Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 99 966518
Last week I travel from Nicosia to Agios Ermolaos to go and meet a witness about possible burial sites in the village and the view is simply breath-taking! Such green and such yellow and red spots here and there: The red field tulips that grow naturally – babarunes in Cypriot Greek and Horoz Lalesi in Cypriot Turkish – if there are no pesticides in the fields… Agios Ermolaos, after the rains even has its own little lake to feel proud of…
For kilometres, there is nothing – just open fields and a few factories here and there for chicken that belong to Haciali from Shilloura… I think Haciali's grandfather was from Agia Marina – the mixed Maronite and Turkish Cypriot village which has become a ghost village after 1974… I remember Mustafa Hadjiali from my childhood, a tall, dark man with a thin moustache who had a shop selling chicken in the bandabuliya – old market – of Nicosia called "Chicken of Krini (Kirni)". He had a chicken farm and was selling chicken and eggs… He also had a shop upstairs near the side entrance of the bandabuliya where there was a sewing shop and a lot of young girls sewing clothes there… This shop was adjacent to the house of Gianni and Kakoullou Ellinas, who had been killed in 1963 and who are still "missing" – I had written their stories on these pages and each time I pass from there, I remember Kakoullou from Yialousa and her incredible and tragic life…
So this sewing workshop was adjacent to the house of Kakoullou and we would go with my sister and my mother so my sister could have a new dress fitting or to choose fabric for a party dress… She loved dressing up throughout her life and always had seamstresses sewing clothes for her… These were times when there was no such abundance of ready-made textiles in Cyprus yet – everyone was sewing and Singer sewing machines were something valuable to have in the house… For those who did not know how to sew or did not have a sewing machine, there were always seamstresses who worked in their houses and some had apprentices, young girls, who would learn to sew… Choosing the cloth, choosing buttons to go with it, choosing accessories were all part of this ritual and then the seamstress would take measurements and write it down and then the cutting of the cloth… Perhaps this was the most important part of it – whoever the seamstress was, she would be cutting it since she could not afford to make a mistake! And then there would be two dress provas (fittings) – the first fitting, where she would fix the dress according to the body of the customer and after a while, a second fitting where the dress would almost be finalized and where she would fix the accessories – if there was any – on the dress…
My sister Ilkay was married to Kutlu Adali and he was the private secretary of Denktash who was the community leader at the time in the Turkish Cypriot Communal Chamber. So my sister and her husband would be going to parties very often and she would have fantastic party dresses made out for her… I would go with her when she was buying the cloth for the dress - chiffons and taffetas and silks in beautiful colours and for the accessories we would cross together from the Ledras crossing to go to Diran where she would get shiny beads or feathers in green to sew on her dress and for beautiful buttons we would go to Yaghcioghlou who was – and still is – the expert for the buttons…
We were poor, my mother and me – my father died when I was seven years old, leaving debts of the house that he had built for us and my mother had a "fixed wage" of 20 Cypriot pounds… From this money, my mother had to support my brother who was studying in Ankara to become an electrical engineer, pay the debts to the bank and raise me… We had no money for such "luxuries" so my mother would make "new" dresses for me from her old clothes or my sister's clothes – she would sew the dress and then design beautiful embroidery with beads and different coloured threads and it would no longer be the old dress of mom or my sister. It would be something completely new… We never had money for coats for me so I would be wearing redesigned coats of my mother or my sister throughout my childhood and my youth until such time when I began to work and I could afford to buy my own clothes… Class differences were visible between the rich and the poor but my mother made sure that I would not feel unhappy and she would use all her creativity with buttons and beads and colourful threads to make something old look like brand new! She had learned sewing through her cousin Ulufer and even had sewn her own wedding gown… Ulufer's sister Tomris was a hat-maker and she knew how to make hats… They were the rich cousins of my mother – I think all my mother's cousins were rich except us since my father had committed the "sin" of refusing to join the underground organisation of the time, saying "I cannot kill anyone…" And the punishment would be to impoverish us, my father dying of a heart attack after getting out of prison, my mother working with a "fixed wage" and never given any raise for many years even though she was working like hell as head of the national Turkish Cypriot library… As a result, we would also pay for the stance of my father, my mother and me but this would never stop us from taking pleasure from life and the earth – even a tin box of buttons would make me so happy as a child…
Buttons were important – for every single shirt or dress or jumper or woollen sweater or sakko, you would choose different buttons according to the style and colour…
