Sevgul Uludag
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I meet Stella Yiallouridis, the wife of `missing` Andreas Yiallouridis to talk about what we can do to find out what had happened to him and the group he had been together with him…
Married in 1971, they had a son in 1972 and when he had gone `missing` in 1974, Stella had been pregnant – two months – to their daughter who would never have a chance to see or touch her father…
In July 1974 when the war began, Andreas Yiallouridis had been called as a `reservist` and had been together with a group, a total of nine persons, who would go `missing` in Kyrenia.
They had taken refuge in a house, later on we would find out that it was the house of a British pilot… From there Andreas would call his wife Stella and when Stella would ask him where in Kyrenia they were, he would answer `We don't know…`
They would find out from the telephone number that this was the Sir Arnold Toynbee Street and that they were in the house of British pilot J.V. Macarthy… They would inform the UN to go and save them from there…
Maroulla Chaghalli from Kyrenia lived in the same street so we would call Maroulla to see if she would come with us to show us the pilot's house and to try to dig further for information about what had happened to the group. The remains of two from the group had been found during the exhumations at the Botanical Garden area in Kyrenia but the rest – the seven Greek Cypriots last time heard of in the pilot's house – are still `missing`.
On the 7th of February 2014 Friday I would arrange with the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee to come with us to go to the Sir Arnold Toynbee Street in Kyrenia and we would all go together, the 78 year old Maroulla Chaghallis, Stella Yiallouridis, myself and from the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee Murat Soysal, Okan Oktay, Xenophon Kallis and a Turkish Cypriot investigator Hikmet Selchuklu.
We would go to find the Sir Arnold Toynbee Street in Kyrenia, now called `Gulbahar Street`, the name of a deceased Turkish Cypriot woman teacher who had been settled in the house of the pilot at the end of 1974. Gulbahar which means `Rose spring` had been a very famous, very active Turkish Cypriot teacher from Limassol – she had raised many good students, had been very active with civil society organisations and charities, helping a lot with children's charity associations. Everyone loved their Gulbahar Teacher… They had moved from Limassol in December 1974 to the house of the pilot. Gulbahar Resa, later on known as Gulbahar Gochkun, lived in this house until she died a decade and a half ago… The street first had been named `Islam Bey Sokak` but when she died, they gave her name to the street in her good memory as `Gulbahar Street`. Her son Resa is a good friend who works at PEO and I would speak to him later about the house…
`When we moved in the pilot's house, there had been no furniture – it had been ransacked` he would tell me. `But there were no bullet holes either inside or outside the house, no sign of any fighting or any shooting…`
The yard of the house had been cement, no soil…
We would go and look at the house where the group of seven `missing` Greek Cypriots had last been seen.
Maroulla Chaghalli whose house had been in the same street had heard someone shouting in Greek on the 25th of July 1974.
`We heard someone saying `Why do you break the doors of the houses to enter?` and then we heard gun shots… After 15 minutes a group of Turkish soldiers, accompanied by two Turkish Cypriots came to our house. One of those Turkish Cypriots we knew as the son of Moustafa, who had a mandra further up… He told us not to be afraid that they would not allow them to hurt us… We ended up in Aghirdagh and there another Turkish Cypriot whom my husband knew, helped us to come back to Kyrenia, to the Dome Hotel…`
Stella Yiallouridis in our first meeting had given me a telephone number of a Turkish Cypriot whom she had said was the Turkish Cypriot who had gone to the house of Maroulla Chaghallis, the son of Moustafa. I had called him and he had come to meet Maroulla when we had gone to the `Gulbahar Street` but it would turn out to be a `mistaken identity` - no, he was not the son of the Moustafa with the mandra, but the son of another Moustafa. He would tell us who the sons of the Moustafa were for whom we had been looking for and we would go to visit them in their shop. But no, they did not quite remember the incident – perhaps it was their elder brother who had passed away some years ago? This family had been a good family who had saved the lives of many Greek Cypriots during the war… Some had even called them `traitors` for exactly that reason: For saving the lives of some Greek Cypriots from the Kyrenia area. When we would go to their shop together with
Maroulla Chaghallis and Stella and the officials of the CMP, both of the sons of Moustafa would tell me that they read my articles about `missing persons` every day in YENIDUZEN and would congratulate me for the good work we had been doing. One of the sons would enquire about Mahallebaris from Kyrenia – he is a good friend of the son of the `missing` Mahallebaris and the son would visit him from time to time… We would say goodbye to this kind hearted family from Kyrenia who had saved the lives of many Greek Cypriots during the war in 1974.
The information that Stella had given me that they might have been killed and buried in the yard of the pilot's house would turn out to be false since the yard had been all cement back in 1974, no soil to bury them in…
There had been another piece of information that Maroulla Chaghallis had heard from a Greek Cypriot years ago that they might have been buried in an empty field next to her house – now this field is the yard of the Kyrenia police where they do the tests for the cars once a year for traffic.
The exhumations at the Botanical Gardens in Kyrenia were done several times but there are still possible burial sites in that area… We had gone there many times – the area has changed dramatically and some apartments had been built in this area, a road passing over a possible burial site… We do not yet know if the group in the pilot's house had been arrested and taken to the area around Botanical Gardens but we will continue with the help of our readers to search every single item of information and to try to find out the fate of this `missing` group from the pilot's house…
It is not easy for Maroulla, at the age of 78 to go to her house, to show us the pilot's house, to go and speak with the sons of Moustafa – all of these would bring back memories of the past… It is not easy for Stella to look at the house of the pilot and to think about what might have happened there or afterwards what might have happened. The worst thing on this earth is not to know… Once you know, you find a way to deal with it but not knowing would paralyse you and pose you with thousands of questions about what might have happened… I whisper to Okan Oktay to take them to lunch to change the mood of the day and I suggest a restaurant not in the old harbour but behind the castle where there is a very open view of the sea, our Mediterranean, our blue sea so that Maroulla and Stella can rest a little bit and calm down their emotions simply by looking at the view… Kyrenia has become a place of hotels and casinos with terrible traffic,
buildings, buildings, buildings everywhere but this spot I have chosen is very quiet and calm, offering us an eternal view of how Kyrenia once was, the eternal beauty of the Kyrenia shores… We sit and look at the crows perching on the rocks, the little fishermen's boats entering the harbour, the castle glistening in the sun, trying to `normalize` life and heal the wounds of the past…
8.2.2014
Photo: The pilot's house...
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 2nd of March 2014 Sunday.
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