The Barbarous and the Bloodthirsty

why Cyprus is the most surreal place on the planet today

Today is the 50th anniversary of Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus. A half century makes this day especially significant, but it’s a major occassion on any given year. In the south of the island, the day is commemorated as one of mourning; in the north, it’s celebrated as one of liberation. I wrote this piece almost two decades ago but, tellingly and drearily, it could have just as well been written today.

“Properity and Victory!”, WWI German postcard of a Central Powers cheering squad (flags: Austria-Hungary, Germany, Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria)

July 20th is an anniversary day in Cyprus. South of the Green Line, you’ll encounter sirens, memorials, cemetery services and hunger strike, while north of the Green Line you’ll find parades, rolling tanks, fanfare, and waving beauty queens. On both sides you’ll hear orations and see flags—Greek ones in the south, Turkish in the north.

The anniversary is of the first wave of the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, which led to the island’s partition, now in its 31st [make that 50th] year. The southern two-thirds of the island make up the Republic of Cyprus and the northern third makes up the breakaway state ‘TRNC’ or ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.’

If you’re in any of the cities in the Greek Cypriot south on July 20th and you want to be up at dawn, you need not set an alarm. The violent wail of sirens will have you out of bed and staring out your window at 5:30, a solemn government reminder of where your bleary thoughts should be on that fine July daybreak. If you’re a churchgoer, you can spend the rest of your morning in ecclesiastical memorials; if you prefer other sorts of men in uniform, you can attend military commemorations; if you want something more intimate, you can walk to the Green Line where hunger-striking mothers in black stand holding framed photos of their sons, who’ve been M.I.A. (aka dead) since 1974. Even if you don’t leave the house, state media documentaries and punditry on tv will ensure your mind doesn’t stray from a grim focus on the Turks. The message: Turkey invaded us, drove us from our homes, and stole our land, the dog-bastards.

That is true enough, expletives aside, but as to be expected from any official perspective, it’s not the whole truth. The rest of the truth, but again only a partial truth, is found if you cross the Green Line into the north. The change of atmosphere, at least on the surface, is the political equivalent of Alice falling through the rabbit hole, or of what it must have felt for Gulliver to go from Lilliput to Brobdingnag. From the land of the sorrowful you’re in the land of the merry. Taped on windows and plastered on buildings are posters proclaiming the July 20th Peace and Freedom Anniversary, along with its parades and festivities.

I’ve twice crossed over on July 20th to witness these parades. The Green Line has been open for over two [now 21] years, but there are still Greek Cypriots—and I assume some Turkish Cypriots too—who refuse to ever cross and who accuse those who do cross of forgetting their history, of selling out, of turning from refugees into tourists, etc. Visiting ‘over there’ is especially frowned upon on the anniversary of the invasion and few Greek Cypriots cross on that day. The newspapers on the following day always print the low figure alongside rousing assertions about how the Greek Cypriot people do not forget the crimes of Attila. What the newspapers never note, though, is that while they may not forget some crimes, there are other crimes that they don’t remember, partly because those same papers never write about them.

Mention these pre-1974 Greek Cypriot crimes and you’ll likely be charged of ‘excusing the invasion,’ which makes as much sense as 1 + 1 = 3. Some deny the Greek Cypriot atrocities altogether, or suggest they were random acts, mishaps, etc, but of course you can also find people who would deny the Armenian genocide or call it an accident.

A more plausible accusation would go as follows: by stating our crimes you give ammunition to Turkish propaganda. This may be true, but it shouldn’t hold weight, assuming you care about living in an open society. The impulse towards self-censorship belies a hankering for a touch of totalitarianism. The totalitarian, after all, would say the same thing: “by stating X we harm our noble cause Y so best to shut up until the threat is over.” The threat, of course, never ends.

Censorship, like rabbits in spring, leads to more censorship; once you get used to not saying things, it gets harder to talk. After a while, you forget. As the next generation comes, there is no longer even any forgetting, because there was nothing to remember in the first place. Criticism becomes an archaism, like writing by hand, while languid acceptance of official doctrine settles like an opioid upon the population.

