and on the wedding invitations of people with a lower status, only the place where the parents lived was indicated.13 Class distinctions were expressed in everyday village life in different ways. The well off in the village shared a common life-style that was readily apparent in the car(s) they owned, the size of their houses and the way they were furnished and decorated. Fatma and Murat lived in one of the biggest houses in Kozan, which was located in the village centre and stood out because it was built on a small hill. When I told my Larnatsjiotes acquaintances which house I was living in, they commented: ‘Ah, in the dipato (a two-floor house). It was one of the nicest houses in Larnakas.’ Murat was proud

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to show the changes he had made to the house. He had renovated the bathroom and added a large bath and a shower stall decorated with trendy light-blue tiles; he had the living room re-painted in a soft pink colour, and had added an extension to the house, including the two outhouses for bread and cheese production. During my stay in the village he had the outside staircase rebuilt and a metal balustrade added. It was clear that Murat did not do any of the manual work himself, because he stressed that his fairly good paycheck as a bank employee allowed him to renovate the house. They were assigned this house on the basis of a ‘point system’, a policy that maintained but also created hierarchies among Turkish Cypriots. Fatma and Murat left a considerable amount of property behind in the south of Cyprus, including a newly built house and fields in Tera.14 The living room of their house in Kozan was furnished with expensive-looking furniture, in contrast to the worn-out furniture in other houses. There was a small TV set in the kitchen and a large flat-screen TV in the living room. On one of the first days of my fieldwork Murat told me to sit in the living room, which was not often used, to write up my field notes. He switched on the air-conditioning and Fatma proudly added: ‘We are the only ones in Kozan who have klima (air-conditioning). We have a unit in the living room, in Ayşe’s bedroom and in ours.’ The air-conditioning was more of a symbolic display of wealth, rather than a functional item. It was rarely used because of the lack of sufficient electricity. Fatma and Murat owned two big cars and had no problem replacing a household item when it broke down (as was the case with the oven which had not been working properly for some days). Fatma asked one of her sons to buy a specific type of microwave in the city which he brought her the same evening. They were also full of pride about the fact that they owned a computer. Fatma told me to have a look at ‘the television you can write on’ (teliorasi pou grafeis). Their grandchildren and other village children, like Elif and her brother Hasan, loved to play games on the computer. Besides that nobody used it, not even Ayşe, in whose bedroom the computer stood on a small desk. When I visited Fahri’s house, located at the entrance of Kozan, he proudly announced that he too had recently installed an air-conditioning system. ‘You see, we are just like Fatma and Murat, we have a klima as well’. Fahri had

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invited me many times to come and stay with their family. There was certainly a competitive spirit among the Kozanlılar from the higher social classes. Fahri’s greatest source of pride was that he was able to send his youngest daughter to study in Turkey, while Ayşe was studying in Nicosia, which he did not consider as prestigious. Once a week a cleaning lady, Vahide, came to Fatma’s house. She was the wife of the local hoca (village imam), who recently arrived from Turkey. Although Fatma and Ayşe were friendly to Vahide, they did not engage in intimate conversations. One day Fatma filled a large bin liner with old clothes. She told me it was for Vahide ‘who comes from Turkey and is very poor’.15 Fatma and Murat had also been able to provide their son Ali with a house in Kozan which they had completely renovated and furnished in a trendy fashion, and they were in the process of building a house for their son Orhan, who was married to Sema. The foundation and concrete structure of the house, located behind Fatma and Murat’s house, were finished by the time I left Kozan. Social distinctions were also visible in consumption patterns. On many occasions I went with Ayşe to a bakkal outside the village where they sold ‘real coke’ (Pepsi) rather than the nameless brand that was available at the local grocer. Buying brand name drinks was something that the family of Kasim, the shepherd, would never do. On the occasions soft drinks were provided in their house, they were a nameless brand. Ayşe also frequented beauticians for wax-treatments. Kozanlılar women from the lower social classes would simply do this in each other’s houses. One day I had lunch in the house of Sevim, Fatma’s oldest daughter, who was married to Mustafa, who worked in Nicosia as a civil servant. Their house looked very much like the houses of the Turkish Cypriot middle-class town dwellers. The family gathered around the table and the children were only allowed to go and play when everybody had finished eating. This was in complete contrast to the unruly behaviour I observed during lunches I had had in other less well-to-do households. After lunch, their two children, Ibrahim and Fatma, jumped from their chairs and asked me whether I wanted to see their bedrooms. They each had a separate bedroom with stylish children’s furniture overloaded with a large collection of toys. Ibrahim had his own computer in his bedroom. Such luxury was not

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to be found in the tiny bedroom Hasan and Elif shared. Some weeks after the sünnet Hasan was still playing with the remote controlled toy car. Kasim told me he had already spent a fortune on batteries. Almost apologetically he stated that his children did not have many toys. Kasim’s family certainly encountered more financial hardship than Murat, Fahri and Mustafa. Kasim, the village shepherd, was only five when he left Akarsu (Akoursos) and came to Kozan. He married Sevilay, a non-refugee from Mağusa (Famagusta). Sevilay did not have a paid job. She helped her husband as much as she could, ran the household with two young children and made dairy products three times a week. They lived in a small, run-down and rather sparsely furnished house on the outskirts of the village. Kasim and Sevilay did not own a car, nor did they know how to drive. Many of the villagers of low social status were engaged in a patron-client relationship with co-villagers of a higher social class. For example, Murat and Fatma were certainly patrons to Kasim. They bought his milk, thus insuring part of his livelihood, but also helped him in other ways. One evening there was a long discussion between the three men: Kasim, visibly distressed, Murat and the local butcher, Cemal. Kasim had noticed that some of his goats were disappearing overnight. He eventually found out that they were being stolen. The thief would kill the animals and sell the meat on the market. It was Murat who arranged for the police to come and help. They chased the thief late into the night but they did not manage to catch him. Although there were class differences among the Kozanlılar, in our conversations the villagers would stress that they ‘were all one big family’, or that ‘we are all human beings (anthropi)’.16 Clearly, Kozan was a well-integrated community, in which, as Peter Loizos noted about the Greek Cypriot village he had studied, ‘in spite of wealth or status differences, people cared more about the opinions of other villagers than about values or judgements from the wider society’.17

Village Men and Women Both the back and the front door of my field family’s house were always open, as is the custom in Turkish Cypriot villages. It signals

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that the residents are at home and available to receive co-villagers. It was considered rude and against the rules of hospitality to keep one’s front door closed. Even in winter the door would be left slightly ajar or the family members would regularly check if there was anybody at the door. On one occasion when Neşe and Ali had their front door closed, there were rumours in the village that there might be a domestic row. As it turned out Neşe was unwell and her mother had picked her up (hence the fact that Neşe’s car was still parked outside her house). The everyday lives of the Kozanlılar, who claimed to be ‘one family’, was full of intrigues, small daily quarrels and competition. The gossip these petty animosities produced made the best reality TV soap opera. Although I observed that there were Kozanlılar men who were not on speaking terms with one another or limited their encounters to a curt greeting, I had more access, as a woman, to the antagonism that existed between some of the village women. Minor disputes were settled in a matter of hours or days, other rows produced long-term conflicts between families. Before I turn to the role of women in guarding their families’ reputation, I will refer to two quarrels I encountered during my stay. During my first fieldwork period in Kozan, Sema would often take me to her sister-in-law’s family who lived just opposite Fatma and Murat. Sema’s brother Hüseyin had married a Kozanlı and the couple was now living in Serhatköy (Philia), where Sema and Hüseyin had grown up. We shared many coffees together with her brother’s in-laws. When I arrived for a second fieldwork round, four months after I had left the village, and suggested we go and say hello to them. Sema adamantly refused and said she was not on speaking terms with the family anymore. Her brother was involved in a quarrel with his parents-in-law over a financial matter, of which I never learned the details, and Sema refused to speak to any of her sister-in-law’s relatives in Kozan. We would pass this house many times daily and Sema would simply turn her head and completely ignore these people, who often sat at the front of their house. I never discussed the issue with Fatma but I observed that she, too, kept a distance from her neighbours, the relatives of her daughter-in-law Sema. At some point during that fieldwork round, after I had been away for a weekend, I learned upon arrival at Fatma

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and Murat’s house that now Sema and Fatma had fallen out. Ayşe took me aside and explained that, if I wanted to see Sema, I would have to go to her house, where she now spent most of her time, whereas before she had practically lived in Fatma’s house. The row had allegedly been about Fatma’s interference in the lives of her son Orhan and her daughter-in-law Sema.18 Fatma did not seem to take the argument very seriously and told me that Sema was behaving like a ‘little child’ (san moro) by not talking to her and that she would soon come to her senses. Sema, on the other hand, was very angry and sat long mornings sulking in her small house. She was often alone as her husband Orhan left early for work in south Cyprus, and her son, Murat (then seven months old) lived with her mother in Serhatköy during the week. One day, Sema showed up for the morning hellim production and the old routine was re-established. Apparently, she had talked to Fatma and they had settled their dispute. That evening Orhan winked at me when Fatma and Sema were preparing food together, which suggested that he had been involved as mediator to end the row. I never heard Fatma, Sema or Ayşe discuss the matter with other women in the village. As has been noted by other anthropologists working in the Mediterranean, the internal affairs of a household may not be harmonious, but they are not discussed with people outside the home.19 The representation of Mediterranean women as being restricted to the private realm and excluded from the public sphere, conceptualized as the ‘honour and shame’ dichotomy has now long been contested and challenged by anthropologists working in the Mediterranean.20 The ‘honour and shame’ complex, outlining both a behavioural and spatial separation of men and women, was particularly criticised for its portrayal of women as suppressed, passive and isolated.21 As I was becoming integrated into the social fabric of village life, I followed the routine of the housewives and the women who worked in the village. Every morning after we made cheese, Ayşe and Sema would take me to a house in the neighbourhood where we had coffee. This kind of socialising occurred among groups of women who were at similar stages in their lives. I would normally join Ayşe and Sema who paid coffee visits to female co-villagers of around the same age and had young kids at school or babies at home. The group of women who

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came together for coffee could be as small as three or as large as ten. No men would be present. The elder women of my neighbourhood also gathered every morning for a coffee. They would often sit outside one of the women’s front door, on small stools or plastic chairs. These groups tended to be smaller, often three to four women who were each other’s immediate neighbours. With the blaring sound of a music TV channel in the background, little more than trivial tittletattle was exchanged. If the group was smaller the women would engage in gossip (dedikodu and meraklı, ([to be] curious) about co-villagers. There were two coffee shops that were open daily, but women were not a part of this scene. The first was the düğün salonu (reception hall), which was also used as a coffee shop. I never joined the men who had their morning coffees there. This was still an exclusively male space. I used to pass by it several times a day and I never saw more than a handful of usually older men sitting on the little porch of the reception hall. The other coffee shop was located near my field family’s house. It was in fact the local grocery (bakkal) but the large, covered entrance area served as a coffee shop, with four small tables and a dozen wooden chairs. Ozkul and his wife Damla ran the grocery. They lived in a large house close to their bakkal, but had recently built a house in Gönyeli (north Nicosia), where their children and grandchildren lived, and only came to Kozan to open the shop. It was often Damla who would be sitting behind the counter of the small shop, because Ozkul was still in Gönyeli or resting in his Kozan house. It would thus be a woman who served the men coffee and engaged in small talk with the male clients. I had been invited on more than one occasion to join the men for a coffee when I was in the bakkal shopping for a few items. In the summer the village children of the neighbourhood would buy candy or juice in carton boxes and linger on the steps of the coffee shop. Neither the women who were ‘drinking coffee’ (kahve içer) together nor the men would take steps to interact any further. In fact, it was rare to see co-villagers sharing food. Dinner parties were not a form of socialising in Kozan, eating together was limited to the nuclear family and close relatives.22 Evening entertainment included visiting neighbours or relatives for a drink. Most of the year this took place outside in the courtyard under the vines, or on the balcony. In winter

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when it was too cold to sit outside, small groups would sit together in the informal living room normally located close to the front door and the kitchen.23 Bahire and her husband Cemal, the local butcher, would habitually sit with their immediate neighbours Hatice and her husband Mahmut. The women would usually drink coffee while the men preferred an alcoholic beverage (whisky or Greek Cypriot brandy). Some sweets (cheese pies or homemade jellied fruit) and a plate of uncooked titbits (cucumber, slices of hellim and nuts) were offered. The conversation would cover a range of topics: upcoming celebrations, local problems, family affairs and politics. None of these subjects would be exclusively discussed by either the men or women. One evening I joined the two couples on Hatice’s terrace and the women asked me whether I wanted them to ‘read my cup’. Reading coffee grounds is a way of predicting the future, using the coffee cup as crystal ball. It is also a pretext to talk about the emotions and relationships that preoccupy the women.24 I agreed and realized that my informants were curious about my personal life and wanted to find out more. When I finished my coffee, Bahire covered my cup with the saucer, shook it and turned it upside down so that the moist residue ran down the sides of the cup and onto the saucer. She then analysed the patterns formed by the sediment inside the cup. Bahire predicted that I would soon officially commit to my partner (she knew I had a relationship) and that we would give each other our ‘word’ (söz). Mahmut interfered and said I should get engaged (nişanlı) right away. Coffee ground readings are usually an exclusively female activity.25 In this case, the men did not really engage in the ritual, but they did not keep a distance either. I witnessed another occasion of ‘reading the cup’, this time at a Saturday morning gathering. We were sitting on the small balcony of Nevin’s house in a party of nine (three men, four women and two children). The men were talking by themselves sitting in a small circle around a low coffee table, oblivious to what was being discussed by the women. The women sat around a larger table. The oldest woman of the party, Ayla, read Nevin’s coffee grounds. I could not entirely follow the conversation, as the woman was talking directly to Nevin and I felt that interrupting the ritual would be rude. Anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis explains that in Greece coffee cup readings took

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place in ‘the kitchen or some imaginatively created on-the-spot “right space” for an intimate, protected communication. It is definitively a private space, a feminized space’.26 This did not seem to be the case in Kozan. On the two occasions I have just related, the activity of coffee cup reading took place outdoors and in the presence of men (although they did not participate). It was not a ‘feminised’ ritual. The everyday activity of coffee drinking, in the late morning after the household chores had been done or in the evening after dinner, was still a gendered activity, but not as strictly gender-segregated in Kozan as in other southern European rural localities. Anthropologist Roger Just wrote that in his field site, a small Greek village, ‘the coffee-shops and drinking places constituted a public world where conspicuous attendance was obligatory, for a man who kept himself to himself or who remained at home was seen either to be failing in his social duties towards others or to be admitting to his own inadequacy’.27 During his fieldwork in north Cyprus, anthropologist Kjetil Fosshagen noted in the mid-1990s that there was a ‘near absence of exclusively male public arenas for urban Turkish Cypriots’.28 Although there were two coffee shops in the village, these were not frequented by all male Kozanlılar but mostly by elderly men who would go more often in the mornings than in the evenings. My observation confirms Fosshagen’s findings, namely that Turkish Cypriot men ‘spend most of their leisure time at home’.29 Every male Kozanlı was expected to fulfil his social duty of hospitality, which was mainly displayed at home.30 In general, conventional gender roles were still very evident. In Kozan, as elsewhere in the Turkish Cypriot community, women’s roles were definitely mother-centred.31 The most visible gender-segregated geography in Kozan was primarily the house. The kitchen was the domain of the woman and doing the household chores (cleaning, cooking, washing and ironing) were female duties. It was important for the women’s reputation to keep the house clean (temiz). Men, who were not part of the nuclear family, would be seated in the informal living room and would not enter the other rooms in the house. This was made clear to me when Zafer, Ayşe’s boyfriend, came to visit the first time after I had arrived in my field family’s house. Zafer went straight to Ayşe’s bedroom and felt visibly at home in the house. Both Fatma and Murat hurried to

