Newsroom / CNA
For 23 years, teacher Eleni Foka stood as a quiet pillar of resistance in the Turkish-occupied village of Ayia Triada, where she educated the children of those who refused to abandon their homes after the 1974 invasion, a generation she now calls “the remnants,” those who “held the Thermopylae.”
“I don’t consider that I offered anything,” Foka says with striking humility. “I was simply answering the call.”
In a moving interview with CNA, Foka recounted decades of quiet heroism in a landscape scarred by occupation and fear. After the initial invasion, Ayia Triada’s primary school remained open with its original staff, under pressure to keep the village alive. But soon, the educators were expelled. Foka, undeterred, returned to answer the plea of parents desperate to keep their children learning. She taught in secret and under surveillance, risking arrest, humiliation, and constant intimidation.
“When I arrived, the school was a deserted building,” she said. There was no electricity, no windows, no roof tiles. Turkish forces repeatedly sabotaged her efforts, removing tiles, vandalizing the grounds, and contaminating water supplies. “I drew water from a well to clean the hallway where the children walked,” she recalled. “They weren’t to blame. I had to protect them.”
Despite the efforts to close the school and force out the remaining Greek Cypriot families, Foka persisted, reporting daily abuses to the United Nations and the Red Cross, sometimes by slipping notes into the hands of UN officers during formal handshakes. “The children would say, ‘Miss, speak up.’ So I did.”
Turkish authorities tried to arrest her in front of her students. In response, the children stood in unison: “We’ll go with the teacher,” they told the soldiers.
Curriculum support was sparse. Greek books arrived late or out of order. History, religion, and geography were withheld. “I wasn’t doing a job. I was fulfilling a mission,” she said. “I stayed from morning to night.”
When children graduated, most had to leave the north to continue their education in the free areas, an often irreversible departure under the occupation’s terms. “Who wants to leave their home of their own free will?” Foka asked.
In 1997, health concerns forced her to the free areas with state promises she’d be allowed to return, promises that were never honored. “I called for three years. No one answered,” she said. “Eventually, I learned it had been decided I would not return. You don’t deceive someone. You explain the truth.”
Even after leaving Ayia Triada, her mission continued. She brought testimonies and photographs to foreign embassies, determined to ensure the story of the enclaved would not be forgotten. “It was the cry of our land, the graves of our parents,” she said. “You had no freedom, no personality.”
She stressed that the Third Vienna Agreement of 1975, which guaranteed basic rights for Greek Cypriots in the north, including education, freedom of religion, and medical care, was never properly enforced. “It should have been implemented tooth and nail,” she said.
Now, with development rapidly transforming occupied Karpasia, Foka questions what more can be done. “Maybe if we had done more in the early years, things would be different.”
She has not returned to Ayia Triada since crossing points reopened. “I see it every night. I mourn for it,” she said. “For me, Ayia Triada, Karpasia, and Cyprus are our freedom, our existence, our life. If we want to call ourselves human, we must fight for them.”
Today, Eleni Foka’s name may not be found in textbooks or official honors, but in the hearts of those children, now grown, she is remembered as something far greater: a guardian of memory, dignity, and defiance.
“Where did I draw my strength?” she said. “From weakness, from humiliation, from degradation.”
