Turkish Cyprus: Aftermath of the Intervention, 1974-77

The intervention of the Turkish military following the Greek coup in July 1974 had profound emotional and psychological consequences for Cypriots, in addition to the obvious political ramifications. In this long segment from the book, Cyprus---War and Adaptation, psychiatrist Vamik Volkan describes and explains his observations among his native Turkish Cypriots. Volkan, a professor at the University of Virginia, emigrated to the U.S. in 1958, and while he naturally retains sympathies for the Turkish Cypriots, his insights are relevant to both communities.  He is now recognized as one of the world's leading theorists and practitioners on the psychological roots of conflict, and has authored a number of important contributions, including, most recently, Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997).  This excerpt is not only useful as a theoretical piece, but as a bit of social history.

The Turks were in a position of great danger as war began. In its first move the Turkish army occupied only a small triangular area that opened the enclave in Nicosia to the Kyrenian shore. The enclaves elsewhere were at once surrounded or captured by the Greeks. Eleven thousand Turks were trapped in the Famagusta enclave that lay in the shadow of Othello's Tower and behind the walls of the ageless city that once again protected its occupants from capture. The situation was different in the southern port city of Limassol, where in the absence of any natural or man-made barrier the Turks were quickly overrun. Those who survived were confined for months in a football stadium nearby. In its second thrust the Turkish army liberated the Cypriot Turks who had been confined in two big enclaves at Famagusta and Serdarli, which is midway between Nicosia and Famagusta, and the occupants of smaller enclaves in the North, but tens of thousands of Turks remained scattered throughout the territory held by the Greeks in the South. These tried to escape to the North, most of them traveling on foot in the hope of going undetected. Their flight to safety required the abandonment of everything they had, as well as the surrender of their land. Many of these refugees were killed and others were wounded. A new "business" came into existence in southern Cyprus; Greeks aiding the Turks in the South to escape charged as much as $200 a person. When I interviewed some of these "escapees" I learned of the imaginative and dangerous ways people were smuggled through the lines. A baby would be hidden in a tin container of the kind used to ship cheese, and the container would be picked up by Turks according to plan after the baby had been smuggled through the checkpoint in it. A special backseat was installed in some cars in order to hide adults, who were obliged to breathe through tubes while in confinement there. The clandestine northern flight of these Turks continued until the fall of 1975, when an agreement was drawn up to permit open travel to the North. By the summer of 1977 the official count of the Cypriot Turkish administration showed only about 100 Cypriot Turks remaining in territory held by the Greeks. The voluntary northward migration of almost all of the 65,000 Turks initially trapped in the South resulted in a de facto division of the population.

In spite of the suffering of the migrating Turks of the South, those in the North continued to celebrate their liberation for months. Before the Cypriot Turkish administration could bring the situation under control, the people looted houses, factories, and villages that had belonged to the Greeks. The impoverishment of the Turkish refugees and the enrichment of many lower-class Turks in the North by looting overturned the social scene. For example, it was said that the erstwhile employers of a middle-aged Turkish woman who had been a maidservant were paying social calls on her in view of her overnight prosperity, based on her vast store of loot hidden away. So widespread was the looting that a euphemistic new word was coined for it, buluntu, which means "something found." At social events there was considerable chatter about the "found things" in the house of one or another of the group. As the old moral strictures on the individual and on society were shaken, people felt that they had the right to own the "found things" and even stole such "found" items from one another.

The general preoccupation with buluntu was still evident when I visited northern Cyprus six months after the war, but it ended soon thereafter, perhaps because of steps taken by the administration or, possibly, because there was nothing more to be "found" readily by individuals. The government put what remained in warehouses and offered for sale the television sets, clothing, canned goods, and other supplies left behind by the Greeks. Other steps taken by the administration to dispose of Greek belongings will be noted in the next chapter.

Such preoccupation with material things had psychological usefulness, I believe, inasmuch as it permitted a group that had for a long time nursed a severe narcissistic hurt to acquire narcissistic supplies in some abundance without guilt. One sometimes heard the situation actually put into words in such remarks as, "See---we were deprived of all luxury for eleven years, and now it is our right to have them!" However, it is of greater significance that this concern over the material helped the people to ignore their psychological difficulties. They were all faced with immense change, in which loss in some degree was inevitably present, and it was necessary to go through the pain of mourning the losses in order to accept the change. Even Avictors"---if victors there be after such extensive human destruction---must morn.

The agency of the Cypriot Turkish administration responsible for resettling Turkish refugees from the South tried to place them in situations as much like those they had left behind as possible. Since there were more vacated villages in the North than had been left behind by migrating Turks in the South, suitable matching, such as the placement of mountain villagers in mountainous terrain, usually was possible. A guide called the kilavuz was assigned to each community newly settled by Turkish refugees. Most often a young man with some college education, the kilavuz in a sense represented the settlement agency in Nicosia, the capital city. He was given a house for his own use and put in charge of a building suitable for a warehouse, in which were stored usable items such as beds, sewing machines, food, and television sets that the Cypriot Greeks had left behind in their flight. The immigrants were assigned to houses comparable to those they had formerly had.