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explain to me that Ayşe (then 17) and Zafer (then 19) had given each other their word and that they would be officially engaged soon. That is why he had access to the private spaces of the house. Later, when Zafer finished his army service he came to live with Ayşe, although his house was only two streets away. Although they were not officially engaged, the wider community accepted this arrangement because it was clear that the parents of the couple all agreed, and they visited each other at least once a day. A strictly gender-segregated event in the village was the lamenting of the dead (mevlit). One sunny Thursday morning, I heard an announcement via the mosque’s loudspeakers while I was chatting with Damla at the coffee shop. I was surprised to hear a declaration because it was not time for the call for prayer. Damla’s eyes watered instantly and I asked her what was happening, since I had not understood the speaker’s short message. Damla explained that a co-villager, Osman, had died. During lunch Sevim told me that Osman was Kasim’s father, and that he had died while putting his trousers on that morning. That night, I joined the Kozanlılar for the mevlit, the ritual of lamenting the dead. This took place in Osman’s house, where over forty women gathered in the front room. Chairs had been placed in rows and in every available corner. One woman, from another village, was singing the laments. There was no participation by men. They gathered in the courtyard of the house and stood chatting in hushed voices and smoking cigarettes. Although the Kozanlılar women played a prominent role in the private domain, there were also many women who were active in the public domain of the village. In that sense they did not differ much from urban Turkish Cypriot women.32 Anthropologist Julie Scott analyses how ideas about gender and sexuality were themselves undergoing transformations in north Cyprus. She indicated a number of factors: paid employment for women, more accessible higher education for Turkish Cypriot girls and the tourism sector.33 This is in agreement with what Jill Dubisch observed in Greece with regard to the changed attitudes of the village women she studied: ‘Radical changes in village life may also shift gender-represented boundaries away from strictly local manifestations and toward regional or national systems.’34

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The recent election of a female village president in Kozan is an illustration of this change. Turkish Cypriot villages are governed by a village commission that consists of a village president (muhtar) and the president’s assistants (azalar). During my fieldwork local elections took place. There were five muhtar candidates (muhtarlık adayları) in Kozan, four men and one woman. Hatice, in her mid-forties, was a housewife and a hellimci (cheese maker). Her husband worked in Nicosia. They had two children, a son who was a soldier in the army at the time and a daughter, Ülviye, who was intending to become a primary school teacher. Hatice was a hard-working, feisty woman. I often hung out with Ülviye and regularly visited their house. On one such occasion I came in and Hatice was lying on the floor. I must have looked puzzled because Hatice started laughing in her typical mischievous, hearty way. She pointed at the heap of drying molohiya (a type of wild green) on a sheet on the sofa and said: ‘There is no space for me to rest!’ and then she jumped up and made us some coffee. Hatice was one of those Kozanlılar women who always seemed to be outside, busy with an errand, talking, gesturing wildly, and visiting co-villagers. The elderly loved her – as Damla once told me: ‘She is a good person (kalo plasma)’ – and was equally popular among my young female friends. I did not see any public debates or speeches in Kozan, but witnessed the candidates campaigning. They would go door-todoor, drink coffee and ask fellow Kozanlılar whom they planned to vote for. It was rather easy to analyse the loyalties of those villagers I got to know best. They would vote for a particular candidate because of kinship ties, patron-client relations and political orientation. On the day of the local elections, 25 June 2006, the villagers cast their vote in the village’s primary school from eight in the morning until six in the afternoon. Hatice won the election with 131 votes from a total of 297 valid votes. She was appointed as the new muhtar of Kozan and she threw a big party that night at the düğün salonu (reception hall).35 Hatice, the first female muhtar of Kozan, was certainly an example of a woman who was an active participant in the public life of the community.36 There were other female Kozanlılar women with equally strong, energetic personalities who were actively taking part in public affairs. Fatma, for instance, was definitely an example of a woman who

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generally ran the show, both in the intimacy of the household and in the outside world, where, as the local baker (ekmekçi), she was known as a tough businesswoman. Villagers in Kozan and Alemdağ (Agridaki) addressed Fatma in a respectful manner on the delivery rounds and at the local markets. Money was handled by Fatma and orders were given directly to her. Murat, her husband, always stayed in the background. He was merely the driver during the bread distribution. At the markets he habitually sat in a chair reading his newspaper and not interfering with the business. The patterns of socializing I have outlined apply mainly to those villagers who already had a family of their own and to those who were middle-aged and elderly Kozanlılar. There are a number of contrasting divergences between the young, single Kozanlılar and those who were already settled with a nuclear family of their own. The distinctions between the younger and older villagers were mainly marked by their preoccupations, attitudes, leisure activities and appearances.

Being Young in Kozan Kozanlılar who were born in the north of Cyprus have no memories of living with Greek Cypriots in the south of Cyprus.37 Unlike some urban Turkish Cypriot girls, the young women in Kozan had virtually no contact with Greek Cypriots. My field sister Ayşe, for instance, told me that I was her ‘first Greek Cypriot friend’. On the rare occasions that they did cross the border it was with a party of relatives. The young Kozanlılar men who worked in south Cyprus had daily contacts with Greek Cypriots but their relationships to them were limited to those of colleague and boss (e.g. contractors, company owners, etc.) and did not seem to extend beyond the workplace. I did not come across any accounts of ‘structural nostalgia’38 among the young villagers about a past life in a Paphos village, transmitted by the older Kozanlılar. The young Kozanlılar did not perceive themselves as ‘refugees’. This was in contrast to Greek Cypriot youngsters with refugee parentage. This became all too clear when, in the first weeks of my fieldwork, I tried to talk to them about refugee issues, and about Greek Cypriots (Rum). Time after time they referred me

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to older Kozanlılar, smiled or joked about their ignorance (‘I don’t know’), or simply showed no interest in the subject. Young women also frequently pointed out that they did not know any Rumca (the Greek Cypriot dialect). This was not meant to indicate that we could not communicate about more serious topics, as we did manage to talk about intimate issues such as birth control, sex and problems with partners. It was a statement that served more as a justification for why they did not or could not talk at length about the ‘Cyprus Problem’ in general, and the refugee predicament of the Kozanlılar, in particular. Their refugee consciousness seemed to be limited to a number of rather practical concerns that directly influenced their lives. One couple, in their mid-fifties, was trying to sell some of their property in Paphos, for which they had kept the original title deeds, to the Greek Cypriot who was using it. If the sale went through, this would mean that a considerable amount of money would be gained. (I never heard whether the sale went through). The parents wanted to build a house for their youngest daughter with the money from the sale. For their daughter ‘being a refugee’ meant financial benefits. Another example was the house that Fatma and Murat were building in Kozan for their son Orhan and his family. In the period after the 2004 referendum they stopped the construction work. Murat told me he wanted to wait and see what the future would bring and whether a solution would necessitate a resettlement of the Kozanlılar. As time passed, and nothing came out of the ongoing negotiations, the building works were recommenced. During the standstill of the works Sema, Orhan’s wife, had expressed her concern about ever having a house of their own. The main preoccupation of the village girls was ‘to find a suitable partner, to have a nice house and to make a lot of money’. I cite Filiz who listed her problems to her UK-based cousin Sevgül, on holiday in Kozan, and her friends Ayşe and Ülviye. We had retreated to Filiz’s bedroom due to the unbearable heat outside. As I had often seen before, the girls were very comfortable in each other’s presence. Some were lying on Filiz’s bed and others were stretched out on the floor. Ayşe was the only one of the women, all between 17 and 19, who was engaged. The others did not have boyfriends. They were mesmerized by Sevgül’s stories of her London-life and wanted to know every detail

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of her past relations with men, which had been limited to some kissing with boys from her high school. They then turned to me and asked me several questions about the kind of relationships young people had in my country (Belgium in this context). Ayşe and Ülviye were appalled when I told them that many couples in Belgium lived together without getting married or having plans to do so. ‘This would not be possible here’ Ayşe said. This was a few weeks before her boyfriend, Zafer, finished his army service. She was very excited about the fact that he would be in Kozan permanently and would be living in her parent’s house. The conversation turned to more intimate details about firsttime-sex. All of them agreed that you had to wait until you were engaged. Filiz told a story about a female co-villager of her age who had been sexually involved with a couple of men. The others knew about it but still expressed their dismay. From what Ayşe was saying I understood, but did not push for details, that Zafer had had more experience than her. They agreed that it was different for men, who did not need to wait until they were officially engaged. This kind of girls-only meetings took place frequently. The young villagers did not engage very often in the socializing of their parents. They met between themselves and withdrew to places where they had some privacy to talk and gossip. This could be in the kitchen, provided nobody else was around, but more often in the girls’ bedrooms that seemed unchanged since childhood. Ayşe’s bedroom, for instance, was painted and decorated in shades of pink and still had a large collection of stuffed toys at the foot of the bed. I rarely saw young women watching TV or a movie together. This was an activity that happened in the confinement of the nuclear family, and certainly more in the winter season when the villagers remained in the house during the evenings. But even on cold, rainy winter evenings the young women preferred to socialize with their peers. On more than one occasion Ayşe and I drove to some friends in Alemdağ (Agridaki) where we spent the evening among single, young women. I observed that young men, both single and married, would eagerly leave the village during their leisure time and drive to Nicosia or Girne (Kyrenia). Ali and Orhan, after a long working day, would regularly join the single Kozanlılar for drinks in Girne. Such an outing was often criticized by their wives.

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Appearances seemed more important for the younger adults in the village than for the married couples.39 My young, female informants paid special attention to their looks when they were going to school, university or to work outside the village. They dressed up, matching shoes, handbags and accessories and some would be heavily made-up. Girls from the higher social class would frequent beauticians and hairdressers outside the village. Caring about appearance did not apply during ordinary workdays in the village. Those women who spent most of the day helping their mothers with the daily chores and the cheese production were dressed in comfortable outfits. They generally wore shorts and a T-shirt in summer and tracksuits in winter and did not change clothes to visit their Kozanlılar friends in the evenings. On winter evenings they would visit nearby friends in their pyjamas and slippers. Girls who could not afford to visit hairdressers or beauticians would give each other beauty treatments: highlighting their hair, waxing their legs, plucking their eyebrows and applying facemasks. This would not necessarily happen in a private space. I have seen Ayşe and Sema waxing their legs on the balcony of the house and Ülviye doing Filiz’s hair in the courtyard facing the street. Married women would not engage in such activities where they could be seen by co-villagers. As for young men, they mostly wore jeans and T-shirts throughout the year, while older men more often wore shorts or comfortable trousers with a green-and-khaki camouflage print. Both young and older adults had short haircuts. It was the young men in particular who took great care to have their hair regularly trimmed and to be clean-shaven. It is imperative to note that in a close-knit community like Kozan members of different age groups maintained close relationships. My observations were similar to those of anthropologist Renee Hirschon in her Greek field site: ‘The contact between old and young is close and continual – there are co-resident households representing different stages in the developmental cycle, and neighbourhood life consists in daily contact between people of different generations.’ 40 Although the younger adults distanced themselves, as befits their age, from certain concerns of the older villagers, they also expressed respect and care for the older Kozanlılar. One striking example is that of Ayşe who, at the age of 17, functioned as the nurse of the village for the many diabetics

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among the Kozanlılar. She would visit on a daily round approximately six co-villagers to help with their blood sugar checks (the youngest was 46), and they called her ‘Doktor Ayşe’. Ayşe knew where they kept their glucose testing kit. She would take it from the cupboard, expertly prick the patient’s finger with a sharp lancet, smear a small amount of blood on the strip and then put it in the testing device. Finally, she would explain the result to her ‘patient’. She would even go as far as Alemdağ (Agridaki), the neighbouring village which was practically an extension of Kozan as the inhabitants of both villages were in close contact. Her ‘patient’ there was Gürkan, the father of her brother-in-law Mustafa. I joined her a couple of times and Gürkan was always working in the fields among his cows. Ayşe would quickly go into his house to take the testing kit, walk through the fields and sit with Gürkan on a straw bale to check his blood sugar. There was also willingness on the part of the young Kozanlılar to help close relatives and immediate neighbours. For instance, during the bread and cheese production the young and the old would work closely together. Orhan and Ali helped their mother with the physical labour during the bread making process, and many village girls readily helped their mothers, female relatives or neighbours with the hellim preparation. The preoccupations, interests and the gender-segregated socializing patterns of the age cohort (15–30 years old) I described here differed from those of the Kozanlilar who were middle-aged or elderly. The young adults, both the men and the women, clearly expressed a stronger interest in material things compared to the older villagers. It was important for the young adults to own a car and to have the latest model of mobile phone. Most girls had a large collection of handbags, shoes and beauty products. Young men often showed off the latest accessory for their cars and there was rivalry among them. In spite of the different sets of values between younger and older Kozanlılar, they still shared a sense of belonging to this particular village. When I asked the young villagers directly whether they liked living in Kozan, their answers were ambivalent. On the one hand they said life in Kozan was boring. ‘There is nothing nice in the village’ some said, and they readily compared it to the city which was ‘very

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attractive’ (çok guzel), ‘because there are bars and discos, entertainment and the seaside’ (cunku bar ve disko, eğlence ve deniz). On the other hand they preferred to live in a village (köy) and definitely wanted to raise their (future) children in Kozan rather than in a city (şehir). More than one young informant described the city as dirty and impure (pis).41 Much like the older villagers, they too appreciated the beautiful landscape of the village. ‘This village’ (bu köy) was definitely nicer than other villages. Sema, who originally came from Serhatköy (Philia), said that she liked the beauty and quietness (sessizlik) of the mountains. Filiz preferred Kozan to Alemdağ (Agridaki) because the latter was too small (küçük). Many of the young married villagers, both men and women, told me that Kozan was a good place to live with their families. Despite the different concerns and values, the young and the old Kozanlılar shared a sense of belonging to this particular village. They all embraced the village as their home. Mahmut told me once over coffee: ‘This is our village (to chorko mas). We have lived here longer [than we have lived in the south] (ezisame parapano da). All our children are here (ta pedia mas einai oula da).’ This was not an isolated statement. Most of the villagers above forty-five said something along those lines over the course of my fieldwork. The Kozanlılar form a settled community, above all, in their collective self-perception. As they themselves say ‘We are one family’. As in every family there are divisions and conflicts. Life in Kozan is characterized by occupational divisions, social status, gender and age. But as I have already shown, the village is also unified by a strong sense of being Kozanlılar and of Kozan being their home. The provisions of the Annan Plan, which stipulated that the village would be returned to Greek Cypriots, undermined the relative security and certainty, which these Paphos refugees felt. Because of this threat, the refugee identity became a prominent feature in the lives of the Kozanlılar.

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CHAPTER SIX R EFUGEES AND LOCALS

Although Turkish Cypriot refugees are settled in villages in north Cyprus, their refugee identity still plays a central role in their lives. This identity is important for several reasons. An emphasis on where they come from provides continuity in their lives and allows them to make sense of who they are. It allows them to distinguish themselves from the local, non-refugee Turkish Cypriots. Turkish Cypriot refugees were not encouraged to express their refugee status, indeed, in many ways they were prevented from doing so. Still, there are different ways in which they contested the policy of the northern regime, precisely because it denies them their history. Finally, emphasizing that they are displaced persons who have endured hardship and suffering allows Turkish Cypriot refugees to claim the right to a secure future, that is, the right to stay where they are and thus become locals. Although they are nostalgic about their villages in the south, Turkish Cypriot refugees wish to stay where they are despite the nostalgia. This undermines the claims of those Greek Cypriots who argue that Turkish Cypriot refugees have forgotten where they come from.

