Cooking with love…

Cooking with love…

Sevgul Uludag

caramel_cy@yahoo.com

Tel: 00 357 99 966518
00 90 542 853 8436

The house is nice and warm, I boil chicken to make stock, to make soup, to make macaroni, to make rice… In the refrigerator, different jams are ready and waiting to be used… The cats sleep curled up like a ball around us, close to the fire… All, except the little blond cat who sleeps with all his claws up in the air… Candles burn, candles that sooth us, that show us that there is light somewhere, that it is not all dark, it is not all gloomy, that there is still hope for the future as long as we are alive and can dream on…
My friends make Christmas cakes for me, kourabiye for my son – soon he will be here for the New Year and all my friends will rush to cook for him… Ferah will wrap vine leaves to make dolma, Okan will cook a yogurt soup with tiny meat balls in it, all the restaurant owners who have been asking about when he will get back will start cooking liver on the charcoal for him or fish soup or wild mushrooms and agrelli with eggs… Everyone is expecting him home so they can cook for him…
Recently one of my dear friends, an archaeologist who has been `digging` for the `missing persons` have had an operation… I visited her and a few days later called her to see what she can eat so I could cook for her…
`Nooo!` she said, `The refrigerator is sooo full of food, you cannot believe… My mother, my sisters all brought something so I don't need any food… You know what? I think in Cyprus, we express ourselves through food… When we feel sad, we eat… When we feel happy, we eat… When someone is sick, we believe that if we cook for that person, he or she will heal immediately…So food is so central in our lives…`
She too has cooked for me, soups when I get sick and indeed when I drink her soup, I believe I heal more quickly: She puts some chicken, some fresh ginger cut in chunks, a carrot and a potato and some rice and some pepper… It's like a mother's soup to heal the soul, comfort food cooked with love…
Perhaps our obsession with cooking is based on the island we live in: For at least those of us who are alive on this earth, the past half century has been full of trouble, conflict and war, full of uncertainty, full of memories of becoming a refugee, seeing our island being divided, cut into two parts forcefully… Even as a child, my first memories are the shrieking sound of a horn when we had to run into shelters at our neighbourhood and wait there for some hours, sitting stifled in the basement of a restaurant or a basement close the restaurant… Then we had to leave home one night when some soldiers knocked at our door and told us to just go! Go, go, go! Don't look back! Don't try to take anything! So off we went, in the middle of the night, end of December 1963, passing through the children's garden of our neighbourhood in Nicosia with my brother, my mother, my grandmother and grandfather who could not walk fast – I was in my mother's
arms, a five year old kid, sleepy, cold, not knowing and understanding what was happening, my grandfather blind so he could not see and my brother had to help him to walk, my grandmother almost deaf so she could not hear what was being said, confused and frightened… Our street was divided and we had seen how they had put sandbags to divide the street, barrels and a military post to guard it… My brother, young as he was, a student in the lyceum one night while on `guard` there, had been punished: He could not bring himself to stop someone who did not know the `parola`, the `password` for that night…
We had gone to inside the walled city to seek refuge in a relative's house where we slept 25 in a room and there was no food, absolutely no food: You had to fight for food… No toys, no going out, no getting back home… We spent about a month like that and managed to go home, to our own house, to our own garden, to our own kitchen and to our own food…
We experienced 1974 at home – my mother refused to leave the house since we had the bad experience of 1964 becoming refugees even for a short time so she decided to stay… `At least we can cook our own food` she would say… She would dig the garden to find potatoes she had planted and had forgotten about and would be happy: She would cook potatoes, she would cook macaroni – there was no bread, this was war – our house was being shelled and we could not go out. So she would cook pitta for us from flour and we would eat pitta bread…
All her life, my mother made stock of food: We would always have at least three-four packages of rice, lots of macaroni, flour, sugar, canned milk, anything you can think of that she could stock, she would stock… `You never know in Cyprus what might happen` she would say…
`But mom, all the markets are full of food! Why do you buy two okkas of halloumi? We can always buy them…`
`No, no` she would say, `you never know what might happen in Cyprus…`
This uncertainty determined our lives and still determines our lives: We are NOT in control of our own lives in Cyprus as a whole – you never know what might come up next: One day the checkpoints are opened but who knows when some big shot might decide to close them? Who knows when they decide to kick off for tension? Or even `peace`… Nothing is certain except one thing for sure: Cypriots on both sides of the dividing line are in FULL CONTROL of their kitchen and perhaps that is why we are so much obsessed with food and we express our love and care with food… Nothing can stop us from eating and cooking and serving – at least we can control this small but very vital area of our lives: We cook for the ones we love…
For the New Year dinner I will cook a recipe I have created with love for my son and for the whole family: I will cook chicken with sweet oranges and clementine tangerines adding olive oil from Karpaz… The sweetness of the oranges and the tangerines will caramelize the skin of the chicken and we will serve it with love and hope that one day the Cypriots will finally be able to get the wheel of their lives and live in a country not with the uncertainty of partition but with the certainty of peace…

19.12.2014

(*) Article published in POLITIS newspaper on the 28th of December 2014, Sunday.