My mother always had at least three tin boxes of buttons – these were tin boxes of Milk Tray and Horniman's Tea and if she was changing a dress – cutting it to make it smaller for me – she would never throw away buttons but keep them in these tin boxes… Even if a dress or a coat was out of wear, she would keep the buttons…
And these tin boxes of buttons were what we played with as kids – when my sister's small children came to our houses, we would take the tin boxes of buttons and play with the buttons – making imaginary trains or cars, arranging them according to colour or to size and when finished, we would collect and fill the boxes with those buttons…
When you went to buy buttons for a dress or a coat from Yaghcioghlou or Munise or Djoshkoun (Coskun) or Zako, you always got a few more in case you lost a button so there would always be spare buttons in the house for such emergencies…
And then of course, my sister would have to find shoes and capes and bags to go with the dress… She had several shoemakers so she would go and as a kid I would accompany her – she is 14 years older than me so I would tag along with her whenever I could since I wanted to peek into the world of the grown-ups – and they would take measurements of her feet and her ankles and her calves and she would choose the colour of the leather from which she wanted boots or shoes and also design the model and then her boots or shoes would be ready no later than a week… I remember these shoe workshops where old men or young apprentices worked with wooden moulds where they would fix the leather with tiny nails and there would be the strong smell of glue and leather in the shop… Shoemaking was an art and all my mother's brothers knew how to do this – we even had a plaster cast of a child's shoe that they had used when making shoes…
So my sister would have red boots, green boots, blue shoes, purple shoes – shoes of all colours and kinds… There was no abundance of imported shoes back then – we only knew Clarks and Bata and the rest were made by shoemakers' cooperatives or individual shoe makers…
These shoes would last a long time and would not be damaged by rain and wear so you had a pair of shoes for school and you would wear them a whole year unless your feet grew…
As a child, I had Clarks shoes before my father had gone to prison and when we could afford to buy shoes from Clarks… My mother Turkan Uludagh in those times was thinking that the best shoes in the world were Clarks shoes… I remember those shoes and even have a photo that Kutlu Adali – the journalist and author who was murdered in 1996 and who was married to my sister – took… At that time, Kutlu Adali wanted to come into our family and was trying to convince my father Niyazi Uludagh to accept him as a son-in-law… So he was coming often to take my photos by the pond or at my birthday party and in one photo, I am sitting at a chaise longue and this must be my third birthday party… I am wearing a dress my mother has sewn for my birthday and I have a big white ribbon on my hair… I can read "Clarks" under my shoes from this photograph… Probably the shoes were brand new, for my third birthday – so this photo must have been taken in 1961…
I remember the shoemaker Kilich where together with my childhood friend Neshe Yashin, we had got identical pairs of red shoes with a shiny buckle on the side – these were such elegant shoes and the colour red gave us energy, making us feel as though we had magical shoes and we could do anything and go anywhere! We would roam the streets of old Nicosia within the walls, we would go to the Turkish Cypriot Communal Chamber to hear the Turkish Cypriot MPs debating various laws of the time and we would sit at the back, giggling and looking how this one sat or that one fell asleep! We were around the age 10 or 11 or 12… Those magical red shoes would take us to the library full of books where my mother worked or to her father's bookshop – again full of books – Ozker Yashin Kitabevi and we would read and read and read and write and write and write… Neshe would be writing poems and during the first years of the secondary school when we were around 12 years old, she would be reciting her poems at the poetry competitions at our school and winning prizes… I would be writing compositions and also poems, but my strength was the prose… Neshe's father when seeing one of my letters written to Neshe when I was in the USA as a Foreign Exchange student at the age of 15 with a Fulbright scholarship would point out to her that one day, I would become a writer… Back in Cyprus after the scholarship, he would also tell me that "Your pen is strong, you write well… You will be a writer…"
The red shoes we both remember because your family would only afford to get you a pair of shoes maybe once a year for an important occasion like starting of the new semester of the school year or your birthday or the Bayram or the New Year…
Travelling to Agios Ermolaos somehow brought back all these memories… My mother passed away, my father passed away, Neshe's mother and father passed away, Kutlu Adali was murdered and we remain on this earth to remember the old times and cherish our memories, even if some of them are bitter…
23.3.2019
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 31st of March 2019, Sunday.
Photos:
*** Both my mother's and my dress was sewn by mom for my birthday as we celebrate together in this photo of 1961... Photo taken by my sister's husband Kutlu Adalı, the journalist who was murdered in 1996...
*** This photo from my third birthday was taken by Kutlu Adali, my sister's husband back in 1961...
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