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The War of July 1974: Narrative from a Greek-Cypriot Village The Turkish intervention following the Greek coup of July 1974 remains the most dramatic and important event in the recent history of Cyprus. In the machinations of Ecevit, the Greek junta, Kissinger, Callaghan, et al, it is easy to lose sight of the effects on ordinary people. Naturally, the events of July and August in particular are greatly traumatic to Greek Cypriots. Below is one account of a village on the northern coastal plain, Argaki. Predominantly Greek, it was chronicled by the renowned anthropologist, Peter Loizos. A Briton by birth, whose father originally came from that village, Loizos teaches at the London School of Economics. This is an excerpt from his second book on the village, The Heart Grown Bitter. WAR July-August 1974 The first phase of the Turkish invasion lasted from 20 to 30 July. The Greeks, dazed and disorganised by the coup, nevertheless managed to confine the Turkish forces to a fairly small space, and when the cease-fire came, had some cause for pride. In mid August there were negotiations, in Geneva, at which Turkey proposed major changes in the constitutional relations between the island's two communities, a much greater geographical separation of Turks from Greeks, and a weaker central government than had been agreed in 1960. The Greeks made counter-proposals, but the Turks' reply, in effect, was, 'Take it or leave it.' The Greeks asked for forty-eight hours to reconsider the Turkish proposals, but this was refused. The conference broke up at 3:00 a.m. on 14 August, and at 4:30 a.m. Turkey restarted military operations, the 'second round', as it came to be called. This 'second round' was a rout for the Greek Cypriots. They had no aircraft, and no significant armour with which to repulse Turkish tank advances, supported by bombing and strafing planes. In three days the Turks had captured 38% of the island, including Argaki, which lay within a mile or two of their most forward position. During the first round of fighting, the Argaki people were mostly spectators, listening to the rather garbled and suspect bulletins from their radios. They had decided during the week of the coup that the radio was no longer to be trusted. A number of young villagers were cither doing their national service, or were members of the reserve, and they were called up immediately the invasion started, so village involvement in the course of the war was intense. Then the refugees from the Kyrenia zone started to reach the villages, and Argaki people heard eyewitness accounts of the shooting of unarmed civilians and of rape. Some of the Argaki EOKA B contingent went off to attack the Turkish village of Ghaziveran, an account of which is given by one of them later in this chapter. The period from 20 July to 20 August was marked by confusion; the villagers of Argaki, and the Cypriots in general, experienced the seizure of power by a small, irrational, and unpopular group, who nearly killed President Makarios, both a popular elected leader and the head of the Church. Then the British, believed by many Cypriots to be 'enemies' of Makarios, saved his life with a magic helicopter, and he departed, first to Britain and then to the USA. For a few days it looked as if that country, in the person of Dr Kissinger, would recognise Sampson's puppet regime, but, soon after the Turkish invasion, Sampson stepped down and was replaced by Clerides, who in Makarios' absence was the legitimate acting President of Cyprus. At this time, too, the military junta in Greece collapsed, and former Prime Minister Karamanlis came to power. Then, the Geneva conference was followed by a huge expansion of Turkish conquest, while both super-powers stood quietly by. Perhaps, people said, there really was a plan cooked up in Athens, Ankara, and Washington for a 'NATO solution', which, if known, could explain all these weird happenings. How else could the world be turned upside down so swiftly and disastrously? It had to be 'the Plan=. 'It wasn't in the Plan', 'It was all foreseen in the Plan', became common phrases on many lips. 'The Plan' could explain why the Kyrenia artillery batteries had failed to stop the Turkish assault craft; why Greek soldiers, always said in school to be worth five to ten Turks, could be so easily defeated; why Turkey had thanked the USA for her 'understanding' and why the USA had failed to stop the invasion. Perhaps the USSR was also in the Plan, for after years of huffing and puffing she had done nothing concrete to stop Turkey either, which left the Greek Cypriot communists especially bewildered. After the war people said bitterly, 'We were fighting the Turkish army in Kyrenia, while in Limassol people were still going to the beach for a dip.' Certainly the invasion did not affect everyone in the same way, or at the same time. But people far removed from the firing were still very frightened. In Argaki, a young girl called Androulla Batsallou, who had just left secondary school, had got into the habit of keeping a diary, a quite unusual thing for village people to do. She wrote it in the rather stiff, formal style which her teachers had told her was 'good Greek=. The two themes which emerge are her terror and how, during lulls, her life resumed its normal pattern. 