I was given permission to study these new ATurkish@ villages on my Cyprus visit six months after the war was over. As luck would have it, I was in the office of the agency in the office complex belonging to Denktash when a message came from one of the villages reporting trouble. One of the new settlers had burned the blankets given him by his kilavuz. I was told that complaints like this from the field were common and that the people in the agency were often puzzled at the stubbornness and apparent ingratitude of immigrants who refused to accept the provision made by a kilavuz. The first interpretation of the blanket-burning was that the recipient was a greedy man who wanted something finer than he had been given, and the same rationale seemed to apply to the case of a man who had broken all the windows of the house assigned to him. No one seemed satisfied with his lot, although I was told that all of the settlers in this village were considerably better off than they had been in their old homes, and that they recognized this. Most of them were farmers who could not but acknowledge the superior promise of their current holdings; but although time was passing, few seemed to have taken appropriate steps toward ploughing and planting their fields. A troubleshooter was being sent into the village where the blankets were burned. I went with him and noted that he was a man well able to handle psychological group processes. The site of my first fieldwork, a village chosen entirely by my chance presence in the agency office when the blanket-burning was reported, was about fifteen miles from Nicosia, near the main road between that city and Famagusta. Turkish tanks had traveled this road six months earlier. Greek villagers had fled before the arrival of the enemy, and the buildings of the village proper had not been destroyed although walls close to the road were pocked by bullet holes and the only service station was burned. The village was a modest one with but one church and one school; it had two coffeehouses, but no more than ten modern buildings, most being made of mud-and-hay bricks in the usual Cypriot fashion.

Fifty-three Turkish families settled there by spring 1975. One of these had come from Central Anatolia, but the others had all fled from the same small farming community in the South. They had left in great fear and with grave risk since such migration was forbidden by the Greeks before the autumn of 1975. Their makhtar (head man) retained his role in the new location, as did their schoolteacher. Except for the family from Anatolia, the only stranger among these people was the official kilavuz. Some houses remained empty; a dozen more refugee families might have been accommodated. Each building bore a crudely scrawled code number required by the central Cypriot Turkish administration as a means of inventory and control. Somehow these ugly scrawls depressed me, reminding me of the tattoos used in concentration camps. They certainly detracted from any homelike aspect these houses might have had, and they served to remind the villagers that their houses were not their very own.

I found that thirty-eight of the fifty-three family heads were given to complaints that were sometimes just vague expressions of discontent. Sixteen of these men were asked to gather in a coffee-house, the usual place for men to socialize, and the mukhtar joined them there in a three-hour discussion with the troubleshooter. I observed the group processes at work and interviewed some of the participants individually in a method that proved so successful in the collection of data that I used it later in other villages. All of the sixteen men admitted when they were prodded that they and their families were better off than they had been in the past, or at least during the eleven years in which their lives had been full of discomfort and fear. They declared, in fact, that they would rather die than return to the South. They were elated over the Turkish victory and were full of nationalistic pride, but on one level they continued to give vent to a generalized charge of hostility by constant complaining.

One complaint concerned the name of the village. The authorities in Nicosia charged with providing Turkish names for the hitherto Greek communities offered names that were nationalistic, like "The Village of the Brave Soldiers," or names with reference to the environment, like "Olive Grove," but the settlers wanted to use the names of the villages from which they had fled, modifying them slightly as American settlers called their cities after the homes they remembered in such names as New Rochelle and New Glarus. The coffeehouse bore a sign announcing that it was a "Refugees' Coffeehouse," and this disturbed the troubleshooter, who thought it was time that the new settlers stopped thinking of themselves as refugees and saw themselves as the possessors of free Turkish land. Although the villagers saw the force of his argument, they did nothing to alter the sign.

When the discussion got around to the reason why one of these men had burned his blankets, I began to see what psychological process was at work. It became clear that the settlers saw the blankets as being unacceptably contaminated by a Greek aura. After the war ended, the Cypriot Turkish administration had too little new bedding to meet the need; so an order went out to make quilts from whatever suitable fabric the Greeks had left behind. Some of the material made into quilts came from garments; so, by extrapolation so to speak, all of the bedding issued suggested to the settlers body contact with Greeks in the past. The blankets were thus perceived as links between the Turks and the Greeks, and the villagers sought to "prove" by burning them that there was no more contact with the Greeks, that separation had taken place. It was a question of burning one's bridges.

It was, however, a symptomatic act inasmuch as the villagers were in the midst of a process of mourning and real psychological separation from the Greeks had not yet become possible. The man who had smashed the windows of his new house was also involved in an attempt to create an illusion of psychological separation from the Greeks who had lived in it, who were unknown to him and whose appearance he could only dimly imagine. During my interview with him, this man expressed his uneasiness at living in a Greek house which he was expected to make his home in spite of the telltale numbers daubed on the wall. Since Greekness and Turkishness met in this house, it was necessary to make a separation; so he smashed the windows. As I listened to him, I became aware that he was not only attacking the Greek aspect of the house---and he perceived what was Greek as bad and dangerous because he had so recently escaped with his family from the annihilation he expected at Greek hands---but was also expressing his feelings of guilt over occupying the home of someone expelled from it. Such feelings, which resembled those of survivor guilt, made his abode an uncomfortable one, however adequate it may have been physically.

