Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 99 966518
The mark of the witness had been a huge carob tree, the only massive tree in the area…
It is no longer there, it is gone…
He had buried them there, few meters away from the carob tree…
We roam the empty fields down under the shooting range that had once been a Greek Cypriot military camp…
Up above is the Saint Hilarion Castle and we can see the tower above the cliffs...
There had been fighting here back in 1974 as the Turkish commandoes came down from St. Hilarion, taking over this military camp…
The witness who had agreed to come and show me and the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee had come here to bury nine `missing` Greek Cypriots.
`The bodies had stayed in a pile under the sun for some days` he explains, `and the smell was terrifying… Even from the village the smell could not be tolerable… They had given me a bulldozer and a soldier to help me to bury them… When I came here, the smell was so bad… The smell of dead humans is something different… It simply overwhelms you… For days later, I would be sick and would not be able to get out of bed…`
He stops, remembering…
`Even if a small animal dies, you can smell…` I say…
`No, no… This is something completely different… Dead humans smell different…` he says…
`In the beginning, I had thought of digging a hole and burying them but I got so sick from the smell and the sight that we simply put some lime over them and then covered them up with soil` he says… `Next to the huge carob tree…`
He had heard rumours that the military might have removed them from here later on but he does not know if it is true or not.
There had been a huge fire on the Pentataktilos and this area too was burned down…
So anything could have happened to the remains buried here…
But Xenophon Kallis, the person who has been doing investigations about all the `missing persons` of Cyprus for almost the last three decades on every single day of his life would not give up easily and take anything for granted. He roams and finds the `boridja` of the carob trees and points them out to us:
"Look! One here and another one there! Further up, two more…"
Over and over he asks the witness the same question:
"Are you sure there was no other very big carob tree?"
"Yes, yes, of course I am sure… I am from Templos and I know this area very well…` he says.
`Carob trees never die` Kallis tells us… `It is amazing… No matter what you do, whether you cut or you burn them, they come up… Because carob trees and olive trees, they have very deep roots… So they would grow again and again…`
There is a carcass of a construction further up and next to it Kallis finds another carob tree, this one bigger than the small `boridja…`
`Come, would you mind, over here…` he points out to us…
We walk in the heat of the day towards the carob tree…
`Could it be this one?` he asks the witness.
`Could be…`
`So if you buried them, let's say near this carob tree, where would it have been, the burial place?`
The witness points out where it might have been, the burial place of the nine Greek Cypriot `missing persons`…
`Perhaps from an aerial photograph you could point out the carob tree… An old aerial photograph that Mr. Kallis might find?` I ask the witness.
`Do they exist?` he asks.
`Of course they do… I am sure he can find a photo…`
Kallis says he can find an old aerial photograph of the area and we will take the photo to the witness to see to be exactly sure where that huge carob tree had been…
The huge carob tree probably burned down in the fire of 1995…
The witness has to go and we thank him and say goodbye… We agree to visit him again once Kallis finds the photo of the area…
Today, 9th of June 2016, Thursday, we are in the Templos area again, investigating about this possible mass grave of the `missing` Greek Cypriots…
With us is also Okan Oktay, the Coordinator of Exhumations of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee.
Okan Oktay explains to us that yes, they had found some remains in this area years ago when they had done excavations… Few remains by the side of the road but inside this huge, fenced field…
The field belongs to a Turkish Cypriot – all 60 donums of it…
We drive inside the idyllic, medieval Templos village to meet another witness who wants to show us some places in Templos and Agios Georgios…
We sit in a restaurant owned by a friend in Templos to wait for him to come…
Everything in this village, all the doors and windows, all the buildings show the Latin heritage of Cyprus… The village was built by the Templar Chevaliers and you can see it in the narrow streets and the architecture of very old, medieval buildings…
The air here is different, much more different than say Nicosia… Even on the hottest summer nights, here is a bit cooler and not sticky like the humid Kyrenia…
At the back of the village is the mountain where the Saint Hilarion Castle looks down… At the front of the village is the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean, the sea…
My reader comes and finds us in the restaurant and we sit together to have some coffee and talk…
He tells us stories from his childhood – he had been only 14 in 1974… He is not from Templos but had been a refugee from 1963 from Lapithos and they stayed in makeshift refugee houses in Templos for many years… After 1974 he moved to Kyrenia…
But he remembers how there was bombing from the Greek Cypriot military camp outside Templos and how they had to leave their makeshift refugee house and go elsewhere for protection… Bombs were falling inside the village and their refugee house was prefabricated so wouldn't stand in case a bomb fell…
He starts talking about how as a child they would go and enter every house in Agios Georgios after the war was over and how they would be shocked to see a woman in her 40s laying down in a one room house, shot from her stomach, dead…
He would tell us of a middle aged man on the side of a road, lying dead… Each time they would pass, his beard would continue to grow… The body, all puffed up and he would feel sorry and strange and would run to the village to tell his elders to please take and bury him, that it was a very sad sight…
He would take us in Templos where a Greek Cypriot was shot from his stomach and fell just across the school where they had gathered… The Greek Cypriot had taken off his fanella and had run with his arms up to give himself up… There had been two UN camps, perhaps the Greek Cypriot youngster had wanted to take refuge in the UN camp next to the school but the UN soldiers had left and had gone to the other camp so no one was there… Why did the UN leave? Does anyone ask any questions about the role of the UN during the war in Cyprus?
Perhaps that's how the Greek Cypriot had come to the village to surrender… They would take him and a Turkish officer would speak with him, while my reader watched from inside the school… He shows us the two big cypress trees under which the officer and the Greek Cypriot soldier spoke… They would let him go and after a few minutes, would shoot and kill him… The child would watch, the terror of the war, the terror of killing someone, the terror of having to grow up in one day, leaving the rosy childhood dreams and becoming sad…
Investigating the area from where this Greek Cypriot had been shot, Kallis finds an ancient `havouzi` and calls us to look at it…
`Perhaps they buried him here` he says…
We will continue to investigate...
In the coffee shop, Kallis tells my reader, `We don't do this for the past, we do this for the future… So that in future, perhaps people would think twice before they do such things…`
We dig the past in order to contribute towards the future, trying to clean up the mess that war has left behind… Because if we don't clean this mess, we cannot build a future for our children on this island…
10.6.2016
Photo: This was the area where 9 Greek Cypriot "missing persons" were buried...
(*) Article published in POLITIS newspaper on the 26th of June 2016, Sunday.
