Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 99 966518
`The tree was like an umbrella, like a shelter, its branches coming down all the way and they had been under the tree, hiding… We had seen them and they had run… It was dark at night… I had left that night to go have dinner at home and would come back later…`
Standing on the once famous `By-pass road` of Kuchuk Kaymakli (Omorphita area) he is telling us the story, pointing out where the tree had been… Today I have asked this reader of mine who is telling us the story of this area to come and meet us here, on the `By-pass road` and tell the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee what he knows. He had told me what he witnessed years ago and I had written but we had never come to the actual spot. That's why I asked him to come and speak to us and he had agreed since he has a human heart and he wants to help… He always helped me on our search for the fate of the `missing persons` and have shared other information as well but today we are focused on the `By-pass road`… With us is Xenophon Kallis, the Assistant to the Greek Cypriot Member of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee and a young Turkish Cypriot investigator from the Turkish Cypriot Office of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee… It is the 14th of June 2016 Tuesday morning… We had come here previously with another reader of mine on the 25th of May 2016, together with Kallis and Okan Oktay, the Coordinator of Exhumations of the CMP and he had shared what he knew about the three `missing` Greek Cypriots… But I would get the actual witness who had arrested them and who had witnessed to the killing of one of them and heard the shots during the killing of the other two to tell us what he saw so that it would help the investigations in this area… My reader continues to tell us what had happened:
`The following day we start going into the houses around here, on this road… We went to that house… Apparently they were hiding in the house… I tried to open one door to a room but they had put a cupboard behind the door… When I pushed, the door opened a bit and I could see them… They put their hands up… It was three youngsters, young Greek Cypriots… They had nothing on top… Perhaps they were searching for civilian clothes in that house… I took them as prisoners of war… They were young Greek Cypriots studying in Greece and during their holidays in Cyprus in 1974, war `happened` and they got caught and had to be in the army because of the war… I took the three youngsters and walked them across the road where there had been the sort of makeshift `headquarters` and took them to our commander. Our commander was a Turkish Cypriot, very well-known figure… He is still alive…` he says.
He points out the house that had been the `headquarters` of those days…
`This was the place we used on those days as `headquarters` in this area… Underneath was a basement… So I walked up to the commander and told him that I had taken three prisoners and asked what to do with them… The commander took out his gun and immediately shot one of them… I was so shocked I ran out and the commander continued to shoot… He killed all the three youngsters…
Down this road, one from our team had killed another Greek Cypriot soldier in the street… Just over there… And when you turn left, I can show you the house, there was an old Greek Cypriot woman lying down on her bed, probably bedridden… Same guy shot her dead…
Further up inside the church there were around 15 Greek Cypriot soldiers who were being held as prisoners of war…
I will show you which church it is… There all those 15 Greek Cypriot soldiers were killed – I saw that… Later, they asked me to bar the doors of the church so no one would enter… So I took some planks and bolded the doors…`
This was the Agios Dimitrianos Church of Kaymakli… It is now in the military area but we see it every day passing through a controlled road that has been opened to civilian traffic, connecting Nicosia with the Famagusta road as you drive towards the north… The church stands at the very beginning of this road opened to civilian traffic as you drive from Nicosia towards the north, on your left…
`Later we were given the task to collect the bodies from this area… We had tied handkerchiefs on our faces and collected the one person that one from our team had killed… The old woman in that house that the same person had killed. The 15 soldiers killed inside the church… We were given garbage trucks that were opening from the top… We would take the dead bodies and put them in these garbage trucks… We never collected the three youngsters whom I had arrested. Perhaps they buried them in the basement but their bodies were not here, not anywhere… Although we came to this road and collected other bodies, the three that our commander killed were not there…`
There is an empty plot next to the `headquarters` of those days and there had been rumours that there might be a burial there…
There had also been rumours that the three killed at the `headquarters` were buried in the basement…
We had gone around the place with Kallis and Okan previously, checking out the `topography` of the building without entering into the premises… Kallis was trying to locate the well that might have been under the house and he thought it might be in the garage now… This had been a Turkish Cypriot house and the owners had left in 1963 without actually having time to finish the building completely when intercommunal fighting broke out in Cyprus in December 1963. So this had been a `Greek Cypriot area` until 1974…
Further up from this house, my reader remembers, there had been the Greek Cypriot police building for the Kaymakli area…
So what happened to the bodies that they collected from this area? Where were they taken?
`They were taken to the area of the garbage dump of Dikomo we had heard… At that time there was no garbage dump there yet… We had heard that where they built the university, when they were building it there, some human remains were found but I wouldn't know exactly… These are the things we heard…`
After collecting the dead bodies, my reader would become terribly sick…
`I would have boils all over me and would lay down for days to come to myself… The stench, the view, the terrible things that we saw made me sick…`
He still feels eerie talking about these and his hair stands on end when he talks… I feel sorry for having to put him through this but he wants to help because he has always been in the forefront of the struggle for peace and reunification of our island…
We leave the `By-pass road` and go to look at the church… It is impossible and `forbidden` to stop on this road or take photographs… So we drive slowly and he points out where he had put the planks…
This was the Agios Dimitrianos Church of Kaymakli… I would call my dear friend Tuncer Baghishkan, the archaeologist and historian – the Wikipedia of Cyprus – to learn more about this church. He would tell me that it had been built in 1902 in the name of Agios Dimitrianos… Agios Dimitrianos had been caught during the Arab raids and had been taken to Baghdad and there the Caliph would allow him to leave for Cyprus together with his followers… He would come and settle in Kythrea… During the X. century A.D., he would be the Bishop of Kythrea… So the church would be built in his name by Archbishop Meletios Kronides from Omorphita…
According to Tuncer Baghishkan, there was a marble inscription above the southern door of this telling this… According to Tuncer Baghishkan, there had been a chapel inside the church built in the name of Agios Ioannis Eleimonas… There had been 33 icons in the church that were turned over to the antiquities department of the Turkish Cypriots and all of these dated between 1957-1960… According to our friend Tuncer, primarily the Greek Cypriot school of the village Kaymakli had been in the yard of the church but later on a Greek Cypriot woman called Evgenia Theodotou would help build an elementary school for girls in the place where the Greek Cypriot club had been… And in 1946, together with the Standard houses, the last of the Greek Cypriot schools had been built…
I thank my reader for coming and seeing us and telling us what he knew…
I thank Tuncer Baghishkan for sharing with us what he knows about the Agios Dimitrianos Church…
Please share with me what you know – I do not want to know your name if you don't want to tell me… My number is 99 966518… Thanks…
9.7.2016
Photo: Kallis in front of the building where 3 Greek Cypriots were killed...
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 7th of August 2016, Sunday.
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