Mourning and Adaptation

The psychological processes of those newly settled in the villages of the North can be best understood after reviewing the process of mourning that precedes adaptation to loss and change. Since the prototype of mourning is the response of grief occasioned by a death, it will be useful to examine what this involves. In spite of certain semantic difficulties, those who have investigated the subject agree about a sequence of reactions to be expected whenever an adult deals with the death of someone of importance to him. Such a loss is initially denied. Then the bereaved feels anger and Aa yearning to recover the dead.@ Disorganization gives way to reorganization in which the loss is accepted as an irreversible event and the preoccupation with the image of the dead person is no longer intense and unrealistic. Although a normal progression from one phase to the next can be seen, the forward movement is not without some back-and-forth fluctuation. Freud held that grief is not a pathological condition but a psychological process that runs its course over an interval of time. He suggested that any interference with normal grief or mourning is potentially harmful. As the work of mourning goes on, memories and expectations connected with the one who has died are brought, one by one, into the mind of the mourner. When they are closely examined, it becomes possible to detach the libido that had been invested in the deceased; and when the mourning is completed, the mourner's ego becomes "free and uninhibited again" Pollock stressed the adaptational aspect of the mourning process. Freud's original work demonstrated how the loss of a loved object---or even of an ideal---is transformed into ego loss which, as Pollock showed, uses the adaptational process of mourning to heal itself.

My research on mourners shows that mourning can become complicated (pathological), with the mourner fixated at one of the normally sequential but often overlapping phases; such a development may relate to the mourner's level of maturity, the suddenness of the loss, or its nature. I have found the fixation most likely to occur at the phase in which the mourner yearns to recover the lost object. Such yearning appears simultaneously or alternately with dread of recovering the dead. These polar responses reflect the ambivalence with which the mourner had regarded the dead person before he died. The mourner so fixated keeps a part-object representation of the deceased as an "inner presence" with which he continues to have a relationship. . . .

Our research also showed that such a mourner invests certain inanimate objects with magical powers that connect him with what he has lost. These I term "linking objects." They are chosen from among the belongings of the dead, something he wore, like a watch; something he used as an extension of his senses, like a camera---an extension of seeing; symbolic or realistic representations of him such as a photograph; or something that was at hand when the news of the death was received or when the mourner saw the body. The latter are last-minute objects since they recall the last moment during which the full impact of the living personality of the other was available. Linking objects provide an external locus in which part of the mourner's projected ambivalent object relationship is "frozen" rather than being renounced.

The wish to annihilate the deceased along with a simultaneous longing for him is condensed in the linking object, which provides in addition an external reference for the painful and unresolved work of mourning. In order to understand the meaning of the blanket-burning episode better, the principle of the linking object being dealt with by a pathological mourner should be applied. One young patient kept as a linking object a photograph of his dead father that he kept out of sight in a folder. In his fantasy the folder represented his father's coffin and he was afraid to open it. At his father's funeral he had entertained the fantasy that the coffin did not contain his father's body; this was a reflection of his wish that his parent still lived. "Quite by accident" he placed the folder beneath a dripping water pipe; this act represented his wish to "kill" his father (to complete grieving), and it was appropriate since his father had been snorkeling in the sea just before he died and this activity was supposed to have contributed to his death. Further associations to the act indicated that the dripping water also represented the tears of the bereaved son that he had been unable to shed. The act put the work of mourning "out there," so to speak.

Although I have been speaking about the mourning that follows someone's death, the same principles apply to mourning occasioned by other losses as well. Any change significant to the ego is mourned. . . . And it seems to me that groups exhibit a response to loss or change that reflects what we have seen in the mourning of an individual; the pattern seems basically the same.

After the war I was able to observe in Cyprus three overlapping types of mourning: the reaction to the death of loved ones; the reaction to a change of location; and the reaction to having lost inter-action with an enemy. I will discuss the latter two here and return to the death of loved ones later. During the first postwar year natural progress in these kinds of mourning could be discerned, but there were also elements suggestive of complication (pathology).

Fixation in the initial phase of grieving over the death of an individual, during which the mourner denies that death has occurred, is, of course, immediately evident to others, and psychiatric help is sought for those seen to be "out of touch with reality," so the chronicity of this state is usually prevented. Six months after the war in Cyprus was over, I noticed aspects of a parallel phenomenon of fixation in the initial phase of mourning among the Cypriot Turks.

