A woman buried with her bed…
Sevgul Uludag
Tel: 00 357 99 966518
00 90 542 853 8436
Together with my dear friend Maria Georgiadou, relative of four `missing persons` from Kythrea we go to Agrokipia, a small village outside Nicosia. It's a pretty village close to Alona, the village my mother loved most in Cyprus… Alona was the only place she talked about throughout her life, perhaps this was the happiest time of her long life – whenever she would meet someone from abroad or a Greek Cypriot, she would talk about Alona. In the 1940s and early 50s, long before I was born, they would rent a house in Alona and my mother would stay with her two young children, my sister and my brother for at least three months, resting, cooking, growing her children, enjoying neighbourhood of Greek Cypriots of Alona – my father would go back and forth to Nicosia where he worked and my sister and brother would learn Greek from Greek Cypriot kids while they played with them… Until EOKA became active, they would continue these holidays in Alona – there were other Turkish Cypriot families as well doing this but as EOKA began, all of this would stop – gradually all other families would stop going to Alona and after a few times alone, our family would also stop going there.
Throughout her life, my mother would want to go back to Alona… When the checkpoints opened in 2003, the first thing I would do was to arrange to visit Alona on my mother's birthday as a gift to her… She would find the house they used to rent, even the girl who worked for her, helping her to wash clothes and do the household chores – this young Greek Cypriot girl of the 40s from Alona had become a `gocagari` by the time we managed to visit Alona but she would remember my father, my mother and the two children they had and how she had worked for them in those times… It was pure luck that we had come across her in the village, carrying a big bag of nuts on her back and we had stopped her and my mother would speak to her in Greek and soon she would find out that that was the girl who had worked in the house they rented! My mother had been happy that day but also very disappointed – sure, Alona had not changed so much, it was still like a green carpet – you could not see soil, just green, just trees and all sorts of trees – but there were no people living there, just a few very old men sitting in the coffee shop… They would tell us to come back in August the following year – we had visited Alona in September – and that they had a festival and families who had houses here would be back for summer holidays… My mother wanted to buy some nuts but there was nothing on sale in the supermarket of the village that had been produced in Alona! She had begged the girl, now a `gocagari` to give her some nuts and she would pay but the `gocagari` refused, saying these nuts were for her angoni…That was a bit mean I had thought since for so many years my mother had dreamt of this village, not being able to go because of the partition line sealed intact and once we were there, she could not even get a handful of nuts from this girl who had become a `gocagari` now… We had left, a little bit sad at heart and I could never manage to bring her back to this village she loved so much – my mother died in August 2005. The last place we managed to go was with my dear friend Androula Georgiadou who took us to Cape Greco in April 2005… There were so many places to take my mother to but we never had time – actually I never had time since I am working with very few days a year for a holiday… As Hayyam says in one of his poems, `What has been written cannot be unwritten` - time has gone by, my mother is not on this earth with us any longer except in our memories and in spirit – I can no longer take her to Alona or Cape Greco or Paphos or Karpaz… I can no longer lie down on the couch and tell her about my day, late night talks with her, she making coffee for me, reading my cup, putting her hand on my forehead and like a magician taking away the headache if I had one… No longer praying for me every day to be safe and sound, collecting the laundry I had hung in the garden and folding them, putting jasmine between the sheets to smell nice when we put it on our bed… Every afternoon she would collect jasmine, counting them and then putting them on a string carefully then giving it to my husband to hang around his neck at night – when we slept, the jasmine would hang from our bedroom window to lull us to sleep with its sweet scent roaming the room with the small breeze from the window… She would cook roast beef, make bottles of lemonade from our tangerines to drink on hot summer days, she would make `macun` (`glika`) from bitter oranges, dates, walnuts, plums, apples, always something in the fridge to offer friends and relatives who came to visit… She would embroider elaborate flowers and keep a whole chest full of gifts for her friends, for children who might visit – embroideries, scarves, tea cups with music, coffee cups, candles, frames for photographs, trays, plates, music boxes, dolls, crayons, toys of all sorts – she had so much love to offer the whole world that there were never enough gifts that she could give…
