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| ana sayfa > dosyalar > Looking at the house from inside (Chapter Three) |  |
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Chapter Three: Empirical Part
1. The significance of the family for Greek-Cypriots The importance of the family Family celebrations and kinship terms The meaning of names Ritual Kinship 2. Constructing group-consciousness: The
notion of the family Inclusion of Turkish-Cypriots Exclusion 3. Summary 1. Constructing group-consciousness: The
notion of religion Inclusion of Turkish-Cypriots Exclusion of Turks 2. Religion within Greek-Cypriot culture The significance of religion Religious rituals throughout the Orthodox
year Religion and politics 3. Summary 1. The significance of work within Greek-Cypriot
culture Economic situation Motivation for working The significance of working relationships 2. Constructing group-consciousness: The
notion of work Inclusion of Turkish-Cypriots Exclusion of Turks 3. Summary 1. The significance of food within Greek-Cypriot
society The symbolic meaning of food in everyday
life Ritual foods 2. Constructing group-consciousness: The
notion of food Inclusion of Turkish-Cypriots 3.
Summary 1. The house in Cyprus The Cypriot house The meaning of the house in Greek-Cypriot
culture Aspects of the family, of gender and
locality Religious aspects of the house The concept of 'inside versus outside' Work for the house The loss of houses 2. Constructing group-consciousness: The
notion of the house Inclusion of Turkish-Cypriots Exclusion of Turks 3. Turkish-Cypriot houses 4. Summary 1. A note about the notion of locality and neighbourhood 2. Aspects of individual priority and gender 3. About 'The stranger'
I Introduction There are two things that practically
everyone agrees on. First of all, the so-called Cyprus problem is attributed to
outside influences in general, to the intervention of the United States,
England, Greece and Turkey. The causes of and responsibilities for the
conflict which led to the division of Cyprus are very much seen as lying
outside, whatever that means. It is i megali, i.e. the powerful ones,
that are to be blamed solely[41]. Secondly, except
for some very young people, everyone very sharply and decisively distinguishes
between Turkish!-Cypriots on the one hand and Turks from mainland Turkey on the
other referred to as 'those from outside'. The term i turki, the Turks, is used by many people indiscriminately
for both Turkish-Cypriots and Turks, but it becomes clear in the context that
by this they sometimes mean the Turkish-Cypriots and sometimes the Turks. For
the sake of clarity, I will distinguish between Turkish-Cypriots and Turks in
my presentation even when my informants did not. The fact that people often
use the same term for both Turkish-Cypriots and Turks does not imply
that they perceive them as one group. On the contrary: the dichotomy between
Turkish-Cypriots and Turks is ubiquitous. There are two processes at work: the process
of inclusion and the process of exclusion. The point I want to make is that
both processes are based on exactly the same cultural notions and values even
though they work in opposite directions. These notions by which people reason
about both Turkish-Cypriots and Turks, and about themselves, are highly
shared. They are cultural notions. Except for a certain difference due to age
and personal experience, I could not detect any significant difference between
either refugees and non-refugees, men and women, Greek-Cypriots and
Turkish-Cypriots (although I only spoke to few Turkish-Cypriots), or between
people of different political positions or educational background. Compare the
following statements for example: "I tell you, we had excellent relationships,
relationships which did not distinguish between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots.
Those who went there (to the North) cannot bear living with these settlers,
because they chose the worst ones, those from Turkey, they brought them from
prisons They are criminals, and they brought them here " "Look, the Turkish-Cypriots were good. I had
Turkish-Cypriot friends when I was young, we went to their homes, we ate
together and enjoyed ourselves. We were together. You couldn't tell who was
Turkish-Cypriot and who was Greek-Cypriot. The Turkish-Cypriots were our
brothers. ... The Turkish-Cypriots themselves cannot live with the Turks, they
emigrate, ... they are all criminals, those from Turkey." The first statement was made by a politically
left, the second by a politically right person. In Cyprus, being politically
left means being 'cypriocentric'. Cypriocentric people consider themselves first
of all Cypriots rather than Greeks. Being politically right means leaning
towards the opposite, 'hellenocentric' side. Hellenocentric people primarily
identify themselves with Greece rather than Cyprus. However, most people sense
a double identity of being both Greek and Cypriot, only hellenocentric people
emphasize the Greek, while cypriocentric people stress the Cypriot part of
their double identity (for a discussion of these two major ideological camps in
Cyprus, i.e. the hellenocentric and the cypriocentric camp cf. Stamatakis 1994).
The similarity of the way people with very diverse political positions talk
about Turkish-Cypriots and Turks was brought home to me once again when I found
out that one of my best friends I had assumed to be politically left due to the
way he talked about intercommunal relations, turned out to be fairly right-wing
in fact. I had not realized this despite knowing him for many months and having
talked to him about intercommunal relationships several times. I had never
explicitely asked him about his political position, but had come to a
completely wrong conclusion on the grounds of my own understanding of what
being politically left and right implies. "We had no problems at all with the
Turkish-Cypriots, we got on like brothers and sisters. ... There is a very big
difference between Turkish-Cypriots and Turks. Ask the Turkish-Cypriots
themselves The Turks are a barbarian, savage people, they are not
civilized." Compare this statement by a university
graduate who studied abroad to the following one by a housewife who has only
gone through primary education: "We got on very well, very well, there was no
problem at all. We had a Turkish-Cypriot neighbour and she treated me like her
own daughter. It is those from outside who have brought all the bad things, they
are bloodthirsty, they are bad, they kill." I could add other examples illustrating the
lack of difference concerning the perception of Turks and Turkish-Cypriots
between refugees and non-refugees or between people who used to live in mixed
villages (about half of the villages were mixed prior to 1974 [Choisi 1993:
428]) as opposed to those who come from exclusively Greek-Cypriot villages. When asked to recall the time before 1974,
some people mentioned personal experiences with intercommunal violence during
the 1960s. Particularly one Greek-Cypriot man who is married to a born
Turkish-Cypriot woman personally experienced harrassment by both Greek- and
Turkish-Cypriot extremists. Nevertheless, people like him who experienced
ethnically based violence at first hand did not hold different views on the
overall relations between the two communities of Cyprus than people without
such experiences. They agree with everyone else, that basically, the
relationship between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots was one of friendship and
trust. The only significant difference I noticed is
that between people of different age groups whereby I define three age groups
based on personal experience and the lack of it respectively (cf. chapter one
and Appendix A). The first age group consists of those people who can personally remember the time
before intercommunal violence first started in the 1960s; the second group
consists of those people whose first memories stem from exactly that time; and
the third one consists of those people
who are too young to personally remember the time before the division of Cyprus
in 1974. I have to add though that I conducted many more interviews with people
of the first than with people belonging to the second and third group.
Especially persons around twenty (third group) were not half as interested in
talking about the topic I focused on than people who are at least thirty or
forty years old. To get a few interviews with younger people of the second and
the third group (eight in total) took much more effort on my part than getting
many more (nineteen) with people belonging to the first group. This is an
interesting fact in itself. Some young people (born in the 1970s) simply lack
interest in the Turkish-Cypriots, because they do and cannot experience their
absence as a loss. They have never known them and, as things look, never will.
People around forty or above, on the other hand, seize every opportunity to emphatically
speak of the Turkish-Cypriots. I will now describe the overall attitude of the
three age groups in turn. First age group: People with
personal experiences and memories of the Turkish-Cypriots before the troubles
started in the 1960s (this group includes informants born between 1914 and
1956, i.e. persons of the age of 40 and above) always stress how well
they used to get on with each other. The phrases 'we got on very well' (perasame
poli kala) and 'we liked each other very much' (imaste agapimeni)
were endlessly repeated. In order to illustrate this, my informants brought up
examples of interaction and cooperation in daily life, such as a
Turkish-Cypriot tailor in the neighbouring village who always made their
clothes, or a Turkish-Cypriot man who sold the best yoghurt in town, or a
Turkish-Cypriot hairdresser they used to go to. But they also told me about
more intimate contacts such as sitting and drinking together in the local cafe (kafenion), visiting each other
at home and looking after each other's children. More than one woman remembered
a Turkish-Cypriot midwife helping herself or her mother giving birth. These
are relationships between good neighbours and friends. Not only did Turkish-
and Greek-Cypriots get on very well before the problems started, they also
helped each other during times of political conflict in the 1960s.
Greek-Cypriots, people belonging to the first age group remember, used to hide
their Turkish-Cypriot neighbours and friends from Greek-Cypriot extremists and
vice versa. One woman for example recalled how a Turkish-Cypriot man from the neighbouring
village tried his best to save her cousin from being taken prisoner by the
invading Turkish military in 1974 although he did not succeed in the end: "... a Turkish-Cypriot of the village (where
her cousin had been arrested by Turkish soldiers) said to him: 'Don't be
afraid, I am here and I will save you. Where are you from?' He said:' I am from
Prastio (a village in the now occupied areas). He said: 'From Prastio? Are you
... whose son are you? Who is your mother?' He said: 'It is Kyriakos S.' 'Ah,
you are the son of Kyriakos S' They knew him. 'Don't be afraid, I will make
sure that they will let you go'." One man twice told me his 'most significant
experience' which he once made on his way home from school leading him through
Turkish-Cypriot villages. "In 1954, I was twelve years old. It had been
raining so heavily, that the river had risen very much so that we couldn't
cross it where we normally did. There was no bridge and we didn't know what to
do. There was a mill nearby which belonged to a Turkish-Cypriot and we went to
ask him what to do and he sent us to a place where, on the other side of the
river, there was yet another Turkish-Cypriot mill, and this man, Kemali, knew
where one could pass the river and he led us across, that means, he risked his
life for us, because it was raining so heavily He felt obliged, and I will
never forget this. These are experiences!" They were good people one could trust. The
Greek-Cypriots of the first age group perceive the Turkish-Cypriots as sharing
with them mentality, character, way of life and most of culture. They hold the
view that one could not tell any difference between Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots
at all, that they were and acted the same as Greek-Cypriots, that they had 'the
same systems'. The fact that the Turkish-Cypriots cried when they were forcibly
removed to Turkish-Cypriot enclaves in the 1960s and to the North in 1974, is
for many people a vivid memory and proof of just how strong the bicommunal
bonds, based on village, neighbourhood, friendship and in some cases family,
were. These people remember the Turkish-Cypriots as 'Osman', 'Abdullah' and
'Ozgür' they had played with as children. This general attitude stressing the
harmonious relations between Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots was also confirmed to
me by the few Turkish-Cypriots I met (according to Turkish-Cypriot informants,
there are still a few hundred Turkish-Cypriots living in the South and about
twenty in Pafos). Second age group: People who were
born in the 1960s remember things somewhat differently. The first
intercommunal violence broke out in December 1963 and lasted for almost a year.
It spured up again in 1967. Even though these people were only a few years old
at the time, they remember certain events and emotions very clearly. And these
memories are amongst the first ones they have. "I remember that my mother told me that they
got on very well with the Turkish-Cypriots, they didn't have to be afraid, they
felt secure. ... But after 1964, the troubles started and I remember that it
was very dangerous then. We were afraid and when we heard 'Turks', it was as
if you heard: 'the dragon comes to eat the babies', and when they said: 'the
Turks come', we were shaking with fear. I was only little, but because these
were serious matters, I remember them. When I was five or six years old, my
mother went to the market with my brother and sister, they were only babies,
she went to the market to do some shopping and the Turkish-Cypriots in the Mutallos
(the formerly Turkish-Cypriot quarter of Pafos) had started to revolt, and they
grabbed several Greek-Cypriots who had gone to the market and they took them
prisoners, they didn't let them go again. They also threw a bomb which killed
one person in front of my mother's eyes, and my mother said that his intestines
were hanging out, and my mother took the blanket in which she had wrapped my
little brother and she covered the dead person with it ... and my brother and
sister were crying and my mother was very sad. And they kept them for two or
three days and then, the UN came and set them free." Despite these personal memories of fear and
shock, the people I conducted interviews with born in the 1960s were very much
aware that it used to be different. They stressed as much as older people the
overall very good and friendly relationship between Turkish- and
Greek-Cypriots. But they seem to be in two ways about their feelings. On the
one hand, they acknowledge that for a very long time indeed there was no
conflict. This they have heard from their parents and other older people and
therefore they feel that the Turkish-Cypriots must have been good people. On
the other hand, they personally remember being afraid or not being able to
enter the Turkish-Cypriot quarter in Pafos in the 1960s. Therefore they lack
the trust in Turkish-Cypriots the older generation has. In one interview
for example, which I conducted with the 68-year-old mother of a friend of mine,
the conversation was brought round to events in the Mutallos in the
1960s. While the mother stressed the generally harmonious relationship, the
daughter who was also present interrupted her to emphasize that it was very
dangerous to enter the Turkish-Cypriot quarter at that time. To this her mother
did agree, only to emphasize, however, that it was dangerous for Greek-Cypriots
to enter the Turkish quarteronly after
a Greek-Cypriot man had been attacked by Turkish-Cypriots, but that
before there had been no problem to do so. It was only after the daughter's
intervention that the mother acknowledged this fact, but she hastened to put it
into a long-term perspective of good relations. They both recalled the same
time and the same series of events, but for the daughter born in 1964 the feeling
of being afraid is prominent while for her mother, the events in the 1960s are
exceptional and therefore do not challenge her overall perception of intercommunal
relations. For the daughter, Turkish-Cypriots are Turks after all. She has no
trust in them even though she is aware of what her mother and other older
people remember and tell her, and despite good personal memories she has of
Turkish-Cypriot neighbours herself. Third age group: People born in the
1970s have no personal memory whatsoever of the time when Turkish- and
Greek-Cypriots used to live together. Some of them not only have
absolutely no trust in either Turks or Turkish-Cypriots, they lump them
together into one category. One 20-year-old woman explained: "Look, I don't make a difference between
Turkish-Cypriots and Turks, because they are all Turks, for us, they are Turks,
for me... okay, I can say that I feel something like hate towards them ... when
I hear the word 'Turk', I will say: 'Far away', I will not say ... , I would
think about it very hard. Of course, neither the young Turks of my age are to
blame, but... they are our enemies, in everything, generally. ... I don't know
how life used to be, but from what I've heard, the Greek-Cypriots were afraid
to move freely, they were afraid to be on the streets, the Greek was afraid,
the Cypriot, because there were Turks, they stopped and caught them, our
grandparents always lived in fear of meeting a Turk..." Another young woman born in 1972 has just as
negative a picture of both the Turkish-Cypriots and the Turks: "Well, the Turkish-Cypriots are not as bad as
the Turks, they are a little cleaner, but still, generally, they are like the
Turks. Not like us. It is inside of them. They are a people which likes
violence and war, they are underdeveloped, not civilized, they don't have the
European culture. They aren't good people. If you fall over on a street in
Turkey or if you need help, nobody will help you, they would step over you
without offering help. It's not like here where everyone would immediately rush
to help." These two young women have never been in
Turkey, nor have they ever met either a Turkish-Cypriot or a Turkish person. In
order to support their views, both also invoked recent events where a
Greek-Cypriot had trusted a Turkish-Cypriot only to get deceived. Although
these young women adopt extremer positions than many other young people I have
met[42], I have chosen them
in order to illustrate the other end of the spectrum, and because I believe
that their statements are indicative of where the new generations are heading
towards. A number of parents expressed their worries about their children's
attitude lumping Turkish-Cypriots and Turks indiscriminately together. This is
attributed, rightly I think, to formal education. Some young people, not
all of them - but this is something only young people would ever do - do not distinguish between
Turkish-Cypriots and Turks, because to them they are all Turks, period. And
Turks basically means enemy, means savage. They draw the line not between
Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots on the one hand and Turks 'from outside' on the
other as the bulk of the Cypriot people do, they draw it between themselves and
the Turks meaning both Turkish-Cypriots and Turks from the mainland. However,
the point I want to make is that the processes through which this line is
drawn, be it between Greek-Cypriots and the rest or between all Cypriots and
the rest, are the same. They are based on culturally shared notions. In order to illustrate these processes I will
now turn to discuss those notions which are most salient in the interviews I
conducted. Their centrality for the processes of constructing belonging and
group-consciousness amongst Greek-Cypriots was also confirmed to me many times
in brief encounters of all kinds. When necessary I will point to the difference
between people belonging to different age groups as defined above. The notions
I am going to discuss are not clear-cut in reality, but overlap considerably.
For the sake of clarity, however, I will present them separately, although, as
will hopefully become clear in the course of my presentation, they are all
related to each other and acquire their full meaning only in combination. It is not my intention to discuss the truth
of the statements made by my informants. It is my aim to understand what and
how Greek-Cypriots perceive other groups of people, irrespective of whether the
truth is remembered selectively or not, or whether their perception is clearly
biased on the grounds of stereotypical, sometimes evolutionist and even racist
prejudices or not. Therefore, I have refrained from citing literature pro or
contra the statements made and accounts given by my informants. Neither is it my intention to give complete analyses
of the notions I concentrate on. My aim is to show their importance
within the Greek-Cypriot context. Therefore, I will cite the relevant
literature only selectively. I will be somewhat more thorough in the section
about the family and the house because there all crucial notions of
Greek-Cypriot culture join up. II The notion
of the family The first notion I
want to discuss is that of the family. This notion is very salient in the way
Greek-Cypriots speak about Turkish-Cypriots and Turks. They employ it in order
to reason about both. Therefore, if one wants to understand Greek-Cypriots' reasoning
about Turkish-Cypriots and Turks, one must first comprehend what the notion of
the family means and implies for them. It is in this notion as well as in the
last one I will discuss, in the notion of the house that all values which are
important within Greek-Cypriot culture, join up. 1. The significance of the family for
Greek-Cypriots The importance of the family There is an
abundance of literature illustrating the central meaning of the family in
Cyprus, Greece and other Mediterranean cultures[43]. "... There
are no individual actors ... there are only members of families" (Loizos
1975a: 63). Mostly, the nuclear family is also the residential unit in Cyprus,
although elderly parents may live in the same household, too. Nevertheless, the
notion of the family far extends the nuclear family and includes both consanguines
(blood relatives) and affines (relatives through marriage) of different grades.
