Tulips blossoming in Masari… Sevgul Uludag Tel: 00 357 99 966518 00 90 542 853 8436 Last week, one of my Turkish Cypriot readers calls me… `I have been thinking a lot of calling you` he says. He comes from a refugee family… His family was settled in Masari (now called Shahinler) village after 1974 – he was only seven years old then… While they were going around with his grandfather on his donkey, they had seen the bodies of some Greek Cypriots killed during the war… His grandfather had buried them… Being only a seven year old kid at the time, what he saw devastated him… `I can show this place of burial to you` he says… Immediately I get into contact with the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee and arrange with them to go with my reader on Tuesday, 29th of January 2013 to Masari so that he can show us this possible burial site. My reader whom I meet for the first time shows us the way – the beauty of my work is that I do not know who my readers are until they stop me in the street, at a café, during shopping or until they call me and then I become very happy to get to know them… This reader too is someone I am meeting for the first time – he has a kind heart and wants to help in the search for the `missing`… At some point close to Philia (now called Serhatkeuy) we get off the main road between Nicosia and Morphou and go on a dirt track… There is a mandra and some bee hives and we pass through the mandra and stop at the point where my reader points out. With us are Xenophon Kallis, Murat Soysal and Okan Oktay from the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee and two Turkish Cypriot investigators from the Committee. We are outside Masari and my reader scrutinizes the area carefully… `Actually I did not want to remember all of this, I was only a seven year old kid then…` he says, `Whether you want or not, you would be affected by what you saw…` He walks on the dirt track and stops at a certain point. There had been the bodies of four `missing` Greek Cypriots here he explains, one of them was being torn by dogs so his grandfather would take this body and bury it by the side of the road. A few meters up, there used to be a military point of Greek Cypriot soldiers he explains – that's why he remembers this spot. The road goes up and then there is a sort of a cavity and a bumpy place and then continues. `Are you sure of this spot?` I ask my reader, `because if you look up, you see how funny that bumpy spot is on this track…` `No, I am sure…` he says. The Greek Cypriots had dug trenches parallel to the dirt track in order to pass water pipes he remembers but war had stopped this activity. So there had already been ready trenches in this area… `You must dig these trenches all the way down as well as the ochto` he says… `They might have buried others around these trenches…` We go up to find the military point that my reader was mentioning but he calls us down to show another spot to us… `Here` he says, `my grandfather had buried a five year old child… It was a girl and had golden hair… Only half of her body was there – perhaps a bomb had hit her and she was torn apart… I remember a burnt doll next to her and some broken crockery…` There are tulips and wild flowers on the spot he shows us: Purple tulips, tulips which are a bright pink, yellow tulips, tulips the colour of lilac… As a seven year old child what he saw that day affected him: `They would come in my dreams…` he says, `Now that we are here again, those horrible memories will come back and haunt me… I will get sick again… I did not want to remember all of these but I have to do this for humanity…` As a seven year old child, a witness of the ugly face of war, he had never forgotten this place and he shows us these possible burial sites years later. `If we had a shovel now, we could find them` he says. `Don't worry the archaeologists of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee will excavate these places properly` we assure him… `There used to be some posts and some wire in this area, leading all the way down` he says… He goes and searches and finds the posts… He walks up the dirt track and finds some bones and shows these to Okan Oktay who is an anthropologist and the Coordinator of Exhumations in the Committee. One of these bones is the bone of an animal. But a bit later, my reader finds a human bone: This is the finger bone of a human and Okan Oktay confirms that it is in fact a human bone. It is the spot where the dirt track has a cavity and a sort of a bump – maybe in this spot there is another burial place… Kallis thanks my reader saying, `What you have done is helping humanity…` My reader says, `At least these families will find some peace at last… I am doing it for humanity…` Before we leave, I collect some tulips of all colours: I do not remember when I had collected tulips; it must have been years ago… I remember the days when as a child I would go to collect tulips – how happy I was finding tulips with different colours. But I have never seen such tulips as in Masari with such bright colours... Tonight, I will put them in an old vase and they will remind me of the seven year old child who saw what no other child should see… They will remind me of the five year old girl killed here and buried somewhere where tulips are blossoming now… The tulips I have collected will remind me that no matter how harsh things might be that life continues and that tulips continue to blossom, the earth offering us its beauty for us to learn to appreciate… Tulips will remind me of children whose hearts have been broken by war – children should never encounter the ugly faces of war, they should just go up these small cliffs and pick tulips happily, they should just play in this beautiful nature, without being exposed to bones and dead bodies and horrible stories of war… They should push their roots on this soil, without fear of being exposed to the poison of war and grow up and blossom with all the colours of these wonderful tulips… A few days later, while we are at an investigation in Dikomo together with Kallis and Murat Soysal, there is a call from one of the archaeologists: Excavations began in Masari and they have started finding bones at the first scoop of the bulldozer as soon as they began digging at the place where my reader has shown… I am so happy for this! If my reader hadn't showed this place, it would have been very difficult to find it - outside Masari with no one living around, if only someone would have started a construction and encountered the human remains and if he or she would be sensitive enough to notify authorities and not throw them away as it happened in so many instances in the past, perhaps they would be found… There are so many `if`s in this scenario so I am so grateful and thankful to my reader who showed the courage and humanity to call me and show us this burial site… In the evening I call my reader to thank him and tell him the good news… `After we went to Masari` he explains to me, `I really got sick… I was remembering all the things I saw there as a child…` `But you can be happy now and tonight you will sleep peacefully` I tell him, `since they have started finding the remains, now you can relax and think of all the families who will find peace receiving these remains…` `Yes…` he says… `Tonight I will sleep peacefully…` `Thank you so much from my heart for showing us this place` I say to him… Next week we will meet again because he will show us yet another possible burial site that he had seen in the area of Agia Marina (now called Gurpinar)… Tulips are blossoming in Masari and the excavations will continue to find the `missing persons` buried in this area… Tulips will blossom in Masari to remind us that life can be beautiful if only we can learn to really appreciate it, instead of destroying it… Tulips will blossom in Masari to remind us to create a country where innocence of children will not be poisoned by war, where they can go and pick tulips without encountering mass graves and only enjoying the delicate smell of tulips and the beauty of our country… Tulips will tell these stories if only we can hear them… 2.2.2013 *** When exhumations began in the possible burial site that my reader showed, the remains of six "missing persons" were found and the exhumation continues... Photo: Tulips I collected from Masari… (*) Article published in POLITIS newspaper on the 17th of February 2013, Sunday. |
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