Paris Demetriades
Twenty-two years ago, in April 2003, I crossed a checkpoint for the first time with my mother and grandmother to see their old home in Famagusta. By then, nearly three decades after the coup and the Turkish invasion, the national narrative we had built as a community was already stale, out of step with reality, and coated in the dust of neglect. No one was seriously talking about the future. We were still picking at the wounds of the past.
Half a century on from 1974, we’ve gone backwards. The Cyprus problem is no longer just unresolved; it’s calcified into something grotesque. Like a mummified spider or an unburied corpse, it’s a story we keep defiling. And still, certain foolish, populist politicians, some draped in the flag, others hiding behind “centrist” labels, build their careers on this hollow, patriotic lie.
Don’t misunderstand me: I know the depth of the wound. My uncle, my mother’s brother from Varosha, fought on the front lines that black summer. One day he was a 21-year-old musician in the discos of Famagusta; the next, he was in a brutal, uneven war. A few mornings later, my mother and grandparents fled their home in Kato Varoshi without taking a single photograph, something my mother would mourn for decades. When we visited in 2003, the woman now living there told us the house had been looted long ago. No doors, no windows. No photos.
I know what war took from us. But what I can’t stomach anymore is the fake grief and staged memorials from hypocritical compatriots, especially the far-right, who invoke international law only when it suits them. They parrot nationalist slogans about Cyprus’ suffering, yet never once confront our own crimes and mistakes. And, perhaps worst of all, they stay silent about the relentless slaughter of civilians just a few kilometers away from us for the past two years. You either care about human suffering and the rule of law, or you don’t.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently posted that geography should never dictate a people’s fate. He’s right. But in practice, that truth is ignored, especially by those of us born into “difficult” geographies. Our reality keeps sliding backwards. At the very least, we should stop burying our heads in the sand. And better yet, we should start seeing people first as human beings, before any other label.
Until then, our national story will remain what it has been for decades, a ghost we keep talking to while life passes us by.
*This op-ed was translated from its Greek original
