by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
Opening the dictionary halfway through, I found the last page of the Turkish section. Even vallahi, literally meaning ‘in the name of Allah’, has an equivalent in the dialect of the church-going Greek Cypriots: ballaci. Unreasonably excited by my find, I thought back to my conversation with Yannis, the young man I had met on a previous visit who had refused to differentiate between Cypriots. His only compromise was to label them ‘Turkish-speaking’ and ‘Greek-speaking’, which I now recognized as a great irony as I leafed through the dictionary. The outside world has never really registered the linguistic overlap of the Cypriot dialects, bent on emphasising differences rather than commonalities. A pamphlet produced by the British Foreign Office in 1920, when Cyprus was under British administration, displays the government’s disproportionate focus on the Greek Cypriots of the island, and a corresponding misunderstanding of the Turkish Cypriots and their language, exemplified in this far-fetched claim: The Osmanli [Ottoman] Turkish spoken by the Moslems is considered very pure.’
When I was a child, the border was closed between the two halves of the island, which had a shuttering effect on my mind. Now the border is open, I have developed a fascination for crossing it. After finding the dictionary in the Old Town of Nicosia, I hired a car and drove along the mountainous backbone of the island up to the most remote tip: the spectacularly beautiful tongue of land known as the Karpaz. As I headed north-east, the scratchy Greek pop music emerging from the radio gradually fuzzed into Turkish; suddenly I could understand the words, but the music stayed the same. I left behind the urbanized area of casinos and resorts in Nicosia and Kyrenia to find that spring had already emerged in the north: fields of bright yellow and purple flowers, bordered by olive trees. The island got narrower; golden beaches appeared on either side of the road ahead of me. Herds of aggressive donkeys replaced the tourists, patrolling the road to the 12th-century Greek Orthodox monastery of Apostolos Andreas at the furthermost tip of the Karpaz. At the most photogenic point of the drive, on a cliff high above the beach where turtles lay their eggs and tourists stop to gawp, a stubborn mafia emerged into the path of my car, forcing me to stop. I had nothing but an orange to give their ringleader, who seized it through the window, splattering juice over the dashboard before I could drive on.
The village of Rizokarpaso, or Dipkarpaz in Turkish (rizi means ‘root’ in Greek, and dip ‘end’ can be used to mean the same in Turkish – perhaps referring to its position at the end of the Karpaz), considers itself the most beautiful in Cyprus – so beautiful, and so self-contented, that after the 1974 war its entirely Greek Cypriot population refused to leave, defying the UN decree to move to the south of the island. The result was a unique social enclave; there is no equivalent community of Turkish Cypriots in the south, although here and there a few families remain, as I was to discover. Forty-five years on, there are only 300 Greek Cypriots left in Rizokarpaso (numbers fluctuate as families come and go from the south), while the Turks number around 2,000. The dominant Greek history of the place is explicitly challenged. The 12th-century Ayios Synesios church takes centre stage in the square but directly opposite, Atatürk sits astride his horse, with his most famous quotes inscribed on adjacent blocks of stone: it is a face-off between ancient and new identities. Twenty metres away from the church is a mosque, the Turkish and Turkish Cypriot flags flying at the base of its minaret, a phenomenon peculiar to Northern Cyprus, where nationalist branding is everything. It was built, belatedly, in 1992 for the Turkish citizens who were shipped in from the mainland after the war in an attempt to counterbalance the Greek presence in the village – mainly former inhabitants of Trabzon, a town on the Black Sea, or Kurds from the south-east of Turkey. Above the mosque are the Turkish primary, middle and senior village schools, and above the church are the Greek equivalents. Children are, theoretically at least, segregated, as are their fathers and grandfathers, who traditionally congregate in separate coffee houses down in the square. I found this depressing until I realized that in practice, everyone mixes. I stopped to watch some children playing football in the square and heard them shouting to each other in a mix of Turkish and Greek. This was the first time I had heard Greek spoken in Northern Cyprus and it was strangely unsettling. When they saw me, they stopped and waved, trying out a mix of greetings for this unidentified stranger: ‘Yassou! [Greek] Merhaba! [Turkish] HELLO!’