The Rumca Speaking Doll When I asked Hasan what present he would like to for his sünnet (circumcision), I had asked his sister Elif too. The girl’s eyes sparkled when she said that a ‘talking doll’ (konuşan bebek) was really her

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favourite present ever. At that time, I had no experience in toy shopping and no idea where to find a toy shop that sold ‘talking dolls’ in north Cyprus. I went instead to one of the big toy stores in south Nicosia with a Greek Cypriot relative. I selected a remote control toy car for Hasan and a cute doll for Elif, which started speaking when you pressed its belly. As I arrived early at the düğün salonu for Hasan’s party, there was plenty of time to lure Elif away from the centre stage and hand her the present. Elif impatiently tore off the wrapping paper and together we extricated the doll from her protective plastic carton. As Elif was caressing the doll and smoothing its clothes. I told her that it could talk as well. ‘Press on its belly’ I told Elif and I smiled in anticipation of her delight. She pressed and the doll said, ‘Yeai sou. Ti kaneis? (Hello. How are you?)’. Elif listened, said nothing and pressed the doll’s belly again: ‘Thelo gala (I want milk),’ the doll said this time. Elif looked up at me and said, more confused than disappointed: ‘But this doll speaks Greek Cypriot (Ama bu bekek Rumca konuşur)’. I could have kicked myself. I had bought a doll that spoke a language the girl didn’t understand! I was so used to the fact that many of the Kozanlılar spoke Greek that I had not foreseen this problem. The next morning I sat down with Elif and translated all the doll’s phrases into Turkish and Elif seemed pleased with her Rumca speaking doll. When I later saw Sevilay, Elif’s mother, I apologized for my thoughtlessness in buying a Greek-speaking doll. Sevilay laughed heartily and said I should stop fretting about it. ‘We are so used to hearing Rumca all the time and it is good for the kids to pick it up too.’ That was my experience too: everybody older than thirty in Kozan seemed to speak some level of the Greek Cypriot dialect. Knowledge of the Greek Cypriot dialect is the main visible distinction between Turkish-Cypriot refugees and non-refugee Turkish Cypriots in north Cyprus. However, this is not to say that Turkish Cypriots who had always lived in north Cyprus do not speak any Greek Cypriot: In Cyprus there were, well into [the twentieth] century, several purely Muslim villages where the inhabitants only or habitually spoke Greek among themselves. ( . . . ) There are two theories to

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explain this ‘confused category’ of Greek-speaking Muslims. The first is that these villagers were descendant of Turkish-speaking immigrants who took up the Greek language due to its commercial usefulness. The other theory holds that they were Greeks who converted to Islam, and this has most adherents today. ( . . . ) [O]ne of my Turkish Cypriot friends, a man in his early forties, took me to his natal (exclusively Turkish Cypriot) village, where his parents still lived, in the Karpas peninsula. When he met his (Turkish Cypriot) former co-villagers, greetings and jokes were exchanged in Greek—apparently as a marker of intimacy—and they then continued in Turkish. Many people told me that their parents, from the same region, only spoke Greek when they were children.1 It was the Kozanlılar themselves who pointed out to me that nowadays ‘speaking Rumca well’ was an important difference between locals and refugees in north Cyprus. ‘We know [Greek] Cypriot (Emeis kseroumen Kypriaka)’ Beyit told me quite smugly. Knowing more than one language was indeed a source of pride for the Kozanlılar. I was asked numerous times which languages I spoke and when I listed them my informants nodded approvingly, often followed by the expression ‘Bir lisan, bir insan (One [foreign] language [makes] one person)’. The more languages you speak, the more persons you can be, is how one Kozanlı explained the saying to me. Some weeks into my first fieldwork round, my Turkish had improved so much that I was able to conduct long conversations without consulting the tiny pocket dictionary I always carried with me.2 Although I knew sufficient Turkish to have everyday conversations with the Kozanlılar at the start of my fieldwork, I had encountered some problems with the Cypriot Turkish dialect but soon my ears adjusted to the accent and I used the local phrases my informants taught me. For example, ‘Napan?’ (Cypriot Turkish for ‘How are you?’) instead of ‘Nasılsın?’ (mainland Turkish for ‘How are you?’) or ‘(çok) mersi’ (Cypriot Turkish for ‘thank you’) instead of ‘teşekkür ederim’ (mainland Turkish for ‘thank you’).3 Sevilay, the shepherd’s wife, and Bahire, the butcher’s wife, could speak only Turkish, unlike their

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refugee-husbands who spoke both Greek and Turkish fluently. Sevilay comes from Mağusa (Famagusta) and Bahire from Karsıyaka (Vasilia). Both women were born one year before the war and had never spoken with Greek Cypriots. Their co-villagers did not teach them any Greek Cypriot, which was also the case with most Kozanlılar younger than thirty-five at the time of my fieldwork in Kozan. No one taught them Greek Cypriot as there was no reason, Murat explained to me. There were exceptions, however. A handful of village children spoke excellent Greek Cypriot. They were extremely pleased that they could talk to me in Greek and show off to the other non-Greek speaking children. These children had been raised by their grandparents who spoke better Greek than Turkish or who spoke no Turkish at all. There were indeed older Kozanlılar who had no or very little knowledge of Turkish and always communicated in Greek. This excluded them without a doubt from conversing with the young villagers, but it was not perceived as a huge obstacle because most of their close acquaintances and relatives spoke Greek anyway. The shepherd Kasim, Sevilay’s husband, speaks better Rumca than Turkish so he said himself. ‘I often tease Sevilay. You know, when I am with co-villagers we talk Rumca and make little jokes which Sevilay does not understand.’ My experience was that in the neighbouring village Alemdağ (Agridaki) Greek was even more widely used among the Turkish Cypriot villagers, who all came from the Paphos area. When I joined Murat and Fatma on their delivery round in that village, they spoke Greek with the Turkish Cypriots. I was surprised and asked Murat about it: ‘Of course we speak Greek. Most of the older people here do not know any Turkish. Fatma’s mother, for example, does not speak Turkish so her youngest grandchild Ayşe cannot talk to her. My oldest daughter Sevim and my sons picked it up and they are able to communicate with their grandmother.’ As a matter of fact, my young female friends asked me frequently to translate a word into Greek. When I returned for a next fieldwork round, I was pregnant and the women were constantly giving me unsolicited advice. I was politely banned from the hellim making since it required too much bending down and carrying heavy things. This was just as well because the smell of the warm milk made me very nauseated in the first months of my pregnancy. As a result I had more time free in

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the mornings and many villagers invited me for long coffee drinking sessions on which they seized the opportunity to learn some English, or in case they did not know any Greek they preferred me to teach them some basic Greek. I recount one conversation with Sema who wanted to talk about her experience of giving birth to her son. I remember that I needed my dictionary then, to look up words such as ‘womb’, ‘contractions’ and ‘Caesarean section’. Sema, however, was not satisfied when I understood her Turkish, she wanted to learn both the Greek and English terminology as well, which resulted in Babel-like confusion and hilarious laughter from both of us. The young Kozanlılar also had several CDs with modern Greek music (singers like Sakis Rouvas and Despina Vandi) which they would play, not only in my presence. I would hear this music through open windows and from young men passing by in their cars. When I asked, they indeed confirmed that they like this particular kind of Greek music. The Rumca (Greek Cypriot) that the Kozanlılar speak is neither standard Greek, nor the Greek Cypriot dialect that Greek Cypriots would normally use. It is the kind of old, rural language that Greek Cypriots spoke fifty years ago. The Greek Cypriot one hears in Kozan is also a Paphos-version of that old language.4 When Kasim explained to me and my Greek Cypriot partner, who comes from Paphos, that his son Hasan would be lying on a ‘moni’ during the sünnet party we did not quite understand what he meant. It turned out that ‘moni’ means bed for which Greek Cypriots now use the word ‘krevati’. There were other words I came across in the Kozanlılar’s Rumca which were different from the Cypriot Greek spoken in the south of the island: the poetic word ‘yiallos’ (sea) instead of ‘thalassa’ and the verb ‘sintihano’ (I talk) instead of ‘milo’, which is used now. Turkish Cypriots made a big effort to communicate with Greek Cypriots and this was certainly the case in any commercial transactions. Ibrahim, for instance, was a Kozanlı who had recently returned to Kozan after living in Finland for many years. He opened a restaurant nestled in the densely forested mountainside just outside the village. Ibrahim had gone to great trouble to produce a menu in three languages: Turkish, English and Greek. He had translated the word ‘starters’, most probably with the help of dictionary, into ‘ekinites’,

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which means, in Greek, the starter of an engine, while the proper word for appetizers is ‘orektika’. Apart from the language the Kozanlılar distinguished themselves from the local Turkish Cypriots who lived in the neighbouring villages in other ways. We are ‘refugees from Paphos’ (prosfyges apo tin Pafo) Damla said to me. Mehmet told me he was proud to be from Paphos: ‘You know, you can tell who is a refugee and who is not. We, people from Paphos, are different than the ntopji (locals)’. He made a waving gesture with his hand pointing in the direction of the nearby village of Kambili (Hisarköy). Mehmet grinned and said something I had heard before: ‘The one from Paphos is different (O Pafitis einai alos)’. The three men I had most contact with – Fahri, Murat and Beyit – all told me, independently from each other, that Paphos-people are trustworthy. ‘He keeps his word (O logos tou einai logos tou)’ is the phrasing Fahri and Beyit used. On the two separate occasions this came up in a conversation about how the non-refugee Turkish Cypriots from the neighbouring villages looted the houses in Kozan before the refugees from Paphos had arrived. The looting was widespread and the loot was coined as buluntu (something found): Before the Cypriot Turkish administration could bring the situation under control, the people looted houses, factories, and villages that had belonged to the Greeks. The impoverishment of the Turkish refugees and the enrichment of many lower-class Turkish in the North by looting overturned the social scene.5 When I asked my informants whether it was possible that Turkish soldiers had looted the Larnatsjiotes’ houses they were adamant: it had been local Turkish Cypriots. Beyit determinedly said: ‘The Turkish army took nothing, not even a pencil, really nothing (oute molivi, oute tipota).’ Fahri told me, on another occasion: ‘The locals put all kinds of things on their donkey but some must have fallen off the animal. I saw some of these things in the riverbed after my arrival in 1975. It was the locals who were looting.’ The implication of this is that they, being from Paphos and therefore decent people, would not have looted Greek Cypriot houses.

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The distinction the Kozanlılar make between themselves and the locals suggests that these refugees are proud of who they are and where they come from. It also undermines the Greek Cypriot claim that they neither care about their place of origin nor where they live now.

‘My Heart Is Over There’ My heart did not warm up at all since I am here (enevrase i karkia mou katholou pou ’mai da). My heart is over there (i karkia mou en potsji). In my village (sto chorio mou). All my dreams are about my village over there (potsji). I never dream of this place [Kozan]. Most of us want to stay here. I don’t want to go back either, but my heart is over there. My heart is weeping (kleii i karkia mou). Fahri, a Kozanlı in his early sixties, looked exhausted and his voice was drained of energy. I had been listening closely for two hours as he recounted his story about his natal village, Tera (Çakırlar), and his arrival in Kozan. He often asked whether I understood him, interrupting his Greek account with the Turkish ‘Anladın? (Did you understand?)’. On the one hand, he gave me a nostalgic account of his village similar to those I had heard from the Larnatsjiotes. On the other hand, he repeatedly stressed that, although he is emotionally drawn toward Tera and still feels a strong connection to it, he cannot go back. Fahri’s feelings were not exceptional. Many of the older Kozanlılar, and those who were in their twenties in 1974, often married with children, recounted similar stories. Fahri and other Kozanlılar also told me they still dream about their former houses and Paphos villages. Fahri got married in Tera to a local girl, Feral, when he was twentyone. That year, in 1968, he built a house there. It was the best house in Tera (to kalitero spiti mes’tin Tera). It was big, about 150 square metres. The two-storey house was built with bricks (toufla) and had a flat concrete roof (plaka) [all ‘modern’ materials]. The doors and the windows had glass. These had a nice design (sxedio), with wrought iron (siderena) in the shape

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of roses (triantafila). I also had seventy skales [one skala is a land unit of 1,338 square metres] of fields for which I held the title deeds (me kotsjania pano mou). Fahri arrived in Kozan by bus on 12 August 1975, at the age of twentyeight. I did not know Larnakas [he used the village’s Greek name here]. I never came here before. I did not like it. Such a dry place (kseros topos). There is only barley (krithari) and wheat (sitari) on the fields. It does not compare to my village at all. What orchards (pervolia) we had in Tera! Here, there is nothing (da exei tipote). It is a dry village (ksero chorio). You know, I wanted to go to Aydınköy (Prastio) or Kalkanlı (Kalo Chorio/Kapouti) [in both villages also Turkish Cypriot Paphos refugees live now]. I knew those villages. They are just like Tera, with water and orchards. Upon their arrival Fahri and his family were ushered into the school’s courtyard where about 200 people had gathered. There were some twenty government people who were showing us where we should go, but it was the teachers (i daskaloi) who made the lists and divided the houses amongst the newcomers.6 They said things like “this family will go to number five” (toudi i ikojenia tha paei sto numero pente). We were five people: my wife, me and our three children. The house we were assigned was completely empty and in ruins. The locals (i ntopji) had taken everything: furniture, doors, and windows . . . literally everything after the Rum (Greek Cypriots) had left. You know, the yerli (Turkish for locals) from the Turkish villages (chorka tourtsjika) nearby: Kambili (Hisarköy), Pileri (Göçeri) and Fota (Dağyolu). We were given five Cypriot pounds and four armchairs (koltuk in Turkish) in the first month. There were already about twenty of us [Turkish Cypriots] here. Those came in hiding (irten kriva). By the time I arrived here there were no Rum (Greek Cypriots) left. The others told me that the Greek Cypriots

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[who had stayed behind after the summer of 1974] had been leaving the village slowly slowly (siga siga). I found a job in Akçiçek (Sisklipos). There I worked for twenty-five years as a driver on a chicken farm delivering eggs and chickens. I retired at fiftythree and since then I worked with my tractor on some fields here [in Kozan] for which I pay rent to the government. Although they often spoke freely about life in their former homes, their losses and their suffering, the Kozanlılar were reluctant to talk about the flight from their villages in Paphos. When I asked them directly, some villagers gave a brief summary of their flight always emphasizing that leaving their Paphos villages, whether sudden or planned, was not easy at all. Fatma, for instance, was pregnant with her daughter Sevim, at the time she left her village. She came to Kozan through the British bases. Other Kozanlılar fled in much more perilous circumstances, at great personal danger, taking next to nothing. Pierre Oberling provides a similar account of a large group of Turkish Cypriot escaping to the north via the Troodos Mountains. He describes the exhaustion of the refugees and the dangerous circumstances in which they fled. A twelve-year-old boy, who had fallen asleep, was caught by a Greek Cypriot patrol. They took him hostage and tortured him for information. Another man, who had fallen into a ravine, was too wounded to carry on and he too was captured and beaten by Greek Cypriots.7 Oberling recounts the flight of a group of hundred men, women and children who ‘had to travel light, for they had rough climbing to do and they had to elude Greek Cypriot patrols which were trying to block the Turkish Cypriot exodus to the north’.8 There was a difference in the resettlement of Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees. Most Greek Cypriots fled during the war, in the summer of 1974, in order to escapte the advancing Turkish army. Those Greek Cypriots who refused to leave their homes and villages arrived later in the south, with the help of UN-solidiers. The main part of the Turkish Cypriot population was brought to the north only a year later, in 1975, when Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders had reached an agreement in Vienna on 2 August 1975. The Vienna agreement entailed the organized departure of Turkish Cypriots: ‘The

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Turkish Cypriots at present in the south of the island will be allowed, if they want to do so, to proceed north with their belongings under an organized programme and with the assistance of the United Nations Peace-keeping Force in Cyprus.’9 Although there was an exchange agreement, many Turkish Cypriots did not wait and had already escaped to the north. Anthropologist Julie Scott describes how these refugees arrived and struggled to find accommodation: Many Turkish Cypriots pre-empted the exchange agreement and crossed the border in secret at night. Others crossed through the British bases, leaving their home in slippers and apron as if going to the shops in order to avoid suspicion. It was not possible in the early days to operate a system based on criteria of equivalence for the property left behind. People therefore had to take whatever was available. One woman described the process as a ‘lottery’. ‘When we arrived, everything else had been taken, this was the only place left.’ Another, indicating the small house in front of which she sat, concluded her account of those days: ‘Kaderim buydu’ (‘This was my fate’).10 There was also a small number of Turkish Cypriots that never left the south. Some of those were elderly people, who refused to leave their villages. This was the case with Fatma’s parents who are still living in their Paphos village. Other Turkish Cypriots in the south are intellectuals and artists who consciously choose to live in the recognized part of the island.11 The Kozanlılar, like other Turkish Cypriot refugees, also contest the northern’s regime’s attempt to efface their links with their pre-displacement lives and their history. The authorities in northern Cyprus stress the permanence of this resettlement. An aspect of this policy was the removal of Greek in the pre-1974 cultural landscape of north Cyprus including the elimination of the Greek village names.12 Ladbury and King noted that ‘the new Turkish names are not political statements in themselves, although of course the renaming policy is intensely political.’13 Anthropologist Yael Navaro-Yashin lists