One small Turkish village in the northern mountains was near two villages formerly occupied by Greeks, and only a few miles from a large Greek town. This village had been attacked from three sides when war broke out, and some villagers died in the struggle. Surrender was prevented only by the last-minute arrival of Turkish aircraft, which bombed the enemy. After the war, the nearby Greek town, now vacated, was taken over by Turkish refugees from the South. The survivors of the beleaguered village reacted strangely toward the new occupants of the town the Greeks had left, finding all sorts of excuses not to go near them. By failing to face up to the change that had taken place---which included a new immunity from harassment---they were able to deny its occurrence. Because of their geographical location and isolation from other Turkish settlements, they had been accustomed to little exchange with others for eleven years, and they now referred to the Turks newly settled nearby as "strangers." The Greeks who had been ousted had been, of course, considered "bad" and dangerous by the villagers, but their presence, in which the villagers had made a heavy psychic investment, particularly with their aggressive drive, had been oddly reassuring simply by being familiar over time. It would appear that the process of mourning may become complicated not only through an excessive libidinal investment in the object that is lost but also through the excessive investment in it of aggression. The disappearance of anything in which considerable aggression is invested may usher in a period of safety, but it may also evoke shock and disbelief. As time wore on, the inhabitants of the old village still found it difficult to visit the settlers' town; they could not tolerate not seeing Greeks there since the illusion of enemy ghosts, so to speak, was necessary in the bargaining for psychological separation. At last, however, reality prevailed.

The village of the burned blankets was also engaged in a mourning process. The occupants shared the diffuse anger so typical in the second phase of mourning. It surfaced in their complaints. The new settlers had gained better homes and fields by moving, but it had cost them their "attachment to the ground". They stubbornly clung to their identity as transients, as the coffeehouse sign attested, and demanded that their new holdings be connected with their old habitat by the use of a related name. The dwellings they remembered had become an introject (an inner presence) in the bosom, internally regarded as an element in the process of mourning. As they tried to establish links between their new surroundings and those of the past, internally or externally, they could not help finding links between themselves and the Greeks they had replaced, and between their self-concept as it was based in one place and their self-concept as it was placed in another. In the linking objects that kept the association with the Greeks alive there was considerable guilt. The burning of the blankets and the smashing of windows had become necessary to the gaining of an illusion that mourning was over.

The most common link to the Greeks was the rubbish left behind as they fled. Great heaps of it lay about. All that was valuable had been taken from the heaps still to be seen in empty houses or in the fields. In some places such rubbish had been gathered in a pile near the center of the village. I was present when an official from the Turkish administration in Nicosia begged the village fathers to burn the rubbish in their village, emphasizing the fact that it was unsanitary and might spread disease. "All it will take," he pointed out, "is a match and a can of gasoline to rid yourself of this ugly presence." The villagers agreed with everything he said but continued to point out to me items in the pile such as broken toys or children's books written in Greek. I was moved at feeling that in their recalcitrance in hanging onto this rubbish there was a hidden cry. They were too angry to cry openly, to complete their mourning, but the guilt they felt at replacing the Greeks who had owned these simple family belongings, now rubbish, accounted for their resistance, however strongly the rubbish represented the "bad" aspects of the enemy as well as their humanity.

The island's appearance changed greatly between my first visit there six months after the war and my return six months later. It was still possible to see bullet holes in the walls of buildings, some collapsed buildings had not been repaired, and the skeletons of burned tanks still stood about; but burned-out forests were being replanted, and it was clear that life was coming back to the place of death. Most of the rubbish heaps had disappeared. Mourning was taking its course and giving way to adaptation to the new life, although one could still stumble on situations that were poignant and find individual Turks who had been unable to grieve and leave their mourning behind.

At the time of the first anniversary of the war I met by chance a Cypriot Turk who was operating a beautiful casino at the seaside. He had at one time owned a modest restaurant not far from the casino but had lost it during the troubles of 1964. For eleven years he had lived as a refugee, longing for life by the sea. After 1974 the Turkish administration gave him the casino to replace the restaurant he had lost, which had long ago been demolished. Although he had never known the Greek proprietor of the establishment that was now his, he kept looking for traces of him. When he found a passport he decided was his predecessor's, the photograph of the owner was missing. Its absence gave his imagination full play; he fantasied how the man had lived and what his feelings had been on the trips his passport indicated he had taken to Iceland and Spain. The Cypriot regarded the passport as a talisman and carried it in his pocket while he worked. It was a linking object between him and the original Greek owner of the casino, and he clung to it as though he were trying to bargain with the unknown Greek and to identify with his introject.

I was told a most unusual story that concerned not a linking object according to my description but an object that became an emotional bond between a newly arrived Turkish refugee and the Greek whose home in the North he now occupied. The Greek owner had departed in great haste, leaving behind almost all of his belongings. On entering his new home the Turk was amazed to find his own photograph on the mantelpiece. It had been taken in 1936 during the annual sports festival of the Larnaca American Academy, which was attended by both Cypriot Greek and Cypriot Turkish students. The two students in the photograph were shown receiving trophies they had won in an athletic contest; one was the former Greek owner of the house, and the other was the Turk who supplanted him there. It seems unlikely that there were more than two copies of the picture in existence. The Turk had had one but had left it behind in his old home, and the other greeted him on his arrival in the house assigned to him. The two people in the picture had not communicated with each other since 1936.