Away from the square, the village is bucolic in the extreme: cows wander around amid the cabbage patches, and near the mosque I encountered a strutting herd of presumably Orthodox turkeys who gabbled in furious response to the call to prayer. Women occasionally emerged from their houses to sweep a porch. Men drove around in tractors, or repaired them in muddy backyards. There was very little sense of time. Down the road from the central square was a 500-year-old, stone colonnaded house, transformed into a guesthouse by a couple from Trabzon. I made friends with the wife, Emine, a hardworking mother of three with hidden reserves of humour, and spent a lot of time in the kitchen with her as she prepared food, occasionally stirring a pot for her, occasionally reading aloud from my new dictionary. At first Emine feigned interest, then asked me to look up some words she remembered from the dialect she had spoken as a child in Trabzon. Much of the Black Sea area was traditionally Greek before the formation of the Republic, its lexicon heavily infused with the Greek that Emine’s grandparents spoke fluently. She had unconsciously cross-referenced these words with the Turkish Cypriot dialect over time, and sure enough, her hunches were spot on. Inspired, she picked up a teaspoon with a flourish.
‘Kutali – we called this kutali in Trabzon, and we call it kutali here!’ (Koutali is a Greek word not used in standard Turkish.) ‘And this [brandishing a fork] is a piron.’ I had never heard this in Turkey and consulted the dictionary to discover that piron, or pirounin, is a Cypriot word of Venetian origin used in both dialects. Emine beamed in satisfaction when I told her, then hitched up her long skirt and started stepping rhythmically backwards and forwards around the kitchen, still grasping the kutali.
You’ve probably seen this – the horon dance of the Black Sea.’ Horon is actually a Greek word related to chorus (meaning ‘dance’), and Emine told me that a Greek guest of hers had once shown her the same dance being performed in his hometown, immortalized on a YouTube clip. Next, she put down the spoon and retied the lilac headscarf that she wore in a practical fashion over her hair. She wrapped the ends around the top of her head like a kind of tasselled tiara: ‘This is how both the Greeks of Trabzon and the Cypriot women tie it – the Turkish Cypriot women too, I suppose they copied it from the Greek women.’ The pressure to prepare dinner on time put an end to further anthropological ruminations, but I did discover later some Turkish words that unexpectedly came from Greek – most impressively, ‘cabbage’ (lahana or lacana), used by the comedian Aristophanes over 2,000 years ago.
Emine was clearly fond, on a personal level, of what she called her ‘Rum’ neighbours (the standard Turkish word for a Greek living in Turkey). She pointed out that, like the inhabitants of Rizokarpaso who refused to leave in 1974, many Greek Orthodox Ottomans refused to leave Trabzon in 1923 during the forced population exchange. While describing a Greek neighbour in the village, she bestowed what she clearly thought was the highest form of praise – ‘a wonderful woman, decent, kind ... In fact, Türk gibi – like a Turk.’ However, this personal warmth did not stop her resenting the benefits this woman enjoys as the recipient of significant financial and food aid from the Cypriot government (delivered, of course, by the UN as a tolerated third party). She also felt the injustice of her neighbours exercising their freedom to go south whenever they please – a freedom Emine herself does not enjoy as the holder of a Turkish passport. It was a delicate balance of friendship and resentment.
Coffee Cups
The next day, I headed to the all-male preserve of the Greek coffee house in the village, which stands opposite the Turkish coffee house. A slight bearded man with nervous movements and a smile that flickered o
n and off introduced himself as Yosef Nikolas and welcomed me, his Turkish heavily Greek-inflected. The other men in the café – an unshaven, brooding Clive Owen type, and an ancient man swaddled in scarves – eyed me silently from a nearby table before I engaged them in conversation, at which point they became extremely friendly, although their Turkish was almost incomprehensible. It occurred to me that these men could get by without speaking much Turkish both socially and financially, thanks to the Cypriot government handouts. Sitting at my table was a man in his late thirties with leathery brown skin, light blue eyes and a slow voice. Recep, originally from Trabzon like Emine, was a tyre-fitter by trade. Whenever Yosef struggled to find a Turkish word, Recep would supply it, and the two would occasionally lapse into Greek – as I was to discover, many of the Turks in the village speak unexpectedly good Greek; as the majority, their only reason to learn it is for the purposes of sociability.