20 July: Day: Saturday, First day of war. Attack by the Turks against the Greeks. A day of fear and terror. This day, Saturday, I got up to hear my mother say to me >My All-Holy Virgin, listen to those bombs.' Then I got up immediately and ran to the radio. My knees became weak when I heard it say that the Turks had turned upon the Greeks without any warning. From moment to moment the war was growing in intensity, and the bombs and smoke struck the hearts of all of us. The radio continually called on the army to tear the heartless enemy to pieces. In a little while there was an announcement in the village that all the infants should be baptised) and so all who had unbaptised ones rushed to do this. Seeing all this I didn't want anything to eat, and I stayed all day on the sofa, listening to the radio. In the evening I lay down on my bed together with my mother and we listened all night to the radio announcements.Second day of war: 21 July. Day: Sunday. Today, Sunday, we listened terrified to the noises of the war. We got up in the morning and when I was dressed I went with Rita to church. Everyone was unhappy and weeping and praying. After the Divine Liturgy I kissed the ikon and went home. Every now and then I heard the aeroplanes going high overhead and my heart raced. At half-past nine they started flying so low that I thought I would lose my wits from fear. When I went to shut the door I saw a plane flying very low, and it turned suddenly and out came very black smoke. I ran and hid under the bed with my sister. All the time I thought we were going to be bombed. My heart was going to burst when I heard the village being bombed. Not knowing what I was doing I took down the All-Holy Mother's ikon and clasped it to my breast as I lay beneath the bed. When this was over we got out and went to see a friend in her unfinished house, because it had two storeys and so we were less fearful. As soon as I got there I felt a bit braver because we talked and forgot it all a little. In the afternoon, some friends joined us there, and so I stayed the night there. We made up beds and laid down on the ground. Because the house was unfinished and there were pebbles on the ground, I ached all over my body. In another room were quite a lot of soldiers staying, not locals. They were guarding us, and because of this I was not as scared as before. At dawn we heard a lot of artillery and I trembled with fear. 22 July: Third day of war. Monday. Monday, today, I heard a lot of artillery and was very scared. I got up at 5:30 and had no appetite for food, none of us did. We kept hearing planes going over and so we went and hid in the bathroom. When they had gone we came out again, and so on. I sat and talked with the soldiers who were on guard and at 4:00 the radio announced that the National Guard had given orders to stop fighting the war, and so we became a little less afraid. A little earlier they had announced that there had been an artillery barrage in Famagusta and that twenty tourists had been killed at a hotel, as well as a child whose family was unknown. A local woman had left her child with her husband in Famagusta and as soon as she heard this she started wailing because she thought it must be her child. Later the radio announced that the Greeks were victorious, having brought down nineteen Turkish planes and taken lots of Turkish villages. We were glad to hear that and since the danger was over went back to our homes. The first thing I did was to have a bath and lie down. But when evening came there was more artillery fire and I was scared. I went and lay down at my neighbour Panayotta =s and we kept the radio on all night. But there were no announcements, only songs.'I sat and talked with the soldiers who were on guard.' They were not locals. Normally, she probably would not have found herself in a situation where she was sitting and talking with young unmarried men who were neither relatives nor neighbours. Her grandmother at the same age would have left the room if a strange man had entered it. 23 July: Fourth day of war. Tuesday .Today, Tuesday I woke up at Panayotta's, since that was where I had slept the night before, and went home. I started the housework and when I had finished it I had a bath and sat and did my lace work. After lunch at noon I lay down for a bit on my bed and in the afternoon I got up and went for a little while to Heleni. I sat and worked my lace, with the soldiers for company, and we talked about the war. In the evening we fixed them some food and after the meal I went home. Heleni and I were in the company of Doros, a soldier from Famagusta, and at 8:15 we left the house taking blankets for the soldiers to lie down on. At 9:15 we saw the news on television and then went to sleep. 