I am sure that there are countless tragic stories about the Greek refugees. One can imagine the horror, shock, and helplessness that was their lot. Although I had no way of going into the territory held by the Greeks and interviewing people there, I was able to study the conditions of some of the 20,000 who had been trapped in Turkish territory in 1974. Most of them were on the Karpasia Peninsula, which I visited about a year after the war. To venture there I had to obtain permission not only from the Cypriot Turkish administration but also from the Turkish military authorities who were stationed there. I went with the troubleshooter who had accompanied me to the new Turkish settlements and an interpreter, since my Greek is now not adequate for even simple conversation. As we passed the military post that guards the entrance to the peninsula, I was emotionally influenced by the absence of any other vehicles on the road we traveled. Their absence gave us the feeling of entering a ghostly place. The Greek town we visited had originally contained some 2,500 people, but some of these had escaped. Others, accepted by the Greek authorities in the South, had been permitted to leave, but the Greek authorities for political reasons favored leaving some of the Cypriot Greeks "trapped" in the North. The population had been reduced to 1,900 at the time of our visit. The appearance of the people did nothing to remove my impression of being in a ghost town for they were silent and slow-moving. The town seemed clean and sterile, probably because the walls had been freshly painted throughout its length to erase nationalistic slogans written in Greek that praised the struggle for Enosis, etc. The Cypriot Greeks were further humiliated by being obliged to hang posters supporting Turkish nationalistic pride in the windows of their coffeehouses and on the walls.

Three policemen and a doctor, all Turkish, had been assigned to the town. There were no physical signs of destruction, since the war had bypassed this area. When I tried to use the same interviewing method I had used in the Turkish sections, I could reach no understanding of the emotional situation of those with whom I spoke, although they seemed interested, and treated us to soft drinks. They were all wary, and I felt that all of those in the coffeehouse were depressed. Although they were at liberty to carry out their daily routine in the town and to work in the nearby fields, there seemed to be little interest in working. They were not under undue pressure to work since the Red Cross gave each four English pounds a month, but I felt that depression kept them detached from the notion of work in any case. No weddings or entertainments had taken place there during the postinvasion year.

These people were also victims of what I call the "television war" on Cyprus. At the time of the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus, the island boasted only one television station, which broadcast in English, Greek, and Turkish in a prescribed manner; but after the 1963-64 events, Cypriot Greeks gained control over the station, and the Greek language was used chiefly except for some films in English. The Greek television and radio facilities were used energetically in a sort of cold war. After the failure of the mainland Turks to come to the rescue of their brothers on the island, the Cypriot Greeks used almost as a theme song for any broadcast in Turkish the lamentation of a Turkish song that began "I waited, but you never came!" This was rubbing salt into the narcissistic wounds of the island Turks. Interestingly, after the war the Cypriot Greek television began a nightly Turkish newscast to acquaint the Cypriot Turks with the Greek stand on the island. The government of mainland Turkey then built a strong station on the southern mountains of Anatolia and began beaming Turkish television to the island. By the time we visited the Greek village, the antenna for reception had been set to pick up the mainland Turkish broadcast and the Greeks could hear programs broadcast in their own language only with difficulty.

On our visit to this Greek town I was interested to see whether group processes paralleling those at work in the Turkish enclaves might have become evident within the postwar year. A Cypriot Greek doctor who worked with the Turkish physician assigned to the town provided me with some clues when I visited him at the local hospital. Since he was suspected of being an EOKA B adherent, he had been harassed by a group of Cypriot Turks soon after the military operation. I appreciated his dedication to helping the townspeople in spite of his own personal feelings of hurt and anxiety. He reported that the chief complaint since the war had been something referred to as difficulty in breathing, and he had a good appreciation of its obvious meaning. It was usually accompanied by stomach trouble and sleep disorders. He also mentioned a statistical increase in the number of cases of hypertension. Another symptom reported by some patients was hallucination in which the patron saint of the monastery of Cape Andreas, which is at the tip of the Karpasia Peninsula, appeared.

It was clear during the first year after the war that although the Turkish army had succeeded in dividing the island in two geo- graphically, psychological acceptance of such division was not accomplished as quickly, even by Cypriot Turks. It took time to adapt to it, and the sequential steps of the mourning process had to be taken before the new realities on the island could be accepted. The mourning process was complicated in a time during which the political situation remained explosive and the settlement of serious differences was far from complete. Nicosia's old green line was not substantially altered, for not only did the Turkish military not cross it into the Greek side of the capital, but it was guarded on either side by members of the opposing forces.