`Pain looks like an earthquake…`

`Pain looks like an earthquake…`

Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com

Tel: 00 357 99 966518
00 90 542 853 8436

Young peace activist Orestis Agisilaou sends me a note:
`Since 2001, United Nations have decided to celebrate the peace on 21/9 every year. At the moment many wars take place in the world. Children are killed every day in Palestine, innocent people are killed in Iraq and Ukraine every day. At all over the world the violence and the terror take place. Cyprus is a country which suffered and is still suffering from a war also. Forty years ago, the county was divided into two parts and Cypriots were told that the borders of their country aren't Kyrenia or Limassol but a buffer zone in the middle of the island. Every Cypriot's dream became half. Our multi coloured island became black and grey. A lot of people were killed. Many of them are still missing. Hundreds of Cypriots became refugees by violence and 40 years later they still hoping to live at least one day at their village before they die. The younger ones are growing up in a divided country and they feel the other community as a stranger. Now, due to
the international peace day, a lot of events take place in order to celebrate peace. And after what? Will we go after home to sleep and to continue our everyday life? The International Day of Peace isn't a reason to go out to see an event, to have fun and after to return home. We should put this day in our everyday life and to celebrate it 365 days a year. If we love honestly our common island we have to take into account the messages of this day and to start working for a better Cyprus. People say that the pain looks like an earthquake. Both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots felt the pain. When an earthquake finishes, people fix the damages of their houses. In the case of Cyprus the materials aren't cement and bricks but love, trust and comprehension. We wait this reconstruction of our home 40 years now…`
Yes the pain that all communities have felt in Cyprus in the last half century is like an earthquake as Orestis points out and each and every step to fix the damage that the pain has done to our people must be encouraged…
Sometimes I encounter people who ask me `Do you think that we will have a solution soon?`
I feel very awkward when I encounter this question and answer them with another question:
`Are you a student at elementary school?`
Problem in Cyprus is that there is absolutely no encouragement from either side for cooperation, for mending our damaged house, for building afresh something that would stand to earthquakes… Problem in Cyprus is that people are far ahead of political structures in both communities – our culture is one that quickly adapts: Cyprus for thousands of years have experienced many civilizations coming and going and Cypriots always found a way to survive by quickly adapting to new conditions… But politicians want to keep things the way it is: Not all politicians of course but exceptions are not the rule – there are always exceptions and good examples but the mainstream politics and policies in this country on either side does not encourage cooperation, not even curiosity about each other… The worst pieces of `news` is selected, when something `good` happens, it is completely ignored by the mainstream politics…
For many years teachers from the two main communities of the island, Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot have been coming together to create new teaching materials for schools and they have produced wonderful books for teachers about for instance how to teach the humanitarian issue of `missing persons` in their classrooms… Neither the Turkish Cypriot, nor the Greek Cypriot authorities have ever allowed these teaching materials officially into the schools. With the efforts of some progressive teachers' trade unions and progressive teachers, some books have been distributed in some schools but this does not make a great impact on the mainstream politics and policies… Our leaders in both sides of the partition line, prefer to hold on to their own rhetoric, their own status quo and organizing events at schools with students have come across great obstacles in some cases… One very good Greek Cypriot friend whose father is `missing` from Karpasia and
whose family suffered quite a lot in 1974 has a heart of gold: He tried desperately for two years to organize a meeting where we would visit the high school he was teaching in Nicosia – he was assistant headmaster – and a Turkish Cypriot and a Greek Cypriot relative of a `missing person` would speak to the students… It proved impossible to organize this event despite his insistence – even the progressive teachers reacted to our proposition saying that `They did not want any trouble in their schools from the known fascist circles`, therefore avoiding efforts of reconciliation and keeping their own `status quo`, their own positions, their own `safe` places… In the end, our dear Greek Cypriot friend was sent to a village to teach: I do not know whether this was due to his very insistent efforts at trying to do an activity of reconciliation at his school or whether it was just a technical and professional decision by the authorities. I did not ask
him because I was a bit scared of what the answer might be… I did not want to find out whether my prediction had come true…
Another dear friend, a young woman teacher who organized events with us at the schools she had been teaching had horrible experiences of being cast out by other Greek Cypriot teachers from her school, gossip spread about her, being alienated and outcast in her school. Not that she was afraid of such things but still it set out an example to others who might have wanted to join her for such peaceful events… It reminded me of Denktash times when we were being alienated, gossip spread about us in order to make sure that people would not support our peaceful activities, that they would fear what might happen to them (not to us!!!)…
But we have in both sides of the partition line, young, courageous people like Orestis who go out of their way in order to try to mend their house damaged by the earthquakes of the past… And they need our support, our encouragement, our good hearted will to be able to carry on… If we don't mend our house together, we will continue to suffer and invite more suffering and more earthquakes… Our whole region is on fire and we still need to figure out how to stay alive together on this land called Cyprus…