24 July: Fifth day of the war. Wednesday. Today, Wednesday, when I woke up I did my housework and after bathing and dressing I went and invited the soldiers to come and cat. Then I went back home and got the food ready, with my sister helping. At 12:30 my mother went and brought them over and we looked after them really nicely. After the meal we sat and talked and then they went off. Off to the coffee shop. But I saw one of then going off by himself, so I called to him to come and join us. He came and sat wit] us, with me and Heleni and her family, and we chatted. Later we played halma [board game, like draughts]. Later on my mother set things up for him so he could have a bath. And then we played halma again. And while we were together, we got on well, he and I. When it was almost evening a neighbour came with ,20 which she owed us. Later in the evening after the meal we sat and chatted and when we'd had enough we went to sleep.26 July: Seventh day of the war. Friday. Friday, today I was woken up at 3:00 in the morning by artillery firing. I was terrified and started trembling. I trembled so much that my teeth chattered. At last I rested for a little while then got up with no appetite and started my housework. When it was finished I lay down on my bed and stayed there till 3:00 p.m. This was the only day so far when I couldn't cat a thing. I got up, dressed and did some lace work. But a friend came so I set the lace aside and we chatted. Then we went for a stroll and while we were outside Doros came by with another fellow and they said they had been up at Masari village. Later we went out for a bit and then I went back to my own place for a while. A neighbour called me over to her house but no sooner had I gone when I saw Doros with some other fellow going to my house. So I went home. We sat and chatted for a bit, playing halma, and later they left. And after the television news I went to sleep. 28 July: Ninth day of the war. Sunday. Sunday, today I got up and started my housework trying not to make a noise because Doros and another soldier were asleep. I wanted to go to church but because there were soldiers to be looked after I didn't go. When they woke up I gave them their breakfast and they went off. Then I mopped the house and lay down on my bed. After a bit my cousin came with her kids, and they wanted to stay with me, but she went off. At noon we ate ravioli, then I lay down and slept. When I woke up I heard that the Hare's son had died of his war wounds, and I was very sad. The daily movements described in Androulla's diary, and her caring for the soldiers, were suddenly interrupted. For her the war had been a series of frightening sounds, radio bulletins, and the occasional aeroplane flying low over the village. But the death of a village boy, whom she had known all her young life, brought the war home in a new way. Her diary had recorded her being frightened on every page, but not 'sad' until now. The diary is a little misleading, because Androulla's responses were inevitably personal, and rather restricted, confined by the life and narrow experiences of a young girl in the village. There are so many other things which might have found their way into her pages: had she a brother at the front, for example, the diary would have been full of her anxieties on his behalf. One villager told me how his son had been at the Kyrenia front, and the boy's mother would not or could not eat, from worry. The father, however, wanted a meal, and this led to cross words, almost to blows, between him and his wife. >I took it one way and she took it another', he told me. 'I heard that the Hare's son had died of his war wounds.' By the time Androulla heard this, everyone in the village must have known that the young man was in hospital. His father, nicknamed 'the Hare', was a shy man, who served on one of the village's two co-operative shops. He was well liked, with no enemies. Word went round the village: 'Have you heard? The Hare's boy has been wounded. Andronikos. Badly. Three bullets through his chest.' In the last chapter, we heard from the young prison officer, Christos Kaourmas, about how he was caught up in the coup against his will. He here tells us something about the Hare's son, Andronikos, which the Hare himself probably did not know, or at least, would not believe:
The Hare has a brother, Vassos, a tailor, whose son Spiros was badly wounded in the fighting, and was expected to die. The Hare and Vassos were both poor men, unaggressive, and quietly left-wing in their views. It was one of the more savage ironies of the coup and the war that their two families, while in no way responsible for the events which overwhelmed them, were to suffer so much, to give so much blood, while most EOKA sympathisers escaped unharmed. Vassos here explains how he came to hear that his son had been wounded, and the aftermath:
Spires' father was also able to give me another version of what happened to his son, the 'official' version written by Spiros himself, as a report to his commanding officer:
The wounded Spiros and the dead Andronikos were first cousins and thus were closely connected, in village kinship terms. But there is another connection between their two situations. The dead boy's comrades, a group of young men who had grown up together with a strong sense of a bond between them as well as of a gap between them and their parents' generation, wished to hide from the Hare and his family the possibility that his son had not been killed by the enemy. The wounded Spiros gave bloodstained bank-notes to his mother for safe keeping. The connection between these events is that for Greeks of all ages it is a compelling idea to give one's life or life's blood in battle for one's native land {dhia tin patridha): pro patria mori, as the Roman poet Horace asserted. The idea of self-sacrifice for one's nation in war has elsewhere a power which it may be hard to imagine for readers who have matured in the thirty-five-year- long peace of Northern Europe. So far the events of this chapter belong to the category of 'normal warfare', if such a thing exists. But what now follows is a little different, and part of a kind of warfare--- politely called 'irregular'---which most of us would prefer not to contemplate. In English writing about the several centuries of conflict between Greeks and Turks, the term 'irregulars' has a slightly sinister resonance, because it has come to be associated with the indiscriminate killing of civilians. But this is something not unknown in regular armies, so the distinction is hardly clear cut. In the last chapter, the EOKA B militant called Kajis described how during the six days of the coup he and his fellows dominated Argaki. Here he describes how when the six days of the coup were followed on Saturday 20 July by the Turkish invasion, he went off to join the attack on the Turkish village of Ghaziveran, about twelve miles from Argaki and nowhere near the Kyrenia invasion area:
Kajis did not stop there, but went off to the Kyrenia front to fight the Turkish army. His account was full of descriptions of the noises of different weapons being fired and shells exploding, and of narrow escapes. Later, in the second phase of the war, he was in Limassol, in recent years an EOKA town, and now more than ever so, since the men of the coup sought a possible stronghold, in case they should suffer reprisals. It was in Limassol that he heard that Argaki had been taken by the Turkish army, and his response, so he told me, was to go and shoot an elderly Turkish woman. 'And I'd have got one of their hojas [a Turkish Muslim cleric] too, if a UN bugger hadn't stopped me.' Let no one say the UN peace forces can do no good in a war, for there are always numbers of men like Kajis---wandering about, killing promiscuously. I would prefer to believe that the killings were merely Kajis' fantasies (which in itself would be bad enough), but that would be at odds with everything Kajis ever said in the past, and with the fact that both his friends and his enemies warned me early on that he was a killer. Kajis and his actions were exceptional, but even one Kajis in every village could clearly do a great deal of damage to Greek-Turkish relations; several such men on each side of a mixed village could create enough suffering to destroy any residual trust which might exist in thousands of people around them. Fortunately, there were others who behaved in a very different way. I was given the following account by an Argaki boy, my nephew Hambos Michaelides, who told me of his friendship with a Turkish Cypriot, a relationship which survived both the war and the deeds of men like Kajis. In 1974 Hambos was doing his military service and was posted to the 'Green Line' in Nicosia. This area was so named in 1964 when a British mediator used a green crayon to mark on a map the road which divided the Greek and Turkish cease-fire positions.
The soldiers on both sides were brought meals from time to time, and Hambos started offering Tourchien a little of whatever the Greek Cypriot soldiers had just received. At first Tourchien had been reluctant to be seen accepting food, but had taken to meeting Hambos in an alleyway, out of sight. After the coup d'etat, the district, Kaimakli, became a centre of socialist resistance, and since the National Guard dared not venture into the area, Hambos and his comrades did not receive their normal meals. With only a tin of marmalade between five young men, as the hours went by they started to get rather hungry. Hambos then gave Tourchien money to buy quantities of halloumi-cheese, watermelons and bread for the hungry Greeks, from the Turkish sector. Thus three days passed. Hambos continued:
Hambos was twenty in 1974. When the first major killings between Greeks and Turks started, in 1958, he was four. He can have had little real contact with Turkish Cypriots, except for a few elderly people in Argaki. At school he was exposed by Greek nationalist teachers, and by many of the newspapers, to a daily stress on the alleged hostility, unreliability, and antagonism of Turkish Cypriots, a poor prognosis for trust or friendship. Twenty years of such conditions should have produced an entire generation of youngsters who would not be able to live with those of the other community, even if there was a settlement, but Hambos' father, a self-educated man with leftish ideas, had never accepted the Greek nationalist view that the Turks were to blame for everything, and this had influenced his son. When people live through a dramatic event, they end up with stories they want to tell about it which seem intensely meaningful to them, but which may strike outsiders as bizarre, or even pointless. Perhaps this is why younger generations are so easily bored by the war stories of their elders. An Argaki villager called Yannis Xenofondos was in the reserves, married, a father, and past thirty when he was called to active service. He told me that while he had been under fire, his one thought had been to stop his motor-cycle getting strafed. He kept moving it, but the planes kept coming back. To me, other details were far more interesting---such as how he and his comrades saw their defeat as having been produced by a high-level >betrayal= (a theme which also occurred in the 1922 Asia Minor rout of the Greek army by the Turks, when Greek generals were tried and executed for 'treason'):
