Sevgul Uludag
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Today I would like to share with my readers an article written by our dear friend Besim Baysal whose father was born and grew up in the mixed neighbourhood of Agios Loucas, Nicosia…
This neighbourhood had become the target of fascists back in the 50s pushing people to leave the area…
Here is the article of Besim Baysal:
"A person develops his or her character and culture in line with the town he or she is born in, grew up, rode his or her first bicycle, first motor, toured the streets with the car, drank his first beer, held the hand of his girlfriend for the first time… Naturally there develops a passionate love with him and the place he lives in. That is why for many of us Nicosia is sometimes unbearable but most of the time a town we cannot give up.
Most of the time we can feel this love inside us while walking from one place to another or driving our car or bicycle in our daily lives.
It is not clear whether we want to spend our life here or whether we have had to stay here, the contradiction is in conflict with Nicosia… Nicosia offers us a historical life of thousands of years, resembling with the feelings of finding our loved one or reaching out to her…
There is love in every single square centimetre in Nicosia: in time our heart is not enough to fit its historical experiences and love…
In the previous weeks, in the southern part of Nicosia I saw a graffiti on a wall and it was quite impressive… This graffiti written in Turkish was as though it would reunite the loves in Nicosia… It was a picture of a wonderful will bringing back historical memories in our minds…
A few words of love in Turkish but it was as though it was as strong as to be able to change the fate of the island… It was a declaration against partition and against history… It said: "My dear I love you so much – Costas" ("Canim seni cok seviyorum – Kostas")
THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF AGIOS LOUCAS
Agios Loucas which still stands with its church and its mosque, here it is… It shouts out what it has lived through with its small bakkalis and its coffeeshop, with its fourno and its small tavern… But every morning it shouts out its love… Pass from its streets every morning once again if you can… Don't ever change your course: these streets connect you to Nicosia, Nicosia connects you to Cyprus and Cyprus is connected to love with these streets… Springing out of history, it wanted to come to the surface once again, charging our memory…
Maybe we know, maybe it does not come to our minds since first fascism, and then the culture of consuming made an impact and made us forget: Falling in love in Cyprus means having to pay for it… It means losing your identity… It means losing your language, your religion, your relatives and even your friends… This island is surrounded by stories of great loves… And its negative aftershocks still continue until today…
There was even a law about it – it was passed during the British colonial years. A Greek Cypriot could not marry a Turkish Cypriot; you had to change your religion and your name and only if you did that you could legally be married. That meant if you were a Turkish Cypriot, you had to become a Greek Cypriot and if you were born as a Greek Cypriot, you had to become a Turkish Cypriot. There was no other way…
It was a big challenge of life for all of us: How much did you love the person you were in love with? I wonder how many persons gave up on his or her love due to these reasons…The other question that comes to mind is who resisted these laws, the state, the communities and their families for their love and who paid for it almost choosing death?
THE MOVIE OF AKAMAS SHOWING THE SILENT RESISTANCE OF LOVE…
Our island was split into two in 1974. The example of one such love was part of the documentary `Our Wall` by Niyazi Kizilyurek and Panicos Chrysanthou. Panicos Chrysanthou made the movie `Akamas` in order to show the silent resistance of love…
There were love stories of Nicosia that were not quite well known that were cut off in 1974 and that rose up with flames in 2003. After 30 years… These loves were great loves who would meet their loved ones after waiting for 30 years… It was now concrete, you could touch it, it was visible… These are the legends of Nicosia, some are in the memory but all of them would be told verbally… It is like the contradiction of being divided as Nicosia – feeling a longing from the northern part to the southern part and from the southern part to the northern part of the town…
THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF AGIOS LOUCAS…
Before the fighting of the period 1955-1958, Agios Loucas was one of the beautiful and historical neighbourhoods of Nicosia where Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots lived together in friendship… It was also one of the areas hosting love and marriages between Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots. The generations born after 1974 only know the Agios Loucas church as the place hosting HAS-DER, a cultural association of Cypriot folklore. But before that there used to be a big panagiri (festival) organised here where children regardless of their ethnicity would have fun… The panagiri of Agios Loucas would be hosted by the Agios Loucas church and the Agios Loucas neighbourhood.
In those years there lived a lot of families here who were living proof that love did not recognize nationality… These were families of Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots who had fallen in love and would live together despite the colonial law… It was a mixed life and a mixed neighbourhood that could survive until the 1955s…
My father would have classmates in the Ataturk Primary School at Yenidjami born out of such love…
The `Underground Organisation` would first knock on their doors, frighten them, then break their windows and even burned their houses… Those who wanted to save themselves would flee… They would take their kids and leave in 1955 and 1956…
In the street of the famous baker Minnosh, there had been two adjacent houses, both houses had been set up as homes with such love but when the neighbourhood became the target of Turkish Cypriot nationalists – that is the fascists and racists – the very first houses to be destroyed were these houses… Only the door of one of them is burned but the other house is completely burned down… The owners of these houses would have to flee to save their own lives and they would go abroad to live…
THE EFENDI DEDE OF AGIOS LOUCAS…
In the Yilancilar Street where my father was born in Agios Loucas, just across the house where he was born in there used to live his Efendi Dede. My father had no blood relation with his Efendi Dede but they had a relationship like a grandpa and a grandson. The street is now called the Turan Street. Until 1955, the Efendi Dede – his real name being Mehmet Kalfa – would live with his Greek Cypriot partner and their two sons under the same roof. As the mixed neighbourhoods were being terrorised from 1955 onwards, people would become a target and the Efendi Dede would be pushed to send his wife and kids away from his house. Their lives would become chaos… Efendi Dede would try to hold on to life alone… His wife would come when she found the opportunity to see him, to clean up, to cook for him and to embrace each other… When my father's family would move from that street to the Kuchuk Medrese Street in Yenidjami neighbourhood, he would not cut off his relationship with his Efendi Dede. He continued to go and see him… On special days like Bayram, my father would go to visit him. And Efendi Dede would walk slowly towards Yenidjami to go and see my father and give him some `Bayramlik` (small amount of money given to kids during the festivities of Bayram).
When my father went to Ankara for treatment in 1969, he would go and visit him before his departure but when he would come back, he would not find Efendi Dede… Efendi Dede would not survive and would pass away…
WE KNOW THAT IF YOU LOVE THIS LAND, YOU PAY FOR IT…
We know that a lot of Cypriots had paid dearly for falling in love in Cyprus… We know that if you love this land, you pay for it…
And we want the future generations, our children and grandchildren would not have to pay dearly the price that the previous generations had to pay, that they live freely and love freely… That graffiti such as we saw in the streets of Nicosia would multiply and we would smile, our heart warming… And everyone would embrace the loves of this land, its history and its culture…
Costas, we too love you…"
(BESIM BAYSAL – August 2019)
31.8.2019
Photos:
*** Old Photo of Ayios Loukas neighbourhood…
*** Grafitti in Turkish on a wall in the southern part of Nicosia saying `I love you my dear, Costas`
*** The flower "tulli" given to us by Efendi Dede still survives in our house…
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 29th of September 2019, Sunday. Same article was published in the YENIDUZEN newspaper in Turkish on my pages entitled "Cyprus: The Untold Stories" on the 30th of August 2019 and the link is:
http://www.yeniduzen.com/aylukada-efendi-dedenin-huzunlu-oykusu-14392yy.htm
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