Table Of ContentColonial and
Postcolonial Cyprus
Transportal Literatures of Empire,
Nationalism, and Sectarianism
Daniele Nunziata
Colonial and Postcolonial Cyprus
You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living. And
though of magnificence and splendour, your house shall not hold your
secret nor shelter your longing. For that which is boundless in you
abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and
whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (1923)
Daniele Nunziata
Colonial
and Postcolonial
Cyprus
Transportal Literatures of Empire, Nationalism,
and Sectarianism
Daniele Nunziata
St Anne’s College
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-58235-7 ISBN 978-3-030-58236-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58236-4
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For my parents,
My grandparents,
And my brothers.
Preface
Six decades ago this year, the eastern-most island of the Mediterranean
gained its independence from the British Empire. Or rather, it mostly
gainedindependence.Formanypeoplelivingbeyonditsshores,thecolo-
nial history of Cyprus is something of which they have little knowledge,
as though this uncomfortable aspect of the island’s past—and that of the
UK—is a fact best forgotten. The bloody reality of its modern history is
an uneasy truth not marketable for holiday brochures of golden beaches
and turquoise seas. Nonetheless, every Cypriot today still reckons with a
century’sworthofviolenceanddispossession,muchofwhichisrootedin
theisland’sbittercolonialshacklesandextendstothecontinuinglegacies
of it post-independence partition in 1974.
This is also a history which has seldom featured in global histori-
ographies and the many unusual aspects of Cyprus’ geographic, cultural,
and political status have resulted in reservation when studying this loca-
tion. Cyprus cannot be easily moored to pre-existing ideas of geog-
raphy, culture, and politics—or, at least, not with the critical tools which
currentlyexist.Itwasforthisreasonthattheparadigmoftransportalliter-
atures wasgeneratedtounderstandculturefromthisislandinwayswhich
are highly indebted to the existing postcolonial discipline, but which also
aim to expand the latter’s theoretical parameters further. It also serves
to pay due diligence to the often-forgotten colonialist structures which
have informed the development of Cyprus and its modern culture as
vii
viii PREFACE
theyexisttoday—torn,broken,sectarian—asamovetowardssomefuture
resolution.
ThisbookbeganlifeasmydoctoralthesisattheUniversityofOxford.
I was encouraged to commence this project by legal cases which were
brought against the British government from 2012 onwards demanding
justice for the atrocities committed by the empire in the 1950s through
torture and internment camps. This was the ‘Cyprus Emergency’, so-
called to echo similar events in Algeria, Kenya, and Malaya. This act of
resistance resulted in a trickling open of archived documents relating to
this suppressed era of British, Commonwealth, and Mediterranean histo-
ries, and monetary compensation began being provided for victims. In
2019, a mere one million pounds were split between 33 people who
were, as they exposed in their court testimonies, tortured and, in some
cases raped, by British officials. These cases offered to closest Cypriots
have ever been granted in the way of recognition of the island’s violent
politicalpast,fromanyofthecountriescomplicitinitsmodernhistoryof
death and displacement. It was a modicum of the type of process facili-
tatedinpost-apartheidSouthAfricathroughthe1995TruthandRecon-
ciliation Commission. For Cypriots, truth and reconciliation have long
been denied. The silences continue and the very limited publicity which
these recent court cases generated signals further denial and cover-up.
As we move into a decade marked by renewed calls to decolonise
academia,andtorecogniseandcorrectthecoloniallegaciesoftheworld’s
major powers, there is need for comparable action in relation to Cyprus
and Cypriots. This urgency informed my research which sought to apply
the invaluable tools of postcolonialism to study the literature of, and
about, Cyprus in order to investigate the colonial residues which remain
interwoven into its cultural being. Politics and culture feed-off each
other in ways which sustain, or repudiate, social conventions. Words are
the units of both storytelling and government doctrines, and these two
forms regularly blur into one another in a site as politically unstable and
fragmented as Cyprus.
TheislandfirstcameunderBritishcontrolin1878,chosentofunction
asastepping-stoneinthemidstoftheLevant,allowingtheempirefurther
manoeuvrability between the three continents meeting on the shores of
theMiddleEast.Thispoliticaldecisionwasfollowedbyanoutpouringof
Anglophone travelogues about Cyprus and featuring accounts of British
travellersarrivingatthe islandto assessits usefulnessforthe empire.This
began with Samuel White Baker and his Cyprus, As I Saw It in 1879,
PREFACE ix
in which he surveyed the economic merits of controlling the island’s
resources while also passing judgement on the ‘Oriental’, ‘savage’, and
‘primitive’ nature of the ‘native’ islanders and their culture. This was
supported by succeeding newspaper accounts, cartographic reports, and
travellers’ guides which veered from warnings of malarial and venereal
infectionstoromanticaccountsofanEasternsiteofotherworldlinessand
exoticism.