Before I go on to discuss salient and ubiquitous features of the family in
Cyprus - family rituals, naming practices and ritual kinship (there would be
many more contexts suitable to illustrate the great significance of the notion
of the family) -, let me just call the meaning of the family to mind again by
means of a couple of statements Greek-Cypriots of different ages made about
their feelings concerning the family. "To have a family is
the most important goal of the Cypriots. If you don't establish a family, you
have somehow missed the aim of your life. And in a way it is the natural duty
of human kind, its reproduction. ... It is better to have a big family than a
small one, four to six children. For me, for the Cypriots, it is better to have
a large family. What do you do if you get old without a family? You are alone.
To have a big family is better." One close friend of mine wanted to convince
me to establish, the sooner the better, a family myself: "The family is the most important thing in
life. If I now see my children grow up, if I see my daughter-in-law at the
side of my son, then you can imagine what happiness I feel. Everything I want
is that my daughters, too, will find good husbands who will be at their sides,
more I do not want. To have a family is the greatest meaning of life, if you
don't have family, you lose the most important." "The family plays a very important role for us,
in any case, we are bound to one another by strong ties, not like with you
(abroad) where every person goes their own way after a certain age ... we grow
up with our parents, with our brothers and sisters, and even when we get
married, we are still unified ... like with my brother who has moved away to
live in his wife's house. Me and my sister stayed here together with our mother
and our young brother who is not married yet, because we have built our
houses together here. I wouldn't like my sister to live at another place, I
would feel like ... I am used to being together with her, and I like to be
together with her. We help each other if one of us needs anything." Family celebrations and kinship terms Marriages Kinship in Cyprus is very clearly bilateral[44]. More importantly,
the notion of the family, the ikojenia
encompasses both consanguines and affines. Good and strong relationships
with affinal relatives are just as important as with blood relatives. This I
could observe when the son of close friends of mine started a romantic
relationship with a young woman. After they had been involved with each other
for about nine months, they decided to get married later on. From the moment
the young couple showed some seriousness in their intentions with each other -
though they were not even engaged yet -, the parents of the two got involved in
a very intense contact with each other independently of the young couple. At
the prospect of their children getting married, two whole families start to
engage themselves in establishing family bonds with each other. It is as if two
families, rather than two individuals were going to get married. My friend put
it this way: "For the young couple to be happy, it is
important that their families get on well. From the moment they are married, my
daughter-in-law will be exactly the same for me as my own daughters. I will love
her just as much." To come from a good family is an important
criterion of the choice of a bride or
groom. The tradition of parents arranging marriages calledproxenia is
still practiced in Cyprus, at least in the area of Pafos[45]. However, nowadays
it is more of a proposal than an arrangement between parents, because
ultimately the young people can accept or refuse each other on the grounds of
personal feelings. However, many of the couples around forty years old now had
little say in the choice of their marital partners (cf. Loizos 1975a: 70). To marry off one's children is the parents'
final contribution to their lives and happiness. Daughters, if possible at all,
are given a house in the neighbourhood of their parents. Sons and daughters
alike are given land if available. Having married off their children and having
given them a house and land, parents feel that they have equipped their
children with what is important in life.They have sent them on their way and
can now relax to wait for grandchildren to come who are going to get the same
kind of help from their parents. One's life has been meaningful in that it has
created a new family and a new house. In Salamone & Stanton's words. "... the goal of familial enterpreneurship [is]
tied to the socially desirable goals of marriage, child rearing, and building
for the future of one's children." (1986: 118) The costs for a marriage are shared between
the two pairs of parents and they are very high indeed. People with a joint
monthly salary of 800 Cypriot Pounds (him working as a bus driver and her as
an employee in a hotel for instance) easily spend 5000 Cypriot Pounds for their
child's wedding and a good portion of that for the engagement which almost
always takes place one or two years prior to marriage. But not only the parents
help their children on their way to becoming parents themselves, all relatives,
neighbours, colleagues and friends contribute money as well. Even second and
even third cousins are considered close relatives and attending their wedding
and contributing financially is a social obligation. In the course of the
wedding celebration, first the closest, then more distant relatives pin on
strings of money on the bride's and the groom's clothes dancing a particular
wedding dance accompanied by a particular wedding melody. The young couple may
get up to 30'000 Cypriot Pounds, I was told, as a start for their joined lives
to which a whole community has contributed. After the money has been given in
this way, the mother of the groom blesses the couple with incense. Then the
other people present are blessed, too. The bride and groom are further decorated
with jewellery. "... parents gain or lose social prestige by
the provision they make for their children's marriages. ... married adults work
throughout their lives to gain their position in the prestige system of the
village, which is only finally decided when the marriages of all their children
can be evaluated by their fellow-villagers." (Loizos 1975a: 65) It has become clear that the families of the
newly wed play as important a role as the religious authorities in the overall
ceremony of a wedding. It is the parents who contribute most to the material
and spiritual well-being of their children. However, religion plays an
important role in creating ritual kinship which I will discuss below. Kinship terminology Linguistically, the bride, the nifi,
is not only the bride of the groom, but of his whole family. She is
everyone's bride, she is the nifi of her husband's parents as well
as of his brothers and sisters and other relatives. The same applies to the
groom, the gambros. 'My bride' or 'my groom' may refer to a person's
daughter- or son-in-law as well as to a sister- or brother-in-law. Except for bride and groom themselves, all
affinial relatives, but particularly the couple's respective parents, are
referred to as sympetheri (which may clumsily be translated as
co-parents-in-law). Rather than addressing affinal relatives by their
individual names, female affines are always called sympethera
(co-mother-in-law) and male affines sympetheros (co-father-in-law). This
is true for a little girl addressing her sister's mother-in-law as much as for
her grandparents addressing the same person, for example. It is the family
relationship above the union between two individual people which is
linguistically stressed. Another pair of terms for a particular family
relationship is sygrambros (co-groom) and synifada (co-bride),
for males and females respectively. These terms refer to men who have married
sisters - they are sygambros for each other - or to women married to
brothers - they are each other's synifada. This is a general phenomenon
in Cyprus. Except for married couples, brothers and sisters, and adults
addressing children, related people address each other by the term describing
their kind of relationship rather than by individual first names, also when
talking about someone not present. Only if necessary in order to avoid
confusion is someone's individual name added. For instance, the parents of a
bride would never address the groom's parents by their individual names, but
always by sympethera and sympetheros. Or a daughter referring to
her brother when speaking to their father would often say 'your son' rather
than that son's individual name. Moreover, family relationships are
linguistically extended to persons who are not family in any sense. Children in
particular are supposed to address all adults by a familial term even if
they are not related to them in any way. For example, I was often referred to
as 'the aunt'.Kori meaning 'daughter' is a term used by anyone - men or women, children or adults, family
members or strangers - to address any female person. Similarly, the
expression 'my child' (pedi mu) can be used by anyone to address any
person except for people distinctively older than oneself. Pedia,
literally 'children', is a very common term of address for any group of people,
be they related or not. It may be translated as 'folks'. And finally, mana
mu which literally means 'my mother', is very often used in a situation
where the speaker wishes to express sympathy or affection to the addressee, in
fact, in any kind of informal social encounter. This affectionate term of
address is not confined to any one sex either. Men and women alike may be
called 'my mother'. Parents address their own children as mana mu. An
old man may call a completely unrelated young woman like myself 'my mother'.
Basically, everyone calls everyone mana mu. What the frequent use of these kinship terms
basically shows is that a person is primarily identified as a daughter, a
child, i.e. a member of a family, be it one's own family or another one. Other family celebrations Most people get engaged before getting married.
Like a wedding, an engagement is a celebration including family, friends and
colleagues. As with weddings, the young couple flanked by parents and ritual
kin (see below) pose near the entrance to receive the guests who file along
wishing all of them the long life of the newly engaged or married
couple. A child's birthday is not celebrated amongst
children only, it is a celebration of the whole family and its physical
continuation in which many different generations take part. With children,
birth- and namedays are celebrated alike. With adults, namedays are much more
important than birthdays, except if a person does not have a holy namesake.
Then, the birthday takes the place of the nameday, but most people do in fact
carry the name of a saint. The celebration of a person's nameday is an
important occasion in which a lot of adult relatives, friends and colleagues
join. As with other family celebrations, not only the person who actually
celebrates is congratulated ('may you live'), but her or his relatives as well,
wishing them that person's long life (na su zisi = may she/he live long
for you). It is not the individual which is primarily celebrated, but the
individual as part of a family and, as will become clear below, the individual
as embodiment of the divine. In order to show the full meaning of namedays I
now turn to Greek-Cypriot naming practices. The meaning of names Names are not primarily a mark of a person's
individuality in Cyprus, but they identify and locate the individual in
relation to the earthly and to the divine community. Names embody and combine
two of the most important notions for Greek-Cypriots, that of the family and
that of religion. First names[46] Linking generations The system of naming children works like
this. The first son is named after his paternal grandfather, the first daughter
after her maternal grandmother. The second son is named after his maternal grandfather
and the second daughter after her paternal grandmother. Subsequent children are
given names of both maternal and paternal relatives. This system is very often
actually applied, but of course in practice, there are alterations and
exceptions. First of all the continuation of a name is not bound to gender. A
male name may be, in its female form, used for a daughter. For example, out of
Savas there can become Savulla, or out of Georgia Georgos. The most important
rule, it seems to me, is not that names continue through gender lines, but that
they do continue in the family, normally jumping one generation. Friends of
mine, for example, called their first child, a son, after his paternal
grandmother transforming Evanthia into the male form Evanthis. To the rule of
continuation through the family, there are not many exceptions. Only few
couples chose names for their children on the basis of personal liking rather
than family tradition. One friend of mine explained very proudly to me that for
three hundred years now, the oldest sons of the family have always been called
Dimitris. Through the existence of her or his name in previous and future
generations, through "the potentially endless repetition of names, in
contrast to the finite span of each human life " (Herzfeld 1992: 292), an
individual's linear time is thus transformed into a cyclical notion of time and
life (see Herzfeld 1982). By being embedded into generations before and after
oneself, a person gains permanence. There are basically two reasons for making an
exception, for not naming a child after relatives in older generations. First,
if a member of the family has died young or under tragic circumstances, that
person is often commemorated by giving his or her name to a child. For example,
friends of mine who lost their first son at the age of two named their first
daughter after him. If one of the parents' own parents is already dead when a
child is born, it is normally named after the late parent. Other members of
one's family may be commemorated, too. Second, if a woman has difficulties in
either conceiving, during pregancy or when giving birth, she may decide to name
her child after a particular saint she has asked for help. One woman told me
for example, that she had prayed to St Nicholas to help her when she was giving
birth and that in return, she had promised to name her child after him and to
celebrate his nameday every year. She added that during the labour pains she
had seen her late mother and the image of St Nicholas in her mind's eye.
Everything went fine and she named her son Nikos. Making such exceptions
concerning names is a matter of establishing priorities. In Herzfeld's words: !j"In practice, exceptions to an articulated,
indigenous set of rules are indicative of a conflict between mutually incompatible
ideals, a conflict which the exigencies of actual social experience and the
need to make strategic choices have forced into the open. ... It allows us to
see rules not merely as a set of constraints upon people, but as something that
people actively manipulate to express a sense of their own position in the
social world." (Herzfeld 1982: 288-90) In any case - and this is what really matters
- first names are never neutral to the parents chosing them, but they always
carry meaning, be they related either to one's own family or to 'the family of
the divine', a point I will take up again below. Names do not first of all
celebrate the individual, but the individual's inte-gration within social
structures. As Kenna notes: "Grandparents say that namesake grandchildren
'resurrect' their names and ensure their physical continuity after
death"(1976a: 24[47]). Note the
religious terminology which leads me to the second source of meaning of
personal names: the holy world. But before, I would like to mention yet another
interesting aspect of Greek-Cypriot naming practices ensuring continuity.
Through naming children after both human heros and gods of the Greek mythology
- such as Afroditi, Artemis, Kallypso,
Iliada, Athina, Erato for women, and Apollonas, Omiros, Ermis, Odisseas,
Sophoklis, Sokratis, Adonis, Periklis, Aristofanes, Achilleas for men, - the
'family' of Greeks is recreated, connecting ancient and modern times. Linking humans to the divine The bulk of Greek-Cypriot people have first
names relating to Orthodox saints such as Maria, Georgia, Christina, Varvara,
Thekla, Sofia, Lukia, Irini Panajota, Katerina, Elpida, Anthi, Anna, Agathi,
Paraskevi, Ariadni or Eleni for women and Georgos, Andreas, Michalis, Marios,
Dimitris, Pavlos, Petros, Christos, Neofytos, Themistoklis, Ilias, Joannis,
Savas, Stavros, Chrisanthos, Alexandros or Jakovos for men. People with such a
name celebrate on the day of their holy namesake. These days run throughout the
year, but are concentrated in the Christmas and Easter periods. Women called
Maria or men called Marios celebrate five times a year on dates referring to
different stages in the life of the Panagia which, following Peristiany
(1992: 113), I prefer to translate as the All Holy rather than the Blessed
Virgin Mary. Through naming people after orthodox saints, they become earthly
embodiments of the divine and of religious values. Some priests, I was told,
reject to baptize children carrying mythological or foreign names such as
Laura. However, there are priests themselves with non-Orthodox names. That
names are linked to religious identity is also illustrated by the fact that
convertion from Islam to Christianity is always accompanied by a change of name
(cf. Maratheftis 1989:163). The two born Turkish-Cypriot women I know in Pafos
have both been renamed Maria when they became Christians. Typically, the legendary Archbishop and
President Makarios is commemorated on his nameday rather than any other[48]. In Orthodoxy,
people holding religious offices such as priests and bishops are understood as
spokesmen rather than representatives of the divine[49]. As people in daily
life, they remain human and earthly. The idea of an infallible pope for example
is alien to Orthodox thinking. Everyone who has been in Greece or Cyprus
will know that a lot of people have the same names. This is so precisely
because first names are not a matter of free choice but a means of binding an
individual to other generations and to the world of the divine. One might
assume now that there is a lot of confusion as to who is actually addressed by
a particular name two or more people in the same room might share. This is,
however, not the case because, as mentioned above, more often than not, people
address each other by familial terms rather than by their individual names. Surnames The term 'family name' is a misnomer in the
Greek-Cypriot context, because both first and surnames are family-related. Epitheto,
surname, literally means 'something added'. A person is normally not addressed
by the equivalent of Mr. Smith for instance, but as Mr. Andreas or Mr.
Christos. Surnames are reserved for very formal occasions only. As with 'individual'
names, surnames have a generational as well as a religious aspect. Linking generations I got different and contradictory
information as to how surnames are passed on through the generations. Some
people said that a family's surname is passed on in the same way it happens in
Western Europe, i.e. from father to son. Other people claimed that the surname
of a patrilineal family changes with every generation. This system, I was
told, goes like this. Keep in mind that for the moment I am talking of men
only. I will touch on the gender aspect below. A male person's full name
consists of, first, his surname which is his grandfathers first name
transformed into a surname (put into the gerund); second, his own personal name
taken over from preceding generations; and third, an additional first name
which is the gerund of his father's first name. So in fact, surnames are not
much different from first names. Both, a man's surname and his additional first
name are teknonyms, identifying him as 'the grandson of such and such' and 'the
son of such and such'. And since a boy often gets the grandfather's first name
as his own and the same grandfather's firstname in the gerund form as his
surname, a lot of men have names such as Georgos Georgiu, Alexandros Alexandru
or Savas Sava. Surnames are, in this system, not fixed, but are constantly
changing according to Ego's position. Let me give an example of the
traditional Cypriot naming system. Suppose a man is called Sava Neofytos Klitu,
i.e. the grandson of Savas, Neofytos,
the son of Klitos. Suppose further that
every male individual gets a new
first name. The following patrilineal generations would be called as
follows: generation grandfather's
name Ego father's
name first Sava Neofytos Klitu second Klitu Marios Neofytu third !ab Neofytu Alexandros Mariu fourth Mariu Dimitris Alexandru fifth Alexandru Andreas Dimitri Through the Greek-Cypriot naming system at
least three patrilineal generations are linked. Every male Ego is linked to two
generations before him, through his grandfather's and his father's name. Suppose now, and this is the case more often
than one might assume, the first son also gets his grandfather's first name.