Yannis was a strong socialist, completely out of sympathy with the Greek army officers who were nearly all supporters of the Greek military dictatorship, to which he was opposed. The disorganisation in the army must have been extreme, and morale poor, since men were being commanded by officers who had just overthrown their popular, elected government, drawn them into a one-sided war with Turkey, and were still trying to enforce 'military discipline=. This hostility certainly came out in Yannis= account:
After many more adventures, Yannis and his comrades joined up with other retreating, disorganised, hungry, thirsty men, withdrawing until they were clear of the Turkish advance. But after a night's sleep in safety at Kykko Monastery, he found himself in trouble again. The colonel who had disappeared during the rout, now re-appeared
Nevertheless, Yannis was, however unwillingly and, in his own eyes, amateurishly, a soldier. He nearly got killed, he nearly got captured, and he was wounded when he burned his hands moving ammunition boxes away from a napalm fire. But other men, sometimes civilians, got drawn into the war in less predictable ways. During a lull, Andreas Hassapis, a cook who lived in Argaki, went to find his son, a soldier on the Green Line in Nicosia, to give him some cigarettes and pocket money. He had the misfortune to take a wrong turning, near no-man's land.
Hassapis was unlucky to walk without knowing it into Turkish hands, but was fortunate not to have been shot on the spot by the man who had lost a son in 1963. When he was questioned about where he was from, he was lucky again, because it was chance that his interrogator knew someone from Argaki, someone who could serve as a test of his bona fides. The value of knowing whom one had caught was two-fold. First, the Turkish army would undoubtedly want to know if Greece had started committing troops to the Cypriot war, since, if they did do so, a counter-attack on Turkey through Thrace or elsewhere would be probable. Secondly, the Turkish Cypriots would have feared that their fellows still in Greek-held areas might be held as hostages, and a man from Argaki, where there was a small Turkish population, might be especially valuable in exchange for Argaki Turks. The patchwork nature of the dispersal of the two ethnic groups throughout the island made many combatants think in terms of hostages, and counter-hostages. Hassapis was interrogated on the Turkish side of the Green Line, in Nicosia; opposite, on the Greek side, was Hambos, the young Argaki conscript who, a few pages back, described his friendship with a Turkish soldier. Some Turks shouted across to him, asking if he knew a sergeant called Hassapis? 'Why?' he countered. They produced the older Hassapis. 'We've got his father', they explained. Hambos was now very anxious, in case the son, the younger Hassapis, should find out that his father was a prisoner, and be driven to 'do something foolish' during the truce, such as open fire on the Turks. Fearing for his friend's sanity, he told his commanding officer what had happened; the latter then contacted various members of the Hassapis family, and made sure that the son was swiftly transferred away from the Green Line before anyone could tell him of his father's fate. Hassapis senior again takes up the story:
Hassapis was not the only Argaki man to be taken prisoner to Turkey, there were several others, and later we shall hear from one of them about the experience. Following each of the two periods of fighting, there was a time when many villagers were desperate for news of their soldier sons. After the second round, the soldiers in turn were equally anxious for news of their parents and other relatives, for they knew that the front had come close to Argaki, and later they learned that the village had fallen to the Turks. The most crucial thing which any fellow-villager could do for any other was to give news of the condition and whereabouts of kinsfolk. Yannis, the soldier we last heard from in dispute with his commanding officer about going back to camp, lost his argument, and had to wait some days for news:
The person who was perhaps hit harder by the war more than anyone else was the village priest, Papa Loizos. On 20 July, when the Turkish invasion started, he was coming out of the church when a villager asked him to baptise his child. The priest then decided to baptise all the newborn children, some twenty in all, since he feared that if they died unbaptised they would not share in eternal life. So he arranged the ceremony, carefully separating the boy babies from the girls, so that should they survive there would be no bar to subsequent marriages between them - for Orthodoxy teaches that baptism creates blood relations, and had these babies been baptised 'at the same font' they would have been as brothers and sisters. The priest stayed in the village until the war came very close:
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