Exactlyonecenturylater(andonlyseveralyearsafterCyprushadbeen
nominally decolonised and then partitioned into incongruous segments),
Edward Said published his famous scholarly resistance to colonialist liter-
ature: Orientalism. Like more than a quarter of Cypriots in the 1970s,
Said was a refugee of the Eastern Mediterranean and his work focused an
unprecedented lens on the ways in which literary depictions of this part
of the world (the ‘Orient’) had been produced according to set motifs
of powerlessness, moral decay, and exotic otherness to justify the need
for paternalistic colonial protection by the imperial powers of Western
Europe. His work forever changed the study of diverse fields—from
literarycriticismtoanthropology—andgavelifetotheframeworkofpost-
colonial theory as it exists today. His notion of the imaginative geog-
raphy ofthecolonialimaginationinfluencedtheconceptofthe imagined
communities of nations (to quote Benedict Anderson) and of the ways
in which these colonial and national spaces of domination create subject
positions of subalternity for its marginalised inhabitants (to paraphrase
Gayatri Spivak).
This field offers an important stepping-off point from which to begin
to consider the situation of Cyprus. This island has been under the sway
of various transcontinental empires since prehistory and has existed as
a unified and independent island for only fourteen years (from 1960 to
1974). This is less than two decades of a lifespan of several millennia,
dating back to the advent of agriculture when the first humans sailed
across from the Levantine mainland approximately 12,000 years ago.
Nonetheless, this claim of complete freedom for fourteen years is a
generous suggestion. It is necessary, here, to return to the opening
sentences of this preface: Cyprus mostly gained independence in 1960.
After formally decolonising the island, the UK retained two sizeable
military bases on the island which remain to this day: the Sovereign
Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia. As their very name suggests, the
sovereignty of the newly ‘independent’ Republic of Cyprus was not
complete. Some was retained by Britain. Despite the decision to include
x PREFACE
a copper-coloured map of the whole island on its national flag, the real
political situation meant that internal borders cut the island into political
territories of independent land and of land still belonging to the British
Empire and its successor nation state. These internal borders increased
dramatically and aggressively in the 1970s. This was, like the ability for
the UK to retain bases on the island, facilitated by the US-backed deci-
sion for Cyprus to be supervised by three Guarantor Powers after osten-
sibledecolonisation.ThesewereGreatBritain,Greece,andTurkey.While
I have said much about the relationship between Cyprus and the UK,
the other two powers have had similarly dominant influences over the
islandinwayswhichsuggestacolonialistrelationshipbetweencentreand
periphery. Greek nationalism and Turkish nationalism are two ideological
forces which have had significant impacts on Cypriots, before and after
1960. Many Cypriots who happen to speak Greek and/or Cypriot Greek
view (or have viewed) Greece as the ‘Motherland’. Similar sentiment can
besaidofCypriotswhohappentospeakTurkishand/orCypriotTurkish
in relation to Turkey. While many citizens of the British Empire and
thentheCommonwealthofNations(ofwhichCyprusisamember)have
considered Britain a ‘Motherland’, or have been indoctrinated with the
idea,Cypriotsalso(orinstead)maintainthistype ofrelationshipwiththe
nations centred around Athens and Ankara.
These nationalisms are not only theoretically fraught, but have had
disastrous effects on islanders. So-called intercommunal conflict between
Greek-speaking Christians and Turkish-speaking Muslims reached a head
on the cusp of 1963 and 1964—stoked on by right-wing nationalists in
Greece and Turkey, and embodying the divide-and-rule tactics of both
British imperialism and Greek and Turkish irredentism. In this time, a
permanent UN Peacekeeping Force was deployed and remains in place
today. In the tragic summer of 1974, a coup organised by Athens’ fascist
government and a military invasion (or, self-styled intervention), lead by
Ankara, resulted in the island became irreversibly partitioned. Around
250,000 Cypriots became refugees or internally-displaced persons, and
thousands more lost their lives. Generally, speakers of Cypriot Turkish
were forced to live only in the north (or move abroad), while speakers of
Cypriot Greek, and the smaller communities who speak Cypriot Arabic
and Armenian, were forced to live only in the south (or abroad). Many
fledtotheformerBritishimperialmetropolisofLondon.Thepartitionis
often referred to as the installation of an apartheid situation of ethnic