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a range of methods used in deciding the new Turkish place names: some names refer to a landscape feature, others are translations of the Greek name into Turkish while some already Turkish-sounding names were maintained. New names included those already used by the local Turkish Cypriot villagers, completely new ones and names of places in Turkey.14 ‘Kozan’ is the name of a Turkish town in the Adana province. It is possible, although not likely, that the Kozanlılar were consulted about the new name. As Navaro-Yashin states, in some cases the authorities asked the local inhabitants’ advice in the renaming process. What is significant in any case – because it shows how they understand themselves – is that the Kozanlılar had their own version of the choice of name. During my fieldwork, an older Greek-speaking Kozanlı offered the following explanation for the name ‘Kozan’: It comes from kazani (Greek for cauldron) because people living in this village come from different [Paphos] villages. We are mixed. Just like one mixes the ingredients for a soup in a kazani.’ When I presented this account to another Kozanlı, he laughed and said: ‘Yes, the story is correct. We come from different villages and now we are here (tsjai tora eimasten da). But the name ‘Kozan’ derives from the Turkish word kazan (cauldron)’. What is significant, though, is that the Kozanlılar engage here in a discourse which allows them to restore links with their past, namely, by emphasizing that they are originally from somewhere else. The idea that the name ‘Kozan’ was chosen because the village is as a cauldron with different ingredients, found its way into the Larnatsjiotes’ discourse shortly after the borders opened. I heard it for the first time in May 2003 from a Larnatsjiotissa who had visited the village a number of times. She told me that she had asked a Kozanlı about the new name of Larnakas and had been told the ‘cauldron’ version. In relating the story about the kazani to Greek Cypriot refugees, the Kozanlılar were perhaps attempting to establish a connection with them that had been severed by the eradication of the original name Larnakas tis Lapithou, and to distance themselves from Turkey where an identical place name exists. With the narrative of the cauldron, the Kozanlılar endowed the village with their own identity. It was indeed my experience that they would refer to the village as ‘Kozan’ even when they spoke Greek

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to me. The villagers used the old, Greek name of the village only in exceptional cases. Fahri, for example, used ‘Larnakas’ in his life story only because he wanted to emphasize that he did not know this village before he was settled there in 1975. Most villagers however did use the original Greek names of the neighbouring villages that were already Turkish Cypriot before 1974. For instance, they would refer to Kambili, Pileri and Fota, instead of the new Turkish names Hisarköy, Göçeri and Dağyolu. Turkish Cypriots contest the ‘TRNC’s’ sovereignty in subverting the new names: The distinction (or difference) between the old and the new names for places was a line which the Turkish-Cypriots used to define ‘the political’. Knowledge of the old names for places was considered ‘local knowledge’ and Turkish-Cypriots differentiated themselves from settlers from Turkey on the grounds of their knowledge (or lack, thereof) of the old names for places. The old names for villages aroused a sense of familiarity as opposed to the new names which were associated with formality, sterility, and administration, including the Turkish military and its political presence.15 Fahri finished his life story on a nostalgic note. He was visibly emotional when he repeated that his ‘heart is still over there’. This resonates with what I often heard, and have already cited earlier, from Greek Cypriot refugees who said: ‘Our mind is over there [in the north]’ (o nous mas einai potsji). When I explicitly asked Kozanlılar about their Paphos village they would praise their village of origin, emphasizing its beauty and the fertility of the land. If the person had been wealthy, an account of what they owned would follow. The Kozanlılar emphasized in their accounts bout their former villages the qualities of the air, trees, fields and water, while women, like Fatma and Hatice talked at length about the sociality of their previous villages’ communities. In this they echoed the stories told by the Larnatsjiotes. Even so, expressions of attachment to what the Kozanlılar have lost do not mirror the nostalgic accounts of Greek Cypriot refugees. The main difference is that Greek Cypriot refugees express both desire and

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right to return, while Turkish Cypriot refugees do not want to go back and demand the right to stay. The nostalgic stories of my Turkish Cypriot informants are not in line with the official political discourse in northern Cyprus, epitomized by Denktaş’ long-term rhetoric about territory. The core message is that the displaced Turkish Cypriots should forget their houses and villages in south Cyprus because their home is now in the north. Anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis phrased it eloquently after his onemonth stay in north Nicosia (in March 1991): The Turkish Cypriot authorities took a different view. Their refugees had been the Turkish Cypriots displaced during the 1960s. Then there were those who left after 1974. But neither group could be called refugees now, since they now lived in their true and only homeland. Except in one case. When Greek Cypriots demanded a solution that would allow all Greek Cypriots to return, Turkish Cypriot officials replied aghast: ‘You can’t possibly expect us to make our people refugees for a third time?’16 Consequently, the personal discourse of my Turkish Cypriot informants was often muted, complex and oppositional in nature since it clashed with the official one. The Greek Cypriot refugee discourse of return, by contrast, is in tune with that of their political leaders and therefore much more openly expressed. Turkish Cypriot refugees’ desire to keep a link with their past lives in the south was already expressed soon after their displacement, but was not accepted by the authorities in the north as was the case with the Greek Cypriot refugees’ discourse in south Cyprus. Erhan, a highly educated Turkish Cypriot refugee in his late sixties, told me about a friend of his who had named his business, which he opened in the north soon after his displacement, ‘Göçmen bakkal’ (Refugee’s grocery). Erhan told me that he changed the name of his grocery after some months, and although he did not want to go into details, it seems that the change came about as a result of pressure of the local authorities.17 Today however, a small business in Kyrenia owned by a refugee from Polemidia near Limassol is still called ‘Refugees’ Supermarket’.18

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Another striking example of how Turkish Cypriot refugees want to maintain a link with the places they come from is the use of specific family names. In the late 1970s, Turkish Cypriots had to choose surnames to replace their patronyms and people were creative in their choices. Although some chose names with allusions to nicknames, professions or one’s looks, many refugees chose a name that referred to the family’s place of origin in the south. I have come across the following surnames: Özbaflı (literally a ‘real’ Paphitian, from Paphos), Lakadamyalı (from Lakatamia), Polili (from Polis), Defteralı (from Deftera), Bodamyalızade (a member of a big family from Potamia) and Teralı (from Tera). Vamik Volkan notes that, by the third year after the war, Turkish Cypriots began to feel at home in the north and there were fewer instances in which he came across to expressions of grief and nostalgia: Whereas three years earlier these people [Turkish Cypriots] clung to their psychic investment in the places they had left and over which they still grieved, they now seemed heavily invested in the land on which they now lived. ( . . . ) The “linking objects” that connected the Cypriot Turks with the Cypriot Greeks were no longer obvious, although they surfaced now and then.19 It was impossible for me to carry out long-term fieldwork in north Cyprus before the border opened and, as I have pointed out earlier, there is not much ethnographic literature that focusses on Turkish Cypriot refugees in north Cyprus in the 1980s and 1990s. My own data reveal that there has always been nostalgia and grief among the Kozanlılar for what they have lost. I do not claim that its expression took the same form or extent as that of Greek Cypriot refugees. Nevertheless I found, on the basis of the life histories of the Kozanlılar and key informants in north Nicosia, that for Turkish Cypriot refugees, too, the refugee experience hurts and that it marked their lives. This is in opposition to the belief of some Greek Cypriots that ‘Turkish Cypriots do not care where they live. They did not have a strong bond with their village [in the south] and they do not care for where they

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live now.’ Or that: ‘Turkish Cypriots forgot all about their villages here [in the south]. They all gained by moving to the north. They have the nicest areas in Cyprus and live in better circumstances than before 1974.’ Since the opening of the border (April 2003), Turkish Cypriot refugees express longing for their places of origin more openly. They visit their former homes and villages and this proves to be as difficult and emotional an event as the visits of Greek Cypriot refugees to their villages and homes. Another expression of nostalgia for their past lives can be found online. There are plenty of websites and Facebook-pages where Turkish Cypriots refugees post information about their villages and towns in the south, such as personal stories, pictures, maps, etc.). There are also a number of Turkish Cypriot refugee organisations, such as Baflılar Dayanisma ve Kültür Dernegi (Association of Paphitians for Solidarity and Culture), Limasollular Dernegi (Association of Limassolians) and Larnakalilar Dernegi (Association of Larnaca people). A final example of Turkish nostalgia is the emergence of a body of literature including poetry, personal memoires, photographic collections and journalistic essays.20 Finally, I cite an example of a recent article in a local Turkish Cypriot newspaper (Havadis, 7 November 2009). The piece, entitled ‘Uncle Enver Longs for Pentakomo (Enver dayı Pendagomo’yu özlüyor)’, tells the story of a seventy-three year old Turkish Cypriot who comes from Pentakomo (a village near Limassol) and was displaced to Aslanköy (Angastina). He had been wealthy and owned twenty acres of land close to the sea. The man complained about the unequal property distribution, stating that he was only given one two acres of land with one single olive tree on it, while others who owned next to nothing in the south, are now affluent land owners. When the journalist asked him whether he misses his former village, the answer was very clearly positive: of course he misses Pentakomo. All these examples belie the Greek Cypriot assumption that Turkish Cypriots do not care about their places of origin in the south. Yet although they do care, it is clear that they do not wish to return. Living with Greek Cypriots was, for many Turkish Cypriots, a negative experience of hardship and suffering and many were displaced more

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than once. Because of these experiences returning to their former villages is not an option.

‘We Suffered More’ ‘We have all kinds of diseases here’, Murat said, ‘which emerge from the stress (apo to angkos) and from being restless’. I had just offered Murat a piece of the chocolate cake in the fridge. The moment I spoke the words, I cursed myself because I remembered that Murat was not allowed to eat any of the cake. Like a relatively large number of Kozanlılar, Murat suffered from şeker (diabetes). I pushed the cake to the back of the fridge and quickly made Murat a sugar free coffee. When I sat next to him, he smiled reassuringly and related to me once more his life story, emphasizing that he had always been restless (anisixos): I was born in 1951 in Kritou Tera. When I was seven years old we moved to Tera, which was very near. That was the first time I became a refugee (göçmen in Turkish). We were given an old house for our large family. After a while we moved back to Kritou Tera. But then the troubles in [December] 1963 started and we moved back to Tera early 1964.21 I married Fatma when I was twentyone and we built a beautiful house in Tera. In 1974 I lived for one month in tents (tsiatirka) in the UN base in Limassol. Then all the men were brought to Turkey where we stayed another five months before we were sent to Kozan. From 1958 we were on the move. That is why I am restless and anxious (eimai anisixos). But even now I cannot say: ‘This house is mine’. (Den mboro na po: ‘Toudo to spiti einai diko mou’). The bank did not give us money to fix our houses. I was lucky because I made some money and I could fix certain things in this house. These diseases (toutes i arosties) we have here come from this suffering (pou to marazi). Diabetes, cancer (karkino) and blood pressure (piesi). We have here all the disease you can imagine (oti mboreis na fantasteis). As I said, we cannot say that these houses are ours. That is the difficulty (afto einai to zori). I suffer (marazono). We all suffer here (marazonoume ouli da).

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In recent years Murat suffered two severe strokes. He recovered each time, although part of his face remained paralyzed and he was restricted in his movements. He was a warm-hearted, jovial man who had welcomed me in his house with open arms. He often said that I, too, was one of his daughters and that I should never hesitate to ask for his help. During my pregnancy I often sat long hours with Murat since I had been banned from the cheese and bread making. Although Murat was always good-humoured there was an infinite sadness in his eyes. I dare to conclude, on the basis of Murat’s countless stories, that he did not suffer too much financial hardship (or certainly less than other poorer Kozanlılar) but that his suffering (to marazi) was of another kind. Murat never felt secure or relaxed. He had been uprooted a number of times during his childhood, teenage years and his first years as a married man. Although he was now settled in Kozan and was happy among his co-villagers, he was not in peace. Murat died some months after I left Kozan. It is beyond the scope of this research to analyse the effects of multiple displacements on the health of the Kozanlılar. Such a study has been conducted by Peter Loizos who compared health issues of Greek Cypriot refugees to those of non-refugees, focussing on a specific age cohort (people born between 1930 and 1940). Like the Kozanlılar, Loizos’ informants explained that illnesses and early deaths were a result of the stress their displacement caused: Just as in some African societies all human deaths have been attributed to ‘witchcraft’, so among the refugees, there is a tendency to attribute early death to ‘the refugee condition’ (prosphygia), and ‘stress’ (angkos). We do not suggest that the refugees are deeply resistant to more rationalist bio-medical arguments ( . . . ) It is rather that when the disturbing fact of human mortality – the loss of friends or relatives – comes up in conversation, their explanation of first recourse is to point to the stresses of refugee life for a convenient all-purpose explanation.22 Most of my older informants spoke in Greek to me, but there was one word, ‘prosfygas’ (refugee), that they did not use very often. They used the Turkish word ‘göçmen’ (refugee, plural: göçmenler) instead. This is

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the term Turkish Cypriot refugees use to refer to themselves.23 One reason why the Kozanlılar employ the Turkish ‘göçmenler’ instead of the Greek ‘prosfyges’, even when a conversation was entirely conducted in Greek, is the Kozanlılar’s insistence on the distinction between the two refugee experiences on Cyprus. The Kozanlılar always stressed that Greek and Turkish Cypriots are all ‘human beings’ but, when it came to the issue of displacement, they would say that Turkish Cypriot were more real refugees than the uprooted Greek Cypriots. Here is how Beyit phrased it: We are all human beings (eimasten oloi anthropoi). Turks, Brits, Christians [referring to Greek Cypriots] (Tourtsji, Englesi, Christiani). All [come] from god (ouloi pou ton theo). But we [Turkish Cypriots] were always on the move. We were made refugees in 1958, 1963 and 1974. What did the Greeks do? They could stay in their villages. I was living for eleven years in a closed village [Tera]. I could not buy what I needed, I could not go where I wanted. They put a barricade and a soldier at the entrance and that was it. The Kozanlılar, and most of the Turkish Cypriot refugees who were born before 1958, have indeed been displaced several times and most of the Turkish Cypriot refugees born before 1970 have been displaced at least twice. Human geographer Richard Patrick has documented this in detail.24 My informants stressed the great hardship and suffering they experienced over the course of their individual lives. Damla, for instance, repeated a number of times that ‘it is more than a person can endure in one life’. Especially the period living in an enclave, literally cut-off from the rest of the world as Beyit described, is often stressed when Turkish Cypriot compare their notion of ‘refugeehood’ to that of the Greek Cypriots.25 In their view, Greek Cypriot refugees experienced only once what Turkish Cypriot had experienced a number of times. This is illustrated in the history schoolbooks in north Cyprus: Now for the first time Greek Cypriots tasted the bitterness that Turkish Cypriots had experienced for many years before. They,

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like Turkish Cypriots for years previously, were forced to abandon their homes and villages, and due to the war they also lost their loved ones like Turkish Cypriots did.26 I did not encounter a blunt denial of the Greek Cypriot refugee experience by my Turkish Cypriot informants, but then one has to bear in mind that they were fully aware that my father was a Greek Cypriot refugee who had been displaced from the very village in which they now lived. But, even though they knew my personal background, they still maintained that Turkish Cypriots were more refugees than Greek Cypriots. The Kozanlılar had little sympathy for the complaints or the expressions of suffering from Greek Cypriot refugees. Most of the Kozanlılar perceived the Greek Cypriots as a people who were greedy and selfish. Therefore, I am persuaded by Nergis Canefe’s argument that among Turkish Cypriots there is a denial of the existence of ‘genuine’ Greek Cypriot refugees. She cites three reasons for the Turkish Cypriot denial. Firstly, it is an attempt to reciprocate the Greek Cypriot denial of the forced migration of Turkish Cypriots since 1958. Secondly, the Turkish Cypriots perceive the 1974 military invasion as ‘breaking the cycle of violence rather than as a cause of massive disruption’. And thirdly, because of the Turkish Cypriot anti-return policy, displacements on Cyprus are perceived as permanent. ‘Ergo, people affected by displacements are not considered as refugees. Since by and large the community itself no longer entertains a prospect of return, such a prospect is not offered to Greek Cypriots, either’.27 ‘We suffered more’ insisted Fatma, first using the past tense of the verb. She was silent for a few moments and then she said: ‘We suffer more (ta plasmata da marazonoun parapano)’, with an emphasis on the continuation of the suffering which is still part of their everyday life. The suffering (to marazi) was, at the time of my fieldwork, mainly expressed around two themes. Firstly, they faced difficulties because they lived in an unrecognized state. Secondly, they did not own the houses they were living in. Although most of the Kozanlılar hold ‘TRNC’ title deeds to the houses they now inhabit or the fields they work on, they realized that these documents are not legally recognized outside the ‘TRNC’. Finally, the Kozanlılar were conscious of