On my visit there in 1975 there were many nights when I slept no more than a block away from the border, and I sometimes heard gunfire. People paid little attention to this and went on with whatever they were doing, saying that there was no problem as long as the fire was not returned. The soldiers on guard on either side had a ritual of abuse. As soon as night fell they would call out their scorn of the other side and curse their enemies, stopping to permit similar imprecations to be hurled back at them from the other side. One thought of an invisible orchestra leader coordinating the antiphony. This curious performance seemed to give a feeling of security to those living on the border; as long as the soldiers expressed themselves so freely, there seemed no cause for alarm. Nevertheless, the border psychology was not without fear. Those living in the Turkish houses on the green line (now called the Attila line) in the capital city could see the Greek houses on the other side across a vista that included some empty buildings, barricades, and military encampments. One Turkish neighborhood penetrated Greek territory in a sort of cul-de-sac; the additional exposure of this position led to more anxiety that was usual elsewhere, and this was heightened at night. Stray bullets were not uncommon, and since a child had been killed by one, people avoided sitting in their windows or on their balconies. Someone took steps to relieve the feeling of anxiety by erecting a flagpole in the cul-de-sac where it faced the Greek community, standing higher than the flag displayed by the Greeks. Since it was illuminated at night, the Turkish flag thus loomed over the Greek banner twenty-four hours a day. Magical gestures soothe anxiety when people are regressed!

My observations on the Turkish side showed the establishment of a "postwar culture" during the year after the war. Aside from the initial looting and its material and psychological effects, other aspects of the recent experience left their mark. Suddenly the shell cases that had so recently meant death became collectors' items greatly valued for home decoration. Polished, painted, or reshaped in arty ways, they became umbrella stands or vases. It was usual for a host to display his collection of them to visitors. People unlucky enough not to find shell cases bought them to keep in style. This was basically a counterphobic adaptation hidden beneath the nationalistic pride of survivors. People put off repairing the holes made by firearms in their houses, and when children came visiting they were encouraged to engage in something like an Easter egg hunt, being given a knife or screwdriver to probe the holes for bullets. A host took pride in pointing out bullet holes in his furniture, as though he gained distinction from having survived an attack so immediate and so savage. At the same time it seemed as though being so close to evidence of fire made fire seem less dangerous, and the people gave careful attention to the different kinds of bullets, their source (they were American, perhaps, or Czechoslovakian), the weapons that had fired them, and whether they had been fired by the Greek assailants or the Turkish rescuers. Places where people gathered remained scarred by war. In Serdarli I watched men play tavla (backgammon), a popular pastime, in the yard of a coffeehouse one wall of which had been ruined by shells and in the shadow of a damaged minaret left in disarray; this was a full year after the war's end. Small found bullets were used for necklaces, perforated and hung on a cord. Bent bullets were those that had been fired, and these were particularly prized; they represented a defused explosive, a defanged attacker. Young Turkish men were especially fond or necklaces made from them.

Mourning over those killed in battle can be complicated, for a number of different reasons. For example, A. Mitscherlich and M. Mitscherlich, using psychoanalytic methodology, pointed out that the people of Germany could not effectively come to grips with the process of mourning for their dead because they had been a sacrifice to Hitler, and to mourn them would be to acknowledge an alliance with Hitler and all he represented. They would thus be in contact with their own guilt because of an implicit association with Nazi crimes.

The Cypriot Turks seemed unable to mourn their war dead, for an entirely different reason. Those who died in the Cyprus struggle died for the freedom of their people rather than to support an evil leader. They were, in fact, idealized, but it is difficult to "kill" idealized ghosts, who are seen as still alive---somewhere---in glory. It was an evidence of unfinished mourning when, on the first anniversary of the war and on those that followed, mourners had local newspapers publish the names and photographs of the war dead, accompanied by expressions of love and reassurance that they would live forever in the hearts of those they left behind.

The adaptation of the Turkish Cypriots to their losses and all of the changes on the island was not without its painful elements such as guilt, and these had to be hidden under the skin, as it were. . . .The assimilation of guilt feelings within a community after a war may be an important factor in the promotion of renewed war, as Wangh suggested. It is possible that on Cyprus such unconscious collective feelings of guilt play a part in the failure of any negotiations seeking a peaceful solution for its problems, since guilt dictates the perpetuation of suffering.

In the beginning of summer in 1975 I learned, from the chance remarks of one Turk to another here and there in Ankara, about a general belief that the waters of the Cyprus beaches were contaminated by some organism that caused itching. The story of this came first from islanders who visited Turkey. When I went to Cyprus a little later I found the rumor about the itch widespread, although there was an inconsistency about it inasmuch as no one stayed out of the water for fear of contamination. Such an inconsistency raised doubt about its truth. I asked a number of physicians if they had seen evidence of the itch among patients who used the bathing beaches, and had negative replies from all. Psychoanalytic investigation has shown that itching can be a sign of repressed anxiety, repressed rage, or repressed sexual excitement. Accordingly, I tried to formulate what went on in unconscious fantasy beneath the skin of Cypriot Turks.

