A story of strife in Cyprus 3/9/22
In 1974, two teenagers — a Greek boy named Kostas 18 and a Turkish girl named Defne 17 — risk their parents’ condemnation by meeting secretly at night. The Fig tree is a memory keeper.
Cyprus is an Island split by 2 different languages and different scrips and religions. the landscape has abandoned villages , coastal hinterland wetlands fallow land pine forests fertile plains copper mines and archaeological sights. The capital Nicosia is the last divided city in Europe.
Ada at school in north London and the history class, her mother had died a few years ago and the father had become a workaholic. A polar vortex causing record breaking low temp and a winter storm which was to be worse that the Great storm of 1703(written about by Daniel Defoe). The father Kostas Kazantzakis was a botanist had published 12 books on the effect of pesticides, impact of logging, evolution and ecology and other damage caused directly by humans. People suffered pain but some managed to hide it.
Without understanding our past how can we hope to change the future.
Ada never knew family , had her parents marriage not been approved by their parents. We are made up of chromosomes from our mother and father. In different stages of Ada's childhood she had visited both church and mosque. Since the loss of her mother had withdrawn and become distant, with labels of weirdo and psycho.
The fig tree has in her canopy at times birds, bees, bats, butterflies, ants, mice, monkey and witness the original sin in Eden. Costas brought a cutting of the fig tree from Cyprus from the taverna the Happy Fig where both Greek and Turkish songs were sung. It was where the 2 lovers met in a back room and later it was burned down. The fig is monecious and parthenocarpy so doesn't need a separate male and the fruit is syngonium so its blossoms end up inside. The English climate is too cold for it.
Curse of enduring memory! Trees reveal a history showing traumas and wildfires. Why burden our children with our past.
Aphrodite was the prettiest goddess of the Olympians and was born in Paphos Cyprus, Venus is her Roman form.
Polyphonte wanted a different life but a women who breaks social conventions is always punished usually in a mental way like Mr. Rochester's first wife.
Ada's mother's sister Meryem had always written to them and was now coming to London. Selma their mother died at the age of 92, only now Meryem could visit them. Defne and Meryem always kept their word.
One should have breakfast like a sultan, lunch like a vizier, and dinner like a mendicant.
1974 News was always about terror attacks. Costas mother was religious, his father died when he was 3 from asbestosis. On the eastern1 side of the TroOdos. Other mines were iron copper cobalt silver pyrite chrome and gold bearing umbers. The wives and children of asbestos workers also suffered.
1878 Sultan Abdul Hamid II made an agreement, in exchange for protection against Russia. Disraeli considered Cyprus now a Crown colony the key to western Asia. Swarms of locust plagued the island.
Hittites, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Greeks, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Franks, Genoese, Venetians ,Ottomans, Turks, British.
1950 first bombs went off by 1955 the florist were fashioning wreath for the funerals for the Gordon Highlanders and other Britain's killed. So many went missing in Cyprus the horrible years
1958 EOKA the Greek nationalist organization banned English lettering, the TNT started erasing Greek names.
Kostos mother Panagiota as a widow raised her 3 boys with an income by selling homemade food to shops but the real money was from carob liquor. She had dozens of superstitions never plant a Judas tree as Judas had hanged himself on one. Eat according to your own taste and dress according to others. Defne became an alcoholic.
Defne's father was head chef at a famous hotel The Ledra Palace. later in no mans land under the UN was the place that negotiation took place.
Saint Hilarion was a traveler who tried helping poor hungry, the Hilarion Castle is where Ada was conceived.
1956 most expats writer artists poets were leaving. 416 terror attacks against Brits, Turks, Greeks who did not agree with EOKO and a barrier was erected between Turks and Greeks. Costas grandfather was deaf and did not listen to soldiers and shot during a curfew. Meryem was married but had no children and her husband divorced her. Nothing brings the women of the island together like pregnancy. She said her parents wishes were a priority. She married when she was 40
Kosta had 2 brothers, Michalis was against ENOSIS. and so was murdered. The younger brother Andreas disappeared.
1956 the Suez Crisis in London people carried banner "Love Not War"
1960 Cyprus gained independence from Britain, the native bird the chuker became the emblem , but their numbers dwindled, due to hunting.
The Green line was called that because when the borders were drawn up neutral green pencil was used by Major general Peter Young instead red or a blue pencil.
1974 During a heat wave there was a really bad smell and the Turks and Greeks thought it was from each others sector but it was dead bats. Different animals are related to differently by man doves =peace , dogs= fuzzy warmth.
Yusuf and Yeorgi were gay partners and could be in greater danger that Kostas and Dafne, but they chose to stay.
During the war British soldiers were waiting for the Nazi invasion of England the saw a cloud coming from the continent and thought it was poison gas but it was migrating butterflies.