Propaganda is hardly unique to authoritarian states. If the mass news outlets are in few enough hands, any reportage that offends or threatens those owners—or the big advertisers who pay them—will be minimized or eliminated. Of course, alternative and grassroots media sources print and broadcast what they want without interference or persecution, and that’s no small matter. But that’s not what most people access.

That’s why the propaganda of open societies is much more effective than in closed ones: in totalitarian states one knows one is being spoon fed the house dish; in free societies you’re stupefied by the belief that somewhere on your plate of mainstream news—amidst all the garnishes and heavy sauces—you’re getting the meat-and-potatoes truth.

The first time I crossed the Green Line on July 20th—which was two [21] summers ago, shortly after the checkpoints opened—I played the uninformed foreigner who knew nothing about any invasion anniversary; the checkpoint guard only gave me a flat, weary stare as he handed me back my American passport and nodded me ahead.

But the second time I crossed on the invasion anniversary, for whatever reason, I spoke to the guard in Greek, which earned me a scowl that I only defused by saying I was going as a journalist. I wasn’t a journalist then, but I did think of myself as an independent one, so it was a semi-truth, just another of the day’s many.

“Well, if you’re a journalist…” he grumbled, handing me back my passport. “Otherwise, I’d say it’s better not to go over today.” The aura of formality was all it took. Hang official titles off yourself and you can buddy-up to the devil himself in the name of doing business. But stroll harmlessly through this world on your own terms and you’re at best an irresponsible vagrant, at worst a traitor.

I pressed my luck too far, though, when I asked the guard if he knew whether the parade had already taken place. The man, who already had bulldoggish features, broke out into a fit of patriotic barking and snapping in which he cursed their mothers [‘their’ presumably referring to the entire Turkish race] and warned me to never again remind him of it. There was little more to say, so I set off to the other side.

This was, as I mentioned, my second attempt to see the Turkish military parade. I missed it the last time, two years before this, because I’d spent most of the morning with my aunt in the Greek Cypriot side at a military memorial. Like most martial events, the memorial was a medley of tanks, flags, wreaths, salutes, and restless children. Toward the end of the ceremony, one of the generals had walked an old woman in black to the memorial’s center stage, where he then stood decorously at her side. The hunched old woman began moaning and flailing and screaming out the name of her son, whom she’d lost in the war. It was an ugly mix of ritual, exploitation, voyeurism, role-playing and genuine sorrow. It was obvious they’d dragged her out because she put on the fiercest show of grief. And the poor woman, who no doubt mourned far more deeply in silent moments of solitude, recognized that all eyes were upon her and gave the unhappy job everything she had.

That’s the curious thing about this day. It’s all about public displays of grief and celebration. In the south, line after line of Greek and Cypriot flags zigzag over cemeteries, town squares, and parks—like Tibetan prayer flags but without the color or love-thy-fellow-creature message. In the north giant Turkish and ‘TRNC’ flags are hung in Stalinist fashion from government buildings, mosques, mountains—anything enormous and visible.

There are also two ‘year-round’ flags, each bigger than football stadiums, painted obnoxiously (and noxiously—the grass doesn’t like them either) on the mountainside north of Nicosia. Implicit in these south-oriented flags—which face over the island’s capital and the highways feeding into it—is a giant middle finger from Ankara. One of the flags is ringed with lights so that the greeting extends through the night hours.

by day

by night

My effort to make the parade this time also failed. I somehow slept through the sirens that morning and had a late start. I did manage to catch several minutes of Turkish troops goose-stepping by, but only in live broadcast on a fuzzy TV screen in a Turkish Cypriot boutique store—not exactly the parade experience I was hoping for.

While heading back to cross over to the south, I stopped into an information booth. After pretending to take interest in the gaudy raft of tourist magazines and brochures, I asked the young man at the counter if there had been some sort of celebration today.

“Yes, there was parade.”

“A parade? Really? For what?”

The young man paused. “Celebration of peace. Because war is over.”

