Table Of ContentRebecca Bryant is Senior Research Fellow in the European Institute
of the London School of Economics and Research Associate of the Peace
Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) Cyprus Centre. She is the author of
Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus (I.B.Tauris)
and The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus (University of
Pennsylvania Press).
Yiannis Papadakis is Associate Professor in the Department of Social
and Political Sciences at the University of Cyprus. He is the author of
Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide (I.B.Tauris), and co-
editor of Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History and an Island in Conflict
(Indiana Univ. Press).
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CYPRUS AND
THE POLITICS
OF MEMORY
History, Community and Conflict
Edited by
Rebecca Bryant and Yiannis Papadakis
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Published in 2012 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
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Distributed in the United States and Canada
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Copyright Editorial Selection © 2012 Yiannis Papadakis and Rebecca Bryant
Copyright Individual Chapters © 2012 Mete Hatay, Stavroula Philippou,
Andreas Panayiotou, Evropi Chatzipanagiotidou, Aybil Göker, Susan Pattie,
Peter Loizos, Mehmet Ratip, Catia Galatariotou, Yiannis Papadakis, Rebecca Bryant
The right of Rebecca Bryant and Yiannis Papadakis to be identifi ed as the
author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof,
may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
International Library of Twentieth Century History, vol. 51
ISBN 978 1 78076 107 7
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A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
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Typeset by Newgen Publishers, Chennai
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Modalities of Time, History and
Memory in Ethnonational Conflicts 1
Rebecca Bryant and Yiannis Papadakis
1. A Critical Comparison of Greek Cypriot and
Turkish Cypriot Official Historiographies
(1940s to the Present) 27
Mete Hatay and Yiannis Papadakis
2. Beyond the History Textbook Debate:
Official Histories in Greek Cypriot Geography
and Civics Curricula 51
Stavroula Philippou
3. Hegemony, Permissible Public Discourse and
Lower Class Political Culture 71
Andreas Panayiotou
4. The ‘Leftovers’ of History: Reconsidering the
‘Unofficial’ History of the Left in Cyprus and
the Cypriot Diaspora 94
Evropi Chatzipanagiotidou
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vi CYPRUS AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY
5. Senses of Belonging and ‘Belongings’ and
Making ‘Home’ away from Home 118
Aybil Göker
6. Imagining Homelands: Poetics and Performance among
Cypriot Armenians 140
Susan Pattie
7. The Fractures of a Struggle: Remembering and Forgetting
Erenköy 168
Rebecca Bryant
8. Correcting the Record: Memory, Minority Insecurity
and Admissible Evidence 195
Peter Loizos
9. On the Need to Belong to a Non-Cypriot History 220
Mehmet Ratip
10. Truth, Memory and the Cypriot Journey towards
a New Past 242
Catia Galatariotou
List of Contributors 265
Index 269
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The papers in this volume were first presented at the Peace Research
Institute Oslo (PRIO) Cyprus Centre conference, ‘One Island, Many
Histories: Rethinking the Politics of the Past in Cyprus’ in November
2008. The editors wish to thank the Chrest Foundation, the Norwegian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and PRIO Cyprus Centre for the financial
support that made that conference and this publication possible. We
would like to thank Panicos Chrysanthou for providing us with the
cover photo.
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INTRODUCTION
Modalities of Time, History and Memory
in Ethnonational Confl icts
Rebecca Bryant and Yiannis Papadakis
The essays in this volume examine a long-term and intractable conflict
in which the narration and memorialisation of history play a signifi-
cant role in the ongoing struggle. Like the island itself, history in
Cyprus has been divided, usually into sides described as Greek and
Turkish, with only a few variations in between. The homogenisation
of Cyprus’ history into the history of two competing sides in a con-
flict not only suppresses the possibility of other histories (and others’
histories) in public discourse, but has led to binary scholarship on the
recent history of the island. Many authors have worked to understand
the emergence of these binary categories, at the same time often unin-
tentionally reinforcing them (cf. Demetriou 2006).
Our goal in this volume is to understand the ways in which, in a
particular conflict, parties to the conflict engage history as an actor
in the struggle, and how the engagement of history in the struggle
makes history itself resistant to questioning and change. Cyprus is
a particularly powerful example of this problem, as it is a divided
island that has been stuck in a stalemate for thirty-eight years – not
the end of war, but its suspension. Life on the island is ‘peaceful’,
to the extent that the past four decades have witnessed only rare
and isolated instances of violence between persons in the two main
parties to the dispute. But despite this lack of violence, or the usual
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2 CYPRUS AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY
signs of war, no Cypriot would say the island is at peace. Rather, the
conflict has continued to be fought on legal and diplomatic terrains
and, as in any conflict, the possibility and anticipation of violence
remain.
As other scholars have noted, the presence or absence of violence
is often the key factor in determining whether or not a conflict has
concluded, hence ignoring the many subtle ways in which a conflict
continues by other means in the absence of violence (Richards 2005;
Ghufran 2006; Perez 2008). In Cyprus, history has become the pri-
mary actor in battles fought on legal and diplomatic terrains; as a
result, narratives of the conflict represent a continuation of the con-
flict. Some of these narratives have been employed to justify or contest
decisions of the United Nations Security Council regarding the con-
flict. More recently, history has been employed in legal disputes over
property initiated by dispossessed owners in both local and transna-
tional courts. In all cases, the actors are aware of the necessity to shape
and employ particular narratives that will resonate both domestically
and internationally, narratives that will in turn shape the course of the
conflict. A common remark by foreign diplomats visiting the island is
how, upon first meeting any leader, they were subjected to the ‘history
lesson’ ordeal.
Writing immediately after the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes
observed that war ‘consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting;
but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is suf-
ficiently known’ (Hobbes 1962: 100). War is not only about violence
but also about the anticipation of violence, and thus involves a dis-
tinct temporality – what we might call a ‘time of war’. Although the
Cyprus conflict is frozen, as though someone has pressed the ‘pause’
button, all parties are aware that the wrong trigger, the wrong button,
might begin the action again; the Cyprus conflict threatens to flare
up again, should any of its participants make the wrong move. This is
what anthropologist Pradeep Jeganathan calls living in ‘the shadow of
violence’ (Jeganathan 2000). Jeganathan deftly deploys the notion of
anticipation to describe the ways in which the anticipation of violence
has defined ‘Tamil-ness’ in southern Sri Lanka; it is similarly possi-
ble to note the ways in which the anticipation of violence defines the
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