Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 00 357 99 966518
00 90 542 853 8436
We set out early morning around 08.30 from Nicosia with two cars on the 15th of January 2014 Wednesday to go to Ipsona together with a Turkish Cypriot witness from Silikou village… The witness is an old man with health problems and he needs to be back at 12.00 o'clock since he has to go into dialysis every day on that hour… Still he comes all the way from Prastio Morphou (it is called Aydinkeuy by Turkish Cypriots now) to show us a possible burial site…
We pass Ipsona and take the road towards Kouris dam… The roads have changed but once we find the right road that the old man remembers, he is happy… At a junction we stop the cars and get out… He shows us an area where there might be some `missing persons` buried. One of his Greek Cypriot friends had seen the burial place and had told him about it and now he is sharing it with us.
We start chatting about his village Silikou and talk about how the father of Nicos Anastasiades, ` Chrysanthos ` as he calls him had saved the lives of his Turkish Cypriot villagers… I had written about this before, one of his villagers, Pembe had told me the story and later on the Turkish media had `discovered` the story… Now the old man tells me more details of what had happened:
`I was the muhktar of the village at that time but could not get out of the village` he tells me, `so we sent Ibrahim Dayi to Chrysanthos Anastasiades to tell him that some Greek Cypriots from outside our village had come and our lives were in danger… Uncle Ibrahim was old so they would not touch him while he travelled to find Chrysanthos, the father of Anastasiades… Chrysanthos was coming from a very poor family and the family of Ibrahim had helped him survive when he had been a child, giving him bread to eat and money… So when Ibrahim would contact Chrysanthos who had been chief of police in Limassol at that time, Chrysanthos would immediately call the Greek Cypriots who came with bad intentions in our village and would send them away, telling them they cannot touch the Turkish Cypriots in Silikou… Some of these Greek Cypriots who had come to our village from outside were from Platres, Trimiklini, Pera Pedi…`
Probably they were some of the EOKA-B teams of the area…
The old man continues to tell his story:
`Chrysanthos was from our village Silikou but he had married to Pera Pedi and had been staying there. After the phone call from Chrysanthos to them, telling them off, they came and apologized and then left. They were afraid of Chrysanthos, that's why they apologized… But this way, our lives were saved…`
We look at the possible burial site on the way to the Kouris dam and then say goodbye to the old man – he will pay a short visit to his village Silikou and then head back in time for his dialysis.
But we have more work to do because I want to show the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee another possible burial site so we head back to Limassol together with Xenophon Kallis, Murat Soysal and Okan Oktay. Here we meet my friend Christina Pavlou Solomi Patsia from Komi Kebir – she has been helping voluntarily the search for the `missing persons`.
We stop at the entrance to the `Turkish Mahalla` of Limassol, `Ayanton` as the Turkish Cypriots call it. We walk towards the north, taking behind us the mosque and the church of the Ayios Antonios neighbourhood. I show the officials of CMP the place shown to me by some Turkish Cypriot witnesses where some Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot `missing` from the 60s might have been buried. The information was that some `missing` Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots are suspected to be buried in the well of the toilet of the `military` building where they might have been kept as prisoners for some time. We walk around the buildings and some Greek Cypriots using these buildings now help us to locate the actual building used as a prison, the toilet itself and show us where the wells are – they are behind the building, they point out four wells but the biggest one, closest to the toilet, might be the possible burial site.
It is said that unknown persons, Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot might have been buried in the toilet well or in the shooting practice area in those times.
Next we try to locate the entry to the underground shooting practice area, some tunnels built underground since there were rumours that some `missing` might have been buried there…
One of my readers who had served here had told me that some `missing persons` had been buried in a well in the underground shooting range.
It is Kallis who discovers the entry – inside a house here, in the kitchen, was a big well and from the well they could enter the tunnel for shooting practice. It is covered now but when the Greek Cypriot refugee family moved in this house, they had discovered a big well, open, inside the kitchen! The well was very clean, no water, no trash – if this was the main entry, that's understandable… We find out that the tunnels stretched under the Turkish neighbourhood, were elaborate and might have had other entrances… Perhaps this had been the main entrance… I have a Turkish Cypriot reader who had served his military service here and I will arrange to take him here so he can tell us more about the secret tunnels and what had happened in these former military buildings of Turkish Cypriots… The refugees living in these houses offer us coffee – they are from Famagusta and very kind, reminding us of the hospitality of our people once upon a time
in Cyprus…
There is yet another secret shooting range underground in Larnaka that we still need to locate – we know from testimonies of my readers that some people were tortured and probably killed, still `missing` until now…
We say goodbye to Limassol with its secrets gradually unfolding before our very eyes… With some more help from readers, I am sure we will discover more about what happened in this neighbourhood back in the 60s and perhaps find the possible burial site of the `missing persons` from around Limassol…
18.1.2014
Photo: Possible burial site outside Limassol around Kouris dam…
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 2nd of February 2014, Sunday.
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