I thanked him and left. “They’re all brainwashed,” I thought, “just like us.” But as I approached the checkpoint, my smugness gave way to regret for not having prodded the young man further. I trudged back in the noon heat to the information booth.

“When you said the war is over, what kind of war was it?” I said.

“The Greek Cypriots were killing Turkish Cypriots and not giving them rights,” he said. This was the part of history that never found its way into the ‘I don’t forget’ Greek Cypriot memories. “So Turkey came.”

“But there were Greek Cypriots in the north, right? And they lost their homes when Turkey invaded?”

The fellow nodded. “If I were Greek-Cypriot, I wouldn’t be happy.” He paused. “It’s difficult, the situation.”

I obviously knew more than I’d first put on, and I soon stopped feigning ignorance about the political situation. I told him that my mother and grandparents had lost their homes in the invasion. By the end, this fellow, whom I’d originally dismissed as a butt boy of Turkish propaganda, was telling me that the parade was no more than state-sponsored cheerleading and chest pounding and that the leaders on both sides of the Green Line had wrecked things for the two communities.

It reminded me of something a Turkish Cypriot museum worker had told me two years earlier. Just as in Amsterdam you can visit the “Sex Museum” and the “Hash Marihuana and Hemp Museum” for unique local flavor, in Cyprus you can visit “The Museum of Barbarism” and “National Struggle” museums. The Turkish army had erected a National Struggle Museum in response to the Greek Cypriot one, so I went to see how it compared. As I was leaving, the deskman asked me if I were Greek Cypriot.

Now I had just spent half the morning looking at photos of wrecked Turkish Cypriot villages and reading about how “the bloodthirsty Greeks” had been busy over the last century trying to exterminate the Turkish Cypriots, and I still had to pass through a Turkish army checkpoint to get out of the museum grounds. But I found myself nodding my head anyway.

The man didn’t seem in the least bothered. He told me that this was a government propaganda museum and that “the troubles have come from above,” in essence the same thing that the fellow in the information center would tell me two years later. And “above” was no reference to the gods.

I’ve repeatedly heard such sentiments from both Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots. The schizophrenia of July 20th in Cyprus only supports this claim that “the troubles have come from above.” The anniversary is, after all, a day of government activities. And what do the leaders do? On one side they organize garish celebrations of a military invasion that displaced about 200,000 people, roughly a third of the population, and on the other they put on histrionic memorials that are as much about not remembering as about remembering.

I remember once flipping through the history textbook of my 11-year-old cousin and coming across repeated references to “the barbarous Turks.” The phrase crops up so often in official literature in Cyprus that it’s as cliché as “greedy capitalist” or “fascist pig.” No distinctions are made between the army, the government, and that vague entity called ‘the people.’ The real estate tycoon, the general, and the watermelon peddler are all barbarous because they fall under the cloak term ‘Turk.’ And of course, cross the Green Line and the same holds for those bloodthirsty Greeks.

If one ever wants to seriously talk about “solving the Cyprus problem,” then a good start would be to hire some new anniversary event planners and dispense with totalitarian terms like barbarous Turks and bloodthirsty Greeks. So long as such phrases remain in the textbooks and museums, one may as well admit that there will never be a solution unless it’s fashioned after Hitler’s methods. And the only ones who’d contemplate that are a few genuine bloodthirsty barbarians on each side who, like chronic migraines or toenail fungus, will simply not go away.

Looking back on what I’ve written, I can see I’ve presented a rather severe picture of Cyprus. But it’s a deceptive picture, because for every armed soldier there's a loaded shish kebab skewer turning over coals and for every foot of barbed wire there’s a yard of sand and salty sea. At this moment, not even 500 yards from where I sit, the yearly wine festival is underway: free wine is gushing out of barrel taps, gyros are turning, and Cypriot predators are prowling for stumbling Brits. And thank god for it. In a country where the politics are so pervasive that there are right-wing trade unions and left-wing sports teams, it’s worth celebrating that you can still knock back a jug of wine without having to endure an oration or wave a flag.