Sevgul Uludag
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She does not have a photograph so we shall never be able to see what she looked like…
She had been around 110 years old in August 1964 so she must have been born around 1854…
She had seen the Ottoman times, the British times, the times of the Republic of Cyprus and the time of the intercommunal conflict…
Her name was Nazire Sadik Chelebi and she was from this tiny village Ayyorgoudi – it is a small village that has disappeared after 1964 – close to Selladi Tou Appi, in the Tylliria area in Cyprus… It had had a population of 30 Turkish Cypriots until 1964… Now there is no such village… Only some destroyed stone houses, like the one of Nazire Sadik Chelebi…
She had been too old to be able to get up and leave – when intercommunal troubles hit the Tylliria area on the 6th of August 1964, she had been laying down in her bed…
Underneath her bed was a small masharappa where she would put her piasters…
The family would leave abruptly for Kokkina, thinking that they would come back the next day…
Her angoni Djemil Huseyin with his wife Remziye and their six or seven kids with them would leave to spend the night in Kokkina thinking they would return the next day… With them Lisani Islam and his wife and their six or seven kids would also leave, as well as their father and mother, Islam Sadik and Zuhre…
But they would never be able to return to their village and their long years of struggle for survival would start, living in tents and caves, trying to hold on to life…
During the bombing of Grivas and his men, the house where Nazire Hanim was laying down on her bed would be hit – although the house had been built of stone, as in the other villages of Tylliria, the ceiling would be hit and the house would burn down, the ceiling crushing on her and she too would burn and die there, alone…
The Greek Cypriots of the area would think that under the rubble was Lisani and his wife and would tell this to the Turkish Cypriots, shouting from the mountains – what they didn't know at that time was that it was not the angoni Lisani and his wife but Nazire Hanim who had been killed in the house of her angoni Lisani…
And under the rubble of her house, she would lay for exactly 48 years!
48 long years and she would remain there, her charred remains under the rubble…
Xenophon Kallis, the Assistant to the Greek Cypriot Member of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee, while investigating for the "missing" Turkish Cypriots of 1964 in Tylliria area, would find out the details as early as the 1990 and whenever we would be in the area of Paphos, he would tell us about the "gocagari under the house" and would say that "we should go and dig there…"
If we would be in Choulou or Polis, he would always remind us of the old woman laying under the rubble in her house…
In 2012 I would get a call from a reader of mine – Nazim Cemil Kizilbora – who would ask for my help… Nazire Hanim, he would tell me, was his great grandmother…
I would call Kallis and his Turkish Cypriot counterpart in the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee and four years ago, together with the angoni of Nazire Hanim, we would go to Ayyorgoudi… The angoni would show the house and the exact location of the bed of his great grandmother and digging would begin on the same day… The archaeologists would be with us on this visit and they would start digging as soon as we would leave and start finding the charred remains, even the masharappa with the piasters that Nazire Hanim had kept under her bed… 48 years after the bombing of Grivas, the charred remains of the oldest known "missing person" in Cyprus would see daylight… The calendars would show the date we went there and the day her remains found: 11th of January 2012…
On the 25th of March 2016, Friday, we go to the funeral of Nazire Hanim…
Nazim Cemil Kizilbora would speak in the name of the family in order to say goodbye to his great grandmother and thank Kallis and me and the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee for helping to take back her remains…
She will lay in a grave now, in Nicosia where her great grandchildren and their children can visit her and lay flowers…
What is strange about this country is that a woman killed in bombing would remain where she had been killed under the rubble for exactly 48 years and no one would question that…
What is strange about this country is that the systems that we created across the partition line, in both sides of the island are not humanitarian systems – because if we had had humanitarian systems working properly, an old woman, estimated to be around 110 years old would not remain under the rubble of her stone house for 48 years…
Her charred bones would be taken out and given to the family for burial… That the family would not have to wait for 48 years for the rubble from the house to be lifted…
Tylliria, a beautiful area, all green when we went with lots of goats coming to look at what we were doing, the bombed house on a slope, underneath a stream running with water… Ayyorgoudi, a tiny village no longer on any map…
Sellain Tapi, Halevga, all those tiny villages in this area…
If there had been any humanity on this land, the old lady would not have to stay under the rubble for almost half a century… Let us say, yes, there is humanity on this land but it is incapable of moving things, shifting things, changing things… It stays quiet or it drifts along with the course of events, not being effective enough to resist and to bring forth its own values…
What is important for our common future is how to make humanity more powerful, more effective, more relevant in our daily lives…
Humanity is fragile, it is not arrogant like violence...
That is why it needs infrastructures to flourish…
Feelings of hatred and prejudice is easier to flare up but feelings of humanity need careful nourishing of the souls of people of this land.
We had been part of nature once when perhaps there had been times when we would be gentle with each other…
Those days are long gone – nowadays it is easier to be cut off from nature and not feel part of the whole… Living in towns and cities, driving cars, using smart phones, being on the internet and watching the world through the internet has not actually helped too much to gain back what we have lost… Our "lifestyles" have turned us more and more egocentric when we don't care about what happens to the person sitting or standing next to us… The capitalist lifestyles on this land has in fact kills our humanity and our humanitarian values and turns us into robots running after things where no one actually even gets satisfied… Because when you get one material thing, you want the next and the next and this has no end…
Because we have lost track of where we come from and where we are going…
If a woman can lay down under the rubble of her house and no one ever bothered to help out for 48 years, there is definitely something wrong with our societies…
It is the shame of humanity that she would stay there for half a century…
Let us take this opportunity to look at what sort of life we can build in this country and how we can bring back the values of humanity, rather than running after our own self-interest…
24.3.2016
Photo: The house where under the rubble lay the old woman in Ayyorgoudi…
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 24th of April 2016, Sunday.
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