The thin green line
by Michael Griffin
[ places - december 05 ]
Yiannoula Vasiliou drifts into the kitchen of the house her father built athwart a zephyr of pure sea-wind using timber from the forest of the Monastery of the Apostle St Andrew, a venerated Greek Orthodox shrine. Every beam was cut to fit and hauled by cart to her smallholding near the village of Rizokarpaso, on the remote peninsula of Karpasia.
She had been startled from her siesta by the arrival of unexpected guests from Nicosia. Though she hasn’t spoken English much in the 31 years she has spent marooned in the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, she goes at it gamely, brings home-made lemonade to drink and will not let go of memory.
From her doorway - past a savage, chained Dalmatian - she watches the scarved Turkish girls collect eggs and scatter hay for milk-cows in the cottage yards appropriated from Greek Cypriots in 1974, while the call of the muezzin blows in from Rizokarpaso’s new mosque. They are among the 140,000 settlers brought in from Anatolia since the invasion to re-populate Greek-Cypriot properties and who now constitute one of the biggest obstacles to the island’s reunification.
Situated opposite one of the last coffee shops in the north run by a Greek Cypriot, the mosque stands shoulder-to-shoulder with an Orthodox church whose parish priest only started to live under the same roof with his wife of three decades in May 2004.
In that month, the UN-arbitrated Green Line that divides the Greek and Turkish sectors of the island was re-opened for unrestricted visiting from inhabitants of what both call, with a hint of menace, ‘the other side’.
There have been six million crossings since then, including the 8-10,000 Turkish Cypriots who daily commute to jobs in the south and enjoy EU citizenship, despite Turkey’s illegal control of the island’s northern third. Indeed, Turkish Cypriots frequently claim to be as much victims of the invasion as their former Greek neighbours, and Cyprus’ accession to the EU in 2004 has only accentuated their loyalty to the idea of a ‘common Cypriot identity’.
Standing in her nightdress in the kitchen’s breeze, Yiannoula is one of the last vestiges of the Greek Cypriot life that existed in the north until Turkey ethnically cleansed the region - two decades before the term was recognised as an instrument of state policy during the break-up of Yugoslavia. She shares that trait with 211 other ‘holdouts’, mostly elderly and ailing now, but all who remain of the 3,000-strong Greek community that once called Rizokarpaso ‘home’. Under a UN ceasefire plan, 20,000 Greek Cypriots and Maronites were guaranteed international protection and aid in the north, but only 535 now remain.
Rizokarpaso is reached along a switchback of roads that are not quite the broken infrastructure that Greek Cypriots would have you believe. After the ruins of Salamis, the road leads through plantations of identical, mostly empty new villas. A glorified rendition of 1950s council estates, they were designed to appeal to the less fortunate end of the British retirement market. Most are built on land stolen from Greek Cypriots - as some British buyers have discovered to their cost.
Yiannoula, an elementary school teacher, had just been promoted to inspector of schools when the Turks arrived 31 years ago. Rizokarpaso’s school provided a combined primary and secondary education but, after a year under Turkish military rule, most teachers left for the south and the secondary school shut down. Why did she stay on?
“Because I like this place very much. I was born here and I grew up here and I love everything here. My children were born here and grew up here until they were 11 when they finished elementary school. Then they were obliged to go to Nicosia to continue their studies. Despite my great sorrow, I stayed...”
Then she adds: “We only had an elementary school here and this depended on me. I sacrificed my own five children to live alone and go there, and I had to teach others’ children.“
There was never much of a Turkish Cypriot community in Rizokarpaso so the abandoned houses and fields were re-distributed among Turkish officers and landless farmers brought from the mainland.
“In the beginning everybody felt very bad. We didn’t know their language: how to speak, how to understand, what they wanted or even what we wanted. They came from very poor families in Turkey and stole everything they found. Carobs, olives, oranges, all the fruits they could find.
“I tried to civilise them. The Turkish children were given our old high-school building. At recess, I tried to speak to them and get them to play with my children. At first, they hit our students, but slowly, slowly, they came to behave better. With my [Turkish] neighbours, it’s very good. I buy milk from them to make yoghurt and they ask from me whatever they need, and I give it to them. I give it them, but I pay them for the milk.”
The key to the survival of the Greek Cypriot enclave is the provision of secondary education. After 30 years in the dark, Rizokarpaso’s secondary school re-opened last year and Yiannoula hopes some of the families that fled to Nicosia will return both to support it, and as a first step toward reclaiming their property in any settlement obtained during the EU negotiations with Turkey. But there are still only 17 Greek Cypriots in the village’s schools and the homeward drift from the capital has been faint: Lambros, who owns the coffee house; the wife of the priest; and one other family of three.
“I should like another generation to come and live here because my aim in staying was just this: to show the country that this place is Greek and that I wanted it to become Greek again. But when I see so many buildings going up on Greek property, and then being sold in England, Austria and every other foreign land, I don’t expect things to be very good, better perhaps, but...”
”I’d like them to come,”she continues, “because I am very old, my husband also, and in some years, perhaps we shall die.”