Then it would look like this: generation grandfather's
name Ego father's
name first Neofytu Neofytos Klitu second Klitu Klitos Neofytu third Neofytu tab Neofytos Klitu fourth Klitu Klitos Neofytu The result is that every other male
generation of first sons has exactly the same name. Thus, the generations are
linked through an endless chain of names. In most cases, names are a mixture of the two
models just described. If one considers the fact that male names are sometimes
derived from female ones or from relatives other than the grandparents or from
saints, it becomes clear that there are not all that many cases - though there
are - which would fit in neatly into the second model. However, the
fact remains that both first and surnames are passed on through the generations
thus linking them all together. Having different information I inquired
further as to which system is actually applied, the West European one or the
one just described in which surnames constantly change. As it turned out, both
systems are still in use. The confusion exists because there is no obligatory
rule concerning surnames. Some people who told me that the Cypriot system -
i.e. the one with altering surnames - was the right one either do not use it
themselves - in this case they assumed that I was after the traditional system
- or they abbreviate the father's first name to its initial (this might be an
americanism), for example: Klitu N. Klitos. Accepted is whatever a person
choses. Under certain circumstances, one and the same person can have different
surnames in the course of her or his life. A friend of mine told me for example
that his official surname first used to be Antoniadis. Later, he chopped off
the end and called himself Antoniu, but in the military he was officially
called Antonis. People interpreted the pros and cons of the traditional system
differently. One man maintained as a pro that he would not like identifying
with people many generations back whom he never knew. With the traditional
naming system, one only identifies with one's immediate predecessors, one's
grandfather and father. A contrary view was held by another man who prefers the
new system, as he called it, because it maintains family lines, because a man's
predecessors do not disappear. The naming system is very flexible and open
to all sorts of changes in general whether it be with first or with surnames as
illustrated in the following examples. One friend's maternal grandfather
apparently, the story goes, very much liked to eat salad which was why he was
called Salata by everyone. With time, Salata became the official family name, a
fact I found hard to believe but which was proven to me by my friend showing me
his identity card with both of his parents' names on it. His mother's maiden
name actually read Salata. Another friend told me that his mother was born on
St Vasilis' day, on the first of January. She was baptized Thekla. After her
birth the family's cows suddenly died which was interpreted as a sign of the
anger of St Vasilis because the girl had not been named after him. Henceforth,
she was, in all official papers, called Vasiliki. I have so far ignored the gender aspect of
the Greek-Cypriot naming system. Obviously, the whole system is clearly
patrilineal and patriarchal. A girl assumes her father's surname until she
marries and afterward she takes on her husband's surname which itself is
derived from male predecessors only. While prior to marriage, a woman is called
after her grandfather (surname) and her father (additional first name) having
thus two teknonyms in her full name as men do - for example a young woman may
be called 'Georgiu Savulla Theoklitu', i.e. Savulla, the daughter of Theoklitos
whose grandfather was Georgos' -, after marriage she adopts her husband's
surname (which is derived from his grandfather's first name). She may
additionally keep her father's first name (in the gerund form, Theoklitu in my
example) thus being identified as the wife of such and such and the daughter of
such and such. However, many women - and this has nothing to do with a feminist
perspective - keep their maiden surname for years or for their entire life.
Looking at the situation in the 1920s, Saint Cassia (1982: 650) notes that the
women used to keep their father's surname after marrying. Apparently, this
practice has been going on until today, at least in some cases. I know of a
married woman for example who did not take on her husband's surname for twenty
years after marrying him. She still had her maiden name in her passport until
one day she had to get a new one and decided to adopt her husband's surname. I
also heard of another woman who kept her maiden name all her life. But the
naming system is patriarchal in that people are exclusively named after
fathers and grandfathers. Linking humans to the divine As explained above, a lot of surnames are
derived from first names[50]. And since most
first names are derived from Orthodox saints, the surnames are, too. But there
is yet another kind of religious attachment through surnames, this being the
prefix Hadji which is particularly interesting because originally, it is
a title given to Muslims who have pilgrimaged to Mecca. The Greek-Cypriots have
transformed this Muslim title (meaning 'pilgrim') into a Christian one given to those who have
pilgrimaged to the Holy Land, have visited the Holy Sepulchre and have been
baptized in the Holy River Jordan[51]. Hadji
becomes the first part of the surname and is passed down the generations. There
are a lot of surnames beginning with Hadji in Cyprus, such as
Hadjipavlou, meaning: the grandson of Pavlos a predecessor of whose family has
pilgrimaged to the Holy Land. In conclusion one can maintain that first
names as well as surnames combine aspects of generational and religious
continuation. Let me finish this section about the
generational and religious aspects of names with an anecdote. One family I know
is called Hadjiomorfos, omorfos meaning 'pretty'. The story goes that
one of the family's predecessors was very pretty which is why everyone called
him the omorfos. Soon it became
the family's surname. When a generation later his son travelled to the Holy
Land, he was entitled Hadji. Ever since, the family's surname has been
Hadjiomorfos, i.e. the pretty one who travelled to the Holy Land. In this case
though, the official name has not changed, but nobody knows this family other
than the Hadjiomorfos. Ritual kinship The second most important kind of
relationship in Cyprus is ritual kinship, kumbaria[52]. Through baptism,
non-kin are transformed into quasi-kin or ritual kin. Through baptizing a
child, one becomes a spiritual co-parent to the child's physical parents. The
two pairs of parents address each other as kumbaros (male form) and kumera (female form). Basically, everyone can
become one's co-parent. Practically, friends and close family members such as
brothers and sisters are often involved in this kind of relationship. Friends
who are kumbari (plural of kumbaros)become
quasi-family, not family in the sense of consanguinity and affinity, but most
definitely in a spiritual and an emotional sense. That kumbari are like
kin is recognizable in the fact that the same rules of exogamy apply to them as
to physical kin. Marriages between children of parents who are in a kumbaria
relationship through baptism are forbidden (cf. Saint Cassia 1982: 645).
Because godfathers and godmothers are ritual fathers and mothers, their
children are like brothers and sisters and therefore cannot marry each other.
Also, persons with the same godparent are considered ritual siblings and may
therefore not marry each other. In order to avoid the hypothetical case of two
people falling in love who are, unwittingly, ritual sister and brother, one
only baptizes either girls or boys[53]. People who stand as witnesses to a couple
getting married also become their kumbari , but this relationship is not
as important as kumbaria through baptism and most of all, it does not
have consequences in terms of exogamy. Children of kumbari through
wedding may marry each other, because they are not considered ritual siblings.
If they were, the rule of exogamy would exclude a lot of potential marriage
partners, because a couple may have up to a few dozens of kumbari (men) and kumeres
(women) standing witness to their marriage. The rule of exogamy due to kumbaria
through weddings only applies to a couple's first kumbaros and first kumera
who play a more important role, because ideally, these two people should become
godfather (tatas) to the first and godmother (nunna) to the
second child respectively born to the couple to whose wedding they were
standing witness thus becoming their co-parents. The term kumbaros - this applies more
to men than to women in my experience - is also used to address friends or even
people one does hardly know. At first, I was very confused as to who exactly is
a kumbaros of whom, because sometimes kumbare (vocative of kumbaros)
is used as a general form of address. Thus like with kori (daughter), pedi
(child) and mana mu (my mother), the quasi-kin relationship of kumbaria
is extended to people to whom it does not actually apply. This chapter has made clear how much the
notion of the family is bound up with the notion of religion which I will
discuss in the next chapter. After having discussed the significance of
the family for Greek-Cypriots, I will now proceed to show how the notion of
the family is employed in their reasoning about both Turkish-Cypriots and
Turks. 2. Constructing group consciouness: The notion of the
family The notion of the family provides both ways
of inclusion and exclusion. I will
first show how the Turkish-Cypriots are conceptually included into the group of
insiders on the grounds of the Greek-Cypriot notion of the family. Then I will
describe how the Turks from mainland Turkey are excluded on the grounds of
just that notion. Inclusion of the Turkish-Cypriots Weddings One point that was endlessly repeated and
emphasized is the fact that Greek-Cypriots used to go to Turkish-Cypriot
weddings and vice versa. Almost always, whether in interviews or on other
occasions this was mentioned as one of the very first things. !"... when the Turkish-Cypriot gets married,
the Christian will go to his wedding, when the Greek-Cypriot marries, the
Turkish-Cypriot will come, and we also have cases when the person playing the
violin was a Turkish-Cypriot at a Greek wedding. ... my son plays violin and
the father of his teacher played lute and he told me that he went to weddings
where there was a Turkish violinist." "We also went to Turkish weddings, certainly.
When there was a wedding, a Turkish wedding we went and when there was a Greek
wedding the Turkish-Cypriots came. And they had weddings just like the
traditional Cypriot village wedding with violins, with ... they shaved the
groom ... exactly the same Once we went to a Greek wedding and the barber who
shaved the groom was a Turkish-Cypriot! It was the same in everything, the
preparations, the same dances, when they danced around the bed, the same. Only
they did not go to church, the Hodja came, ... yes, only that they didn't go to
church." "At that time there weren't ten couples dancing
together, there was only one dancing the Cypriot wedding dance, a
Turkish-Cypriot and a Greek-Cypriot. And later when the clothes were passed
round, some were Turkish-Cypriots others Greek-Cypriots." Traditionally, both the wedding clothes of
the groom and the dress of the bride were passed around in the course of a
particular dance before the couple was dressed in them. "We celebrated our weddings together in the
village. We (the Greek-Cypriot women) went to adorn their brides, they adorned
us, we invited them with a candle. We went to their houses, to every family
and we brought the candles and said: ' I invite you to the wedding of my son,
of my daughter.' And all of them came." Love relationships Even though only few Greek-
and Turkish-Cypriots married each other, they had of course love relationships.
One very interesting example is that of a Greek-Cypriot man married to a born
Turkish-Cypriot woman of the same village. Before they got married they already
had six children together. When in the 1960s they started to get teased in
school because of their Turkish mother, then Ementé decided to get baptized.
She became Maria and got married to her partner immediately afterwards.
Particularly interesting is the attitude of her brothers and sisters which her
husband described like this:par "When I proposed to her father - I had
Turkish-Cypriot friends who interceded for me - he agreed with our
relationship and decided that I was going to be his son-in-law. 'It doesn't
matter (that he is a Christian), his parents are good, our daughter shall live
with him.' This went on like this until my father-in-law's death in 1954. We already
had four children. After his death, arguments started with my brothers- and
sisters-in-law. They didn't want to give us any land. Then Maria decided to
get baptized. And we married in 1965. The day my brothers- and sistes-in-law
and her cousins heard that she had got baptized and that she had become Maria
and that we had got married, they started to embrace us brotherly! Much more
than before. Things changed immediately. They changed their opinion
immediately. Since we had been married there weren't any problems anymore, and
they started to love us." The reason why this mixed couple had not been
accepted at first by the Turkish-Cypriot relatives apparently had more to do
with the fact that they were living together and having children without being married
than with him being Greek-Cypriot and Christian. This examples hints at shared
cultural values, at a shared notion of the family between Turkish- and
Greek-Cypriots (and other Mediterranean people). Ritual kinship The same man who talked about his marriage to
his born Turkish-Cypriot wife recalls the Turkish-Greek relationships in his
village like this: "And most people said kumbaros to each
other. That's just how friendly we were with each other. We didn't have any
differences, uncle Lambros, uncle Abdullah... without misunderstandings." A 45-year-old man told me at least on three
differnt occasions that when he got married in 1970, he had three
Turkish-Cypriot kumbari. Of one of them he knows that he is abroad now,
the other two left in 1974. And finally, a 55 year-old refugee woman
remembered her Turkish-Cypriot neighbours as follows: "We only had few Turkish-Cypriots in our town,
but opposite my house there was one Turkish-Cypriot woman who was like a mother
for me, she practically brought me up. ... And when I got married, her son
became my kumbaros." Having in mind the
significance of kumbaria relationships and their social implications, it is clear that the above
accounts document very close, family-like bonds between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots,
although the relationship of kumbaria between Greek- and
Turkish-Cypriots could only be established through weddings, not through
baptism. Obviously, the Orthodox church would not have accepted a Muslim as a
godfather or -mother to a Christian child. But Turkish-Cypriots nevertheless
used to attend Orthodox christianings. On the other hand, the Greek-Cypriots,
at least in mixed villages, would join Muslim circumcision ceremonies (this was
mentioned only by one woman, however). The metaphor of the family The notion of the family was very often
extended to the Turkish-Cypriots in a metaphorical way. Statements such as 'we
were like sisters', 'we were like a family' or 'she was like a mother to me'
were part of many interviews with older and younger people. "All Cypriots have the right to live in Cyprus.
It is just like with a family. Would it be right for me to only give one
daughter or one son land, if I had enough? Everyone has the right to live
here." Another man metaphorically paralleled the
relationship between Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots to that of a marriage which
must be saved for the sake of the children, the future generations: "We don't have a future unless we live one next
to the other with the Turkish-Cypriots. Imagine a married couple who argues.
Maybe they would say that they were going to get divorced, and their friends
would recommend them not to do so and they would say: 'It is not good that you
want to divorce', and since they also have children, they understand that they
have to find a solution in order to save the family. This is what we must do
with the Turkish-Cypriots today." Here is an impressionistic portrait of the
man who made the above statement. When he was young, he did not use to think
of the Turks as human beings. He used to
be - these are his own words - very extreme. When the war happened in
1974, he was taken prisoner by the Turkish army at the age of twenty-three. He
spent two months in Turkish prisons. It was there, being a prisoner of the Turkish
army, that he realized that Turkish people are human beings just as himself.
Ironically, he got to know them as people rather than as Turks being their
prisoner. He recently published his experiences as a prisoner writing about
human gestures by Turkish officers as well as about their powerlessness. It was
in prison that he started to write poems. The following one, written in 1974
shortly after he was released, won a price at a student competition at the
University of Athens in 1975 . ADERFIKH NOTA Mecmet se luphq1hka Mehmet I felt sorry for you otan trabouses to loupi sfikta when you tightened the belt pisqaggona, gia na me deseis.
to strap my hands behind my back. Otan sklh3982ra me ktuphses sto koutello
When you strongly hit my forehead me tis groqies sou. with your fists. To blemma mou se tromaxe,
qumam!ai, My look frightened you, I remember, phre th dunamh sou kai thn
epnixe, it took your strength and drowned it mes sto pikro parapono mou. in my bitter complaint. Me koita-3976xes neurika, me narkwmenh skeyh,
You looked at me nervously, with numb thoughts, ki exallas xanalaktises ta spasmena pleura mou.2e and frantically,
you once again kicked
on my broken ribs. Ponesa, ma den orgisthka
Mecmet,
I was in pain , but I did not get angry, Mehmet, Ta dakria mou htan gia
sena. my tears were for you. Den hmou-3986n sklabos sou ... I was not your slave ... H sklabia baraine kai sena, Slavery burdened you too, sthn idia agora mas xepoulhsane, they sold us on the same market, Meecmeeet. Meehmeeet. (Artemhs Antwniou)[54] (Artemis
Antoniou 1974 ; my translation[55]) This is how the Turkish-Cypriots are included
by means of the Greek-Cypriot notion of the family. The Turkish from the
mainland on the other hand are excluded on the grounds of just that notion. Exclusion Lack of respect for
ancestral sites One thing that was endlessly stressed was the
destruction of ancestral sites by the Turks. These being first of all
cemeteries in the now occupied North, the former homeland of many thousand
Greek-Cypriot refugees, and archaeological sites both in the North and in Asia
Minor. Certainly hellenocentric people, but a lot of cypriocentric people as
well consider themselves the descendants of the ancient Greeks. As mentioned
above, most people sense a double identity of being both Greek and Cypriot.
Consider the following statements by two fairly hellenocentric persons. (Recall
the creation of the Greek nation as a family by means of naming children after
ancient heros and gods.) "To tell the truth, I don't feel myself to be
Cypriot, I feel that I am a Greek of Cyprus. ...You are obliged to follow your
people, because a people is like a river which flows. And if you try to swim
against this river, it means that you are lost. You are obliged to swim with
your own river. ... ethnos means tradition, means history. And a human being
who has arrived at a particular moment has a long way behind him, he has
continuity, that's why it is a mistake for me to say that I am 45 years old, I
am 5000 years old, just like the history of my people. Because what the old,
the ancestors have lived penetrates me without me noticing it." "I tell you, unfortunately, the Turks don't
respect anything, those from Turkey, neither crucifixes and cemeteries, nor old
things and bones." And here is a statement of a very clearly
cypriocentric and politically left elderly man talking about the losses caused
by the Turkish invasion in 1974: "Even though we are much better off here than
the Turkish-Cypriots in the North, we cannot forget what we lost: our
properties, our houses, the tombs of our grandfathers, we cannot forget these
things." ! The destruction of archaological sites and of
cemeteries is an attack on one's predecessors, on the family itself, on past
and present generations. It violates one of the most fundamental notion in
Cyprus, that of the family. Rapes Men as often as women claimed that the Turks
not only raped a lot of women during different times of war with Greece or
Cyprus, but also that they rape their own women. Moreover, they are believed to
be violent to their own family members, i.e. inside the house. The issue of
rape also hints at the Greek-Cypriot notion of the family being attacked. The
shame brought upon a woman who is raped not only affects herself, but her whole
family. It is the family honour[56] and its integrity
which is at stake. "A woman's body thus becomes the symbol of
family integrity and purity and, more generally, of society as a whole"
(Dubisch 1986b: 210-11). Through rape, a woman's body is polluted. The
pollution of her body is conceptually linked to the pollution of her entire
family and of the house (see below). Rape is not only a physical violation of
women, but also a mental and symbolic violation of the fundamental value of
family integrity, and thus an attack on the whole Greek-Cypriot society. Other aspects of exclusion In the following example Turkish-Cypriots,
not Turks, are excluded on the basis of the notion of the family. The account
was given to me by a now 41-year-old woman from a formerly mixed village
recalling what happened to her sister as a result of intercommunal violence in
the 1960s. I will take up her differentiation between Turkish-Cypriots from her
own village and from 'outside' again in the concluding chapter. For the moment,
note the way she uses the notion of the family to distinguish between in- and outsiders,
between good and bad. "The Turkish-Cypriots from the neighbouring
village, not from our village, they were good, but those from the other
Turkish-Cypriot village they attacked us, and they shot at our door. My mother
was six months pregnant and gave birth early becauses she was so afraid." She continues her story telling me how that
baby was handicapped and how this caused a lot of problems for her mother and
the whole family. Finally, her sister
died through a series of tragic events at the age of twenty-six. She
concludes: "And all of this happened to us because of the
Turkish-Cypriots from this other village. If that had not happened, she would
have been married now, wouldn't she?" What she wants to express with her final
remark is that she has been deprived of reaching one of the most important
goals in life for Greek-Cypriots, to marry and to establish a new family, to
ensure the continuation of the family. The attacking Turkish-Cypriots have
deprived her of being a person in its fullest sense. Finally, one 20-year-old woman mentioned the
fact that Muslim men, and thus Turkish-Cypriots too, can have several wives as
a factor separating Greek- from
Turkish-Cypriots, because having more than one wife is of course incompatible
with the Greek-Cypriot idea of marriage and family. 3. Summary To summarize, Greek-Cypriots employ the
notion of the family both to include the Turkish-Cypriots in the group defined
as insiders and to exclude the Turks (and rarely Turkish-Cypriots) from it. The notion of the family is one of the most
fundamental ones in Cypriot culture. The family includes both consanguines and
affines and is generally considered to be of crucial importance for the
well-being of an individual. Through family rituals, naming practices and
ritual kinship, the individual is firmly placed within a network of meaning
referring to the earthly as well as to the divine family. II The notion of religion 1. Constructing group-consciousness: The notion of
religion One of the recurring
themes in interviews as well as on other occasions was religion. By this I do not
mean religion in the sense of 'we are Orthodox Christians, they are Muslims,
that's why we have a problem'. Nobody ever said anything like that. On
the contrary, people across age groups, political positions and educational
backgrounds agreed that religion is no obstacle for two religious communities
to harmoniously live together. One man for example recalled having gone to the
Tekke in Larnaka, an important Muslim holy site together with Turkish-Cypriots
as a child. A baptized born Turkish-Cypriot woman remembered that for forty
years the sexton of the church in their mixed village used to be a
Turkish-Cypriot, i.e. a Muslim. The fact as such that someone has a different
religion than one's own is not seen as being of any importance at all. What
counts is the human being, the person, regardless of their creed and faith.