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the fact that they might have to move again if a solution of the ‘Cyprus Problem’ would be implemented. Already before 2003, Turkish Cypriots were well aware which areas were likely to be returned to Greek Cypriots in a political settlement (the Morphou region), and which would not be returned (the area north of the Girne (Kyrenia) mountain range).28 Kozan, or Larnakas tis Lapithou, is located in a cluster of villages, at the edge of the Girne (Kyrenia) area, which were inhabited only by Greek Cypriots prior to 1974. Because of its location it was likely to be returned to Greek Cypriots in the event of a solution. The Kozanlılar told me that they always had this in the back of their minds. This can be one explanation for the current state of the village. As I have described earlier, the Larnatsjiotes found that their village was in a state of neglect. Peter Loizos made a similar observation for the village he studied, Argaki (Morphou area), which would also have been returned to Greek Cypriots. Loizos suggests that perhaps Greek Cypriot refugees hold a visual image of a clean, orderly village that had never existed but in their post-war memories: The general texture of the village was full of broken fences and bits of metal used to pen in animals, old bed frames, and one area contained at least five broken-down buses. Perhaps it looked like this in the 1930s? But have our memories tidied up, cleaned up, prettified the Argaki we left? Is the dilapidated village we now see all that different from how Argaki really was in 1973? There is no way to pin this down.29 One of Loizos’ informants put the current state of Argaki down to ‘the fact that the people told to settle there had never believed they would stay permanently, and had therefore not invested in it’.30 It seems that this might be the case in Kozan. On my first visit to a particular house the inhabitants pointed out themselves that it was rundown and in urgent need of repair. The doors and shutters had rotted away and plaster ceilings were about to fall. Some houses had tumbled down in recent years with only a grim pile of stones serving as a reminder of where a house once stood. ‘But what can we do?’ one Kozanlı aksed

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me. ‘It is not our house. We do not hold the title deeds (den exoume to kotsjani).’ When I accompanied a Greek Cypriot refugee to her former house in Kyrenia (Girne), the present inhabitant, an elderly Turkish Cypriot woman, complained to my acquaintance that the roof was leaking. The Greek Cypriot was annoyed and replied: ‘What do you want me to do? Do you want me to repair it?’ I tentatively suggest that the fear of another displacement, exacerbated since 2003, partly explains why the Kozanlılar neglected the village. In addition to complaints about the poor state of many houses, the Kozanlılar grumbled often about public services, such as water and electricity distribution, garbage collection and disposal, public transport and healthcare provisions, which did not run smoothly or consistently. These problems are not unique to the village but both the authorities and the local people seemed reluctant to do anything about them.31 From the large bay window in Fatma’s kitchen there was a panoramic view of the village centre. It was a favourite sitting spot of the female family members. Sema and Ayşe regularly climbed on the kitchen counter right under the window and lay there watching the comings and goings of the Kozanlılar. On the rare occasion that Fatma was not working or entertaining guests, she would sit on a high stool in the kitchen, watching the small TV set but keeping one eye on the village at the same time. One morning, after we had put the köfte (minced meatballs with herbs) in the oven, Sema and Ayşe were looking out the bay window. I was immersed in a novel. Suddenly, Sema jumped from her high stool, took my arm and said ‘gel, gel (come, come)’. I grabbed my camera assuming my two ‘research assistants’ wanted to show me something interesting as they so often did. When we arrived at the bakkal I heard the words ‘hasta’ (sick) and ‘ambülans’ (ambulance). We walked to a house in a small street opposite the bakkal where a large crowd of villagers had gathered outside. Several women were screaming, yelling and crying. The few men present were conversing in loud voices and making telephone calls. A little while later Ayşe explained what happened. An elderly Kozanlı, Osman, had felt sick with a chest pains. When he started sweating and feeling nauseated, someone called an ambulance. It took a long time to arrive, and

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in the meantime Osman suffered a heart attack. Two men lifted him into a car and tried to meet the ambulance. Someone else called the emergency services again to give the brand, colour and license plate of the car. Orhan died in the car. In the weeks after his death, I heard vehement discussions about the promised road works and the inaccessibility of the village in case of an emergency. When I returned to the village the following year a large part of the potholed road connecting the village to the main road to Nicosia had been fixed and re-asphalted. The road works were praised both by the Kozanlılar and the visiting Larnatsjiotes. Still, promised improvements to the roads in the village were delayed and no one seemed to do much about it. The lack of cleanliness in the village might also indicate neglect stemming from the fear of having to move again, but it may only reflect the general attitudes towards litter.32 Although the village had an overwhelming natural beauty, there was rubbish everywhere: around the houses, in the courtyards, the fields, and on roadsides. Some of it was household waste in plastic bags but there was also discarded furniture, and old, abandoned cars dotted the roads outside the village. The road connecting Kozan with Karşıyaka (Vasilia) had two big garbage dumps. Fosshagen observed that his Turkish Cypriot informants in Mağusa (Famagusta) would throw ‘cigarettes, nut shells and other small litter’ into the street in front of the house and that there was a ‘lack of care for the street immediately outside [the house]’.33 This was my experience in Kozan too. The first time I cooked with Sema I asked her where I should throw the onion peels, not knowing where the dustbin was. She took the rubbish from my hands and without hesitation threw it out of the large bay window. Sema must have seen I was perplexed because she laughed and told me, while pointing outside, that the ‘big dustbin’ (büyük çöp kötusu) is outside. This became a sort of standing joke because whenever my friends flicked away their cigarette butts they would smile and say that this is a ‘büyük küllük’ (large ashtray). One night my host family organised a barbeque in the mountains to welcome Fatma’s brother, who lived in the United Kingdom and had not visited Kozan for five years. After the meal, we cleaned up the makeshift picnic spot and I was impressed that Fatma was collecting all the garbage – melon peels, empty bottles, nut shells,

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left-over food – in a plastic bag. We brought the chairs, folding tables and barbeque set to the car. I took the plastic bag, assuming we would take it home to discard it in the rubbish bin. Fatma took the bag from me and hurled it off the steep cliff into the darkness. Murat said something along the lines that it was not worth taking the garbage home because there was no proper rubbish collection. This complaint was echoed by many other villagers.

‘Where Will They Take Us Now?’ When I asked my informants directly why they did not want to return to Tera, Akoursos or the other villages where they had houses for which they hold recognized title deeds (a thing they emphasized often), they were resolute. It was impossible to return because to do so would mean that they would have to live again among Greek Cypriots and this had proved impossible in the past. There was no trust that history would not repeat itself. Fahri put it to me like this: Say that I return to Tera. Then the government should provide a mosque (cami), a hodja (hoca), [Turkish Cypriot] teacher (daskalos). Our flag (bayraki) should be there. We need our flag, in case there would be a wedding. But I cannot go back. Shall I go back to be there alone? What if I get sick? How will I go to the doctor? I do not want to go back. It is important to point out that the Kozanlılar had a nuanced view of Greek Cypriots. Many informants distinguished between Greek Cypriot politicians (i megali, literally ‘the big ones’) and the ordinary citizens who are just decent human beings (anthropoi) like them. My informants were not only critical of Greek Cypriot leaders (with the former president, Tassos Papadopoulos, as the personification of the evil politician), but also of their own leaders. Neşe, a Kozanlı in her late fifties, expressed it as follows: It is the politicians who can solve the [Cyprus] problem. But they do nothing. Denktaş, for example, what did he do all these

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years? And now they brought Talat. What is he doing? Nothing. Do they kill over a flag (bayrak) in England or Germany? No. But here in Cyprus they do, such a small country . . . Although the villagers held sophisticated views about the Greek Cypriots, their distrust surfaced in every conversation. Many Kozanlılar insisted that it only takes two persons to start fighting over nothing (gia tipote) for it to blow up. Like Ibrahim who told me one morning, very adamant: Of course I want to go to the south. Or wherever I want. To work there. Well, my sons. There is no work here, so my two sons go and work in the south. But at night there should be sentries (froura). We cannot live with the Greek Cypriots again. It does not work. Troubles (fasaries) can start so quickly. It was also in that context that my informants insisted that the Turkish army should remain in the north. Mehmet asked me during one of our interviews: Why should the army leave? I want it here, not for five days, but forever, because I feel safer with the soldiers. We [Turkish Cypriots] are so few. I know what could happen. I saw it before. Two people [Turkish Cypriot and a Greek Cypriot] start a fight and then . . . (Sighed). Of course we want the army here. All the villagers agreed about the need for the Turkish army’s presence. They also agreed that they did not want to live among Greek Cypriots again and thus excluded completely the possibility of return to their former villages in the Paphos district. Greek and Turkish Cypriots had to live separately, each community ‘in their own room’ to use Salih’s metaphor. When I visited the village just before the 2004 referendum, Mehmet had expressed strong disagreement with the Annan Plan. ‘Where will they take us now?’ (Pou na mas paroun tora?), he asked in despair. However, in the first month I lived in Kozan Mehmet told me that he had voted in favour of the Annan Plan:

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Of course I said ‘Yes’ to the Annan plan. Yes, we have to move, but they would give us a new home. That is not the problem. They can build a village overnight. If they want (an theloun). If there is money. Other Kozanlılar also said they had voted ‘yes’ in the referendum. When I asked Murat about the house he was building for his son Orhan, he simply replied: ‘So what? They would have to provide a house for him too.’ Ozkul stressed that it was important to find a solution (na vroume mia lisi) because he did not want to feel oppressed anymore by living in an unrecognized state and he wanted peace and quiet (na me afisoun isixi). It was only during my second fieldwork round in Kozan that I heard other versions of the story, namely, that many of them actually voted against the plan. One reason for the yesvote story could be that the Kozanlılar saw me, at first, primarily as a Greek Cypriot and wanted to show me that they, just as the majority of Turkish Cypriots, were willing to make sacrifices for a solution, unlike the Greek Cypriots who had voted against the proposed solution. It could also be that the villagers gave me first a ‘public discourse answer’ (yes, we voted ‘yes’) and only offered me a ‘private discourse answer’ once they trusted me sufficiently. The fact was that later on in my fieldwork I came across more villagers who openly told me that they voted against the Annan Plan because they did not want to move again. Hatice explained the growing insecurity of her co-villagers: There was no money and no map to indicate where we would be sent if the Annan Plan would be implemented. About fifty percent of us voted ‘no’. The village was divided over the referendum. Some wanted to have a permanent solution, to move and to be left alone. Others were vehement and would not hear of moving again. What was a good solution then according to the Kozanlılar? Turkish Cypriot should be able to retain the properties, especially the houses, they used now and the Greek Cypriots should be compensated for them. There was a consensus among my informants on two issues:

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they should receive internationally recognized title deeds to the house they inhabited and they should get a guarantee that they would not be displaced again. Just as Greek Cypriot refugees mourn their losses and express nostalgia about their pre-displacement lives, so do Turkish Cypriot refugees. The Kozanlılar’s nostalgic accounts, however, are more muted, complex and ambivalent compared to the more vociferous accounts of Greek Cypriot refugees. Such accounts are not encouraged by the Turkish Cypriot regime, and they are complex and ambivalent because, unlike Greek Cypriot refugees, the Kozanlılar have no wish to return to their villages in the south. They have been displaced several times and have suffered enough. The Kozanlılar wish to remain where they are and become locals, that is, lead settled and secured lives. Emphasizing their refugee identity not only allows them to retain a sense of who they are, but also claim a future for themselves and their children.

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It is often said that we live in a globalized, cosmopolitan world in which place, locality and rootedness no longer hold the significance they once had. This may be true in many cases but it is at odds with the experience of refugees and other forced migrants. When one has suffered the loss of home and community once or more than once, as is the case for the Larnatsjiotes and Kozanlılar, one is not likely to celebrate mobility and rootlessness. Jean Améry, a holocaust survivor, phrased it most eloquently: How much home a person needs cannot be quantified. And still, precisely at this time, when home is losing some of its repute, one is greatly tempted to answer the purely rhetorical question and say: he needs more home, more, at any rate, than a world of people with a homeland, whose entire pride is their cosmopolitan vacation of fun, can dream of.1 Those theories that emphasize the importance of place as a constructed network of social relationships best capture the experience of Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees.2 Both groups strive to embed themselves in the places they live now, while at the same time they long for the localities from which they have been displaced. Doreen Massey defends the notion of place and belonging against accusations of nationalism and defines place and localities as ‘constructions out of the intersections and interactions of concrete social relations and social processes in a situation of co-presence’.3 This is important to my work because it explains, at least partly, why many Larnatsjiotes did not

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support the Annan Plan that would allow them to return to their village. It was not only the actual space that counted for them but also the place as a ‘construction’ of social relations, that is, the community, which in this sense was no longer there. The work of John Davis on the normality of suffering and Clifford Geertz’s theory about the need to make sense of it are also pertinent.4 In his discussion of the division between ‘comfortable anthropology’ and ‘emergency anthropology’, Davis points out that pain and suffering are very much ‘part and parcel of social conditions generally’.5 This is not to underrate the extent of Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees’ suffering but to show that it has been part of their lives for a long time and to emphasize the refugees’ need to come to terms with it. As Geertz shows, making sense of suffering does not take it away, but it makes it bearable. Cypriots explain their displacement as an injustice done to them by the other party: by Turkey in the case of Greek Cypriots and by Greek Cypriots in the case of Turkish Cypriots. It is this demand for justice that has kept the two communities apart ever since. For Greek Cypriot refugees, justice is the recognition of their suffering, which is couched in terms of the right to return. For Turkish Cypriot refugees, justice is recognition of what they have suffered before 1974, which in practical terms means the right to stay. The six chapters in this book illustrated the ways in which suffering is part of the lives of both Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees. In Chapter One, I concentrated on the emplacement of the Larnatsjiotes in the south of Cyprus. Over the past three decades the Larnatsjiotes mourned the loss of community, a certain life-style and their properties. They recounted in vivid detail the first two years after the war when they moved several times to improve their living conditions. In their nostalgic accounts their former houses were always a focal point, because these were most invested with meaning and were their most tangible loss. Significantly, the nostalgia expressed by ordinary Greek Cypriot refugees found support in the official discourse of the state. The ubiquitous phrase ‘our desire is to go back [to Larnakas]’ (o pothos mas einai i epistrofi), which I often heard in informal conversations and interviews with Larnatsjiotes, echoed the rhetoric of Greek Cypriot politicians in public speeches. Larnatsjiotes would also say

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that although they were physically ‘here’ [in the south of Cyprus], their minds were ‘over there’ (potsji [in Larnakas]). There was not a single Larnatsjiotis who did not stress that his ‘real’ home is Larnakas. Nonetheless, Larnatsjiotes also emphasized that, despite their displacement, they have worked hard and were able to educate their children and lead more or less comfortable lives after the first years of financial hardship. Greek Cypriot refugees moved on. This echoes Peter Loizos’ observation: It would seem to be the case that as time goes by, more and more refugees spend more and more time with their refugee identity “switched off”. If something happens to “switch it on” then the sense of grievance returns to the surface in full strength—the iron is still in both heart, and soul.6 Chapter Two described exactly such an event, that is, one that ‘switched on’ their refugee identity: the opening of the border made it suddenly possible for the Larnatsjiotes to visit their former villages and houses. Access to Larnakas, since April 2003, brought grievances back to the surface ‘in full strength’. What it also did however, was test their desire to return and re-occupy their houses. Their image of the house and village retained in post-war memories was altogether different from the place they were now allowed to visit. The Larnatsjiotes were disappointed and sad after the first visit to their former village. They described Larnakas as a village that was neglected, dirty and turkified. Many Larnatsjiotes refrained from crossing the border again, or only did so very few times over the past years because of the disappointment. As I showed in Chapter Three, there are however some Larnatsjiotes who frequently visited their village and tried to reappropriate the village symbolically, for example, by engaging in certain rituals such as resacrilizing religious places and visiting places holding special meaning. Regardless of whether Greek Cypriots crossed the border or not, they are unified in their attitude towards it. The border is illegitimate and they demand its elimination. On the other hand, crossing the border did not seem to pose an ethical dilemma for Turkish Cypriots.

