Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 99 966518
Our friend dear Marios Epaminondas, active in the bi-communal movement for peace and reunification, one of the leaders of the Association of Historical Dialogue and Research remembers his grandmother…
The grandmother Eleni who was a refugee from Lysi…
The grandmother Eleni whose husband got her a sewing machine so that she could carry out her daily life and hold onto something…
The grandmother Eleni whose sewing machine the grandfather would buy from a Turkish Cypriot woman from Alaminos, soon to become a refugee…
Grandmother Eleni would be listening to her transistor radio all the time while sewing in order not to miss the news she expected to hear: Time to return to her house in Lysi…
She didn't want to lose any time to go back to her house and she waited and waited but that news never came…
She passed away, leaving behind the sewing machine that helped her to survive in a different area of Cyprus, far from her home…
Marios Epaminondas wrote the following about her:
`In the second advance of the Turkish army, Grandma Eleni lost the war. Flying away from her ancestral home in Lysi with her family, she only took with her only one radio transistor. "To hear the news when they tell us that we are going back"... Pain and frustration was soon toped up with another peculiar suffering, that of losing the intimate occupations.
In her temporary home in Larnaca where she ended up, a few months later she received a redeeming gift from her husband: a TAHSIN sewing machine. Grandpa bought it from a Turkish Cypriot (let's call Naime to give her a face) who was then then starting a reverse uprooting along with her family, from Alaminos.
I first met my grandmother as owner of these humble belongings. In a room of a foreign building, which was made a home by necessity stepping on the sewing machine's pedal and listening to her transistor. The sewing machine being a thin line of continuity with her past which was abruptly interrupted. And the voice in the radio, a ray of light from the future, trying to teach her to endure, not to forget and to hope for the return. Did she believe it? Probably yes, because those who can not aspire to promised land must, at least, have the hope of returning to a lost homeland in order to be able to live.
And Naime? I imagine her arriving at a foreign building to be made a home by necessity and encountering by a strange coincidence the SINGER of Eleni the tailor waiting for her. She steps on the pedal as she did before, and she listens to her transistor with a voice teaching her another story: learning to endure, forgetting what she left, and looking forward to a new life in the "safe haven" created by the Turkish army. Did she believe it? Probably yes, because those who can not hope to return to a lost homeland have to aspire to a promised land in order to be able to live.
The years passed. The transistor was lost. The voice continued to sound but now stripped of meaning, wooden, almost vulgar, a pre-election tactic. The TAHSIN sewing machine survived as a souvenir. Of the crossing in the life of two women who never met. Grandma left... Having felt as an only kind of "return", the repetition of her beloved practice of sewing alongside a foreign sewing machine, which was made, by necessity, a "small homeland".
A few words about my maternal grandmother Eleni Tsangari (nee Papademetre)… She was displaced with her family from Lysi on 16 August 1974. They left only with "the clothes they wore" because they were in panic and also thought they would go back soon. Went first to British Bases at Xylophagou. My grandfather went back to Lysi a couple of times and he only brought bread and halloumi. Later they rent a house with my parents and other family members from a kind family in Larnaca. She was eager to contribute more to the household. So my grandfather bought a sewing machine from a Turkish Cypriot lady who was flying from Alaminos (in 1975 I suppose). We reused our clothes a lot as kids and my grandma did a good job patching them. As a kid I took these things for granted. When I grew up she told me that she only took a radio when leaving her home because she wanted to return fast as soon as the announcement of return was to be made…
My grandfather Andreas Tsangaris who was a fine craftsman carpenter and could made masterpieces even with scrap wood…`
Lots of people left thinking they would return quickly… Both in 1958, in 1963 and 1974… Some did… Some never could go back… Some did not want to go back… Some wanted to go back so much like Grandmother of Marios, Mrs. Eleni that her ear was hooked to the little transistor radio to hear of the news…
Another Greek Cypriot friend of mine whose husband is a refugee from Kyrenia could never adjust to Nicosia after 1974…
Psychologically he would be still living in the Kyrenia area, in Agios Georgios where he came from…
He would never learn the streets of Nicosia and almost every day, he would get lost in the streets driving and would call his wife – my friend – for directions…
She was very patient with him since patience comes from love and understanding…
She would explain and try to help him out but he was like an oyster, all closed up inside himself, never smiling, never happy, always waiting and paralysing his own life with that belonging… He had also lost members of his family in the war of 1974 so these traumas would steal his future and hold him like a hostage forever…
Some Turkish Cypriot friends – refugees – would tell me about their dreams – they would dream of going back to their village, collecting grapes, living in their house… But that would only be a dream… In real life, they would visit their house couple of times but then stop – perhaps in order not to feel more and more sad… And because of their bad memories, they would not be willing to dream of going back, returning to their house in the village… No Greek Cypriot has ever been punished for the crimes of 1963-64 so how can you tell someone "You just go back and it will be ok…" She or he would never believe you… Making sure that no one was punished on either side of our island for crimes against humanity committed both in 1963 and 1974 also helps to keep the partition of the island…
What is a village? What is a house? What is a sewing machine or a transistor radio?
It is all about our connections to where we have been born, what we used to do, who we used to live with…
It's all gone though, never to come back in the way things had been in those times that we had lived through it…
Old Cyprus is gone…
That old village life is gone…
People are gone, dispersed all over Cyprus and all over the world…
It is only our memories that no one could steal from us that connects us to our past and even that, the ruling elites use in order to keep us paralysed – we live in a different kind of Cyprus, partitioned and traumatized, never allowed to treat its wounds, never allowed to recover from the past conflicts, every day a new reminder with new tensions, always making us live on the edge… Never finding peace inside us, never being able to move that decisive one step where we could change things…
They want us to live like that, with our traumas and with our fears and with our longings and with our memories that hook us to the neverland where we can never return…
They want us to live like that so they can rule this land the way they want…
Look at the Varosha people – they want them always to just long for returning but stay where they are and not move…
Out of the memories – the good and the bad memories – the regimes in both sides of the island, the ruling elites have created a sort of status quo that they don't want changed… They just want us to behave and hold on to our memories and not move… Turkish Cypriots should only remember 1963 and Greek Cypriots should only remember 1974. Full stop… Those are the memories they are using against the whole of our people, against both communities, never allowing our communities to see the whole picture, never allowing connections, shutting anyone up, putting them in their place through their media and education systems… They "select" which memories we should have – what we should remember and what we should not remember… What we should forget and what we should not forget… And this they do in order to continue the partition…
They don't want any changes in Cyprus…
They don't want us to connect and move towards the future and build a better, more humane country…
They want to keep us apart…
It is our duty to our children to learn everything that has happened on this island, to learn how people from all our communities suffered, to see the pain of refugees, the pain and suffering of those who lost loved ones… This is the only way to make sure that we have a future on this island…
We need to tell the story of Marios's grandmother Eleni as well as the story of my friend from Avdimou who does not want to return out of fear…
We need to see where we can reconcile in a humanitarian way, how we can acknowledge the suffering, how we can connect and give assurances to each other that such things should not happen…
We need to cleanse the fear from our souls and find a way to feel confident with each other – that is the only way to build peace on this land…
15.9.2018
Photo: The sewing machine of grandmother Eleni...
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 14th of October, 2018 Sunday. Similar article was published on my pages entitled "Cyprus: The Untold Stories" in the YENİDÜZEN newspaper in Turkish on the 10th of September 2018 and here is the link:
http://www.yeniduzen.com/alaminyolu-bir-kibrisliturkten-satin-alinan-tahsin-marka-bir-dikis-makinesi-ve-ninem-12909yy.htm
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