Not once I heard the opposite. "God does not distinguish between people or
religions. When Christ came to earth he looked at all people in the same way.
He did not distinguish between peoples or races." !0Let me quote what
one man said at the very beginning of our interview: "I once heard a most wise statement from my
mother I have never read in any book. She said about a Turkish-Cypriot who had
died: 'God may make him happy in his faith.' The Turkish-Cypriot was a friend
of the family, and if someone is a good person then we say in Greek 'God may
make him happy' which means God may make him happy in the life after where he
is. This wish we only make for good people. And this has made a great
impression on me, what my mother had said, 'in his faith', which means: may God
make him happy in accordance to what he believed and not in accordance
to what we believe. This statement I find very wise." !dctlpar And this is what one
of the two young women I referred to in the previous chapter said when asked
about the role of religion concerning intercommunal relations: "It's not because of their religion. Next door
to my aunt there lives a Syrian family, we are very friendly with, they come to
our house ... we are friends, but, okay, if they were Turks, I don't know, how
it would be then, I don't know, if ..." The only occasion religion was sometimes
talked of as a factor separating Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots was when people
regretted that, due to their respective religious laws, Turkish- and
Greek-Cypriots could not marry. Marriages between Muslims and Christians were
only possible if either the Muslim partner became Christian or the Christian
Muslim. Mixed marriages were therefore rare, but not unheard of. During an
interview with an approximately 40-year-old woman I asked her whether she
considered religion to play any role concerning the relationship between
Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots. She first answered that religion did indeed cause
problems for their relationship. When I inquired about what exactly the
problems were, she explicated: "I believe that it didn't hinder them simply
living together. But since they were not able to establish families..., if you
establish families together you also establish closer relationships, don't
you? If you establish a family, your family together with mine, then
relationships will develop with your relatives, with my relatives. But if you
cannot say 'I will join your family', you will distance yourself more and
more." The lack of family bonds between Turkish- and
Greek-Cypriots was commented on by an elderly man like this: "They (the Turkish-Cypriots) told us openly
that it was a mistake on their forefathers' part having started this Turkish
community, because had they not been Muslims they would have become our sympetheri
(co-parents-in-law). We would have married each other, that's how good our
relationships were." As many other Greek-Cypriots, this man
believes that the Turkish-Cypriots are in fact Greek-Cypriots who converted to
Islam to avoid the high taxes imposed on Christians by the Ottomans. One woman born in 1960 was sceptical to
marriages between a Muslim and a Christian because she feared that the children
would not get baptized. These concerns about
religious difference are not caused by the Turkish-Cypriots being Muslims as
such. The Greek-Cypriots are concerned that, as a consequence of the
Turkish-Cypriots' being Muslims, family bonds are difficult to establish and
that children may not get baptized. Having the importance of the ikojenia
in mind, it is understandable why Greek-Cypriots view the lack of family bonds
as a problem. However, religion is
a crucial aspect in the process of constructing group consciouness, of
inclusion and exclusion, of belonging. I will first look at religion as an
integrative theme. Inclusion of Turkish-Cypriots Religious
feasts On countless
occasions and without having mentioned religion myself I was told that Greek-
and Turkish-Cypriots used to celebrate the religious feasts of both communities
jointly. They would also help each other out with herding animals during their
respective celebrations. Turkish-Cypriots would herd the Greek-Cypriots' sheep
and goats during Easter and Christmas, while the Greek-Cypriots would do the
same for the Turkish-Cypriots during Ramadan, and in the evenings they would
celebrate together. Let me quote one amusing example in which a 40-year-old man
recalls his friendship with a Turkish-Cypriot he spent a lot of time with
during his childhood and youth: "When for us it was Christmas, we joked and we
asked him to come to our house to eat pork which of course they are not allowed
to eat, because their religion forbids it, and we made jokes, you know ...
'why don't you come to my house to eat pork and drink wine'. " He roguishly laughed
telling me this. The way he could tease his Muslim friend about religious rules
itself hints at an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. Believing Particularly one
Orthodox saint is said to have been believed in and worshipped by the
Turkish-Cypriots, too. This is Apostle Andreas. There lies an important
monastery on the now Turkish occupied Karpasia peninsula dedicated to him which
often was the destination of joint excursions after a season' work picking
citrus fruit (from September until May) on plantations where Turkish- and
Greek-Cypriots, mostly women, used to work side by side. "They brought us to Kakopetria (a mountain
village) where we went to the place of pilgrimage of a saint and they ... the
Turkish-Cypriots wanted to go to the Panagia (the All Holy) of the Kykko
monastery[57]. One
Turkish-Cypriot woman said to us: 'Let's go to the Panagia of the Kykko
monastery. Well, the Turkish-Cypriot doesn't believe, does he? He is a Muslim.
But she wanted to go to the Kykko monastery! In order to go to the Panagia,
she believed in the Panagia. Later they brought us to the church of St
John the Baptist. And we went, you will not believe this, they crossed
themselves the way we do and prayed, the Turkish-Cypriots! They went inside the
church, crossed themselves and prayed! ... They prayed at our icons! They also
believed in our religion! Yes, they were Muslims, but they believed. And in
Apostle Andreas, the Turkish-Cypriots, the Turks of Cyprus, they believed in
the Apostle Andreas very much. He is the saint they believe in... whichever
Turkish-Cypriot you ask ..." The woman who said
this is 41 years old. She grew up in an exclusively Greek-Cypriot village with
close contacts to the neighbouring Turkish-Cypriot village. Herself and her
family are now refugees. They have lost house and land. Together with her
husband, she has worked very hard over the past twenty years in order to build
a new house for themselves. This task has very recently been completed. She
suffers from the fact that her family is spread all over Cyprus now and that,
being a refugee, she will not be able to give her children any land and her
daugther a house. She has lost her first child when it was two years old and
she attributes her son's death to someone having, though unwittingly, cast the
Evil Eye on him. She is a devout Orthodox Christian and follows religious
practices throughout the year. Good people can have the Evil Eye without
wanting to, because one unwillingly gets caught by it. If this happens, one may
cause harm to other people when looking at them or talking about them. A
variety of charms against the Evil Eye are worn by many Greek-Cypriots,
particularly blue beads are thought to protect the wearer against evil. The
belief in non-Christian forces such as the Evil Eye merges with Christianity in
a number of areas in Cyprus[58]. Even a 67-year-old
man who has been a communist and atheist all of his life - he makes slightly
fun of his wife and other old women going to church every Sunday - chose the
fact that the Turkish-Cypriots went along with their Greek-Cypriot colleagues
to the monastery of the Apostle Andreas and that they prayed there as an
example to illustrate the unity of Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots. The same point
was made by yet another (approximately 45-year-old) man who says of himself
that he does 'not believe in the church'. He claimed that while the
Greek-Cypriots spent the entire day of such a workers' excursion to the monastery
in the kafenion, the Turkish-Cypriots would pray and worship the
Christian saint for which he gives them credit. One woman who comes
from a formerly mixed village explained to me that the Turkish-Cypriots believe
the Panagia to have been a Muslim originally because of the way she is
dressed which resembles much more the traditional clothing of a Turkish than
that of a Greek woman. The Turkish-Cypriots believed in the Panagia ,
she continued, as well as in the village's saint (Saint Barbara) to the church
of whom they donated icons and chairs. Not only did the Turkish-Cypriots
worship Orthodox saints, they are even said to have believed more than
many Greek-Cypriots[59]. One woman was
particularly eloquent on this. " There was one Turkish-Cypriot in our village
... this man ... it had been raining since the morning, slowly, slowly, and in
the afternoon it was raining very heavily and the river rose, but he had not
reckoned with this ... and as he came to the river there was a lot of water
... and he sent his goats and his donkey into the river, and his cows and he
said: 'Holy Panagia, help me to cross the river.' And there was something
like a gust of air, he told us, and it took him out of the river, and he was
wet, and he went to thank her, he went to the church, and he told us about it
when he later came to the kafenion, ... you know, they believed very
strongly! They believed more than us! And his wife went, too, and she had a
bath beforehand, she said that one must take a bath immediately before one
enters the church in order to be clean, and she took off her shoes in front of
the church and she worshipped (the icons), she filled all candles with oil ...
and this man (the one who had been saved) said that at night, not always, but
mostly, he saw a light ... and that it entered the church through the door.
This he always saw and he said that it was the Panagia. This is how much
they believed. They believed very much! We, however, believe but... does it
ever happen that you take a bath and then immediatly go to church? Like
ourselves (her husband and herself) yesterday, we had a bath in the morning and
went to church in the evening, didn't we (it was Easter time and I had been to
church together with them the night before)? One has to take a bath and to go
clean, of all sins, a woman should not have her period, you know, nowadays we
go, they (the Turkish-Cypriot women) did not, it is a sin to go to the crucifix
inside the church, it is a holy place. We nowadays go, but the Turkish-Cypriot
women did not, nor into the mosque. They didn't go (when they were
menstruating), and when they went they took off their shoes." In another
conversation she added that the Turkish-Cypriots used to fast more properly
according to their own religion than the Greek-Cypriots according to theirs. I
would like to complement these statements by a brief impressionistic portrait
of the woman who made them. This 41-year-old
woman comes from a formerly mixed village in Southern Cyprus and now lives in
Lemesos. Because she is related to a family in Pafos she came to spend Easter
with them this year. But she was not happy with the way things happened. She
had not fasted properly and she had not gone to church at the proper times
either. Therefore, she felt that she was neither mentally nor physically clean enough to take the Holy Communion on
Easter morning. She was very sad about not having practiced Easter properly
this year, about not having been able to take the most important Holy Communion
of the Orthodox year. She also criticized the way the congregation rushed to
get the communion so that there was no space to worship the icons first, which
is the proper way to do it. Those of her family who went to take the communion
she pressed not to do so unless they had gone to worship the holy icons
beforehand. She was disappointed that they nevertheless did. Talking about the
political situation of Cyprus, the same woman I have just portrayed emphasized
how much the Turkish-Cypriots who have been forced to abondon their homes want
to come back to live together with the Greek-Cypriots again. In the following
account she talks about one of those rare occasions when Turkish-Cypriots get
permission to come to the South for a visit to meet family members giving them
credit for their religiousness: "They came and they crossed themselves and they
bent down to the earth and said 'Allah' and they said 'help us that we can come
back here'." To these repeatedly
emphasized factors pointing to the religiously motivated inclusion of the
Turkish-Cypriots I would like to add another statement by one of my informants
and to portray him briefly. "If someone is rooted in their religion and in
their homeland, then this person has nothing to fear... Those who can
interprete/understand our religion, live very well with the Muslims, it is
those who do not understand it who blame the Muslims and ... and for the
Muslims who cannot interprete the Koran correctly and what it tells them, we
are to blame due to our religion. Neither do we read the Gospel rightly if we
constantly have conflicts. For both the Koran and the Gospel say that one
should never do any harm to anybody, one should never start a conflict.
The difference is that the Koran tells the Muslim to defend himself by every
means if attacked, but our religion does not allow us ... only if you
attack me in my house, then I may defend myself, but outside of my
house, whatever you say to me, I will bend and leave, I will not attack you,
outside of my house, only if you come into my house, and in regard to that, the
Koran forbids you to enter a house without having been asked to do so! This is
what it says, yes, the Koran forbids the Muslim to enter a house, by all means,
without having been invited to do so, and it says that you have to call
someone before you go in, that you call him so that he can open the door for
you." Like the two women I
have portrayed above, this man has not gone through higher education. But he
has educated himself very thoroughly by means of reading. He is now 60 years
old. Before he became a refugee, he was a wealthy landowner and businessman.
He lost everything he possessed. He also lost two of his three children at a
young age due to illness and an accident. One of these children is buried in a
cemetery in the North, so that his parents have been unable to visit his grave
ever since 1974. Himself and his wife now live in a formerly Turkish-Cypriot
house on Turkish-Cypriot land. They are well aware that it is not theirs.
Economically, they live from what they earn by making cheese. The bulk of his time, he now spends reading newspapers
and discussing politics. He has read a Greek translation of the Koran which
makes him very exceptional. He is clearly on the cypriocentric, anti-hellenocentric
line and he is also interested in bicommunal work going on in the capital. He
is one of the very few people I met who criticizes and blames the Greek-Cypriot
leadership as much as the Turkish-Cypriot one for what happened. Apart from the Turkish-Cypriots believing in
Christian saints and worshipping them, many people also mentioned that quite a
lot of Turkish-Cypriots had become baptized Christians. These are the processes by which an integrity
between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots is constructed by employing religious
values. But religion is used in order to express the opposite as well; it is
invoked in the process of excluding the Turks from the mainland and the
Turkish-Cypriot political leadership collaborating with them from the group
defined as insiders which includes both Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots. Exclusion of Turks The destruction of holy
sites Along with the destruction of ancestral sites
already referred to in the chapter about the family, the destruction of holy
sites, of monasteries and churches, was endlessly stressed. On the one hand,
people pointed to the fact that they themselves, i.e. their own government
would never harm any mosque or Muslim cemetery in the South, but that they
leave the Muslim sites the way they were or even properly maintain them. On the
other hand, Christian churches and monasteries are said to have been
intentionally destroyed by the Turks and the Turkish-Cypriot leadership ever
since the division of Cyprus in 1974. Not only do they not maintain the
Greek-Cypriots' holy sites, they also convert churches into mosques or worse,
they use them as pigsties and pens. This of course is the ultimate disrespect
in the eyes of Orthodox Christians. The destruction of the church of Saint
Sofia in former Constantinople[60] by the Ottoman
conquerors is seen as an early, but particularly tragic and indicative example
of the Turks' lack of respect for other people's holy sites. And not only do
the Turks destroy churches and monasteries, they also steal the holy icons out
of them and sell them abroad. The destruction of holy sites is central in
the Greek-Cypriots' process of excluding the Turks. The protection and
maintenance of Muslim holy sites in the South is invoked in order to emphasize
the difference between in- and outsiders. Islamic fanaticism Furthermore, Islamic fanaticism is conceived
as a major threat to the whole world by many Greek-Cypriots today. In order to
lend their argument credibility, people refer to recent news. In contrast to
the Turks and other Muslims, the Turkish-Cypriots are remembered as not having
been religiously fanatical. Religious fanaticism is thus used as a means to
distinguish Turks from Turkish-Cypriots. One man who is himself happily married
to a woman of different faith to his own made the following statement. "Here you see my wife, she is from another
country, from another nationality, she has another religion, what keeps us
from being a happy family ? But if she were to get up tomorrow and to say that
her religion is better, or if I would get up, that would be the same. I also
respect the mosque, one has to accept the other the way he is. But they (the
Turks) have turned our churches into mosques and have destroyed our holy
icons." The killing of holy people In history classes, the killing and hanging
of Christian priests and deacons in the course of rebellions directed against
the Ottoman rulers gets literally drummed into children. Since the Ottoman conquerors in the 16th
century are conceptually linked to the Turkish conquerors of 1974, their
actions become an argument for the exclusion of Turks today. Thus, if priests
were killed by the Ottomans four hundred years ago, the Turks of today surely
do the same. While the common powerless folk of the Ottomans' descendents,
i.e. the Turkish-Cypriots, are not counted as being part of this conceptual
continuity, the same differentiation is not made in regard to the Turks today.