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They crossed the border for various reasons: for sightseeing, to work, to shop, to obtain documents and claim various benefits from the Republic of Cyprus. Turkish Cypriots too would like to see the checkpoints removed although they are unanimous in the view that the notional border of an autonomous state within the federation should remain in place. In Chapter Four, I also suggested that the stereotypes that each community held about the other have not been broken down by contact as the most optimistic people in both communities had hoped. On the contrary, old stereotypes were strenghtened and new ones emerged. Chapter Five and Six dealt with a small Turkish Cypriot refugee community. Had both sides accepted the terms of the Annan plan, their village was to be returned to Greek Cypriots. It is possible, therefore that the views expressed by the inhabitants of the village were influenced by this prospect. In any case, I do not want to claim that they are necessarily representative of all Turkish Cypriot refugees. The Kozanlılar’s efforts to emplace themselves in their new environment, the village Kozan, seem to have been successful. The community consists of refugees from different Paphos villages and is differentiated on the basis of wealth, occupation, gender and age, but it is also unified as a moral community. In their own words, they are ‘one big family’. Like other rural communities, the Kozanlılar encounter a number of difficulties, but an overall feeling of being settled in Kozan prevails. As a result this village, which was not known to most of these Paphos refugees before 1974, and was therefore devoid of meaning, has become their home. Much like Greek Cypriot refugees, the Kozanlılar express nostalgia for their village in the south. There are differences, however. The Turkish Cypriot refugees’ expression of attachment to their villages in the south is not supported by the official Turkish Cypriot discourse. Moreover, it does not mean that they wish to return. Contrary to what some Greek Cypriots claim, the Kozanlılar lead normal, settled lives, have formed strong attachment to their village and would like to remain where they are. However, the process of emplacement for the Kozanlılar, as for so many other forced migrants, does not seem to have come to an end. Since 2003, when details of the United Nations’ peace plan emerged and it became apparent that the village

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would be returned to Greek Cypriots, a heightened sense of insecurity has lingered under the surface of normal life. Although nothing came of the United Nations’ plan, their fear is that in a future settlement of the ‘Cyprus Problem’ the village would to be returned and their community would be disrupted and displaced again. The Kozanlılar would have to start a new process of ‘home-making’ again. For these Turkish Cypriot refugees, returning to their former villages is not an option. Notwithstanding their attachment to their Paphos villages, repeatedly expressed in nostalgic accounts, these localities were also sites of suffering, fear and insecurity. Their ‘place of desire’ is the village they live in now, separate from Greek Cypriots, whom they still distrust, but with whom they are also willing to form new bonds. Greek Cypriots, in their view, are fellow islanders and not simply enemies. Yet, the violence of the past and the current attitude of Greek Cypriots towards them, exemplified by the Greek Cypriot rejection of the Annan Plan, confirmed to the Kozanlılar that they cannot live with Greek Cypriots. Although they will be under one roof, they wish to live in a separate room. As I have already suggested, the need for both Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees to make sense of their suffering entails the notion of justice. Justice for Greek Cypriot refugees is couched in terms of the right to return, whereas for Turkish Cypriot refugees it is couched in terms of the right to stay.7 As I have shown in this book, the Larnatsjiotes’ demand to return to Larnakas is in conflict with the Kozanlılar’s demand to stay in Kozan. The village is ‘the place of desire’ for both. Their demands are obviously incompatible and mutually exclusive and at this level of analysis the prospects for a solution of the ‘Cyprus Problem’ seem to be almost non-existent. To bolster their mutually incompatible claims, Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees engage in a game of competitive victimhood and this, apparently, cannot be the basis for peace. My data however suggest that this pessimistic scenario is not necessarily the only way to interpret the current situation on the island. It may be the case that the ‘desire’ is not so much for the ‘place’ itself as for recognition of the injustice that Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees feel was done to them. In sum, this state of ‘desire’ is not merely a case of emplacing desire. I have used this

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concept because it illustrates how significant the affective component of the micro-politics of both ‘displacement’ and ‘emplacement’ is, experienced by the refugees who live with the ‘Cyprus Problem’ on a local, everyday level. Such an interpretation goes a long way in explaining the stance of many Larnatsjiotes towards the Annan Plan. The tenuous, ambiguous and often contradictory responses to the Annan Plan show that the people cannot decide which choice would be better: to return to the village or stay put and live with the nostalgia about it. This is one of the predicaments they face on an emotional level. As I have already suggested the plan stipulated that the village would be returned to its former inhabitants and yet many Larnatsjiotes voted against the plan. It is also consistent with the fact that, three decades after their displacement, life has moved on. They, their children and grandchildren are settled in the south and although they would not say this publicly, in the intimacy of the household they acknowledge that they will not return even if they are allowed to. I asked many Larnatsjiotes over the past years why they voted against the Annan Plan and received various answers. Firstly, some believe that all Greek Cypriot should have the right to return, not only those from a handful of villages. Secondly, the plan did not address their demand for a total and immediate withdrawal of the Turkish army and guarantees that Turkey would no longer have the right to intervene in Cyprus unilaterally. Finally, they needed more guarantees about the cost of implementing the Annan Plan. Such answers suggest that recognition of their suffering was at least as important as the prospect of reoccupying their lost village. Injustice was done to all Greek Cypriot refugees, not only to those who were allowed to return; the Turkish army could come back and commit the same acts as in 1974; and the cost of implementing peace should be borne by the aggressors not the victims. Thus I agree with Loizos that the Annan Plan offered ‘too little’ and ‘too late’8: too little because what it stipulated for Greek Cypriots was not justice enough, and too late because even in the cases where justice was to be done it would have no practical currency. For the Kozanlılar, the fear of being displaced yet again became a reality through the Annan Plan. As a result their refugee identity was

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‘switched on’. Some of them voted against and some of them in favour of the plan, but both attitudes had as their basis the question of justice. For the former, justice was already done in 1974 and they were willing to defy the international community as long as Turkey guaranteed the permanence of the division. For the latter, although justice was also done in 1974, the fact that the international community did not recognize it meant that it was precarious and temporary. They were therefore willing to move yet again as long as this was going to be the last time. The United Nations’ plan provided the required legitimacy and by voting in favour of the plan Greek Cypriots would also have recognized that this was indeed going to be the last time. So, in this case the ‘desire’ was not necessarily for the ‘place’, namely the actual village of Kozan, but for a place of permanence, security and peace. The Cypriot predicament, analyzed here in terms of justice, requires a resolution for a future settlement that is necessarily couched in terms of rectifying the kinds of perceived injustices I have described. In the case of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees the essential matter is not which of the two communities wins, but that both sides articulate their demands in terms of some concept of justice. If, as I tried to show in this book, the restitution of justice is paramount for both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, then a solution to the ‘Cyprus Problem’ requires mutual recognition of the injustice and suffering experienced by both sides.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. In UN jargon Cypriot refugees are defined as ‘internally displaced persons’, having been uprooted from their place of origin and forced to move within their own country. Both Greek and Turkish Cypriots refer to themselves as ‘refugees’ (prosfyges in Greek and göçmenler in Turkish), and for that reason I employ this term here. Although this book focusses only on Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees, it is important to note that these refugee communities are not the only ones on the island. Members of the smaller Armenian and Maronites communities on Cyprus also became refugees during the intracommunal violence or in 1974. See Pattie (1997) for a detailed ethnography about the Armenians on Cyprus and Matossian (2006) for the story of his Armenian family on Cyprus. 2. Koumoulides 1986. 3. Both of these histories include examples of such ‘transitional periods’. For example, for the Greek Cypriot side, the start of the anti-colonial struggle in 1955 until the Independence Day on 1 October 1960 or, for the Turkish Cypriot side, the period between the ‘peace operation’ in 1974 and the Declaration of Independence in 1983 by the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ (TRNC), only recognized by Turkey. For detailed analyses see Papadakis (1993) and Bryant (2004). As Sant Cassia (2005) clearly documents, the issue of the ‘missing person’ began for both communities at different times. For the Turkish Cypriots the first missing persons were reported from 1963 onwards, while the problem of the missing persons began for the Greek Cypriots in 1974. 4. For more details on the recent history of Cyprus see following ethnographies: Loizos (1975: 13–23) and Argyrou (1996: 14–57) who provide us with an

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

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excellent political, economic and historical background of Cyprus. Sant-Cassia (2005: 18–22) gives a brief history of the inter-ethnic relations on Cyprus. The term ‘peaceful relations’ is a contested issue among political analysts and historians of Cyprus. I use it here in the sense of ‘non-violent coexistence’. ‘There were a number of violent attacks on high officials, usually involving shootings, or the bombing of homes. Arms and explosives were seized from police stations and mining camps. There was a general atmosphere of tension, the newspapers were again full of stories of coups being planned’ (Loizos 1975: 20). I explore this topic at length in the next chapter. For more detailed analyses on the failed Annan Plan see Varnava and Faustmann (2009). Gürel and Özersay 2006b: 3. Canefe 2002: 9; Sant Cassia 2005: 19. Patrick 1976: 344–345, his emphasis. Gürel and Özersay 2006b: 3. Canefe 2002: 16. See Gürel and Özersay 2006a; 2006b. Report of the Secretary General to the Security Council on Cyprus, 1 April 2003, S/2003/398, page 23. Available at http://www.un.org/Docs/sc/sgrep03.html See ‘The State as Emergency Planner’ (Loizos 2008: 42 and 50). For more detailed information on refugee housing see Zetter (1986, 1991, 1994 and 1998). Scott 1998: 147. İskan, Topraklandırma ve Eşdgeğer Mal Yasası (the Law for Housing, Allocation of Land, and Property of Equal Value) was established in 1985, in the TRNC constitution, and has been amended numerous times (Gürel and Özersay 2006b: 13). Scott 1998: 142–143, her emphasis. Hatay and Bryant 2008: 428–429. See Jansen and Löfving 2009; Kibreab 1999; Turton 2005; Malkki 1995. Two examples from the anthropological literature on Greek Cypriots refugees: Jepson (2006) explored how Greek Cypriot refugees recreated in their new place the gardens they had in their villages. Loizos (2008) examined how the experience of displacement influenced the health of Greek Cypriot refugees. I hold both the Belgian and Cypriot identity. The north of the island, where the Turkish Cypriots live, was inaccessible for Greek Cypriots before the border opened in April 2003. Massey 1994, 2005. Massey 1994: 2.

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25. Geertz 1973. 26. It is important, though, to mention that my father did not come to Belgium ‘as a refugee’. Many displaced Cypriots left the island and emigrated to the United Kingdom or to Australia, where in most cases they had already relatives or acquaintances. 27. She sets the example in her own work (Behar 1993, 1996). 28. Behar 1995: 3. 29. See, for instance, Behar and Gordon 1995; Okely and Callaway 1992; ReedDanahay 1997. 30. Abu-Lughod 1991: 137. 31. Behar 1996: 7. This attraction to insert one’s own biography to a great extent into the ethnography shows in my early writings and publications (Dikomitis 2003, 2004). 32. Barnard 2000: 165. 33. Dikomitis 2005, 2009. 34. The Cypriot hospitality, especially by relatives welcoming one of their own on their return home, is a heartwarming and motivating start for a beginning anthropologist. I refer to Loizos’ account of how he was received in 1966 by his Argaki relatives whom he had never met before (1981: 3–10). 35. Gay y Blasco and Wardle 2007: 118. 36. Panourgia 1995: 8. 37. Loizos 2001: 181. 38. Loizos 2008: 4. 39. Argyrou 1996: 61. 40. Macintyre 1993: 47. 41. Crick 1992: 176.

Chapter One 1. Herzfeld 1997: 109. 2. Bal 1985: 147. See also Bal et al 1999. 3. Loizos (2008: 41–51) provides us with an excellent, retrospective view on how the Greek Cypriot economy recovered quickly after the 1974 tragedy and how the state helped the refugees to resettle in the south, by providing all kinds of help and support in finding jobs and accommodation. It depended on a number of factors (e.g. the job held before displacement, the financial situation of each nuclear family, the age and number of children) in what kind of house and neighbourhood the Larnatsjiotes lived anno 2002, when I started my fieldwork. 4. Greenfield 1987; Honeyman 1938.

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5. Parkin 1999: 315. 6. As I will show later this is not totally true. Many Turkish Cypriots actually fled their houses in the same way Greek Cypriots did. 7. Such images are also widespread on the Internet, in particular on websites of Greek Cypriot refugee associations. See for instance www.larnacaslapithou. com (last accessed on 1 December 2010). 8. Bird 2002: 523. 9. See Dikomitis 2003; Loizos 1981, 2003, 2008. 10. Larnakas tis Lapithou is represented in two associations, both in Nicosia. The right-wing refugee association is called ‘National Union Mavromatis’ (Ethniki Enosi Mavromati) and the left-wing ‘Refugee Association Larnakas tis Lapithou’ (Prosfygiko Somateio Larnaka Lapithou). The latter was founded recently, in 2000, and has no coffee shop or meeting place. 11. See Argyrou 1996. 12. Loizos 2008: 10. 13. Dubisch: 1995. 14. Danforth 1989: 168–213. 15. Jepson 2006: 163. 16. De Boeck 1998: 26.

Chapter Two 1. The first division of the capital, however, took place in 1956 when Cyprus was still a British colony. As Papadakis (2006: 2) notes: ‘That was a period when the British exploited interethnic differences leading to interethnic violence and the erection of a barbed wire division of parts of the city known as the “Mason-Dixon” Line.’ This led later, in 1958, to the issue of separate municipalities (see Markides 1998 for more details). 2. United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus. 3. Henn 2004: 15 and 497–498. 4. Loizos 2008: 61 and 65. 5. This rebellion period was coined as the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ (Yasemin Devrimi) by Hatay and Bryant (2008). 6. For more details on this period see Demetriou and Vlachos (2007). 7. For such stories see Dikomitis (2003), Loizos (1981: 99–111) and Loizos (2008: 70). 8. Later identity cards were also accepted and there was no one-day limit for visits to the other side. It is, however, still necessary to complete a form whose details are then fed into a computer at the checkpoints. 9. Kundera 2002: 15–16.

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10. See Scott and Topcan (2006) for details on the construction boom in north Cyprus. 11. Nicosia/Lefkoşa, Kyrenia/Girne and Famagusta/Gazi Mağusa. 12. Another leaflet entitled ‘Useful and Important Information for Daily Visitors from South Cyprus’ was distributed at the checkpoints, with the text in English and Greek. It explained the procedure for crossing from ‘South Cyprus to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ at the time: presentation of passport, registration, stamping, returning the entry document upon exit, opening hours of the checkpoint and the obligation to buy a car insurance. It also included the emergency telephone numbers and the ‘dos and don’ts’ during a visit to the north of Cyprus. Much later there was also a map available at the kiosks in south Cyprus, for the price of ₤1.75. It was a map of the north (only half of the island was printed) with the Greek and Turkish village names. 13. See Ladbury and King (1988) and Navaro-Yashin (2010) on the renaming of localities in north Cyprus. It is important to note also that Turkish-Cypriot village names were ‘changed and assigned names more akin to places and connotations of Turkey’. Navaro-Yashin (2003: 122) coins this process ‘Turkey-fication’, which ‘is different from Turkification’. 14. See Shehadeh (2007) for another example of a transforming landscape due to the long-standing conflict in Palestine. 15. Bird 2002: 523. 16. Proust 1982: 48–51. 17. Two years after the borders opened the church building was opened and converted into a mosque. 18. Stelios Mavromatis, one of the many young nationalists of the EOKA period, was hung by the colonial authorities on 21 September 1956, having been sentenced to death for shooting at British soldiers. 19. Loizos 2008: 71. 20. This checkpoint was opened on 10 May 2003. 21. See Scott’s (2003) analysis of the casino tourism in north Cyprus before the border openings. 22. From The Cyprus Mail, Thursday 6 July 2004. 23. Turkish Cypriots older than 35 generally speak some level of the Greek Cypriot dialect given that they lived in an area, before 1974, where they had daily contact with Greek Cypriots. 24. You could call the other side through the UN-lines but this was not done often. Later on, the quality of a phone call between a landline in north and south Cyprus was often poor, so people preferred conversations via a mobile phone. 25. See Argyrou (1996) on Greek Cypriot weddings.