3.12.2014

(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 21st of December 2014, Sunday.

Understanding the struggle for `missing persons` in Mexico…

Understanding the struggle for `missing persons` in Mexico…

Sevgul Uludag

caramel_cy@yahoo.com

Tel: 00 357 99 966518
00 90 542 853 8436

We have connections with Mexico through the humanitarian issue of `missing persons` - through Mexican Cordelia Rizzo, an activist who works with the relatives of `missing persons` we have learned a lot about what has been happening in Mexico, connecting Cyprus and Mexico on this dramatic and sad issue, exhibiting the scarves that Mexican relatives of `missing persons` embroider in Cyprus… Every Sunday relatives gather in the town squares and embroider and exhibit these scarves – on the scarves they actually embroider the stories of their own `missing persons` and we have managed with the help of dear Cordelia Rizzo to exhibit them in Cyprus last year… One of the active members of `Together We Can`, the Bi-Communal Initiative of Relatives of Missing Persons and Victims of War in Cyprus, Christina Pavlou Solomi Patsia embroidered a scarf in solidarity with the relatives of Mexican `missing persons` and we had sent this – now in these days of
demonstration in Mexico, Christina's scarf is currently exhibited at the University Monterrey…
Recently through the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico, since September there has been mass demonstrations about `missing persons` not only in Mexico but also internationally… Mexico has thousands of `missing persons` and our dear friend Cordelia Rizzo a few days ago on the 20th of November 2014 wrote an article about what is happening now in Mexico concerning the `missing` students and why it became part of the agenda of the people now… I want to share her article with you… Under the heading `Understanding Ayotzinapa`, Cordelia Rizzo says:
`On September 26th, 43 students, most of whom were just beginning their first year of college at the Teacher's College of Ayotzinapa, were kidnapped from Iguala. This attack, which also resulted in the deaths of several students, was allegedly ordered by Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, the mayor and first lady of Iguala. News of the disappearances broke out through a photo taken of student Julio Cesar Mondragon's cadaver; his skull was exposed and bleeding, his eyes gouged out. After the picture went viral – as is often organized crime's intention in capturing these images – the nation slowly realized the extent of September 26th's tragedy. Mondragon's face was wiped out while he was still alive.
Attacks on Mexico's youth have been taking place for years, but this time is different. This time, society's outcry has been coherent, clear, and unified in a way that many say is unprecedented.
Why now?
What is happening with the Ayotzinapa case has, in a way, taken place before. In 1974, Lucio Cabañas, leader of the Party of the Poor and an alumnus of the Teacher's College of Ayotzinapa, was also killed – in an ambush by the Mexican Army. Footage of his autopsy was recorded; it was meant to be televised. Like Mondragon's corpse, Cabañas' body was a message to and a metaphor for Mexican society. What followed was more systematic harassment and disappearances of student leaders who sympathized with Cabañas' ideals during the '70s and '80s. This dark period is the infamous Dirty War, which kicked off in '68 – and the state of Guerrero, where the Teacher's College of Ayotzinapa is located, suffered the most.
Thirty years later, Guerrero and other northern states found themselves at the epicentre of violence once again, this time with Mexico's war on drugs – a war that has led to more than 100,00 deaths, not including the 27,000 missing.
The collusion between local authorities and organized crime can no longer be ignored.
In 2010 alone, Ciudad Juarez endured the Villas de Salvarcar massacre, in which sixteen persons (mostly high school students from CBTIS) were killed and twelve wounded in a house after twenty sicarios opened fire on them. Their parents had to endure the fact that the deaths were not the result of settling a rift among rival cartel members, as then-President Calderon assured, but a mistake. Meanwhile in Monterrey, Jorge Mercado and Javier Arredondo, graduate students from the engineering schools at Monterrey's Technological Institute, were killed in a cross fire between the army and alleged sicarios inside the campus. Their bodies were manipulated – student IDs removed from their wallets – to make it seem like they were criminals.
