Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 99 966518
My father Huseyin Niyazi Sami or later on when he took his surname and became Niyazi Uludagh or "Niyazi from Lefkonico" as he was known, throughout his whole life had very close relationships with Greek Cypriots of his villages Akanthou and Lefkonico… Born in Akanthou and later moved with his family to Lefkonico, my grandmother Faika and grandfather Sami had their house adjacent to the house of the Mammou (Midwife) Areti and the kids would play together, eat together and when the Mammou would have to go to another village for the birth of a baby, my grandmother Faika would take care of the Mammou's kids, feeding them and putting them to sleep and making sure that everything is okay until the Mammou would come back with her donkey…
My father would go to school in Lefkonico and he would be better in Greek than his Greek Cypriot classmates… He was very fluent in reading and writing and speaking in three languages like most Cypriots of the time: Turkish, English and Greek… He would read classics under street lamps and would continue his studies in the Agricultural School in Nicosia, with the help of his Greek Cypriot villagers from Lefkonico who had seen his potential and didn't want him wasted in building roads and wanted him to continue his studies… The Greek Cypriot leader of Lefkonico would collect some money from the villagers in the village coffee shop to send my father Niyazi to Nicosia to enrol in the Agricultural School…
My father would indeed go to Nicosia but from Lefkonico to Nicosia he would walk since the money that the Greek Cypriot villagers collected was given to my grandfather who had not bothered to give his son some money so he could travel by bus!
Determined and fresh as a young man, he would finish his studies despite poverty as was the case for most of the people in Cyprus in those times and he would be sent to Dali to build a garden…
According to my late mother's story, the Turkish Cypriot leadership of the Agricultural School would be jealous of my father and although they did have opportunities to send him to London for further studies in agriculture, they would decline doing that…
During his work in Dali, planting eucalyptus trees to dry the marshes in order to dry out the breeding grounds of mosquitoes at that time, my father would fall ill with malaria – his sister Pembe would travel to Dali to look after him and she too would fall ill and both would lay down sweating… Then my uncle Hassan would travel on his horse from Larnaca to check them and he would tell my father, "Forget agriculture! Come, I will enrol you as a policeman!" and that's how my father would enrol as a policeman…
Working at different parts of Cyprus, finally he would end up in Famagusta where my mother had been a teacher and was living with her sister and her uncle in Famagusta in a beautiful house there…
My father would meet my great uncle from Varosha, Ahmet Soyer and also my auntie Fatma and my mother Hatice Turkan…
He would write letters to my mother asking to get married with her… He had already seen her during her teaching period in Limassol and coincidentally they would both be transferred to Famagusta where their roads would meet…
They would get married and settle in Famagusta, in a house that Mr. Hassabi, my father's boss in Famagusta police had found for them in a sort of isolated area since this was the time of the Second World War and they could not find houses to rent in more populated places… The house was at "The English Halt", a big house with five rooms, allocated to become a hospital but abandoned with broken windows… They would fix it and move there… Close by would be the Farm of Garabet, an Armenian Cypriot where Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots worked…
My mother would give birth to my sister Ilkay and she would stay at home looking after her – in those times, the British rulers would not allow married women to teach so she would have to give up teaching after being married…
My father would continue to have very good relations with Hassabi and his work mates but one Turkish Cypriot whom he had arrested for his misdemeanours would have a grudge on him. As soon as he would get out of jail, he would go and find a gun and go to the isolated house in Famagusta to kill my father…
My mother, alone in the house with my sister would notice someone outside and start shouting for help and he would get frightened and run away…
This would be the end of my father's police career… Hassabi would help him to be transferred to Nicosia but after a while he would quit the police force and start working in the Nicosia Municipality.