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26. Rushdie 1991: 10. 27. In this section I am concerned with the Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees’ behavior at the time of the referendum. A detailed summary or in-depth analysis of the Annan plan is beyond the scope of this chapter. By now, there is a burgeoning literature on the Annan Plan and the outcome of the twin referenda. See the special edition of the Cyprus Review: Cyprus, the EU and the Referenda on the Annan Plan (vol. 16, no. 2, Fall 2004); Cyprus After Accession: Getting Past ‘No’?, a report by the South East European Studies, St Anthony’s College, the University of Oxford (May 2007); Dikomitis Elena 2009; Faustmann 2004; Loizos 2008: 85–95; Platis, Orphanides and Mullen 2006; Trimikliniotis 2006; Qvortrup 2005; Webster and Lordos 2006. 28. At the time I was mainly doing fieldwork in south Nicosia, on which these observations are based. It has to be noted that the Annan Plan was, for several reasons, discussed for a much longer period and in more detail in the Turkish Cypriot community than in the Greek Cypriot community (see Bahcheli 2004). 29. For example, To sxedio Annan me geloiografies kai polla aposiopitika by Sotos Voskaridis (Boss) published by Printko Limited (Nicosia) in April 2004 and reprinted in September 2005. 30. Reunifying Cyprus, edited by Varnava and Faustmann (2009), provides detailed information on the referendum results. 31. Loizos 2008: 91–93. See also Loizos 2009. 32. Cited in an article by Elena Dikomitis 2008. 33. Loizos 2009: 81.

Chapter Three 1. Webster and Timothy 2006: 175. 2. It is impossible to tell exactly how many Greek Cypriot refugees engage in frequent return visits. What is certain is that this is not only a phenomenon among the Larnatsjiotes. I have encountered similar practices among refugees from many other villages. 3. On the prevalence of saints in everyday life of Greek Orthodox see Hart (1992: 193–223). 4. Hart 1992: 130. 5. There are many similar narratives to be found in ethnographic works about other societies, from which I cite two significant examples that indicate the importance and emotional value people attach to their places of origin. Delaney (1990: 525), for instance, offers a comparable depiction of Turkish

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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immigrants, now living in West-European cities, who return for an annual holiday to their villages, where ‘they touch the native soil of their village, which is almost sacred, and drink from the village fountain, which they have idealized in their imagination’. Also Herzfeld (1991: 20) mentions pilgrimages undertaken by Cretan Muslims, now living in Turkey, to Rethemnos, and of Asia Minor Greeks making sentimental journeys to Turkey. I quote one telling example: ‘One former coffee shop owner went into his erstwhile establishment, still in use. Announcing, “I’m going to drink water” – an emotive marker of place for Greeks – he made for the cold water faucet, where he promptly burst into tears’ (Herzfeld 1991: 63). For this purpose, certain aspects of the conventional concept of pilgrimage will be revisited (following Delaney 1990). See Turner 1974, Turner and Turner 1978 and Dubisch 1995. Dubisch 1995: 35–36. Massey 2005: 124. For more details on Saint Fanourios, celebrated on 27 August, see Paraskevopoulou (1982: 85–86). See Dubisch 1983, 1995; Hart 1992; Hirschon 1983, 1989; Rushton 1983. See Paraskevopoulou (1982: 143–144) for details on the Panagia Katharkotissa. Dubisch 1995: 64. Stewart 1991: 165. Stewart 1991: 166. Du Boulay 1974: 140. Du Boulay 1974: 54. Hart 1992: 148. See Hirschon 1983, 1989; Sarris 1995; Zetter 1998. See Danforth (1982) for a detailed study of Greek Orthodox death rituals as rites of passage. Hirschon (1983: 121). See also Bowman (2000) about Orthodox pilgrimage in Jerusalem. In this section I am using the term ‘ritual’ to denote repetitive behaviour. In contemporary fiction about refugees authors often let their characters engage in similar acts. See, for example, this excerpt from Khaled Hosseini’s (2003: 112) The Kite Runner, where the two main characters are fleeing from their village: ‘We left that night, Baba and I, Kamal and his father, the others. Karim and his cousin, a square-faced balding man named Aziz, helped us get into the fuel tank. One by one, we mounted the idling truck’s rear deck, climbed the rear access ladder, and slid down into the tank. I remember Baba climbed halfway up the ladder, hopped back down and fished the

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snuffbox from his pocket. He emptied the box and picked up a handful of dirt from the middle of the unpaved road. He kissed the dirt. Poured it into the box. Stowed the box in his breast pocket, next to his heart.’ 24. See the collecting Hearing Cultures (Erlmann 2004) for detailed analyses of auditory perceptions in a range of contexts. 25. Gozdziak 2002: 138 and 146.

Chapter Four 1. Both the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) keep track of the crossings. I obtained the statistics of the RoC via regular email request from the RoC’s police headquarters. The TRNC’s statistics are available online on one of the websites of the Ministry of Tourism and Economy (http://www.turizmcevrekultur.org). For an analysis of these statistics see Jacobson et al (2009); Scott and Topcan (2006) and Webster and Timothy (2006). 2. Numbers from the RoC Police. For a detailed table see Jacobson et al (2009: 10). 3. See http://www.turizmcevrekultur.org for a table of all the non-Cypriot crossers (last accessed on 20 November 2010). 4. See Olga Demetriou’s (2007) excellent analysis of political subjectivity in relation to the opening of the border. 5. Webster and Timothy (2006). This number was confirmed by a survey in 2008 (Jacobscon et al 2009: 9). 6. Numbers of the RoC Police. The number of Turkish Cypriots crossing to the south increased again in 2008 (1,298,325). 7. My Turkish Cypriot informants would call the borders interchangeably kapı (gate), sınır (border) and barikat (checkpoint). The term Yeşil Hat (Green Line) would rarely be used. 8. See, for instance, the article Kaldırın sınırları! (Remove the Borders!) in Yenidüzen newspaper (23 September 2009) in which four Turkish Cypriots were interviewed, when crossing the Metehan (Agios Dometios) checkpoint. They complained about the long queue and the ineffective service of the Turkish Cypriot police. The interview was taken on the third day of the Bayram holiday (see further). 9. Canefe 2002: 2. 10. My Turkish Cypriot informants referred to the south of Cyprus variously as güney Kıbrıs’da (south Cyprus), güney’de (in the south), öbür tarafta (on the other side). The word obür is the dialect variant of the Turkish word diger.

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11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

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The word Urum is used mostly by the elderly: (U)Rum tarafinda (the GreekCypriot side) or (U)Rum’da (to the Greek Cypriots). See also the article Bayram Rum esnafa yaradı (Greek Cypriot Shopkeepers Profit from Bayram) in the newspaper Kıbrıs (22 September 2009), about the large number of Turkish Cypriot urbanites who crossed during the Bayram holidays. The heading of this section is borrowed from Donnan and Wilson (1999: 122): ‘Borders are economic resources, to be consumed like other resources in a variety of ways. This is especially apparent to those who use the border as one way to add value to their own products, or who market themselves as masters of the border in order to entice people to use their services’. Numbers from an online article in Türk Medya Kıbrıs, last accessed on 20 November 2010. See Webster and Timothy 2006. Papadakis 2005: 81. See Argyrou 2007. Theodossopoulos 2007: 8 I use the term ‘recognize’ here in an individual sense.

Chapter Five 1. Some of the Kozanlılar who were born and lived in Kritou Tera still identified themselves with this village, although they moved to the neighbouring village of Tera by 1964. 2. The 2006 census results are available on http://nufussayimi.devplan.org/ Census%202006.pdf (last accessed on 4 December 2010). According to Hatay (2005: 66) there were, in 2005, 348 registered voters in Kozan. 3. See Hatay (2005: 23 and 66). When I last visited the village, in the summer of 2009, there was a Turkish family living in my father’s former home. The house became vacant when the old Turkish Cypriot man moved in with his daughter. I do not know whether more mainland Turks came to live in Kozan since I ended my field research in the spring of 2006. Consequently, in the following chapters about the Kozanlılar I will rarely touch upon this subject. The Kozanlılar did not mention (problems with) mainland Turks that often, if at all. If I had done fieldwork in a ‘settler village’ (see Hatay 2005), a mixed village or north Nicosia the relationship between Turkish Cypriots and mainland Turks might have been the main focus of research. Many villages in the area of Kozan, such as Alemdağ (Agridaki), Akçiçek (Sisklipos) and Şirnevler (Agios Ermolaos), are now inhabited by Turkish

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

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Cypriot refugees who come from villages in the Paphos area. These are all, according to Hatay (2005: 66), ‘native Turkish Cypriot villages’. Like in Kozan the number of present inhabitants in these villages is more or less half the number of Greek Cypriots who lived there before the displacements of 1974. Peter Loizos (1981: 22) wrote about cheese making groups among Greek Cypriots. The small-scale economies of cheese production greatly encouraged such rotating systems of co-operation, which were informal, but effective. ‘The parea [a ‘company’ of people informally associating on good terms] was the simplest and most sensible form of co-operation to be found in the village’. Welz and Andilios 2004: 217. See Welz and Andilios (2004) for an analysis of the transformations in halloumi production on Cyprus from the 1960s to the present day. Hellim, the traditional Cypriot cheese, can be served fresh, but can also be fried, grated or grilled. It is a white salty-flavoured cheese with a distinctive layered texture, not unlike mozzarella. Hellim is a popular food and an important ingredient of many dishes, both for Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Nor, which can be eaten fresh or dried, has a chalk-white look with a soft consistency, similar to ricotta and cottage cheese. Welz and Andilios 2004: 226. Welz and Andilios 2004: 227. The region around Kozan, including villages like Alemdağ (Agridaki) and Akçiçek (Sisklipos) nestled in the hillsides, still have agricultural activity and animal husbandry, although a large number of the local villagers have jobs other than working on the fields. This was confirmed in conversations with the Kozanlılar and via my own observations. I have not conducted any systematic research into the livelihoods of the villagers as that was not the focus of my research. Names and dates have been changed to protect my informants’ privacy. See Argyrou 1996 for a detailed analysis of weddings in Cyprus. On Greek Cypriot wedding invitations the place in north Cyprus where people originally came from would be included. For instance, ‘From Larnakas tis Lapithou, now Strovolos’. They always referred to their former village in the Paphos district with the Greek name Tera. I never heard the Kozanlılar using the Turkish name Çakırlar, at least not in my presence. That was my only encounter with a mainland Turk in Kozan. See Just (2000: 55) and Hart (1992: 172) who observed identical phrases during their fieldwork in Greece.

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17. Loizos 1975: 41. 18. For a discussion on tensions between in-laws living in the same house in other Mediterranean societies, see Bringa 1995: 44–45; Du Boulay 1974: 19; Hirschon 1989: 154–155, 161–163. 19. See Du Boulay 1974: 18–19; Hirschon 1989: 153–165; Just 2000: 159. As Hirschon (1989: 163) phrased it: ‘Household members created exclusive ties, secrets were shared “within the house”, but the awareness of obligation to those related by kinship or marriage, wherever they lived, always persisted’. 20. See Cowan 1990, 1991; Dubisch 1986, 1991, 1995; Hirschon 1989; Kirtsoglou 2004. 21. In what follows, I will highlight some issues regarding gender in Kozan, but I will use different conceptual tools from the ‘honour and shame’ complex (for a similar approach see Dubisch 1995: 280 n. 7). 22. This is also the case in Greek communities (see, for instance, Cowan 1991: 182). 23. See Fosshagen 1999: 67–74 for an outline of Turkish Cypriot houses. 24. Cowan 1991: 186. 25. Cowan 1991. See Serematakis (2009) for a recent analysis of coffee-cup readings in Greece. 26. Seremetakis 2009: 347. 27. Just 2000: 159. 28. Fosshagen 1999: 80. In her analysis of gambling in northern Cyprus, Scott (2003: 273) points to other public male arenas: coffee shops, sports clubs, ‘town clubs’ (şehir kulüberi) and casinos. These casinos can be visited by couples but ‘all-male gambling is still common’. 29. Fosshagen 1999: 68. 30. During my two fieldwork periods in the village I never joined a party of Kozanlılar who had lunch or dinner at a restaurant. This did not seem to be part of the Kozanlılar’s social life. On the few occasions I joined some of the villagers on visits to the city (Nicosia and Kyrenia) we ate at a kebab place or at a fast-food chain. There is a restaurant just outside the village, on the way to Vasilia (Karşıyaka), owned by a Kozanlı. On the numerous occasions I visited the place (with non-Cypriot tourists) I never saw any Kozanlılar there, only foreign (mainly British) tourists, and on a rare occasion, Greek Cypriots. 31. Killoran 1998: 193. 32. See Killoran 1998 for an exploration of gender issues in an urban Turkish Cypriot community. 33. Scott 1995: 394–395.

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34. Dubisch 1993: 282. 35. It is still exceptional that women take key positions in the political arena of northern Cyprus. In 2009, only four out of fifty MPs were women. On the local level, there are no female mayors, only 10 out of 140 muhtars are women and only 46 out of 460 muhtar’s assistants are female. For a full analysis see the supplement Gaile of the newspaper Yenidüzen (2 August 2009). 36. On 14 December 2009, three years after these local elections, an article about Kozan appeared in the Havadis newspaper in which the Kozanlılar praise their female muhtar (see http://www.havadiskibris.com/KIBRIS/2321Kozankoy.html, last accessed on 4 December 2010). 37. The young people I am concerned with here were between the ages of fifteen and thirty at the time of fieldwork. Inevitably, since I was conducting fieldwork in a community where gender divisions were still clearly marked, my contacts were mainly with young single women. The data I collected about how young, male Kozanlılar spent their free time was mainly via the accounts of women. 38. Herzfeld 1997. 39. See Hirschon (1983) for a similar example in Greece. 40. Hirschon 1983: 125. 41. See Fosshagen (1999: 72–85) for an analysis of the notions of dirt and impurity (pis) among Turkish Cypriots.

Chapter Six 1. Fosshagen 1999: 22–23, his emphasis. 2. I learned Turkish via local courses in a Turkish Cypriot community centre in north Nicosia and one-to-one courses with a young Turkish Cypriot teacher. I also spent one month in Istanbul where I followed an intensive Turkish language course at the local Tömer branch of Ankara University. The fact that I speak French too helped considerably in understanding many words in Turkish which have the same root or/and pronunciation as the French words. 3. In fact, the phrase ‘Napan?’ comes from the mainland Turkish ‘Ne yapıyorsun?’ which means ‘What are you doing?’. Turkish Cypriots use it also to inquire how one is, very much like the Greek ‘Ti kaneis?’ which literally means ‘What are you doing?’, but is also used to ask ‘How are you?’. 4. Turkish Cypriot writer Taner Baybars (2005: 62) wrote in his memoir that indeed ‘Paphos people spoke better Greek than Turkish’. 5. Volkan 1979: 121. See also Bryant 2010. 6. Volkan (1979: 123) indicated that each community of Turkish Cypriot refugees was assigned a kılavuz (guide): ‘Most often a young man with some

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7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

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college education, the kılavuz in a sense represented the settlement agency in Nicosia, the capital city. He was given a house for his own use and put in charge of a building suitable for a warehouse, in which were stored usable items such as beds, sewing machines, food, and television sets that the Greek Cypriots had left behind in their flight. The immigrants were assigned to houses comparable to those they had formerly had.’ Oberling 1982: ix-xii. Oberling 1982: ix. In August and September 1975, 8,033 Turkish Cypriots moved to the north, while 130 Turkish Cypriots, from twenty-two different localities, stayed in the south (Oberling 1982: 192–193). Scott 1998: 148. Papadakis 2005: 154. This renaming process, especially for villages had already started in the 1957. The standardization process of the new place names started in 1978 (Navaro-Yashin 2010). Ladbury and King 1988: 364, their emphasis. They mention one exception. The village Agios Georgos had been renamed Karaoğlanoğlu after the first Turkish commander who died in the 1974 war. Navaro-Yashin (2010) gives another example of a new name with an admittedly less obvious political connotation: Vasilia has been renamed to Karsıyaka, ‘to honour a general who was from the Karsıyaka district of Izmir in Turkey’. Navaro-Yashin 2010. Navaro-Yashin 2010. A well-known example is the widespread use of the old name ‘Bellapais’ for a picturesque village with a view on Girne (Kyrenia). The name Bellapais (beautiful place) was ‘phonetically rendered into the nearest Turkish word which meant something’, namely Beylerbeyi (‘Lord of Men’) (Ladbury and King 1988: 364). This name however is not popular among Turkish Cypriots. Papadakis 2005: 149. Volkan (1979: 126) reports a similar incident about a coffee shop in north Cyprus with the name ‘Refugees’ Coffeehouse’ in 1975. This had disturbed the government official (‘the troubleshooter’) who had been send to the village to solve a problem of a Turkish Cypriot refugee who had burned the Greek Cypriot blankets he had been given. The troubleshooter ‘thought it was time that the new settlers [Turkish Cypriot refugees] stopped thinking of themselves as refuees and saw themselves as the possessors of free Turkish land. Although the villagers saw the force of his argument, they did not alter the sign’. When Volkan (1979: 144) visited this village three years later he ‘found the sign gone and a Turkish flag painted in its place on the newly painted white wall.’