The start of the Turkish military operation of the summer of 1974 had been made on the northern beaches of the island at the peak of the swimming season, when Cypriot Greeks and tourists swarmed there. Cypriot Turks were tolerated, but it humiliated them to use a beach of which not one inch belonged to their group. Military action in the summer of 1974 saw this playground strewn with the dead, and the stains of the quicklime scattered over them as a hygienic measure remained as late as mid-spring of the following year. The Turkish army marked the spot with a statue honoring those of their number who fell there on the first day of the war, and the place was thus hallowed by death and suffering as well as triumph. On a field trip to this spot six months after the war ended, I could see the personal effects of soldiers long gone and of civilians who had fled in haste; piles of Greek military shirts, boots, etc., still cluttered the place, with quicklime scattered around them. Parents warned their children to pick up nothing lest they come to harm (suffer with itching) because of the residual quicklime or the bacteria of bodily decay.

Although the rumor about the itch may have been first connected with the northern beaches near Kyrenia, where quicklime had actually been used, it may very well have spread psychological contamination to other beaches that fell under Turkish control after the war. After the northern beaches were cleaned and the Turks resumed swimming and sunning there, notices were posted warning of the need to report the finding of any suspicious objects. Although the piles of personal effects and stains of quicklime were gone, they must have left a memory trace. And it was not unusual to find in the water bits of green plastic associated with the body bags used to carry corpses after the military operation. When wet plastic pieces adhered to a bather's skin he quickly tore them off. Signs of shot and shell in the walls of hotels and other buildings reminded one of the tragedy of a year earlier even as one heard the joyous laughter of the bathers. Although the scene was one of careless outdoor fun, as in any other seaside resort in the summer, an investigator sprung from these people could easily pick up hidden meanings in the jokes and apparently trivial remarks they made. One common joke concerned the fact that small fish bit the bathers. One swimmer would say to another, "They're so used to eating human flesh (meaning the dead that had floated there) that they're trying to eat us up!" Nervous laughter would follow such a remark.

After my return to the United States in the autumn of 1975 I saw the film Jaws and heard remarks about it from my patients on the couch. The uneasiness of the Cypriot Turkish bathers could be compared to the quickened fear of sharks that a bather anywhere might have after seeing the film, and his secret dread that what seemed nothing but a submerged rock might turn out to be something vastly more malign. The uneasiness pointed to guilt about enjoying oneself in a place of death. As survivors, the bathers felt guilty. The biting fish were punishing them, but the sharp prick of their jaws at least reminded them that they were alive.

Their feelings about bathing in a place of death surfaced usually quite subtly in remarks bathers made as they quit the water; some- thing was sure to be said expressing surprise that they had survived their dips, andCby implicationCsurprise that they had not joined the legions of those who met death there. Anxiety stemming from the superego's demand that one refrain from enjoyment in a tragic place appeared over and over in such supposedly offhand comments. Moreover, I observed this survivor guilt being condensed with the guilt they felt over enjoying themselves in places from which the Greeks had been expelled. Their feeling of being now "owners" of the beach would take some time to be assimilated. The story that follows shows this condensed second kind of guilt.

In the summer of 1975 a moving poem written by a little Cypriot Greek girl now living in the southern part of the island appeared in the Cyprus Mail. The Mail was published in English and distributed to the Greek neighborhoods, from which it found its way into Turkish hands. She had lived near the northern beach before the war, and she grieved over the loss of her home there and was sad to be called a refugee. After reading this poem, a group of Turkish bathers took notice of the nearby houses, beautiful buildings built only a few years earlier by Greeks but now occupied by Turks. The Greek expulsion was part of a cycle; the land on which these houses stood had been Turkish until eleven years before the war, and the Turks had been run off by the Greeks. If we accept as free association of a sort the typical Turkish response to this poem, we must assume that the Turks felt guilt, guilt that they tried to modify by the intellectual rationalization, rooted in reality, that the expulsion of the Greeks was justified by their earlier expulsion of the Turks from the same territory.

A brief formulation can be offered. The itching phenomenon seems to have been rooted in the real circumstance that quicklime of the sort that had been strewn over the bodies does cause itching and burning. Even after the lime was gone, the itch continued to be a symbolic connection with the dead; it represented not only the guilty feelings of the survivors who had expelled enemies from their homes (now the quicklime burned their own skins) but a proof that the survivors were indeed alive, as skin sensations made clear. The fish bites and the clinging bits of green plastic helped to perpetuate the belief in the "itch."

I returned to the northern part of Cyprus around the third anniversary of the war, flying from Istanbul on a plane marked "Cyprus Turkish Airlines." It was rented from a firm based in Europe, and its pilot and hostesses spoke British English. Near the old airport the British had used during World War II, now rebuilt by Cypriot Turks, I saw a new modern air terminal soon to be officially opened, one vastly more impressive than any in Turkey. I was coming to a "new" country, the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus. Although not officially recognized by any country other than Turkey, it was well on its way to becoming a cohesive democratic state full of the excitement and pain of being newly fledged.