In San Fernando, in the perennial PRI stronghold of Tamaulipas, 72 migrants were found dead. Coverage of this event simmered down within weeks even though hundreds of bodies were found. More than 300 were disappeared and killed in Allende, Coahuila (another PRI stronghold) in 2011, but when the Mexican public learned about this in 2013 no protests followed. In Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, 6 young men were disappeared in 2013. After roughly a month, police found their alleged remains, which were supposedly dissolved in acid. Urns with ashes and a sticker from the local government (as if branding the deaths) were handed to the families.
The disappearances from the Dirty War happened 40 years ago, and amount to a few hundred missing compared to the tens of thousands of disappearances of the past 8 years. But those of us who have been observing closely see a continuum that can no longer be ignored: the collusion between local authorities and organized crime.
Mexico's crisis of disappearances is unlike any others that have happened in Latin America. Some have been enacted by the State, while others have been committed by cartels and organized crime. But this latter type is rarely investigated thoroughly, and very few of victims have been identified. Former President Vicente Fox rose to power promising to bring the Dirty War cases to justice, but the tribunal set up for such a task was conveniently dismantled and no responsible parties were tried. Today, in the era of NSA surveillance, authorities in Mexico routinely claim to have no information on the whereabouts of the disappeared. They construe outlandish theories to discourage relatives in their search.
And yet, it has been very difficult to raise awareness until now. Guerrero has long seemed like a foreign land to many Mexicans. Identified with Marxist and Socialist ideals, which are not popular in the North and several other conservative parts of Mexico, the region is considered indomitable – an image that authorities perpetuated by casting victims of violence as deserving agitators. But Guerrero is also a time capsule, it holds the memory of what it meant to be young and committed. And this is what has come to the fore after the events of September 26th.
Finally, the portrait that emerged of the 43 missing — rural first-year teaching students from one of the poorest states in Mexico — made it clear that they were not, as former president Felipe Calderon once intimated of the tens of thousands of victims during the early years of the drug war he initiated, corrupt and somehow deserving of their fate. They were simply innocent victims. Today, a multitude of Mexicans are looking beyond the stigma that the students of its highlands have endured for decades. We finally see in the faces of these men, who barely touched adulthood our hopes shattered. Ayotzinapa symbolizes the peasantry, the origins of the Mexican peoples. Perhaps we might also unknowingly begin to come to peace with our indigenous roots, an aspect of our heritage we are never at ease with.
The events in the seemingly remote mountains of Guerrero have galvanized a stream of frustrations that no soccer game or finely tailored telenovela can distract us from. It has dragged the grand multitude of Mexicans who wouldn't show empathy towards the war's victims into the protests, and made them admit, for the first time, that they too are vulnerable.
Today, Nov. 20, Mexico celebrates the 104th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution with a national day of marches and work stoppages. Today, and every day until there is justice, we show the world that #TodossomosAyotzinapa.`
http://remezcla.com/features/understanding-ayotzinapa/


Photo: `Mother if I disappeared where did I go?` says the scarf embroidered by the relative of a `missing` person from Mexico...

(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 14th of December 2014, Sunday.