Maria Theodosiou also was a mother of six children – she was living in Limnya village near Famagusta. She had been born in 1902 and had worked in the fields, had cooked, had made sweets and lemonade just like my mother – she had struggled to raise her six children – she had lost her husband in 1960 and in 1974, she was in bed, being able only to walk a little bit – she had been sort of bedridden when war came like a catastrophe for all the inhabitants of our island… The catastrophe was that her family had gone thinking that they would come back in a few hours or the next day – no one at the time of the war in 1974 suspected that there would be a partition line and that it would be sealed and those who had gone to the southern part of the island would never be able to return to their villages, to their homes… So Maria had stayed alone and died in her bed…
Years later, one of my readers would call me to take me to Limnya to a house where he said, there was a woman buried with her bed, to show me the possible burial site of a `missing` Greek Cypriot woman. We had gone and the new inhabitant of the house, a Turkish Cypriot displaced from the southern part of the island had shown me a piece of the bed he had found while planting something. When they had moved to this house, their neighbours would say to them `Aren't you afraid of sleeping in that house? There is a woman buried with her bed in your yard…` In the beginning they had not believed to what the neighbours were saying but one day as the inhabitant of the house was digging to plant something, he had found this piece of bed that he gave me. I took it to the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee and told them of the story and showed them the yard. As they would excavate the yard, the place we showed them, they would find the remains of an old woman buried with her bed – the bed was also there… What had happened was that since the body was in no form to lift up from the bed, the ones who had buried her had brought down one wall of the small house and taken with a bulldozer the bed and in it the `missing` Greek Cypriot old woman and had buried her in the yard with the bed.
It took me a while to find out who she might be but with the help of some Greek Cypriot relatives of another `missing` old woman from Limnya, I had found the son of the old lady buried with her bed. It was Costas Theodosiou and the old lady was Maria Theodosiou… She had not been on any list of `missing` or `known dead` so I helped to facilitate this process in order to register her as a `missing person` and for the relatives to give DNA.
Finally we are here in Agrokipia with Maria, not far from Alona… Being close to Alona in this village brings back all the memories of my mother… We are in the church Panagia Pantanassa – the daughters of Maria Theodosiou, Eleni and Georgia and her son Costas are here in the church… I go to greet them and we hug each other… Eleni and Georgia came from London for the funeral… There in the church is the small coffin where Maria Theodosiou's remains have been placed. On top of the coffin is a photograph of Maria Theodosiou – I lay flowers next to her coffin, colourful flowers to say goodbye to her… Speeches are made thanking me for my efforts in finding her remains and Costas invites me to go to his house after the funeral but since I work, I have to get back to Nicosia after the funeral. We will come another day to visit him, have coffee, visit the grave of Maria Theodosiou, perhaps I will bring some soil from the yard where she was buried to put on her grave and then we can go to Alona with my friend Maria Georgiadou in order to commemorate my mother there, in the village that was her favourite throughout her life… I have often thought why she had been so happy in Alona – perhaps the answer is that these were the times prior to the conflict in Cyprus, it was times when people lived together in harmony without fear or suspicion… Perhaps the answer lies with the fine neighbourhood relations she had in Alona, the way they exchanged recipes with Greek Cypriot women, the way my mother read their cups and the way they would make sweets and talk about their children and their lives… She always wanted to go back to Alona and I suspect she wanted to go to the past where such a drastic conflict did not exist – perhaps that's why she was always remembering this good time in her life… We could not bury Maria Theodosiou in Limnya but where she is buried; close to Alona is a very beautiful place… May she rest in peace here and may her family at last have closure…
9.7.2013
Photo: The mall coffin of `missing` Maria Theodosiou...
(*) Article published in POLITIS newspaper on the 28th of July 2013 Sunday.