After some comfortable small talk, I asked Yosef why his fellow Greek Cypriots stayed here after the war of ‘74.
‘The war was further south, there was no war here. We had no reason to leave.’
What caused the war?
‘It is Greece who caused all the problems in the sixties, and the war. There was no problem between us before that.’
I wondered if he was saying that to please me, or whether he had genuinely aligned his loyalties with the North. I also wanted to know, conversely, how far Recep’s affinity for Greek Cypriots extended – did he vote in favour of unification of the island in 2004? He hesitated before answering, picking at some mud on his knee.
‘I did. But it is not a promising situation. Last year, ELAM [an ultranationalist Greek group] attacked some of our middle-school kids here. There is hatred, still.’
Yosef nodded gravely in agreement. Recep turned to me.
‘You want to talk to some more Rum? Go and see my neighbour, Gagou hanim, she lives next to the mosque. She will tell your fortune.’
Hanim roughly translates as ‘lady’, so my Turkish-English brain automatically computed her name as Lady Gaga as I walked up to the house. I was welcomed warmly by her husband Christos, a cheery chain-smoking man in his sixties, and two of their adult daughters. Christos fiddled unsuccessfully with an ancient television aerial as we waited for his wife to appear – ‘this is an antique’ – before giving up and taking me to inspect his animals in the backyard. Among them, to my shock, were two pigs, oinking loudly in the shadow of the mosque. When I asked my host if anyone minded this, he laughed.
‘No! No one cares around here. Aren’t they beautiful?’
The pigs were merely the warm-up act: finally, Lady Gagou made her entrance, an elderly woman wreathed in smiles, with dyed jet-black hair, dressed in farm clothes and boots. Stepping into the house, she immediately took off her muddy trousers to reveal pyjama bottoms underneath. As if reading strangers’ fortunes was a daily occurrence, she nodded cheerily to me, ordered one of her daughters to make coffee and sat at the kitchen table, scrutinising my face. Suddenly, a jeep pulled up outside and two enormous young men dressed in brown camouflage emerged, stomping over the threshold with guns and bags of recently slaughtered songbirds. This Tweedledum and Tweedledee pair of hunters turned out to be Kurdish brothers from Turkey. Elated by their combined haul of thirty-five birds, they had come to give some of them to Gagou’s family, because Greek Cypriots are not allowed gun licences in the Karpaz and so cannot join in the hunting that takes place every Sunday and Wednesday. The brothers were clearly part of the family – one immediately seized Gagou’s six-month-old grandson and tossed him into the air, cooing, while his gargantuan brother sat on a worryingly spindly chair and regaled everyone with an account of his hunting exploits, mostly in Kurdish-inflected Turkish with snatches of Greek, drawing guffaws from the daughters, who had already started plucking the birds for dinner.
Amid this mayhem, Lady Gagou had not forgotten her fortune-telling duties, and motioned to me to finish my coffee. I had not had my fal read since I was a child, but knew in advance that this Greek Cypriot woman would read it exactly as my grandmother had. I placed the saucer on top of the cup, swirled it round three times and tipped it over so that the upside-down cup drained on to the saucer. We waited for it to cool. Then, like my grandmother, Lady Gagou peered inside the cup before sighing and reporting a finely balanced blend of obscurely tragic and joyful news based on the shapes she pointed out in the dregs. ‘In three weeks – or three years, I’m not sure – you will be given some money, or a field . . .There is a jealous woman in your life, avoid her evil eye’ . . . etc. As I left, she gave me her number and kissed me warmly. ‘Any time you need me to read your future – from London, wherever – just call me. I’ll make some coffee and read the signs for you. Any time, honey.’
The Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots of Rizokarpaso are a family. Like all families, there are tensions, but the underlying love is steady, born of proximity and continuity – as Yosef explained, they lived only on the periphery of the war, and its repercussions. I wanted to talk to Cypriots who did live through the war, and who are still determined to be friends. The most defiant of these are undoubtedly the members of the Traitors’ Club of Cyprus, who have been meeting for coffee just north of the border crossing in Nicosia since it opened in 2003. These men – both Greek and Turkish Cypriots – see themselves merely as ‘Cypriot’, thus ‘traitors’ to the nationalist segments of their respective communities.