The scars of my land…

The scars of my land…

Sevgul Uludag

caramel_cy@yahoo.com

Tel: 00 357 99 966518
00 90 542 853 8436

One of my readers, while speaking, blurts out something that strikes me as important: Some years ago, together with a friend of his, while travelling in Famagusta, his friend had pointed out a place and told him that there had been a mass grave where some Greek Cypriots were buried there… This was what Turkish Cypriots call `Varosha`, part of the town that has been settled by Turkish Cypriot refugees from Paphos…
I ask him if he could show this place to us or even better, if his friend can show it to us… He is not sure of his friend since he says, `he is an ultra-nationalist` and wouldn't come out to meet with us… He would call him anyway and ask… But he volunteers to come with me and with the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee to try to locate at least the area and tell us the story…
So off we go, on the 10th of November 2014 Monday morning to Famagusta…
We try to find the area he is talking about in Varosha… We drive around to see whether we can see the place he is describing…
`It was a garden with some olive trees and around it was a high wall with yellow stone…` he describes.
His friend whose mother lives in this avenue had told him that they had tried to `empty` this mass grave in the past, `they` being `the authorities` in charge in the northern part of our island.
We find the avenue they had travelled – he remembers that at some point they had turned to go to Nicosia – so the possible burial site he is talking about must be around this avenue…
I have some assumptions about the place he is describing: Some years ago, another reader had shown us a garden with a stone wall around it and she had said that there had been a burial there… Next to the garden, in the road where she was living there had also been suspicion about a burial site: When they had come from the southern part of the island to be settled in these houses of Greek Cypriots from Varosha, they had found a big hole in the middle of their road and for many years, the hole stayed as it is like a scar until sometime later the municipality had put asphalt over it…
A few years ago the municipality had gone there to do some work concerning pipes and my reader had called me to try to suggest that since they are digging the asphalt, why doesn't the CMP start excavations here – I had told what she had suggested to the officials of the CMP but nothing happened. Probably CMP officials warned the workers to contact them if they found any remains during digging… The municipality did its work on pipes and closed the hole and left… The place remains as a possible burial site that we had shown with my reader to the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee – there needs to be investigation about both this hole, as well as the adjacent garden with the wall surrounding it – years ago there had been information about this garden, that there might be a possible burial site in the garden…
We thank my reader for trying to locate the suspicious garden with us and he promises to try to contact his friend and try to get more information – since we now know on which avenue this possible burial site was located, the Turkish Cypriot investigators can go and make investigation about it. Our reader has given us a good clue and a good description: What remains is for the Turkish Cypriot officials to start investigating this area…
Our next stop is on the road from Kalopsida to Kuklia where the relative of a Turkish Cypriot `missing` person wants to show us another possible burial site… His father has been `missing` since 1974 on the road between Kalopsida and Kuklia and he has been trying very hard to find his burial site, going around the villages where Greek Cypriots from Kalopsida live, talking to them, trying to find any information about his father's burial site. There has been some digging for this `missing person` in the area without any concrete result… Now he shows us a big havuza (water pond) where once upon a time, water used to come from different wells for irrigation – he says that he had found some information about the possible burial site of his father, that he is buried in a water well in this field… Further up, we see a water well, closed now… We thank him and say goodbye to continue to Epicho (Abohor) to the possible burial site of some `missing`
Greek Cypriots – this had been a big hole where the British had taken `havara` soil while building the road from Epicho to Beykeuy – the big hole was around 20 meters to 30 meters in diameter and 3.5-4 meters deep… In 1974, one of my readers had seen that they had buried some `missing` Greek Cypriots in that `havara hole` - seven or eight of them, they had been killed in the war and after the war the bodies were collected and buried in that `havara hole`… Sometime later this area had become a rubbish dump and the whole village as well as those from surrounding villages would dump their rubbish here... Not only the hole but the whole area would be full of garbage as well as remnants from constructions…
We have been working on this area for many years and when finally the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee began digging, they stopped since they found `asbestos` in the rubbish dump…
Archaeologists were sent for training about how to handle asbestos and experts came to see the rubbish dump… The mukhtar of Epicho wanted to make a park here so he had the area fenced off so no one would be able to throw any more garbage here – but the damage is already done…
We walk around and see broken pieces of asbestos in the area… These came from renovations or constructions – old water pipes or old asbestos lamarina was thrown here, now making it difficult to dig since it might harm the health of archaeologists… They got some special clothing and special gear but still they are not so willing to dig and they say this to us when we visit the area… The Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee will decide how to carry on excavations here with proper health measures, if possible…
We walk towards the second big hole that the mukhtar himself had shown us, saying there might have been two or three `missing persons` buried there. In and around this hole too, there is asbestos…
The mukhtar is waiting for the work of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee to be finalized here so that he can continue with his park project – they had already planted a lot of trees but they have now wilted – the old rubbish dump looks like a sinister place – I hope that one day it will really become a nice park with trees where children can play and people can have nice picnics…
Cyprus is scarred: Wherever we go, we see the signs of these scars… When you know the stories, these scars become scars in your heart and you carry them around forever in your soul…
Cyprus needs to heal from these scars but as things stand today, we are so far away from healing…

21.11.2014

Photo: From the rubbish damp at Epikho...

(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 7th of December, 2014 Sunday.