Sevgul Uludag
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One of our readers, our dear friend Artemis Poullos who has helped enormously in finding the burial site of `missing` Ramadan Ahmet wrote an article and had published in HARAVGI back in December 2016… When he sent me the clipping, I would ask him for translation since I would not understand a word…
Last week he would do that and I would have it in Turkish so I could also translate to English… This way, all our readers whether they read Turkish, Greek or English would understand the important words of this humanist hero – Artemis Poullos – about his feelings…
We had started working with Artemis Poullos on trying to find the burial site of Ramadan Ahmet back in 2008 or 2009… AKEL MEP Takis Hadjigeorgiou was working quietly in the area of Paphos, trying to convince people who could help us to show us the possible burial site of Ramadan…
Ramadan Ahmet was married, a builder, an innocent person with a small daughter, Sevil…
Ramadan was travelling on his motorcycle when some Greek Cypriots caught and killed him and buried him in a well in Polemi…
They would keep and use his motorcycle…
The family of Ramadan would be devastated…
Ramadan had been from Arodes and years later I would meet his brother Beyit Direkchi who would come with me to meet with Artemis and with Christos Vrahnou in Droushia village – this was around the year 2010…
Eventually with the help of Takis Hadjigeorgiou, our wonderful friend Artemis Poullos and with the help of Christos Vrahnou from Yiolou, we would be able to show the burial site of Ramadan Ahmet to the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee in 2010… The father of Christos Vrahnou had been killed by the same killers who had killed Ramadan because the father of Vrahnou had witnessed the murder of a Turkish Cypriot woman and her stepson and they did not want to leave any witnesses behind… Christos Vrahnou, with the help of Takis Hadjigeorgiou and Artemis, would become good friends with Beyit Direkchi, the brother of `missing` Ramadan…
His remains would be found in a well in Polemi that Artemis and Vrahnou had shown us when CMP would dig there three years later…
It would take another three years for the DNA identification and last year in December, the family would receive the remains of Ramadan Ahmet and bury him with a proper funeral in Famagusta…
Artemis Poullos would attend the funeral…
I want to share his very meaningful words with you today…
This is what our dear friend who helped find the remains of Ramadan Ahmet wrote:
"I had no chance of meeting Ramadan. But I know the area where he used to live, well… Arodes, Inya, Droushia, Terra, Kritou Terra… I have been on top of many wells in the village Polemi… His bones were in one of those wells… The killers had thrown his lifeless body in one of those wells… Approximately 20 kilometres away from where he had been killed.
Ramadan, I walked all the way to the spot where the killers had set an ambush to kill you. Your father and your brothers had found your blood there… They had also found your motorcycle there – its light was broken… It was three days after the birthday of Jesus Christ. Three days before the 1964 New Year day. These Greek Cypriot killers were known as `good` Christians… They were head of households with kids, now they are grandparents with grandchildren.
The Turkish Cypriot Ramadan was only 22 years old. The killers left his daughter an orphan – she was only one and a half years old and his wife a widow. They brought darkness to the lives of a big family.
I searched for the family of Ramadan and I found them. I met his daughter, his brothers, his grandchildren. We became good friends with his brother Beyit and his family. Also with Christos from Yiolou and his family… These two friends have some commonalities. They are both from villages from the Chrysohou area. They are both interested in the land and trees. They have a more bitter commonality: Both Ramadan and the father of Christos had been killed by the same persons.
The father of Christos, after nine months of the killing of Ramadan had been a witness to the killing of two Turkish Cypriots. This time, the victims were an old woman and a young boy. They wanted to shut him up and they killed him. This time they left a man as a widower and three young kids as orphans… They brought mourning to one more family…
During the funeral I could not recognize the wife of Ramadan. After the mosque, we went to the cemetery and then to the house of a relative of Ramadan. A woman approached me and then I realized, this was the wife of Ramadan. We shook hands and embraced each other and in Cypriot dialect she said to me: "I thank you for your help in finding my husband. We will build his grave in stone and we will lay some flowers… May his soul rest in peace now…`
I hope that in the new year there will be a solution for the Cyprus problem and our souls too find some peace…`
(Artemis Poullos – a friend of the family of Ramadan Ahmet.)
I will never forget the day Beyit and Christos Vrahnou had met…
I will never forget the amount of effort Takis Hadjigeorgiou put to get Christos Vrahnou and Beyit together…
I will never forget the day we went driving in the tiny car of Artemis Poullos to Drousia to meet Christos Vrahnou and introduce Beyit to him…
I will never forget how his cousins helped us translating his words to communicate with us…
I will never forget the day we would meet Artemis and Christos to go to Polemi together with the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee in 2010 so they could show us the area and the well where Ramadan Ahmet had been buried…
More than half a century he would stay in that well, waiting for a human to show his place so he could get back to his wife and his daughter and his brothers who missed him so much… The daughter he could not see grow up, the grandchildren he could not embrace, the wife he left behind with tears to think of him all these years – his brothers who would keep him in their hearts… His absence would always be his presence amongst them, never forgetting even for a single day, never giving up his memory…
From my heart, I thank Artemis Poullos, Christos Vrahnou and Takis Hadjigeorgiou for helping find the remains of Ramadan Ahmet…
25.3.2017
Photo: Ramadan Ahmet.
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 30th of April 2017, Sunday.
(**) The Turkish version of this article was published in YENİDÜZEN newspaper on my pages called "Cyprus: The Untold Stories" on 24th of March, 2017.
The link to this article in Turkish:
http://www.yeniduzen.com/ramadan-ahmetin-ardindan-10418yy.htm
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