Most Greek-Cypriots lump them all together without distinguishing between
different social groups for example on the grounds of an alleged common
character or the lack of education and hence civilization. In order to fully grasp the meaning of the
Greek-Cypriots' references to religion in their reasoning about both
Turkish-Cypriots and Turks, one has to be aware of the central position
religion holds within Greek-Cypriot culture which I now turn to describe. 2. Religion within Greek-Cypriot culture The significance of religion !rid Religious syncretism - discussed in the
literature under the heading of the linobambaki, the Cryptochristians
under Ottoman rule[61] and hinted at by
many informants - did not occur just in the past, but is going on at present
as well, if to a very limited extent due to the political situation[62]. A nice example of
present forms of religious syncretism I encountered with a Turkish-Cypriot man
who lives in a village outside of Pafos. He is well integrated in Greek-Cypriot
society. I happened to take the same bus as him shortly before Easter. Since everyone
sits in front and chats with each other on Pafos buses, it was not very
difficult for me to start a conversation. As it turned out, he goes to church
at Easter time as everyone else does, despite the fact that he has not been
baptized and that he is a Muslim. I was a little amazed to hear this, but to
him going to church at Easter is completely natural and hardly worth
mentioning. The only comment on his part was: "Why not?" As with the significance of the family, there
is abundant evidence of the importance of religion in Mediterranean societies
in the available literature. In fact, the notions of religion and of the
family are, as hopefully has already become clear, intimately linked. Many
authors[63] have shown this. In
Du Boulay's words: "The true function, then, of the earthly family
is to be an icon of the Holy Family in which the husband, the wife and the
child, are earthly representatives of Christ the man, Christ the child, and the
Mother of God." (1986: 166) All religious rituals in Cyprus are strongly
bound up with the family because they are celebrated amongst family members
although other people such as friends and colleagues may join in as well. How
much family bonds are established and solidified through practicing religion
jointly, became particularly clear to me on one occasion when friends of mine
took their newly gained sympetheri (co-parents-in-law) to the church of
the husband's native village. It was the nameday of the village saint who is
said to be able to cure eye illnesses. So, my friends took their affines there
in order to worship her thus strengthening family ties through sharing faith
and religious practices with each other. In Cyprus, it is not only old women who have
a concern in the Christian faith. The Orthodox religion is extremely important
for, I am convinced, almost all Greek-Cypriots, regardless of their age or
background. Though older women are in fact represented in church in larger
numbers than other social groups, I have met very few Greek-Cypriots indeed who
say of themselves that they do not believe in Christianity. It is quite
unthinkable for a Greek-Cypriot person not to attend at least one or two Easter
church services and to perform the veneration of the saints. Believing in God
is so completely natural to Greek-Cypriots that nobody ever asked me whether I
was a Christian myself; this was simply assumed, although when I went to church
with them - which I did many times particularly around Easter - I did not
perform myself, I only watched what was going on. What Loizos tells us about the situation in a Cypriot village in
the 1970s, still holds true today: "Everybody married in church. Even though there
was a sizeable number of villagers ... who were communists, socialists, or
called themselves 'modern' or 'progressive', and even though the men among
them could be brought to say that they did not think God existed, that religion
was largely superstition, that the Church owned far too much property and
should care better for the poor, it was notable that no cases came to my
knowledge of anyone - right, centre, or left - refusing to have his
children baptised, to marry in church[64], or to have his old
people buried by the priest. ... If prodded about belief, most villagers spoke
as if God existed, and that was that, just as they knew that Nicosia
existed." (Loizos 1981: 34-5) For Greek-Cypriots, believing is tantamount
to being a righteous person. I am sure that it is much harder for them to
accept a person without any faith than accepting someone who believes in
a deity other than the Christian god. That is why Greek-Cypriots respect
Turkish-Cypriots for their faith in Allah. In order to illustrate the significance of
the notion of religion for Greek-Cypriots and its impact on daily life, I will
briefly describe the most important religious rituals during the Orthodox year
as I experienced them in Pafos. Religious rituals throughout the Orthodox year Most religious rituals take place during the winter
months. One celebration follows the other in this time between December and the
end of the Easter period sometime in April or May with a break of about one
and a half months in January or February. Orthodox religious activity centers
around the two major complexes of Christmas and Easter which is the most
important celebration in Orthodoxy. The month of December is full of days dedicated to
Orthodox saints. Because most people are namesakes of an Orthodox saint, as
described in the previous chapter, there are a lot of nameday celebrations
going on in the weeks prior to Christmas. Orthodox Christians are supposed to
fast for forty days prior to Christmas which itself is a mixture of attending
church services, strolling around town and enjoying good and plenty of food. On
New Year's Eve, St Vasilis is believed to come and to bring the children
presents. Epiphany Day on the sixth of January - i.e. the celebration of
Jesus' baptism - is called 'The lights'
(ta fota), because the Holy Spirit is believed to have appeared in the
form of a pigeon illuminating the sky on this day. From the church service in
the morning people take a burning candle symbolizing the Holy Light home with
them and a few drops of the Holy Water which has been blessed by the priest.
This they keep throughout the year, because it is believed to cure illnesses
and to bless the house. I was told that this Holy Water does not become murky
as normal water does after some time. But before going home, people walk in a
procession to the harbour of Pafos. In the ceremony taking place there, priests
as well as politicians and the army play a part. The high spot of the
celebration has come when the priest throws a big cross into the sea followed
by five courageous young men dressed in swimming trunks only (it is January
after all) who try to capture the cross. This sequence is repeated several
times. After the ritual part of the celebration, one goes home in order to
feast together with relatives and friends. After an opulent meal, the housewife
blesses everyone present with incense. As with other religious celebrations, ta
fota is a combination of religion, family and food, taking place in the
house. With the celebration of the baptism of Jesus, the first ritual period
has come to its end. Between the end of the Christmas cycle and the beginning
of Easter, there is the Carnival period including two All Soul's days (psychosavvato)
at the end of it. Another two of these collective memorials for the dead take
place during the Easter period. The Easter cycle begins forty days before the Holy Easter
Week. Then, on The first Monday of Lent (kathara deftera, Clean/Pure
Monday), the fast officially begins and is to go on until midnight on Easter
Eve (see the chapter about food below). During this period, there is an
increased number of church services going on, particularly the Panagia
(the All Holy) is worshipped every Friday evening. During the Holy Week before
Easter Eve, practically everyone, young and old, goes to church at least twice
or three times and most people fast in order to cleanse themselves, though
some of them emphasize that they take Lent as an opportunity to get rid of a
few pounds or simply 'to clean out the system' once a year. However,
practically everyone sticks to the rule of fasting during the Holy Week, i.e.
not eating any animal products. If there is one time during the year that one
just has to go to church, it certainly is during the Holy Week. Teenagers On Holy Thursday, the icons in the churches are covered
with black cloth as a sign of grief. The first of several very important church
services during this time takes place. As always in Orthodox churches, women
and men stand separately, sometimes the men stand in front and the women in the
back of the church, sometimes the women to the left and the men to the right.
People of all ages are present, from crying babies to elderly people barely
able to walk. Some read along with the liturgy delivered by the priest and the
psaltes, the church singers. The faithful get blessed with incense. A
the end of the service, men go first to worship the icons of Jesus and the Panagia
in the front, then women file along kissing them. In the church yard, there is
a little funfair going on and children burn Bengal lights. If possible, people
take the Holy Communion on Thursday because this communion is believed to be
the holiest of all. On Good Friday, the entombment of Christ is commemorated
in a procession the centre of which is the worshipping of the epitafios,
a holy cloth depicting the entombment of Christ in silver embroidery. Women who
happen to be menstruating are neither allowed to worship the epitafios
nor any other icon. Only eight days after their period are they said to be
ritually clean again. This applies not only to the Easter Week, but to Orthodox
practices in general. Nowadays, a lot of menstruating women, I believe,
passively attend church services somewhere in the back of the church. But they
do not come near the epitafios nor any holy icon. On Easter Saturday morning, the mirofores - the
women who came to clean and perfume the dead body of Christ (literally: 'those
who bring pleasant scent') - are said to have first discovered that Christ had
risen. The first time during the church service on Saturday morning the glad
tidings of Christ's resurrection are proclaimed by the priest shouting Anastasi,
resurrection, the black cloths are pulled off the holy icons and everyone
stands up and makes a lot of noise flapping the wooden pews up and down. This is
repeated every time the priest announces Christ's resurrection again. The noise
was explained to me as symbolizing either the massive stone in front of
Christ's tomb rolling away or else the earth quake caused by it. It is the
first celebration of Christ's resurrection. At the end of the church service,
the Holy Communion is offered. Afterwards, the women spend their day preparing flaunes,
a special kind of Easter bread made with grated cheese and raisins. The
resurrection of Christ is celebrated a second time on Saturday night which is
the high spot of the whole Easter cycle. After his resurrection had been
discovered by the women who came to wash and perfume his body, the message took
a whole day to get spread and acknowledged which is why the final ceremony
takes place on Saturday night only. At about eleven o'clock at night, the
church bells start to ring. Since a lot of people find no place inside the
church, they gather on the church yard holding candles. A big fire symbolizing
the burning of Judas has been lit there and sometimes, a dolly of the traitor
is burnt. When Christ's resurrection is finally announced exactly at midnight,
the Holy Light starts to be passed around lighting all the candles in turn.
Firework goes off and people kiss and wish each other Christos anesti,
Christ has risen, a form of greeting which will go on until forty days after
Easter. For schoolchildren and teenagers, the Saturday night ceremony is at the
same time as being a religious ritual an occasion for having fun. After the
liturgy has come to an end, or before, people go home carrying the Holy Light
with them. On their arrival at their house, they bless it by tracing the shape
of a cross above the door with the burning candle which is kept throughout the
year and may be lit to protect the house from thunder and lightning and other
dangers. Then, each family joins to eat the Easter rice soup and some sort of
meat for the first time again after the Lent. The rest of the Easter
celebration, another three days, is mainly a matter of feasting and eating lots
of rosted lamb and other kinds of nutricious food. Apart from that, there are
many fun-fairs on church yards and organized party games going on. The period preceding Easter Eve night is characterized by
abstinence and reflection. Following the celebration of Chirst's resurrection,
Easter turns into a collective feast of sociability. The only really important religious date during the other
half of the year between May and December is The Assumption of Mary on the fifteenth
of August fourteen days prior to which Greek-Cypriots are supposed to fast
again. After this celebration, collective religious activity is taken up again
in December. During the Orthodox year, there are a number of church
services of minor importance - such as those related to different stages in
the life of the Panagia - in which a lot of people of all ages take
part. On occasions such as religious rituals or family
celebrations such as namedays or a child's birthday, women and men tend to sit
spacially segregated. The more people present, the more likely the women sit at
one end of a long table while the men sit at the other. Also, women only drink
very little or no alcohol, while the men drink pure brandy as if it was wine.
After the main course of a meal, the women sometimes gather in the kitchen to
help with the dishes or with preparing more food. They may also have their
coffee there spending their time by reading each other's fortune from the
remaining coffee-grounds - the little cup is turned upside down for this
purpose - though not many women actually believe in this. Religion and politics Religion is given further weight in Cyprus by the fact
that it is intimately and firmly linked to politics[65]. Political
leaders legitimize themselves through recourse to religion. The best example
of the marriage between religion and politics is the late President and
Archbishop Makarios (he died in 1977). His still immense popularity is partly
due to him having been the Archbishop of the independent church of Cyprus at
the same time as holding the highest political office. The close link between
church and state politics is observable on numerous occasions. For example
when national heros are commemorated during church service, when the president
of the Republic of Cyprus attends Epiphany Day standing next to the Archbishop,
when on the 30th January the three prelates who are said to have
joined the Orthodox religion with the Greek language, i.e. Christianity with
Hellenism, are commemorated, when in preparation for national holidays of
both Greece and Cyprus the church yards and the interior of churches are decorated
with Greek and Cypriot flags. The 25th of March is both the most
important Greek national holiday celebrated in Cyprus as well (the present
government of Glafkos Kleridis is a hellenocentric one) and the date of the
Annunciation of Mary. The importance of religion in the Greek-Cypriot context
and its linkage with politics became clear to me once again when, in Spring
1996, a very popular Archimandrite was accused of being a homosexual by the
Archbishop and hence suspended from running for the vacant office of bishop of
Morfu (in the North). For two months, during which the debate was in the
headline news, angry supporters of the alleged homosexual demonstrated against
the decision of the Archbishop who is believed to have suspended the Archmandrite
for reasons of corruption and self-interest by many people. It is quite
remarkable what a storm the suspension of an Archimandrite was able to cause,
finally forcing the Archbishop to give in. In order to convince, church as much as state politics must
anchor themselves in cultural notions and values, such as the family. "... the Church has played up the Holy Family
precisely because it cannot effectively combat the power of the earthly one,
and 'family' is the most powerful metaphor we have for expressing love,
commitment, and association." (Loizos 1981: 39). 3. Summary To summarize, the notion of religion is
employed by Greek-Cypriots to reason about both Turkish-Cypriots and Turks. It
is central to the processes leading to in- and exclusion, to
group-consciousness and belonging. Religion figures very prominently in
Greek-Cypriot culture and thought. Its significance is constantly restated and
recreated in religious rituals throughout the year and in the intermingling of
religion and politics. IV The
notion of work 1. The significance of work within Greek-Cypriot
culture Economic situation Yet another culturally central notion is that
of work and working. First of all, I would like to draw attention to the fact
that at least lower strata Greek-Cypriots have to work very hard in order to
pay for their expenses. While the cost of living is little less than in England
for example, busdrivers or waitresses, chambermaids and receptionists in
hotels or salespersons - and a lot of people have jobs like this because the
Cypriot economy lives on tourism to a great extent - but also librarians for example
earn about 400 Cypriot Pounds a month (1 Cypriot Pound equals approximately
1.45 British Pounds in 1996) working forty hours a week. New employees often start with a salary of not even 300
Cypriot Pounds. Often, people work either very long hours - in summertime
during the tourist season up to fourteen or even sixteen hours a day - or they
have two jobs, one during the day and another one in the evening working in a
restaurant for example. Except for well off families, both partners usually
work full-time. Although the economic prosperity of Cyprus is generally
admired, this should not obscure the fact that statistical data illustrating
the economic growth and boom in Cyprus say little about the daily economic
struggles of a lot of people. I often wondered how they make ends meet. That women work outside the house, is an
economic constraint for many families in Cyprus and therefore accepted.
Women's double burden as housewives and mothers on the one hand (very few men
help a little with housework) and wage labourers on the other has even become a
social ideal which was brought home to me in a rather awkward way on the
occasion of the official celebration in Pafos of the International Women's Day
1996. After a couple of speeches stressing the pain of women as mothers,
sisters and daughters of war victims and missing persons, the mayor of the town
handed out medals to those women who are civil servants and have at least three
children at the same time. The audience clapped. Motivation for working Most importantly, people are motivated to
work for a house, an aspect I will come back to in the second last chapter of
this empirical part. To build either one's own house or to build a house for
one's daughter is the ultimate goal in life for which Greek-Cypriots invest
everything. Caring for one's family - which implies paying for very costly
engagements and weddings - and building a house are the two major reasons which
motivate people to work as hard as they can. Except for sometimes very
expensive clothes, particularly for children and teenagers at Christmas and
Easter, people spend very little for personal needs. Travelling for example is
a luxury a lot of adult people I have met have never enjoyed. Having work, and
therefore being able to provide for one's family and to build a house, is
tantamount to fulfilment. Let me quote one of my friends talking about the most
important things in his life: "First of all, we all
want peace ... and security for our children and families. Secondly, for me
personally and I believe for every Cypriot, the family, that it lives
harmoniously, that the children grow up and that it flourishes. Then, that
there are jobs so that people can work, because if there is work, a people can
live better and more comfortably, without difficulties and problems. Then, a
people lives in prosperity and can be sure not to get any problems. If people
have no work though, there will inevitably be problems, the families will start
to argue, the villagers, too, one with the other, and different problems will
arise. If people have no work, how could they build houses? This requires
people to have work and thus prosperity." The significance of working relationships In Cyprus, working means much more than
turning up in the morning and leaving eight hours later. Working means
establishing social relationships which extend to one's private life. First of
all, a lot of close friendships are made at the work-place. Colleagues go out
and celebrate religious feasts together, they invite each other to engagement
and wedding parties. For example, at the engagement party of a young busdriver
who had been working with a company only for a couple of months - but he has an
uncle in there -, most of his new colleagues with their families and even the
director of the company turned up. It is socially unacceptable not to do so. Of course, the importance of work also has to
do with patron-client relations on which a significant part of social relations
and duties are based in Cyprus. But this is not the place to discuss this in
detail. For the purpose of showing the significance of working relations, it
is sufficient to note that the impact of patron-client relations in
Mediterranean societies including Cyprus is well documented[66]. In Cyprus, work is intimately linked to the
family, including ritual kin. If someone looks for a job, that person would
first of all think about where she or he has family members working. Similarly,
if a company looks for a new employee, family members of already employed
people are considered first. Only if there is nobody suitable for a job,
'neutral' persons are taken into consideration. The daughter of a friend of
mine for example used to work in a hotel as a waitress where she had no
relatives or friends. She had to work very long hours and most of all
impossible shifts. At Carneval, the whole family was to go to the town of
Lemesos (Limassol) where the biggest carneval parade takes place every year and
where my friends have future relatives-in-law. When, to my surprise, their
daughter did not come along with us, my friend told me that unexpectedly, she
had to work both evening and night shift so that it was impossible for her to
come as well. He explained: 'She doesn't have anybody in there'. By this he
meant that she has no relatives or friends at her work-place who could protect
her against such kinds of working conditions. The situation went on like this
and got even worse and when at Easter the same happened again, she quitted.
Herself and her parents felt that she was being exploited and treated unfairly because
she was alone in there. In a place like Cyprus where there are a lot of
jobs which have to be done on Sundays as well as on public holidays due to the
islands dependency on tourism and where normally there are no fixed rules at
to how many weekends or public holidays each employee has to work, it is more
often than not the case that those people in good positions - and that means
not being the only one of your family working in a place - have Christmas and
Easter days off for example. Not surprisingly, it is attractive to work where
one is not alone. Let me give an example of network structures
based on private relationships within a company which I believe is not
untypical if perhaps a little extreme, though I do not know this for sure. It
is the bus company I have already mentioned a couple of times in which I have
gained an insight. In total, twenty-eight persons worked there as drivers or in
offices at the time I did research in Cyprus, out of which only twelve are not
related to anyone else in the company. The remaining sixteen are related to at
least one other person in the following ways. 1+2 3+4 5+6 7+8 father, son brothers cousins father, son 9 10
11
12 13 14 15+16 nephew niece father, son of 9 of 9 ( = blood relatives, - - - = affinal relatives) When people introduce someone else, they
quite often add what kind of job that person has: 'This is such and such,
she/he works with such and such a company'. This is indicative, I believe, of
the importance of work in Cyprus. As I mentioned in the first chapter, my
already existing working relation with more than one family helped me a great
deal when I came to Cyprus to do research, because working together implies
taking responsibility for one another, it implies having a social relationship.
