Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 99 966518
Today, an article by one of my friends, writer and musician Eralp Adanir was published in our newspaper YENIDUZEN…
It was entitled "Going back 43 years…"
It reflected how our traumas from the times of conflict never heal but stay there since no one ever attempted to heal them…
We all live with our traumas from the conflict – I was barely five years old in 1963 and those memories of fleeing our house, the sound of the fighting, the frightening darkness because of shooting, the lack of food, being a refugee in different relatives' houses and most of all, the partition of our street and the fear of playing in the street stayed with me forever…
We should share these childhood memories of the conflict in order to show how it affected us all and how we pass it on to other generations… We could tackle these traumas only by sharing and knowing that war leaves scars in our psyche and that is one of the primary reasons why we should work for peaceful reconciliation…
Eralp Adanir as a musician and a writer worked throughout his life for peace… And what he shares with us is precious since it shows us what sort of trauma he has gone through… He has been for many years making TV programmes of music and culture, of books on "Bayrak" (BRT tv) and was persecuted in the past for being very outspoken for peace and reunification of our island… For many years he has been writing a weekly column in our newspaper YENIDUZEN and has many published books based on research about music, culture and other issues.
I want to share what he wrote… Eralp Adanir, in his article entitled "Going back 43 years" writes:
"It is a fact that those things we lived in our childhood make the basis of an unforgettable and non-erasable source of memory… That is why some of the psychiatrists, while trying to understand the problems of persons the first place they go is the period of "childhood"…
People like us who have seen and experienced war as children have this "trauma" in our past but always it stays somewhere in our daily lives…
Sometimes this "trauma" pops up and sometimes it doesn't but hides itself somewhere until you die…
But when I think about the war of 20th July 1974, I realize that my childhood memories of nine and a half years old have been split into two and this split is full of sadness…
I personally experienced the war at the age of nine and a half…
I experienced the surrender, the bullets, the shells, the smell of gunpowder, the whistle of the mortar rounds, the wounded, the dead bodies, the ration cards, the martial law…
In summary I lived through the biggest horrors that a child can live through…
In those days with my childhood mind things that did not make sense now make sense in the most appropriate way, I can now evaluate what sort of impact the war has especially over children.
On that hot summer day of 20th of July 1974, I was nine and a half years old.
I was in the centre of the Turkish sector of our Limassol, just across our hospital.
My memories: movies at the Taksim Cinema, Turkish songs played before the movie began and during the breaks… In our neighbourhood and at the Park Gazino playing football in the yard, the Sandwich-maker Uncle Kemal in our neighbourhood, Uncle Chakir, Uncle Osman the doner (gyros) maker, Uncle Salih the barber, the coffee shop of Salih Yek, the shop of Mustafa Muhsin, the coffeeshop owner Uncle Naim, Uncle Durmush the Bakkalis, Uncle Djemal, the Sedat Simavi Primary School, my class mates and teachers, the joy of 23rd of April Children's Day, the bayrams (religious feasts) where we would kiss the hands of the elderly and they would give us Money… The Ladies' Mile, Moloz, my grandfather's boats for the sea made of wood, the sea festival – panayiri – and the Limassol carnival… The love for football taking us over through the football teams of Limassol Doghan Turk Birlighi and Turk Ocaghi Limassol… Car trips on the bypass, my father taking us to the Akrotiri British Bases and me, eating "fish and chips" there for the first time in my life…
In the old Limassol, the sellers of pots under the eucalyptus trees, the monkey in the cage, the first sentence I was made to memorise: "Ena shelinia pagado…" and me buying ice cream from the cart of the ice-cream maker… Another Greek sentence we acquired in our language when the New Year would approach and we would decorate a New Year tree: Singing the song "Ay Vasili Erkete…"
These were the things on my childish memory until 10 o'clock in the morning on the 20th of July 1974.
Until the guns started speaking, bombs started exploding…
Until 5 o'clock in the afternoon when we would surrender as the Turkish Cypriots of Limassol, running from one house to another, tens of persons taking shelter in rooms, the crying, the fears…
And when it was time to surrender, the realization of what exactly was meant by the Greek Cypriot word "Exo!" ("Get out!") accompanied with the knock of the butt of a gun on the door… Another Greek sentence I would learn while trying to be with the civilian population gathered in the yard of the hospital just across our house: "Gatse de gado…" ("Sit on the floor")
Thousands of kids, old women and youth brought here from the centre of Limassol and surrounding areas…
The mudjaheet (Turkish Cypriot soldiers) or those whom they thought were "soldiers" put aside in front of the high wall of the Arnavut Mosque apart from the crowd…
That night was too long…
The painful moaning of the wounded would mix up with those who were wriggling with thirst, people were trying to find their loved ones, and Greek Cypriot and Greek soldiers with their guns pointed at the crowd, at the frightful eyes, the white sheet that was hanged on the flagpole and me and my family watching how they were looting our house just across from where we were…
Exactly 43 years later, I sat on the floor on the exact same spot.
I sat my daughter down next to me and I just wanted her to think and try to feel as much as she could, all these things…
I had been exactly at her age and sitting on the cement floor exactly like this, I wanted her to understand how horrible war is…"
4.12.2017
Photo: Eralp Adanir with his daughter sitting on the spot where he sat on 20 July 1974…
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 24th of December 2017, Sunday. This article was published in Turkish in the YENİDÜZEN newspaper on the 3rd of December 2017 and the link is:
http://www.yeniduzen.com/43-yil-geriye-donmek-11610yy.htm
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