Ancient Greeks were puzzled what happened to birds in the cold weather and thought that they metamorphosed into fish. Trees can recover from the horror they experience but not man. If your beard is on fire others will use it to light their pipes. There were rumor's that the Junta in Greece were plotting to oust the Cyprus President Archbishop Makarios.
Yusuf Yiorgos was planning to close the Happy Fig while Kostas left for England , his mother had lost 2 sons and wanted to protect Kostas by sending him to relatives in England. Defne says they risked their lives for her. Then the Junta overthrow Makarios replacing him with Nikos Sampson but resigned after 8 days. Turkish troops 40,000 landed in Kyrenia with 300 tanks. The Athens military regime collapsed while there were clashes between Turkish and Greek warships. There was now a transfer of populating and Kostas was told not to come home.
1974 by summer 4400 people were dead. 160,000 Greeks moved south and 50,000Turks moved north many old neighbors betrayed each other.
2000s after being away Kostas arrives in Cyprus by ferry in north Nicosia none of the Greek neighbors are left. Defne is an archaeologist and never left or got married. She speaks at world conferences on her subject. Bridges appear in our lives only when we are ready to cross them. The friends they had in the past were scattered all over the world.
1980s set up The Committee of Missing Persons both Turks and Greeks are working together on this, but some of the members have been threatened. some informants misremember details others deliberately lead them on a wild goose chase. Medieval, Roman, Hellenistic bones or prehistoric fossils, pigmy hippos, pigmy elephants are found.
The mass graves are found, the older generation dying taking secrets to the graves. His mother made bread from terebinth fruit and use it resin to preserve carob liquor. His mother came to England with Andreas but died of the asbestos exposure.
When they found the body of a husband the wife stopped wearing black and came in a pink dress.
Marie Fernanda documented atrocities of the civil war in Spain and the mass graves of the Guatemala of the 1990s. thousands disappeared under Pinochet where they were weighted with pieces of railway tracks and dropped into the sea but this was exposed when a tortured body washed up on the beach when the wire connecting to the weight broke. Yugoslavia Cambodia Rwanda and Iraq also have buried victims.
Fig trees support the ecosystem more than others plants. Butterflies feed on figs and Painted Ladies arrive every year from Israel, reach in Cyprus and the go off to Turkey, Greece, North Africa or central Europe.
Buyuk Han was build as a caravanserai and converted by the British into a city prison.
Mereyam takes Kostas and to a psychic but Defne but the are unimpressed. Later on in London she takes Ada to one but Ada though about her father who said" knowledge was the antidote to fear."
Kostas on a walk finds stretches of birds nets and returned late was a knife to cut them down there is a black market for birds. 2 million songbirds are slain in Cyprus every year. Those that made money are placed in container the rest are dumped. He returns cuts the nets but the next time he is caught and beaten up. Of the 5 billion birds that fly to Africa 1 billion are slaughtered every year.
Eucalyptus trees have a habit of dropping branches and if you are under it you can get killed. There is a cemetery that includes 300 British babies who died on the island of mysterious affliction.
Gerde was pregnant when Kostas left and he was adopted by a British officer but Defne could visit him. The grave stone says Yusuf Yiorgos Robinson Jan1975 to July1976. Yusuf and Yiorgos were found buried in a well and killed because they were gay.
Mosquitoes killed half the human on earth. Ronald Ross a Scottish doctor in India discovered inside the stomach of a mosquito the malaria parasite. He won the Nobel Prize. He set out to eradicate mosquitoes in the British Empire and came to Cyprus in 1913.
1936 Cyprus was the worst country for death by mosquitos and Dr. Mehmet Aziz who had trained under Robert Ross set up a program to wipe out the anopheles mosquito. The island was divided up into a grid of 500 squares and in 12 days with DDT did the eradication, traffic moving across the zones were also sprayed.
A bee can visit 300 flowers on one flight.
1947 The Ledra Palace was a luxury hotel with 240 bedrooms build by German Jewish architect Benjamen Gunsburg.
1955EOKA attempted to assassinate the British Governor Sir John Harding there. It ended up in UN no mans land.
1968 intercommunal talks opened there. The UN contingent is located in the hotel.
1974 Turkish invasion.
Meryem described that her father was a famous chef, he sent his children to get English educations. Of all wars civil wars are the worst. Many parents never talked about the past. In London Defne wanted to talk to elderly people about their past in Cyprus many would only talk when no other family members were around. The youngest seemed to have the oldest memory and hands are the most honest part of the body as they gave out true emotions. It is women that are holding up the world.
Human existence has no special priority over the ecological chain. Persephone is the goddess of spring.
Sweet and Bitter island by Tabitha Morgan,
Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrel about 1953to 1956 Read also
British Imperialism in Cyprus by Andrekos Varnava on 1878 to 1915
Journey into Cyprus by Colin Thubron
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