I was often introduced like this: 'This is Eva from Switzerland, she works
with us/she works with the company my son works with, she is our friend. At
present, she is doing some research in Cyprus.' Loizos (1975a) analyzing the ambiguous
benefits of modern politics in a Cypriot village in the 1970s comes to the
conclusion that village solidarity - and that implies working relations based
on kin- and friendship - and the "fruits of personal labour" are what
villagers trust and rely on (1975a: 23). 2. Constructing group-consciousness: The
notion of work As with the other notions I
have discussed so far, the notion of work and working relations is employed by
Greek-Cypriots in the process of reasoning about both Turkish-Cypriots and
Turks. The notion of work with all its connotations is primarily invoked in
order to include Turkish-Cypriots, to a lesser extent, it is also used to
exclude Turks. Inclusion of Turkish-Cypriots Working relationships That Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots used to work
together in agriculture and elsewhere was mentioned by many people first of
all when I inquired about their relationship to Turkish-Cypriots. Working
together on the fields, watering and harvesting together, herding animals and
making the Cypriot Chalumi cheese together, as well as trading relationships
between Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots such as that between a butcher and a cattle
dealer were invoked as examples of good cooperation. One elderly man even remembered
that one of his father's friends used to work and live together with a
Turkish-Cypriot, a Muslim, in an Orthodox convent One man recalled his
childhood in the following way: " In summertime I had to work on the fields in
order to pay for the school, because we were a poor family. ... The first
summer I worked in a Turkish-Cypriot village. We were about five to six
Greek-Cypriots working there and we also stayed there at night. In the
evenings, we sat together with the Turkish-Cypriots, we ate and drank, in the kafenion,
in the Turkish ... there wasn't any problem at all. In the second year I worked
in another village, there too, most of the people were Turkish-Cypriots and in
the third summer I went there again. " Turkish-Cypriots worked on the plantations of
richer Greek-Cypriots or vice versa or else, Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot
people, mostly women, worked for joint cooperatives picking citrus fruit, or
they had share cropping arrangments with one another, as the following accounts
show. "We got on well together, at work, I did not
work myself yet because I was still young, but others such as my mother, they
picked oranges on the fields, there were Turkish-Cypriot women, too, and they
got on well. In the morning, they went to work together, did different kinds of
work in the fields, planted potatoes, carots, and they went together and
worked. They finished work together and went home together." "We had fields in the neighbouring
Turkish-Cypriot village, and our father always took us with him .... we were
together with them (the Turkish-Cypriots) all the time ... many times, my
father cultivated fields which belonged to a Turkish-Cypriot and then they
shared the harvest 50% - 50%, it was like a cooperative, they shared the
harvest." "I remember that in our village the
Turkish-Cypriots and the Greek-Cypriots used to water their fields together and
to help each other with their work in the fields. In the morning at four
o'clock, Osman used to knock at our door and then they went together and helped
each other." "We got on very well with the Turkish-Cypriots,
we were no different, we went to the spring together, before there was water
inside the houses, we went to the spring to fetch water, we went together to
herd our animals. " Other people emphasized that Greek- and
Turkish-Cypriots used to work together in offices or as civil servants. "We used to work together in the countryside
and in the towns. The town hall was mixed. The mayor was always a Greek-Cypriot
because they were the majority, but the civil servants were Turkish-Cypriots as
well as Greek-Cypriots. There was only one townhall. And the offices were
mixed, too, they worked together. When a Turkish-Cypriot was employed he was
welcomed by his Greek-Cypriot colleagues and they sat at the same table. ... It
would be beautiful if we were to work together again." The woman who gave me this account is an
elderly Turkish-Cypriot lady who has been living in Pafos all of her life. She was born in 1920. She is
the wife of the late Turkish-Cypriot personal advisor of the late President
Makarios, Dr. Ihsan Ali, a man highly respected by Greek-Cypriots both for his
personal qualities and medical skills. Due to her family's critical attitude
towards the Turkish-Cypriot leadership, they have had Greek-Cypriot body and
house guards ever since the 1960s which is why they could not be forced to
leave for the North as most other Turkish-Cypriots who used to live in the
Pafos area have been. In 1974, they helped a number of Turkish-Cypriots to flee
abroad. Her family has always been in favour - and very outspoken at that - of
the Turkish-Greek-Cypriot friendship. She is now an old lady bound to her house
and at times to her bed because of health problems. Her house is full of
precious valuables from all over the world. She feels happy with living in an
Greek-Cypriot environment, even though she is quite lonely. But she is sad
about how Cyprus has changed from a place of Turkish-Greek friendship to one of
hostility and ignorance. She hopes that one day, the Cypriot people will
consider themselves first of all Cypriots rather than Turks and Greeks. Joint unions[67] Two politically left men also stressed the
fact that Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots used to be organized in joint unions. "From an early age on, we worked together with
the Turkish-Cypriots from other villages, as friends. We made the anti-colonial
strike (1948[68]) together. 2000
Turkish-Cypriots were in the PEO (the union of the Communist Party AKEL), the
vice-president was a Turkish-Cypriot!" This man has been a
convinced communist and an active member of the Communist Party for all of his
life. He is now 67 years old and still as staunch in his belief in the
communist cause as ever before. When I went for a brief visit to the occupied
North, he entrusted me with conveying his warmest greetings to his
Turkish-Cypriot brothers and sisters and to tell them to keep fighting for the
Greek-Turkish friendship. He is a refugee. As much as he is a charming 'communist
of the old guard', one might say, he is a man dedicated to his family. Every
other Sunday, all of his five children with their own families gather at his
house (together with his wife he now lives in a fairly simple former
Turkish-Cypriot house) for one of his famous 'suvlas' (braised lamb, pork or
chicken). Maintaining close family ties is very important to him. The other man who mentioned joint unions
remembers the Turkish-Cypriots as 'arkadash': "There were many Turkish-Cypriots who were
organized in the Greek-Cypriot unions as well. They were 'arkadash', that's how
they were called, 'arkadash' means 'brother' in Turkish, fellow worker, friend,
and I felt that they were indeed 'arkadash'." Impact of working relations The fact that working together not only
implies economic but also personal and emotional bonds - be they between equals
or between employer and employee -, is nicely illustrated in the following
statement. "One woman who used to work on my orange
plantations in 1974 married off her daughter, and she invited me to come to the
wedding. Really, I had to go, because you see, if someone works with you and
you have a relationship with them and they invite you to a wedding and you do
not go, then this means that ... that
socially, you are not okay." As I have shown, working relations are much
more than just that in Cyprus. They are, next to the family, what one really
relies on. I would like to add a last statement by a woman from a formerly
mixed village which shows the emotional bonds established through working
together, in this case in the fields as co-villagers. "There was a Turkish-Cypriot woman, and I
always took the thorns out of her hands, you know, when you work on the fields
you get thorns into your hands, and she always wanted me to do this because she
said that I did it so well. And the day before they had to leave (in 1974), she
came to me and asked me to take out the thorns in her hands for a last time:
'Who will take them out now for me when I'll be there (in the North)?'" Exclusion of Turks 'The Turks do not work' Only one man born in 1959 claimed that the
Turkish-Cypriots did not know how to work, that all their properties went to
rack due to neglect. This he said during the same conversation in which he also
recalled his parents working together with Turkish-Cypriots. He is an exception
in that, despite belonging to the second age group (people whose memory does
not reach further back than to the 1960s), he holds a view typical of some
people of the third age group (with no personal memories of bicommunal relations whatsoever). His
example not only illustrates how contradictory different statements by one and
the same person can be, it also supports my point in so far as it shows that
even though this fairly young person distinguishes between Turkish- and
Greek-Cypriots, he does so invoking the Greek-Cypriot notion of work which
other, older people employ to demonstrate
exactly the opposite, namely that the Turkish-Cypriots worked hard just like
themselves and that they had good relationships with them. Older people came up
with the same argument, but they brought it forward in order to exclude the
Turks from the mainland asserting that they are lazy and do not know how to
work. Since working is conceptually linked to providing
for one's family, to building houses and to prosperity, in short, to being a
righteous person leading a life pleasing to God, it is clear that by denying
the Turks the quality of working hard and honestly and thus the ability to
prosper, they cannot but be seen as outsiders who do not share the
Greek-Cypriot notion of work with all its implications. !Repressive measures Since working together is tantamout to having
and enjoying good relations one can trust in, those who do not want to
collaborate - i.e. the Turkish and the Turkish-Cypriot leadership - disqualify themselves,
from the Greek-Cypriot point of view, because they do not support the value of
working together so important to Greek-Cypriots. Hence, they must be outsiders.
Not only do they discourage cooperation between Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots,
they also employ repressive measures againgst dissident Turkish-Cypriots. "His father had a conflict with the Turks,
because he wanted to work with us, and he was seen as a traitor by the Turks.
And they put him into jail." At the same time, repressive measures
directed against Turkish-Cypriots aiming at cooperation with Greek-Cypriots,
are evidence of the significance of working relations in establishing
social bonds. Because if the Turkish leaders spare no effort to stop working
relations between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots, they surely must be aware of the
social potential these relations carry. This, ironically, makes them, in an
indirect way, to insiders sharing the notion of work with the Greek-Cypriots. ANTEQNIKH
SUNERGASIA ANTI-ETHNIC
COOPERATION O Cau-3981san htan filos mou Hasan was a friend of mine mia cronia speirame ta cwrafia
mazi. one year we sowed the fields together. H sodeia htane megalh, The h!arvest was big, perase o kairos cwris daneika. time passed without debts. O Casan htan eutucismenos, Hasan was happy, etrebe ta ceria caru-3985oumenos. he rubbed his hands cheerfully. O agas, den tou fage to moscari! The agas did not eat his cattle! Persi gia ligo stari ... Last year, for a little bit of wheat ... tou phu-3982re thn gelada. he took his cow. - Twra ... o agas o patriwths! -
Now ... the agas the patriot! Kathgorei to filo mou Casan, accuses my friend Hasan, g91i anteqnikh sunergasia. of antiethnic co-operation. (Artemhs Antwniou) (Artemis Antoniou 1974; my
translation) What is expressed with this
poem is that those who do not want cooperation are motivated by their own
self-interest. 3. Summary To summarize,
working relationships occupy a central position in Cypriot society and are
intimately linked to social relationships based on family and friendship. The notion of work
with all its implications it has in Cyprus is invoked by Greek-Cypriots when
mentally constructing groups of in - and outsiders, when creating
group-consciousness. It is employed both to include the Turkish-Cypriots and to
exclude the Turks. V The notion
of Food As with all other aspects I discuss, the
notion of food is salient in the Greek-Cypriots' way of reasoning about the
Turkish-Cypriots. In contrast to the other notions though, the notion of food
is only invoked to include the Turkish-Cypriots, but not to exclude Turks from
mainland Turkey. Before turning to examples given by my informants, I will
provide the basis on which they have to be understood by discussing the social
implications of sharing food in Greek-Cypriot culture. 1. The significance of food within Greek-Cypriot
society Food in Cyprus as in many other cultures
carries symbolic meaning both in everyday life and in rituals particularly
those related to death. As a part of funeral and memorial rituals, food is a
female sphere of responsibility and strongly associated with women (cf.
Danforth 1982: 42-47/99-109 and Du Boulay 1991: 67-69). However, the gender
aspect of food is not central in Cyprus in everyday life[69]. Dubisch's
interpretation of the symbolism of food in Greece applies to Cyprus as well: in "It would be a mistake, however, to view
the symbolism of food only in terms of gender roles. Food is part of a general
idiom in which social relationships are expressed. It symbolizes bonds within
the family and between the family and the outside world." (1986b: 207). The symbolic meaning of food in everyday life Food is very significant in Greek-Cypriot
everyday life. It is much more than just calories and nutrition. Eating and
drinking together means establishing and solidifying social relationships and bonds[70]. Everyone exchanges
food with everyone else in Cyprus. Very rarely do people refuse to either eat
or, if they really cannot manage to eat anything, to take some food home with
them. It is utterly unpolite and socially unsound to do so. Whenever people
meet, be they family, friends, acquaintances or neighbours they offer each
other food. Both offering and accepting food are socially defined and
imperative orders. Exchanging food is
rather like exchanging gifts in the sense Mauss described it, insofar as both
offering and accepting food are two likewise important components of
establishing social relationships (cf. Mauss 1990: 36-39). In general, material modesty is not a virtue
for Greek-Cypriots, because it is a virtue to give, particularly to one's
family but also to strangers. It is good to have a lot, because only then one
can give. When I moved into my flat in Pafos, my
landlady who owns a small hairdressing
saloon in the same building came up with some makaronia the very first
day, and every time I passed by her saloon, I had to eat a little bit of
something, be it a sweet or at least a couple of bites from her pastry she had
bought for lunch. Whenever I went to someone's place I returned loaden with
food. People insisted on giving me something edible to take home with me. They
gave me cheese, lemons and oranges, sweets, spirit (meant to be used as a
remedy against colds) and sometimes cooked food. I remember Sundays going along
with friends on visits to different members of their family, when I ate cooked
food three times, at lunch at the first place, in the afternoon at the next and
later on in the evening again. We could not but accept because we actually were
at three different places and it is impossible to pay someone a visit without
eating at least something small. Offering food is not just a sign of
hospitality as it is popularly interpreted, its deeper sense is to establish,
to maintain and to confirm social relationships between those exchanging food.
One evening, I was going to visit a married
couple; he is Greek-Cypriot, she is foreign originally although she has lived
in Cyprus for over twenty years now. Before I went there I quickly passed by a
friend's place to say hello. Assuming that I was going to get food later on, I
only had some fruit at my friend's house. As it turned out though, I was not
offered any food later on, so that I went home hungry. When I met my friend
whose house I had passed before going to visit these people the other day, he
asked me how it had been there the night before. When I told him that I had not
been offered any food after all, he got very indignant bursting out: 'There
you see that she is a foreigner, even after so many years of having been here.
A Cypriot woman would never do that, having you at her place in the evening
without offering you any food.' To him, this was unthinkable and not offering
me any food was a sign of her being an outsider. On another occasion, I went to the house of
friends of mine together with people that I wanted to introduce to my friends.
These were people my friends respect very much but did not yet know personally
at the time. So, they felt honoured by our visit. My friends were in the middle
of making cheese, so that we felt a little awkward and first insisted that we
did not want anything to eat. But since it was not too long before lunchtime,
that was out of the question. They took us down from the farm where they had
been busy making cheese to their house nearby, to the 'good table'. Entering
the house, my friend explained: 'If you sit down somewhere and have even just
a little bit of cheese and tomato you will feel at home.' So, we gave up
resisting and all had a solid meal together although at least the visitors I
had brought were not hungry at all, because they had had a good breakfast
shortly before. !arDubisch (1986b), analyzing social life in
the Cycladic islands, shows the conceptual link between food and social order
in general, mediated by women. Food is linked to a whole network of meaning,
involving the concept of 'inside versus outside', of the house and the body, of
religion and pollution, of the family and of gender roles. All of these aspects
are central to Greek-Cypriot culture as well and intimately linked to each
other[71]. Through food, social
order and boundaries are established and maintained[72]. Ritual foods Not only is food significant in everyday
life, but there are special kinds of foods which carry religious meaning. All
important celebrations in Cyprus are either related to the family or to
religion establishing a bond between these two notions. This bond is partly
symbolized by food. At weddings, there is a special kind of dish
called resi which consists of wheat and meat[73]. Every guest also
gets a sweet on their arrival to an engagement or a wedding party as they file
along to congratulate the young couple. At memorials and on patron saint
celebrations, women take kolliva, a ritual food consisting of boiled
wheat, pomegranate pips, almonds, sesame and raisins to church. Dead persons
are commemorated on the third, the ninth and the fortieth day after their
death, then after three, six and nine months and then annually. The women write
the names of their deceased family members on a piece of paper which the priest
reads out thus blessing the dead. At the end of the church service, the kolliva which has also been
blessed by the priest is offered to everyone present. In this way, all the
families represented by someone present
share in the memorial by that person eating a spoonful of kolliva. Giving and receiving kolliva! is also
part of collective memorials, called psychosavvata which are very similar to individual
memorial services. There are five psychosavvata during the Orthodox year, four of them
during the Easter period (cf. Danforth 1982: 56). Forty days before Christmas and Easter and
fifteen days prior to the Assumption of Mary, food and the lack of it
respectively is rendered a particularly strong significance. The Orthodox Lent
begins on Monday six weeks prior to the Holy Easter Week itself. From then on
until Easter Eve after midnight, Orthodox Christians are not supposed to eat
any animal products at all, but only few people, mostly older women, follow
this rule strictly these days. However, most people, young and old, fast during
the Holy Week. If they do not keep the fast for at least the last few days
before Easter, people do not feel comfortable accepting the Holy Communion
which may happen anytime between Thursday and Saturday morning of the Easter
week. The day before one goes to take the Holy Communion, one is not supposed
to eat oil either. The Holy Communion on Thursday is considered the most holy
one following the Last Supper. It cleanses the faithful Orthodox Christian for
an entire year. But in order for it to be taken properly, one has to prepare
oneself physically and spiritually, one has to cleanse one's body, soul and
mind. This happens through fasting and attending church services on the one
hand, and sexual abstinence and the renunciation of other kinds of worldly
pleasures on the other. Only with the proper kind of personal preparation is
one worthy of taking it. Friends of mine for example who had had a serious argument
with each other during the Holy Week did not go to take the Holy Communion
because they felt that after having argued they were not spiritually clean
enough to do so. In general, an Orthodox Christian is supposed to fast three
days before taking the Communion at any time during the year. After the announcement
of Christ's resurrection on Easter Eve at midnight, each family goes home to
share the traditional Easter ricesoup and some meat for the first time after
the Lent. On Easter Sunday, people celebrate by means of eating lots and lots
of roasted lamb. During times of religiously motivated fasts, food which normally
symbolizes and establishes social relationships is temporarily rendered unclean
and thus unfit for consumption. However, it is through ritual foods, the Holy
Communion, that daily food is blessed and rendered clean again[74]. 2. Constructing group-consciousness: The notion of
food Inclusion of Turkish-Cypriots Eating and drinking together 'We ate and drank together'
is one of the endlessly repeated phrases chosen to exemplify the good relations
between all Cypriots. It often comes along in combination with the other
notions I have already discussed. ar "We used to work together, we got on
very well, we ate and enjoyed ourselves together, they came to our weddings and
feasts, everything." "They were like brothers and sisters. Or they
had Turkish-Cypriots who worked in their houses and they were very good to
them, and they worked and they ate together, they invited each other, were
friends." Having in mind the social significance of
food in Greek-Cypriot culture, it is clear that the sharing of food symbolizes
relationships of friendship and trust. Let me also quote an amusing anecdote which a
man who used to have Turkish-Cypriot workers told me: "You know, the religion forbids the Muslims to
eat pork. There was a Turkish-Cypriot who used to work for me as a driver and
he just loved to eat pork ('he used to eat it with the hair'). And I said to
him: 'Are you eating pork again?' He answered: 'Mister H., I do not eat the
pork, but its fat.'" The kafenion As the literature on Greece and Cyprus or
even a brief visit to these countries undoubtedly makes obvious, the kafenion
occupies a central place for at least the men of these societies. As with other
food related encounters, sitting together in the kafenion means much
more than just drinking coffee. It is a space for social interaction in which
friendship and cooperation play an important part. An elderly man who came as
a refugee to a then still mixed village (T.) in the south (in some places the
Turkish-Cypriots only left in 1975) describes his experience on his arrival
like this: ! "In September 1974, I came to T. ... I didn't make any difference between the
Turkish-Cypriot and the Greek-Cypriot kafenion, one evening I went to
the Greek, the next to the Turkish. In the Turkish-Cypriot kafenion I
never payed one single coffee! Never! As soon as I came into the door:
'Welcome Mister H., a coffee for Mister H.'. I also went to the Greek-Cypriot kafenion
of the village, to establish relations, you know, going to the kafenion
is establishing relations, I went to the Greek-Cypriot kafenion, and now
I will compare the Greek-Cypriots with the Turkish-Cypriots in T. for you, I
came into the kafenion and nobody even said 'good evening', in the
Greek-Cypriot one! And in the Turkish-Cypriot one I never paid a single
coffee." !r In the kafenion as elsewhere,
offering food is tantamount to offering a social relationship. Food as social bond The most important aspect of food is its
potential to bind people socially. The following statements illustrate this.