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18. Personal communication with Mete Hatay. 19. Volkan 1979: 144. 20. Echoes from the Past: The Turkish Cypriot community of Limassol and its Heritage (Akif 2008) is an excellent collection of stories, photographs and background information on the Limassolian Turkish Cypriots. This book is in three languages (Turkish, Greek and English), which makes it accessible to a wide audience. For contemporary Turkish Cypriot poetry, see Yashin (2000: 111–114), the poetry by Neşe and Mehmet Yashin, the collection of essays by journalist Sevgül Uludağ (2005) and the memoir by Taner Baybars (2005, first published in 1970). 21. Pierre Oberling (1982: 242) reports that 156 Turkish Cypriots were evacuated from Kritou Tera between 2 and 14 February 1964. 22. Loizos 2008: 104, his emphasis. 23. ‘Göçmen’ is in fact a kind of umbrella-term in Turkish. It can refer to migrants, but also to nomads or travellers. Turkish Cypriots do not use the term mülteci (refugee fleeing war or oppression) to refer to themselves, except those who applied for political asylum in the United Kingdom (Julie Scott, personal communication). 24. Patrick 1976. 25. See Patrick (1976: 313–316) for details on the enclave populations in the Polis area in Paphos where the Kozanlılar were then living. 26. Papadakis 2008: 23. 27. Canefe 2002: 17. 28. Scott 1998: 156–157. 29. Loizos 2008: 79. 30. Loizos 2008: 78. See also Loizos 2009: 69. 31. The European Union is giving financial assistance to encourage the economic development of the Turkish Cypriot community. This funding includes upgrading the management of the energy sector and a solid waste programme. 32. On littering in the south of Cyprus, see Argyrou 1997. 33. Fosshagen 1999: 72.

Places of Desire 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Améry 1980: 60. For example Massey 1994, 2005. Massey 1994: 138, her emphasis. Davis 1992; Geertz 1973. Davis 1992: 152.

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6. Loizos 2008: 186. 7. From the standpoint of international legal norms ‘the right to stay’ has only been articulated in negative terms as the ‘right not to be uprooted’. This in the context of the reconceptualisation of the international refugee regime, in the 1990s, following the conflict in Yugoslavia. 8. Loizos 2009: 82.

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WEBSTER, CRAIG and TIMOTHY, DALLEN J. 2006. ‘Travelling to the “Other Side”: the Occupied Zone and Greek Cypriot Views of Crossing the Green Line’, Tourism Geographies, 8 (2): 162–181 WELZ, GISELA and ANDILIOS, NICHOLAS. 2004. ‘Modern Methods for Producing the Tradition: the Case of Making Halloumi Cheese in Cyprus’, in Lysaght, Patricia and Burckhardt-Seebass, Christine (eds.), Changing Tastes: Food Culture and the Processes of Industrialization. Basel and Dublin: Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde and the Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin YASHIN, MEHMET (ed.) 2000. Step-Mothertongue: From Nationalism to Multiculturalism: Literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey. Middlesex: Middlesex University Press ZETTER, ROGER. 1986. ‘Rehousing the Greek Cypriot Refugees from 1974’ in John Koumoulides (ed.), Cyprus in Transition: 1960–1985. London: Trigraph ZETTER, ROGER. 1991. ‘Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 4 (1): 39–62 ZETTER, ROGER. 1994. ‘The Greek-Cypriot Refugees: Perceptions of Return under Conditions of Protracted Exile’, International Migration Review, 28 (2): 307–322 ZETTER, ROGER. 1998. ‘ “We Are Strangers here”: Continuity and Transition: The impact of Displacement and Protracted Exile on the Greek Cypriot “Refugees” ’ in Calotychos, Vangelis (ed.), Cyprus and Its People: Nation, Identity, and Experience in an Unimaginable Community, 1955–1997. Oxford: Westview Press

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INDEX

A Abu-Lughod, Lila, 22–23 Act of memory, 40–53, 57–58, 114 Agios Fanourios, 103–104, 106, 108 Akif, Özay, 215 n. 20 Améry, Jean, 195 Andilios, Nicholas, 140, 143 Annan Plan, 5, 9, 33, 35, 60, 84–92, 108, 168, 192–194, 196, 198–199, 200 Referendum, on, 6–7, 9, 11, 30, 33, 60, 86–92, 109, 136, 164, 192–193 Anthropology, 22–23, 32, 196 Fieldwork, 3, 4, 6, 15, 17, 20, 23–30, 34, 36, 43, 48, 53, 86, 103, 121, 133, 138, 156, 168, 171, 172, 182, 193 Argyrou, Vassos, 7, 27, 56, 83, 133–134, 149, 215 n. 32 Autoethnography, 22–23

Baybars, Taner, 213 n. 4, 215 n. 20 Behar, Ruth, 22, 23 Bird, Elizabeth, 49, 68 Border, 15, 59–61, 63, 91–92, 135–136, 197, 209 n. 7 and n. 10 Checkpoint, 15, 17, 60–61, 119 Crossing, 53, 59–61, 64–65, 80–81, 82, 91–92, 93–101, 117–120, 125–130, 163, 178, 197 Green Line, the, 9, 59–63, 93, 96, 117–118, 209 n. 7 Opening, of, 6–7, 22, 36, 58, 61, 77–79, 91–92, 117–120, 182, 183, 197 Perceptions, of, 26, 29, 31–32, 63, 77–79, 80–81, 83–84, 91–92, 96–97, 116, 118–125, 197–198 Restrictions, 34, 60, 63, 205 n. 8 Shopping, 82, 124, 125–130, 135–136, 210 n. 12 Bowman, Glenn, 108 Bringa, Tone, 212 n. 18 Bryant, Rebecca, 7, 14, 60, 213 n. 5

B Bahcheli, Tozun, 86 Bal, Mieke, 40 Barnard, Alan, 23

index.indd 225

C Callaway, Helen, 22 Canefe, Nergis, 123, 187

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226

C YPRUS

AND ITS

Casino, 79, 126–127, 206 n. 11, 212 n. 28 Checkpoint. See Border Circumcision, 71, 147–151, 169 Community, 39, 53–58, 101, 114, 125, 135–137, 155, 168, 192, 195–199 Coppieters, Bruno, 90 Cowan, Jane, 157, 158, 159, 212 n. 22 Crick, Malcom, 30 Cyprus, History, 7–9, 202 n. 3 Problem, 8–9, 15, 18, 21, 35, 85, 164, 188, 191–192, 199–201 Refugees, 6–20, 34–35, 36, 53, 57, 85, 91–92, 94–97, 99, 114–115, 135–136, 169, 195–201, 202 n. 1 Transitional period, 2, 202 n. 3

PLACES

OF

DESIRE

F Faustmann, Hubert, 9, 85, 89 Fosshagen, Kjetil, 160, 168, 170–171, 190, 212 n. 23, 213 n. 41

G Gay Y Blasco, Paloma, 24 Geertz, Clifford, 19, 196 Gender, 27–29, 42–43, 140, 155–163, 167, 168, 212 n. 21, 213 n. 37. See also Honour and shame complex Gozdziak, Elzbieta M., 115 Greek and Turkish Cypriot relations, 82–84, 96–97, 125–127, 130–135 Greenfield, J.C., 44 Green Line, 9, 59–61, 63, 85, 117–118. See also Border Gürel, Ayla, 10, 11, 13

D Danforth, Loring M., 57, 107 Davis, John, 196 De Boeck, Filip, 57 Delaney, Carol, 101 Demetriou, Olga, 118, 209 n. 4 Demetriou, Themos, 60 Dikomitis, Elena, 85, 90 Dikomitis, Lisa, 23, 47, 53 Displacement, 9–14, 17–20, 36, 40, 46–47, 53–58, 123, 178, 181, 185–189, 195–201 Donnan, Hastings, 125, 210 n. 12 Dubisch, Jill, 56, 101, 104, 106, 157, 161 Du Boulay, Juliet, 106–107, 157, 212 n. 18

E Emplacement, 14, 19, 35, 42, 196, 198 Erlmann, Veit, 209 n. 24

index.indd 226

H Halfie, 22–23 Hart, Laurie Kain, 100, 104, 107, 155 Hatay, Mete, 14, 60, 137, 210–211 n. 3 Hellim/Halloumi (cheese), 138–145, 211 n. 7 Henn, Brigadier Francis, 59 Herzfeld, Michael, 40, 101, 163 Hirschon, Renee, 104, 107, 108, 157, 166, 212 n. 18 Home, 6, 14–20, 24, 39, 42, 51, 53, 63, 84, 91, 96, 101, 107, 115, 133, 168, 177, 195–201 Notions of 14–19, 24, 67–77, 85 Honeyman, A.M., 44 Honour and shame complex, 157, 212 n. 20 and 21. See also Gender Hosseini, Khaled, 113

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INDEX

I Internally displaced persons, 6, 202 n. 1

J Jacobson, David, 117, 209 n. 1 Jansen, Stef, 14 Jepsom, Anne, 21, 57 Justice, 6, 19–20, 58, 86, 90, 135–136, 195–201 Just, Roger, 155, 157, 160

K Kibreab, Gaim, 14 Killoran, Moira, 160, 161 King, Russell, 66, 178–180, 214 n. 13 Kirtsoglou, Elisabeth, 157 Koumoulides, John, 7 Kozan, 17, 30–32, 137, 211 n. 10 Kozanlılar 16, 210 n. 2 Age, 163–168 Cheese makers, 138–145 Community, 137, 155, 156, 168 Daily life, 3–4, 138–168 Fieldwork among, 27–29, 33 Gender, 155–163 Language, 170–174 Livelihood, 137–146 Memories, 163–164 Social distinctions, 147–155 Village politics, 162, 213 n. 35 Kundera, Milan, 65

L Ladbury, Sarah, 66, 178–180, 214 n. 13 Landscape, 6, 47, 49, 58, 65–67, 77, 95, 98, 101, 178–179. See also Place Larnakas tis Lapithou, 15, 17, 36, 43 Cemetery, 51, 76–77, 98, 103, 107–108, 110, 113

index.indd 227

227

Fountain (vrises), 51, 71–72, 76, 113 History of, 43–44 Lacharopetra, 44, 48, 51, 62, 113 Landscape of, 44, 47, 66–67 Maps of, 48–53. See also Mental map Monastery, 47, 51, 56, 77, 98, 103–108, 113, 119, 138. See also Religion, Rituals, Saints Photographs of, 47–48 Trouli, 48, 67, 68, 98 Larnatsjiotes 16, Association of (syllogos), 55, 103, 205 n. 10 Community, 36, 39, 53–58 Memories of, 2, 40–48, 57–58, 66–67 Locality, 19, 57, 67, 73, 101, 106, 195 Löfving, Staffan, 14 Loizos, Peter, 7, 8, 15, 21, 24, 26, 27, 41, 53, 56, 60, 77, 85, 90, 92, 139, 155, 185, 188, 197, 200 Lordos, Alexandros, 85 Lovell, Nadia

M Macintyre, Martha, 29 Malkki, Liisa H., 14 Markides, Diana, 205 n. 1 Material culture, 45–48, 111–114. See also Mementoes Matossian, J., 6, 202, n. 1 Massey, Doreen, 19, 101, 195 Mavromatis, Stelios, 71, 206 n. 18 Mental map, 48–53, 49 Mementoes, 45–46, 48, 111–114 Mullen, Fiona, 85

N Navaro-Yashin, Yael, 66, 178–180, 214 n. 12 and n. 13

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228

C YPRUS

AND ITS

O Oberling, Pierre, 177–178, 214 n. 9, 215 n. 21 Okely, Judith, 22 Orphanides, Stelios, 85 Özersay, Kudret, 10, 11, 13

P Panourgia, Neni, 25 Papadakis, Yiannis, 7, 133, 178, 181, 186–187, 205 n. 1 Paraskevopoulou, Maria,104, Parkin, David , 46 Patrick, Richard A., 10–11, 186 Pattie, S., 6, 202 n. 1 Pilgrimage, 77, 97, 101, 108, 110, 111, 114–115 Place Notions of, 19, 101, 195–201, 211 n. 13 Place-making, 6, 14–18. See also Displacement, Emplacement, Home Platis, Stelios, 85 Proust, Marcel, 70

Q Qvortrup, Matt, 85

R Reed-Danahay, Deborah E., 22 Reflexivity, 22–23 Referendum. See Annan Plan Refugees, 9–14, 195–201 Embodiment, 78–79 Refugee estate, 37–40, 41, 46. See also Kozanlılar, Larnatsjiotes, Return

index.indd 228

PLACES

OF

DESIRE

Religion, 47, 56, 98–100, 102–111. See also Rituals, Saints Return, 198–201, 216 n. 7 First return, 67–77, 93–94 Perceptions, 90, 92 Visits, 67–77, 98–101 Rituals, 56, 98, 101, 114–116, 159 Circumcision (sünnet), 147–151 Death ritual (mevlit), 161 Reading coffee, 159–160 Resacralisation, 105, 114, 197 Secular, 111–114, 208 n. 22 Vow (tama), 108–109 Wedding, 151–152 Rushdie, Salman, 84–85 Rushton, Lucy, 104

S Saints, 48, 49, 56–57, 71, 100, 104, 108–111 Agios Fanourios, 103–104, 106, 108 Name day, of, 56, 104, 111 Panagia ton Katharon, 47, 56, 77, 103–104, 106, 110, 138 Patron saint, 56, 71, 100 Sant Cassia, Paul, 7 Sarris, Marios, 107 Scott, Julie, 13, 66, 79, 161, 178, 188, 209 n. 1 Seremetakis, Nadia C., 159–160, 212 n. 25 Shehadeh, Raja, 67 Stereotypes, 18, 32, 73–74, 84, 87, 96–97, 130–135, 142–143 Stewart, Charles, 106 Suffering, 6, 11, 19–20, 54, 57, 115, 130, 135–136, 177, 184–187, 195–201 Sünnet. See circumcision Synikismos. See refugee estate

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INDEX

T Topcan, Laik, 66, 209 n. 1 Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios, 134 Timothy, Dallen J., 97, 118, 129, 209 n. 1 Tourists, 62–63, 96–99, 101, 114–116, 118, 124–125, 135 Trimikliniotis, Nicos, 85 Turner, Edith, 101 Turner, Victor, 101 Turton, David, 14

229

Volkan, Vamik, 174, 182, 213 n. 6, 214 n. 17

W Wardle, Huon, 24 Webster, Craig, 85, 97, 118, 129, 209 n. 1 Welz, Gisela, 140, 143 Wilson, Thomas M., 125, 210 n. 12

U Uludağ, Sevgül, 215 n. 20 United Nations (UN), 30, 59–60, 61, 85, 178, 198–199, 201

Y Yashin, Mehmet, 215 n. 20

Z V

Zetter, Roger, 12, 107

Varnava, Andrekos, 89 Vlachos, Sotiris, 60

index.indd 229

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index.indd 230

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