They would settle in the house in Ermou that my mother had…
Then my mother would give birth to my brother Alper and they would live in the house in Ermou…
The two houses that my mother's auntie Afet gave to my mother were in the Agios Iacovou Street, close to the Agios Iacovos Church there… At the end of the street was the famous Ermou Street, according to my sister Ilkay who remembers every room and every detail of this house that I have never seen in my life… My mother's auntie Afet was married to Mr. Kazim from Avdimou who had been very rich and had lots of land and houses – the houses around Ermou Street… Since they had no children, they would give these houses to the children of Afet's sister Ziba (my mother being one of them)… They would take my mother to live with them and send her to the Victoria Girl's School and then onto the Shakespeare School and that's how my mother would eventually become a teacher…
My sister remembers Auntie Afet and the house distinctly though she had been very young at that time…
Auntie Afet was living with them and my mother would look after her until she passed away… Auntie Afet was a natural healer and people would go to her to get the natural medicine recipes to cure their illnesses… Auntie Afet would give to my sister a beautiful wall clock and a huge copper kazani when she was passing away… They slept in the same room and little Ilkay would be her companion… My sister Ilkay still has the wall clock but my mother sold the huge antique kazani when our family would go in dire straits…
My father would be working at the Nicosia Municipality with Dr. Gigi (Mr. Dervis) and he would have again, very good relations with his co-workers there…
But clouds of nationalism would start to gather when EOKA and later TMT would be formed – in 1955 when EOKA would be formed, my father foreseeing what might happen in the coming years would want to leave from the Ermou Street – he would buy land in the Chaghlayan Area, close to Agios Kasianos and the Famagusta Gate and the house we live in now would be finished to move into: That was 1956…
A co-worker from the Nicosia Municipality, a friend of my father, Mr. Stavrakis whose wife's name my sister remembers as Rene had got land in Keushkleuchiftlik area in Nicosia, close to the Ledra Palace Hotel… When clashes would begin between TMT and EOKA, the house Mr. Stavrakis was trying to build would come under danger: Every night, some TMT guys would demolish one wall…
He would come to my father for help, my sister remembers: My father would buy the half-finished house from him in order to help…
But the dark clouds of nationalism would also hit fiercely our family as well: My father's good relations with Greek Cypriots would not be "approved" by the Turkish Cypriot leadership and he would get "warnings" and when my father would refuse to join TMT, saying he cannot even slay a chicken, let alone kill anyone, he would be in jail… He would be out of a job… Our family would meet poverty again but with our human dignity… Neither my father, nor my mother would succumb to nationalism or the incredible pressures put on them by the Turkish Cypriot leadership of those times…
Our family would not be the only one to pay dearly – it would be the time when Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots would come under fire for being friendly with each other – some would be beaten up from teams from their own communities all over the island…
Our family would remain poor, with debts to pay and my father would pass away in 1966 with a heart attack – one of the first conscientious objectors refusing to take up a gun to kill anyone – and my mother would try to survive without bending her head to anyone…
I also remember the new year cards we received from the Commissar of Nicosia, a Greek Cypriot who was my father's friend: I also remember visiting him in his Office with my mother… My father passed away in 1965 but whenever I would cross the checkpoints, wherever I went, I would find one of his Greek Cypriot friends…
This month for the first time in the last 60 years of the house built by my father in Chaghlayan, we renovated the outside walls… For 60 years, the outside walls never saw any repairs or painting… So workers came and worked for 15 days to repair the outside, to paint the walls and the old wooden shutters… They would close the bullet holes left over from the clashes from 1963 and 1974… The bullets are still within the walls of our house but covered with cement and painted over now… The house stands in a street that was divided by varellakis and bags of sand in 1963 and I remember these very well – I was five years old… The street is eerie if you look since you see the partition line at the end of the street… At the end of the street is Beuyeuk Kaymakli – no man's land – and the varellaki remains where they are…
While the outside of our house was being repaired, I had to choose the colour of the walls and the shutters: It took me a long while to decide…
I chose the colour of sand for the walls… To remind me of the beautiful days I spent on the beaches of Varosha where our great uncle Ahmet Soyer had a house in Euripides Street…
The house in Varosha was beautiful – I spent my holidays there and on the beach in Varosha… Our great uncle Ahmet was very famous for swimming in ice during his days of youth in the USA as well as diving and hunting octopus in Varosha, making covers of magazines…
I chose the colour of the shutters from the house of our great uncle Ahmet in Varosha: A soft blueish green – to remind me of the sea, to remind me of the past, to remind me of old days in Cyprus where people once lived without nationalisms, without pointing fingers at each other, like brothers and sisters, like a big family with happiness or sadness but a family where you shared things…
The renovation finished and I sit down in the garden to look at the sandy colour of the walls and the blueish green colour of the old wooden shutters and to remind myself that in Cyprus, we have a choice of living like before: Finding beauty, finding friendship, finding love to overcome all differences that we can solve through dialogue and mutual understanding… If we are sincere to ourselves and to each other, yes, there is a way to live like before when nationalisms had not managed to mess things up in Cyprus…
11.8.2018
Photo: Catching octopus in Varosha was uncle Ahmet's favorite hobby...
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 7th of October 2018, Sunday.
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