The political scene was competitive. An opposition party challenged the Denktash government, and postal workers and some teachers were out on strike. In view of the rising cost of living there was much discussion of economic issues. Nevertheless, there was confidence in the future and an expectation that the new state would before long be generally recognized. It was expected that even before recognition came, the island's "new reality" would so impress other nations that trade would pick up and prosperity would come. The Turks were learning, though slowly, to care for the formerly Greek orange groves, and were beginning to export the fruit. There was even talk of an undersea pipeline to bring water from the Toros Mountains in southern Turkey to maximize production in the already fertile fields of northern Cyprus.

Dreams, realities, and frustrations mingled. Logic told me that there would be no Turkish Federated State of Cyprus without the continued presence of Turkish soldiers and that northern Cyprus had become in effect an extension of mainland Turkey. One saw no Cypriot currency---Turkish money was in use everywhere. Many tourists began coming to northern Cyprus from Turkey; Cypriot Turks who had been living elsewhere, mostly in England, flocked back for visits; and many Turkish scientific conventions were being scheduled in the old Greek hotels in Cyprus that now had Turkish names. I learned that American, German, and British tourists, of whom only a very few were to be seen in the North, were swarming into the southern ("legal") part of the island, access to the Turkish Federated State being available only by boat or plane out of Turkey.

Some Turks from the mainland have already settled on the island, and the foreign press spoke of friction between the native Cypriot Turks and such newcomers. The Greeks exploited such news items for propaganda. Obviously, the newcomers, especially those from Anatolia, which is less westernized than Cyprus, brought a lifestyle that differed from the island's, and among themselves Cypriot Turks did indeed talk about their peasant dress and provincial notions. Relations with the Turkish soldiers made for some discomfort also, as their roistering on the beaches made these places less attractive for family outings. It would be a grave mistake, however, to think of the Cypriot Turks as in any way denying their blood brotherhood with other Turks, wherever they might come from.

The people by now have repressed their affect concerning their war memories, which have become duly "memorialized." The physical evidences of war on the northern shore and such psychological aftermaths as the itching phenomenon have given way to an imposing memorial which marks the site of conflict. Blasted Greek tanks which previously were scattered around northern Cyprus are now lined up near the war memorial, and people passing by on their way to the popular beaches sometimes stop to look at them, but the profound emotional response such sights evoked three years ago is no longer there.

Makarios died a few days after my arrival, on August 3, 1977. There were headlines about his death in the newspapers on the Turkish side, but they evoked neither joy nor sorrow there. The news was greeted with general indifference, and the few comments about it that I heard were disparaging. Only the politicians wondered what Makarios's disappearance from the scene might mean for the future. It rained on the day of his funeral. Rain being highly unusual in Cyprus during the month of August, an official of the Cypriot Turkish government, believing (correctly) that the Greeks would capitalize on the downpour by calling it the tears of heaven, announced that it was an old Turkish belief that rain attends the burial of a sinner to wash away his sins! The salute of guns given in the Greek section of Nicosia at the time of the funeral awakened fear in the Turkish section lest the Greeks were beginning to fight one another again and stray bullets might again be a threat. Cypriot Turks watched the funeral of Makarios on the Cypriot Greek television as if they wanted to make certain that the man whose name they associated with devilish deeds was indeed gone. Only by their close attention to the television did they betray the concern that underlay their surface indifference, which reappeared, undisturbed, when the event was over.

I returned to the village of the blanket-burning, accompanied by the same troubleshooter with whom I had gone there earlier. The service station at the outskirts of the village was now busy, and its walls bore a huge sign with the name of an American oil company instead of the scars of battle. The sign turned out to be one that the owner had found and used, along with another advertising sign that featured a bikini-clad girl, purely for decorative purposes, since the gasoline he sold came from mainland Turkey. When we drove to the coffeeshop that had formerly borne the sign saying "Refugees' Coffeeshop" we found the sign gone and a Turkish flag painted in its place on the newly painted white wall. Some of the dozen or so people gathered there recognized the troubleshooter. They all seemed to know that he had become the director of the prime minister's office complex, and talk turned to their getting their share of water, there being some current dispute over the distribution of water from a spring some miles away. Whereas three years earlier these people clung to their psychic investment in the places they had left and over which they still grieved, they now seemed heavily invested in the land on which they now lived. Their indifference to tilling the northern fields was gone, and now they had a keen interest in working them and in obtaining additional water to make them more fruitful. There were five men there who seemed to be in their thirties, and I sensed that one belonged to an opposition party. Our arrival did nothing to distract them from the game of cards in which they were engrossed, but when it was time for news on the radio they gathered excitedly around it to hear more particulars about the death of Elvis Presley, and after this they joined with the rest of us in the room.

The "linking objects" that connected the Cypriot Turks with the Cypriot Greeks were no longer obvious, although they surfaced now and then; on occasion someone in whose home I was visiting would bring me the picture of the Greek who had formerly occupied his house and speak about him, but the interest in these poignant mementos was no longer obsessive.

From Cyprus---War and Adaptation, by Vamik Volkan, M.D., published by the University Press of Virginia, 1979, pp. 120-144.  A few references to psychiatric theory have not been included.