The first one I have already partially quoted in the section about work. "One woman who used to work on my orange
plantations in 1974 married off her daughter, and she invited me to come to the
wedding. ... So, I went, and they brought us food, on my right and on my left
were Turkish-Cypriots, and someone brought me a roasted chicken on a plate, a whole
chicken! And he said: 'This is for the master.' He brought it especially for
me. You know extra ... he wanted to ... ,he somehow felt obliged to bring me
something special. And I said: 'Thank you very much, but I cannot possibly eat
a whole chicken all by myself, put it in the middle of the table.' You know, he
wanted to express his ... esteem for me." The man who told me how a Turkish-Cypriot
risked his life in order to bring him across a raging torrent (I stated this
example in the introduction to this empirical part) continues his account like
this: " ... after that, we always brought him
something when we passed his village on our way from school, and every time he
loaded us with oranges and lemons, and we were friends. They used to call us to
come into the kafenion and they gave us tea, and we sat in the kafenion
together, they never took any money. " !t An elderly Turkish-Cypriot woman recalls
former times: "When there was a religious feast, we used to
exchange gifts. The Turkish-Cypriots made sweets and they gave the
Greek-Cypriots, too. The old people remember this. They remember how we used to
exchange food and religious/festive foods." That offering food symbolizes social
relationships and care is obvious in the following accounts as well in which
the notions of the family and of food are invoked to characterize the
relationships between Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots. "... the Turkish-Cypriot women used to come to
my mother and they asked whether they could cut some things ... they didn't have tomatoes, pepper and
cucumber and we said: 'Take as much as you like' so that they could eat. We got
on very well. ... And there was one Turkish-Cypriot woman for whom I was like a
daughter. She was called Masief. She used to buy ice-cream when the ice-man
came (this was in the 1950s) and she held it in her hand all the way and she
brought it to me, she treated me like a daughter." "She was like my mother, she practically
brought me up. When my mother went to work and I was alone at home, she cooked
for me and gave me food. I sat together with her daughter and she gave us rice
and we ate." 3. Summary To summarize, the notion of food is yet another
aspect by which Greek-Cypriots define Turkish-Cypriots as insiders. Food in everyday life as well as ritual food
carries symbolic meaning for Greek-Cypriots and sharing and exchanging food
implies establishing and solidifying social relationships. VI The notion
of the house One of the most important notions in Cyprus
is that of the house. It is crucial to any understanding of the Cypriot
culture. In the process of constructing group-consciousness, the notion of the
house plays a central part. But in order to fully grasp the meaning and the
significance of statements about the house, one must first understand what it
means to Greek-Cypriots. 1. The house in Cyprus The Cypriot house The hous!e, the spiti, is a
materialization of the values of Greek-Cypriot culture. It embodies and
symbolizes all crucial notions: the family, the locality, religion, work, food
and the concept of 'inside versus outside'. This is also true for the notion of
the family which is not only intimately linked but in many ways synonymous
with the house. Just how much the house means in Cyprus can hardly be
overemphasized. It means virtually everything. Having one's own house is one of
the first, if not the first priority in life. Renting is a very
unsatisfactory option which to Greek-Cypriots is acceptable only temporarily,
for the house is "a symbol of permanence" (Du Boulay 1991: 62). Before turning to the symbolic meaning of the
Greek-Cypriot house, let me briefly describe the most important spaces within
it: the saloni and the kitchen. First of all, Greek-Cypriot houses are
spacious. There is a lot of mostly 'unused' space. In most houses there are two
saloni, a 'good' one and one for daily use. The good one remains
untouched except for special occasions such as family parties or religious
feasts. Photographs of the members of the family living in the house and of
other relatives including ritual kin are displayed at prominent places in both
the good and the everyday saloni[75] (where the TV is on
practically all the time). Handmade gobelins depicting romantic West European
motives hang on the walls and the tables are decorated with Cypriot laces[76]. Whenever there are
visitors in the house, one sits in the saloni, normally the everyday
one, drinking coffee and eating homemade sweets or other sorts of snacks.
Everyday family life takes place here as well, but social interaction amongst
the members of the nuclear family concentrates in the kitchen. There, a picture
of the Last Supper hangs above the table where the family shares its meals[77]. In some new
houses, there are two kitchens, a 'good' fancy one which is hardly ever used
and a less expensive one for daily use. The meaning of the house in Greek-Cypriot culture The central meaning of the house for
Greek-Cypriots was brought home to me during one of my first visits to Cyprus
guiding a party of tourists. On our way to a monastery near Pafos we were to
pass our busdriver's newly built house. When he suggested stopping for a drink
there I first refused his offer on the grounds of our limited time. As soon as
I had said that I would prefer going straight to the monastery, I realized that
I had said something wrong, because I could very clearly sense that he felt
insulted and even hurt although he accepted my decision. As we actually came to
his village, he asked again whether I would like to take the group to his
house. Having had a little time to think about my mistake, I accepted with the
effect that his whole expression changed immediately. Showing his house to the
world meant quite obviously a great deal to him. Only later did I understand
why. Here is an impressionistic portrait of him. His house means everything
to him. Not bein!g a refugee, he was able to finish a house at the age of 41
for himself and his older daughter who is going to live on the upper floor once
she will be married,. This house is his whole pride and the fulfilment of his
dream. He and his wife have put all their effort and money into it. Up to this
year, they have never travelled anywhere together. He strongly believes in the
ideal of an upright and proper kind of lifestyle which to him means helping
one's fellow human beings, acting properly according to one's religion, working
hard and most of all caring for one's family, which involves providing one's
daughter with a dowry house. Once all of his three children will be happily
married, he will have achieved the goal of his life. He is, no doubt, the
patriach of the family, and that is, in his view, the proper way things should
be. He is a very kind and warm-hearted person. And this is what he told me imagining a
possible loss of his house: "For sure, this would be my greatest grief, the
biggest psychological problem I had to face. Because it took me and my wife a
whole lifetime to build this house for our daughter, so much struggling, so
many problems, so many difficulties until we arrived were we are today. You
cannot exchange it with anything else, because it means an entire life, you
work, year after year and you give everything to build a house for your child,
as a father. From the moment on that someone would come and say: 'This house is
not yours, it is mine, you can go to another house', even if this other house
were better than mine, but for me, it means everything. The house is the
priority of our life. Because we get it from our parents, we keep it, it is our
most treasured possession. Because this way we show our parents our love and
esteem for them. It is the present that our parents have made us, that is why
we should never give it away. I imagine, this house which I now have given to
my daughter, for which I have given my whole life, if she were to sell it
tomorrow... I imagine my pain, there would be two kinds of pain for me: first,
that she has sold the house I have given her, and then, that I would see it in
foreign hands, every day. That's why we think it right to ... mainly because
our parents have given it to us, we want to keep it. That's why you can see
this eagerness, that's why the Cypriots work so hard, so that they can build a
house, if I had not worked properly all my life so that I can protect my family
properly, I could not have built this house for my daughter. " The above statement makes clear how much the
notion of the house is wound up with the notion of work, with the concept of
'inside and outside' (foreign) and most of all, with the notion of the family.
Typically, the Greek word for family, ikojenia , literally translates as
'house lineage' (Iossifides 1991: 140) or "the people who originate from
the same house" (Du Boulay 1986: 141). The house is much more than just
accomodation for Greek-Cypriots. It is the materialized symbol of the success
of a family. Building a house means the fulfilment of a central and highly
valued goal in life. The daughter referred to in the above
statement is a little over twenty years old now which means it is time to find
a husband for her. Since she has not become friends with a possible partner on
her own yet, her parents have introduced her to a number of young men (proxenia).
One of them seemed suitable both to the daughter and her parents and therefore
engagement arrangements were made. After a little while during which the
daughter and her future husband got to know each other better, it turned out
that he did not want to live in her village, i.e. in her house she has been
given by her parents. This was completely unacceptable and the engagement was
immediatly broken off. Aspects of the family, of gender and locality In Cyprus and Greece, houses are strongly
associated with women[78]. In Cyprus, daughters get a house as part of
their dowry and therefore it belongs to them[79]. Whoever can, will
give their daughter a house, and a lot of people can, although this is much
harder for refugees than for non-refugees of course. After the death of one or
both of their parents, daughters and sons inherit, if available, equal amounts
of land (cf. Sant Cassia 1982: 645). Because the house is perceived to be
passed on from mother to daughter and is thus primarily associated with women[80], women often told
me that they got their house from their mother. Similarly, people often
say that their mother lives next door, meaning their parents. A house is
not only passed on from woman to woman, it is also the center of a matrifocal
unit[81]. One daughter, if
there are more than one, will inherit the parental house, the other daughters
will get other houses or flats on an upper floor or nearby referred to as spiti
as well. This means that sisters will keep on living close to each other after
marrying. Their husbands will move in with them. This uxorilocal model[1]!otnote
[1]Sant Cassia (1982:
654) notes this mode of residence for the 1920s as well as for the 1980s. is a
theoretical one which cannot always be put into practice. Whenever possible
though it is. But due to mainly economic constraints - imagine a farmer with
four daughters - the ideal of giving one's daughter a house or a flat is not
always feasible. One of the greatest grieves for many refugees is the fact
that they will not be able to give their daughters a spiti. Some of my
refugee friends have helped their daughters to build houses while staying in an
old Turkish-Cypriot house themselves. The costs involved in building a In general, the dowry house has remained the ideal
for most Greek-Cypriots, despite the economic difficulties involved which
surely are not a novelty for the poorer strata of the Greek-Cypriot society. If a daughter's house is not yet finished
when she gets married, the young couple will live in the bride's parental house
until her own is ready. Sometimes this situation goes on for a year or more,
even if the first child has already been born. Engaged people as well - and
sometimes very young people get engaged after having been involved with each
other for a short time only -, live together at the woman's parental house
until they get married[82]. Stamatakis (in his unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
1994) misses the crucial gender aspect of houses in his discussion of the
"Women's Walks across the Green Line" (p. 266-309), a ritual of
protest against the Turkish occupation of the north of Cyprus, during which
women tried to cross the border in order to walk home ('to our houses', spiti
mas). It is not by accident that it was women walking home because
it is them who are primarily associated with houses. Thus this ritual protest
gained extra weight. The protest was culturally meaningful. Though the house in both Greece[83] and Cyprus is very
strongly associated with women, men are also "intrinsically
connected to the house" (Dubisch 1986a: 19-20) through their obligation to
provide for the family. Du Boulay, discussing power relations within Greek
marriages, notes that "... man's character is tempered by an
unremitting and often tyrannous service to the house. Food, shelter, and
clothing, not to mention dowries for the daughters and inheritances for the
sons, neither are nor were won easily from a harsh and rocky land, and when it
is said that the man is the head of the house, it means that he bears, quite
literally, with only his two hands to help him, the responsibility for the
lives of all within it." (1986: 154) The central significance of the house in a
variety of cultures very different from that of Cyprus is documented in Carsten
& Hugh-Jones' collection "About the house" (1995), bringing
together concepts of the house from societies in Southeast Asia (including
Madagascar, see also Bloch 1993) and South America. Taking a "sympathetic
but critical look at Lévi-Strauss's ideas of the house" (p. 1), Carsten
& Hugh-Jones emphasize (unlike Lévi-Strauss, cf. p. 37; for further
bibilographical references on the anthropology of the house, see Carsten &
Hugh-Jones 1995) the dynamic qualities of the house and its processual
character which is paralleled by the process of its inhabitants' lives. "... architectural processes are made to
coincide, in various ways, with important events and processes in the lives of
their occupants and are thought of in terms of them. ... We have shown the
value of seeing houses together with the people who inhabit them as mutually
implicated in the process of living." (Carsten & Hugh Jones 1995: 39,
45) This observation is true for Cyprus, as well,
where the building of a house goes hand in hand with the growing of a family,
the growing up of a daughter for whom the house is being built. Building a
house often takes years in Cyprus. Construction may start when a girl is only
ten years old for example, because the house is not expected to be ready until
the daughter's wedding. "Crucially, we would consider architectural
features of houses as an aspect of their importance as social units in both
life and thought" (Carsten & Hugh Jones 1995: 20). The building of the house thus parallels a
married couple's efforts to equip their daughter for life. The purpose of and
the most important goal in life, the well-being of one's children, is at least
partially fulfilled when she can be given a house thus smoothing the way for her
and the whole family's future. Only with the refugees the growth of the family
cannot be paralleled by the growth of the house, because they have to make up
time the fruits of which have been stolen from them by the invasion of 1974. Religious aspects of the house[84] In Cyprus, most women work as! wage labourers
as well as their husbands and thus share with them the responsibility of
providing materially for the nuclear family and the household. Caring for the
spiritual life of the family, however, for alive and dead members alike, is the
responsibility of women only. "... the woman conserves and nourishes the life
within it, and without the woman not only does the physical order of the house
fall apart, but the spiritual order also." (Du Boulay 1986: 163) Besides icons depicting holy scenes arranged
in a kind of private household shrine, the ikonostasi sometimes found in
Cypriot houses - but not as many times as seems to be the case in Greece[85] -, the house has
yet another, quite different religious aspect. It is conceptually linked with
purity, symbolized by its cleanliness, and pollution respectively. One of my
informants paralleled the cleanliness of the house with the purity of the
body, the spirit and the soul in the following way. She was explaining to me
why fasting during Easter time is important. "Just as you clean your house, you clean your
body of particular foods and of your husband (sexual abstinence) and your
spirit through attending religious ceremonies. You should take the Holy
Communion only if you are clean. Would you feel comfortable if you were dressed
nicely but your house was not clean? No, you wouldn't." !d What is particularly interesting is the
way she parallels the house with both the body and the spirit as opposed to
clothes. House, body and spirit are all inner spaces which must be kept
clean and free of pollution. Clothes and taking the Holy Communion on the other
hand are external mirrors of inner purity.