I returned to the ancient Büyük Han caravanserai, where I bought my dictionary, to meet the Traitors. As their name would suggest, they treat life with a certain levity. Coffee progressed to a boozy lunch, at the end of which each boozer placed several empty beer bottles in front of the only person not drinking, chiding him for his alcoholism. They speak in English, although one of the founders, Andreas, took Turkish lessons for three years in an effort to speak to his Turkish Cypriot friends in their native tongue – ‘But the bastards just spoke back to me in English.’ Jokes flew back and forth, their camaraderie deliberately mocking, as though to parody the more serious tensions between their respective communities. The day after the border opened in 2003, Andreas crossed over to the south to track down his old classmates, Turkish Cypriots who had attended the English high school with him in Nicosia and whom he had not seen in decades; he never managed to find them. About nine years ago, he tells me, his son was serving in the Greek Cypriot army; at the same time, the son of one of his fellow founders, Suleyman, was serving in the Turkish Cypriot army – these young soldiers could have been facing each other at opposite military outposts while their fathers sipped coffee together in Nicosia.
Dimitri grew up in the Greek enclave of Famagusta, which is now on the Turkish side. No Greeks were allowed to stay behind after 1974, so Dimitri is technically a refugee. He told me, ‘I identify more with other refugees – others who had to leave their homes after the war, from either side – than I do with Greek Cypriots.’ Like Yosef in Rizokarpaso, Andreas holds Greece, and the nationalist segments of Greek Cypriot society, responsible for the war: ‘I feel that we bear more responsibility for what happened – we were, and still are, the majority, so we must solve this.’ Needless to say, there are many Greek Cypriots who do not share this view – hence the majority who voted against the Kofi Anan unification referendum in 2004.
What struck me most about these men was, frankly, how old they are. I’ve met pro-unification Turkish and Greek Cypriots before (they usually refer to themselves as ‘bi-communal’) but they were all young, in their twenties and thirties, and I’d assumed, from my mother’s example, that people of her age and over would not be pro-unification. The members of the Traitors’ Club lived through the war, as my mother did, but either they have less bitter memories of it or the act of continuing to live in Cyprus for decades afterwards has softened them. There are certainly more politicized bi-communal groups in Cyprus, such as those supported by Easyjet’s boss Stelios Haji-Ioannou, who has donated nearly 3 million euros to bi-commu
nal projects in the past decade, but the Traitors’ Club’s low-key brand of defiance is the real deal.
Before I left Cyprus, I made one last trip, this time south of the border to Potamia (Turkish Bodamya), a tiny village which still hosts three Turkish Cypriot families whose relatives have lived there from long before the war. Unlike Rizokarpaso far up in the north, Potamia was geographically in the thick of the war but refused to take part – most of its Greek and Turkish Cypriot residents were, and still are, Communists and rejected the right-wing nationalism of both sides. They considered themselves ‘brothers, always brothers’, according to an old man I chatted to in Turkish in the village café (as surreal an experience as hearing Greek in the north of the island).
‘It was impossible that those bastards would separate us – impossible, impossible, IMPOSSIBLE!’ he shouted, banging his fist on the table. Seeing my startled face, he smiled. We still live all together, thank God.’ Later, I walked down from the café through the sleepy village to find two cemeteries – the larger one Greek Orthodox, the smaller Turkish, with the crescent and flag picked out in red on the tombstones, another astonishing sight to anyone used to the ubiquitous blue and white colours of the Greek flag in the south of the island. To a Greek nationalist, this would be anathema.
These tombstones were my abiding memory of a trip that overturned many of my childhood preconceptions, but I was also conscious that I had deliberately sought out the Cypriots who are comfortable living side by side, and who are in favour of unification, at least in principle (many Cypriots, particularly in the south, object to the political solutions proposed so far). There are contingents on both sides – in Cyprus, and in the diaspora – who will never vote in favour of unification, and who cannot forget or forgive horrific acts of war. My mother is among them.