"The house and the body are intimately
linked" (Carsten & Hugh Jones 1995: 2), and thus the anthropology of
architecture and the anthropology of the body. This linkage which holds true
for Cyprus as well is nicely illustrated by the above statement. Dubisch (1986b) analyzes exactly this
parallel between the body and the house, both seen as inner space (I will come
back to her thesis below.). Keeping pollution away from inner spaces is
primarily a female task through which women secure social boundaries and order
for the whole society. "... what pollution beliefs reflect is not
gender status so much as more general concepts of control and order. ... It is
women's task ... to create and maintain the order that is the foundation of
culture. ... We see, then, that rather
than viewing women simply as sources of pollution ... we need to examine their
role as controllers of pollution, both their own and that of others, and thus
as guardians of order." (Dubisch 1986b; 202-3) The religious meaning of the house, and of
much else, is summarized by Du Boulay like this: "The house, however, is not only the basis of
material and social existence for the villager, for ... it is an image of
heaven on earth, re-creating within the human order the harmony of the divine
archetype on which it is based. The preservation of the life of the house, and
of the family within it, is a creative act that is carried out not merely in
response to the immediate material exigencies of the natural environment and
the agricultural cycle, but also in response to the sacred world, according to
which there are ordained periods of feast and periods of fast, times to rest
and times to work, saints' days and penitential periods - an interlocking
pattern of work and prayer and festival. The house, the pivot of these
activities, is thus both sanctuary and cornucopia [a place for plentifulness;
my addition], the point at which the beneficence of God and the fruits of the
earth meet and are manifested within the material world. And in the values of
hospitality to the stranger and the mourning rituals performed for the
forefathers, the gift of life and of food is mediated to the communities of
both the living and the dead." (1986: 143) The concept of 'inside versus outside' The house also embodies the widely documented
dichotomy of 'inside versus outside' in Greek-Orthodox contexts, 'outside'
meaning: cannot be trusted. The 'inside' on the other hand is the most sacred
realm. The family - and particularly women - and the house have the strongest
inside quality possible, but the dichotomy between in- and outside runs
through all important notions of Greek-Cypriot culture. Recall the statement I
quoted in the section about religion in which one informant talks about the
difference between 'inside and outside' of the house when it comes to defending
oneself and giving the Muslims credit for respecting the integrity of the
interior of the house (p. 81). That the quality of the house is an inner one
for Greek-Cypriots is visible in the fact that people often do not finish off
the outside of their house before moving in. A house is considered finished
when its inside is done. Outside painting may be delayed for several months. It
has no priority at all. Tourist often comment on how ugly Greek-Cypriot houses
look from outside because normally a lot of thin steel bars protrude from the
top of the flat roofs. Greek-Cypriot people are not bothered by this the least.
For them, the quality of the house lies inside and is paralleled to the inner
quality of the family both of which grow together (cf. Carsten & Hugh-Jones
1995). This is why in Cyprus the outside of a house is not relevant, it may be
neglected until its inner quality has fully grown. Cyprus itself, the topos, has an inner
quality opposed to the foreign outside which only causes trouble. Spiti mu,
literally 'my house', means my home and my homeland at the same time. The
house/home/homeland is what outsiders cannot take from you, theoretically at
least, which is an aspect a number of people stressed. Consider the following
statement of a non-refugee: "For Cypriots, the house means everything, it
is a space you have to yourself, others cannot just kick you out. I think the
Cypriots generally want something of their own. The house is our way of life,
everything is put into it. So many foreign powers have passed Cyprus and they
all took earth, land, that's why it has become so important to us to have our
own property nobody can take from us. And many people are angry now because
our earth is sold to foreigners[86], because we feel a
need to hold on to our earth, our land. ... The refugees cannot ... it is a
drama for them, this moment old people die, and they die with the pain the
refugees have, that they had to leave their houses, and if possible they want
to be buried in their villages." Related to the inner quality of the house is,
finally, food and all social actions and encounters taking place inside the
house. Through food, socially important values of Greek-Cypriot culture,
within and between families, are mediated in the house (cf. Dubisch 1986b). I would like to end this part about the inner
qualities of the house by pointing to a brilliant article by Dubisch (1993)
entitled "'foreign chickens' and other outsiders: gender and community
in Greece". Dubisch scrutinizes
the often unreflected concept of 'honour and shame' (Peristiany 1965, see also
the updated discussion of this concept: Peristiany & Pitt-Rivers 1992[87] and Gilmore 1987)
which is intimately linked to the integrity of the family, to its inner
quality. Within this concept, women are understood as those to be
controlled, primarily by means of controlling their sexuality (see for example
Du Boulay 1986, Roussou 1986). Dubisch (1986b, 1993), in contrast, sees women
as those who actively control social boundaries relevant to the whole
society[88]. "... concepts of gender
are not simply 'about' men and women ... they serve to construct and interpret
other areas of social experience as well, including social segmentation and
communal boundaries." (Dubisch 1993: 272)!ar Women, therefore, actively establish
and maintain the boundaries between the inside and the outside, they are
responsible for the integrity of the family and the house. Unlike in the
concept of 'honour & shame' which stresses women's passivity, Dubisch
interpretes their contribution to ensuring the integrity of the inside as an
active one. However, 'inside' does not merely mean the private, rather it is
one facet of a complex conceptual framework of 'inside versus outside' extending
into both public and private areas, into both female and male spheres[89] (Dubisch 1993:
35-38, 280; see also Salamone & Stanton 1986). Work for the house Working is not something Greek-Cypriots like
to do for its own sake, it is not a virtue as such. Working hard is only
worth for certain things, particularly for the well-being of the family and the
house. "... the houses are homes identified with the
labour, life-history, taste and personality of their owner." (Loizos
1977b:8) People are more than happy to invest everything
they have into their house. Money well spent is money spent for the family and
the spiti. Before one has built a house for oneself or for one's
daughter, not much money is sacrificed for anything else. The house is the
reward for one's labour and that is why it is worth working. One young woman who is critical of the
Cypriot 'house mania' made the following prognosis about the way I would
certainly change if I were to stay in Cyprus: "If you were to stay in Cyprus for another few
years, you would want to have your own house and car ... working, working ...
you would take on the Cypriot mentality ... our life is full of stress, because
we want to build these houses. Once you have finished your house, like my
mother... just recently, well, they had built the house, but then they needed
furniture, things ... and now they have a lot of stress for my house." !lt0 The loss of houses Having the significance of the house in mind,
it becomes clear that the loss of one's spiti is one of the most tragic
things that can happen to a Greek-Cypriot person. Houses are irreplaceable.
Nothing is quite like home, and by this Greek-Cypriots literally mean their
house (cf. Loizos 1981: 130/200; 1977b: 7-9). The refugees are "mourning
for ... a pattern of meaning" (Loizos 1977b: 8-9). Due to women's central
place and position in the house, refugee women suffer particularly strongly
from the loss of their houses[90]. Loizos (1981: 177)
even talks of a "sense of amputation" they have experienced. The
following statement by one of them is indicative of this. "The land (topos) where you were born is
different from any other place. It is a big difference! It is not the same
here. Whatever they will give you, you don't value it like your land, your
house where you were born, even if they gave you a kingdom. Whatever we have
here, we want to return to our houses, to our land. I have worked from an early
age on to build my house. I got the land from my mother but I worked myself to
build a house. I started to work at the age of fifteen to build a house and
just when it was finished, they took it away from me. It is mainly
psychological, you know, what goes to pieces. ... It is as if you are not at
home, as if you were a foreigner, you lose your friends, your own ones, your
relatives, we were six brothers and sisters but we have lost each other (we
are spread all over the island now), you lose your (social) circle... like a
bird on its own[91]. Here I have
nobody. When I gave birth, I had nobody, when I was sick, neither mother nor
brother, nobody. Alone with my husband. But if you are at home, you have your
family, relatives, close to you. We all went where our husbands found work. But
in Morfu (the town she is from) we had built so that all sisters would be
together, you know, in the same row of houses, we all wanted to live there,
together. My mother told us to build like that so that we would all stay
together, so that we would help each other. Then the terrible thing happened
and we came here. Each one of us went somewhere else." slmult0One day when I was helping a friend of
mine, a refugee woman, making cheese, she all of a sudden bursted out: "Oh, it is difficult not to be able to go to
your house knowing that it is only half an hour's drive away. If only we could
go! Do you know what it means to have invested so much work and then to lose
everything within an hour? It is terrible. And even if we could go across to
the North, if the borders were to open, could I then go into my house?
Or would I have to stand in front of my own door not being able to go in? This
house here (she lives in a former Turkish-Cypriot house) is not ours, it
belongs to Turkish people." The loss of the house means much more than
its material loss. Along with it a family's identity and history is lost as
illustrated by the following story told by a 20-year-old woman: " I know of a refugee family, the grandmother,
the mother and the daughter ... and when she (the daughter) was young, her
mother had taken her to the Green Line (the border between North and South) and
had shown her where herself and her own mother had been born and she said so
her: 'Over there is our spiti', and the daughter answered her: 'Mama, I
was born in Pafos, how can I say that my spiti is over there?'" The weather forecast on Greek-Cypriot
television still gives the temperature in the occupied areas every evening
despite the fact that no Greek-Cypriot can go there. But it still seems to be
of interest to the refugees to know what kind of weather there is 'at home'. The absolutely central meaning of the house
for Greek-Cypriots was brought home to me once again after I had left Cyprus
when I got a letter from a friend of mine who is a refugee from the town of
Kerynia. It included a visiting-card which read: To spiti
mou einai sthn Keruneia. Ekei zw. M�995enw twra: ... My home/house is in Kerynia.
There I live. Presently I stay at ... then came the present address. 2. Constructing group-consciousness: The notion of the house The notion of the house is mainly used as a
delimitating factor excluding the Turks from mainland Turkey, though there is
an integrative aspect to it as well which I will discuss first. Inclusion of Turkish-Cypriots Inside the house Turkish-Cypriots are thought to be civilized
in their bahaviour inside the house according to Greek-Cypriot standards of
what civilization means. They are thought to value the inside of the house as
much as Greek-Cypriots do themselves. This is the first aspect leading to
their inclusion into the group defined as insiders, the Cypriots. A statement
which I will quote in the section about processes of exclusion illustrates
this. The loss of houses The Turkish-Cypriots were forced to leave
their houses and many people claim that they cried when they were taken away.
Because the Turkish-Cypriots are perceived to share the Greek-Cypriot notion
of the house, loosing their homes must have been as tragic for them as it was
for the Greek-Cypriots. The following statement in which the loss of houses stands as a symbol of the refugee
experience in general, was made by a Greek-Cypriot refugee. "And, I remember, when we came to Pafos, the
Turkish-Cypriots did not want to leave, from Pafos. They cried and cried! I
tell you honestly, they sat on the street and cried and did not want to go
away. And they said: 'Here I have my s!piti, I want to stay, and they
brought them away in busses.'" A couple of people added to this sort of
statement that the Turkish-Cypriots entrusted their houses to their
Greek-Cypriot neighbours and friends until their expected return. Both Turkish-
and Greek-Cypriots believed that they were going to go back to their homes
which neither of them did to this day. Exclusion of Turks Inside the house The following statements will illustrate both
the inclusion of the Turkish-Cypriots and the exclusion of the Turks by means
of their respective behaviour inside the house. "The Turks are different from ours (the
Turkish-Cypriots). They don't have the same way of keeping house, they are
different, they are not interested in having a table and chairs to sit at and
eat, ... not like the Turkish-Cypriots, the Turkish-Cypriots used to have this
..., even more than us ... this... inside the house, because they saw how we
lived and they identified with it and became like us." "They are not a cultivated people. They are
still very backwards. They come into their houses and dig, in the middle of the
house, of a room, and they make a fire and sit around it. They have no culture
yet." 'The Turks have taken our
houses' On countless occasions people emphasized that
the Turks have taken their houses, this being one of the absolutely inexcusable
crimes they have committed in the course and after the war in 1974. Especially
for the refugees, the loss of their houses and the fact that there is hardly
any hope that they will ever return is one of the most difficult consequences
of war they have to face. The loss of their houses is for Greek-Cypriots the
ultimate proof that the Turks are
indeed a bad people and that they have no culture at all. Because by taking
away the houses from the Greek-Cypriots, the Turks have attacked and deprived
them of one of the most important notions of the Cypriot culture: one's own house.
It is hard for Cypriot people to imagine something more barbarian and cruel. "They took our property, our houses, the tombs
of our grandfathers, these things, I cannot forget." "I am not a refugee, I didn't lose my house,
but there are others who lost their house. They are even more hurt, and do not
want the Turks at all, of course we don't want them either, but the refugees ..
They drove us out of our houses, they took half of Cyprus, the most beautiful
places. ... if the Turks were to come here and take my house, it would be very
difficult indeed... to forget, to get over it, and the refugees feel the
same." The woman who said this is
31 years old. She works as a chambermaid in a hotel in Pafos. She lives with
her mother and brother in one part of a pair of semi-detached houses that
herself and her sister who lives in the other part have jointly built. Their
mother's house had been on the same ground, but they had to demolish it
because it was very old. She has invested ten years of her life to build this
house and she would never consider moving away even if she was given a much
bigger and more luxurious house, because this place in this neighbourhood is
where she was born and where she grew up, where she has spent all of her life
and plans to spend the rest of it, too. Neither could she imagine not living
next to her sister's. A 35-year-old man who is not in favour of
bicommunal talks with the Turkish-Cypriot leadership explicated his position: "Do you talk to someone who has taken your
house from you?" The answer is obvious. Another man, not a
refugee himself, reacted in the same way when I told him that I had attended a
bicommunal meeting in the captial: !ctlpar"If you take my
house and drive me away, shall I then sit at a table with you in order to
negotiate?" A couple who had, unlike most other people,
the option of not moving into a Turkish-Cypriot house when they became
refugees, decided not to do so. Their decision was a means by which they
actively differentiated themselves from uncivilized acts such as seizing
someone else's house. They explained: "We didn't want to. I could not have lived in a
Turkish-Cypriot house, not because it is Turkish, but because I did not want to
take something which belongs to someone else." Destruction! and sale of
houses Not only have the Turks deprived the
Greek-Cypriots of their right - and this is a human right for the
Greek-Cypriots - to live in their houses, they also neglect and willingly
destroy them. This is as inexcusable and unforgivable as the destruction of
holy and ancestral sites. This point was made again and again, at every opportunity. Before I went for a short visit to the
occupied North of Cyprus for the first time, I was told that I was going to
find lots of ruined houses and churches turned into pigsties. When I came back
with my personal impression that this was not the case actually - I also
brought some pictures back with me - I was immediately corrected that I had
just not noticed the ruins of houses and holy sites or that, had I gone to
small villages rather than towns, I would for sure have seen plenty of evidence
of the Turks' destructive frenzy. This may be true, I do not know this from
first hand experience. The point I want to make is that the argument of the
destruction of Greek-Cypriot houses and holy sites figures so prominentely in
the Greek-Cypriots' way of reasoning about the Turks, that it simply cannot be
but true. A friend of mine reminded me that: "... the demolishment of our homes was the last
thing we saw. The last thing we remember is bombs dropping and us trying to get
away, running out of our houses, and behind us was like a typhoon sweeping
everything away. That's our last memory. We haven't been back since." What is worse than the Turks neglecting the
houses they have stolen from their rightful owners is that they sell them. To
Greek-Cypriots, this is the ultimate disrespect for anything valuable to them.
! " ... and they sell them to foreigners! English
people for example. Our houses! This is a very big ... yesterday they
said on TV, that a deputy of the English parlament has bought a house in
Kerynia, a Greek house, and he bought it from the Turks! And it turned out that
it had belonged to someone who is here (in the South), and they sold his house
to this English man!" Moreover, the Turks are accused of attacking
the house's most sacred realm: its interior. This is presented as characteric
behaviour of Turkish people. They are said to break in other people's houses
and of 'stealing everything out of your house' as well as of behaving violently
inside the house against their own family. All of this violates the
Greek-Cypriot notion of the house. Thus, people who do this sort of thing can
never be insiders. 3. Turkish-Cypriot houses I will end this chapter by pointing to a
contradiction that I am at a loss to explain. People who otherwise emphasized
the sameness of Turkish- and
Greek-Cypriots and that one could not tell a difference between them said -
when talking about their refugee experience and the Turkish-Cypriot houses they
had to move in at first for lack of something else - that the Turkish-Cypriot
houses were dirty, that they were little more than miserable shacks. This is
contradictory to what was said above. However, the three women who complained
about the condition of their initial accomodation after having become refugees
did this in order to illustrate the enormous loss they suffered through the
invasion and the deterioration of their lifestyle rather than in order to
distinguish between themselves and the Turkish-Cypriots and to exclude the
latter from their own group of people. Consider the following interview
sequence: "I did not get a house from my mother. ... I
worked from an early age on, so that I would be able to build a house. I built
it, I was engaged and we were ready to get married. I had sheets, all the
things for the wedding, everything. The very day the invasion happened, my husband
decorated the house where we were going to get married... They gave us, we got
a Turkish-Cypriot house, but it was old! How can I tell you ... the walls were
leaning, the plaster came off, old, dirty ... you know, Turkish-Cypriot, dirty,
old houses, it was terrible, ... we struggled a lot... it rained into the house
, and I had my first baby, it was cold, we struggled a lot, we suffered. I had
built my own house in Morfu and then I came here and lived in such an old
house, I was sad and I cried." 4. Summary To summarize, the house is extremely
important in Cyprus. In the notion of the house - as is the case for the notion
of the family which in many ways is synonymous with the house -, all crucial
values for Greek-Cypriots join up and concentrate. The notion of the house is invoked by
Greek-Cypriots when they reason about both Turkish-Cypriots and Turks. It is
crucial to the construction of in- and outsiders, of group-consciousness and
belonging. STOUS TOURKOKUPRIOUS !TO
THE TURKISH-CYPRIOTS Ctes me
skotwses,
se skotwsa, Yesterday, you
killed me, I killed you, alloi, se baros
mas
kerdisan. Others
won at our costs. Emeis to mis3os
... thn katastrofh! We won hate ...
catastrophy! 'Ela, ela n'agaphqoume
... Come
and let us reconcile ... h ghs mas
giomise calasmata. Our earth has filled with ruins. 'Ela﹪4 na xanaktisoume,
geitona, Come, neighbour, let
us build mia aulh to spiti mas
... aderfika. houses with one
yard again ... like
brothers and sisters. Artemhs
Antwnio!u Artemis
Antoniou, 1974, (my translation)
VII Further
aspects 1. A note about the notion of locality and
neighbourhood In order to illustrate the point I want to
make, I have chosen five notions I consider fundamental to Cypriot culture. Of
course these are not exhaustive, one could add other notions such as that of
the land (topos), of locality and neighbourhood. Consider for example
the following statement by a 81-year-old refugee: "We got on very well. We had Turkish-Cypriots
as neighbours and we got on very well indeed. She (a Turkish-Cypriot neighbour)
used to look after my children! Yes! She even looked after my children. Many
times I gave her my Eleni (her daughter). She used to live across the street,
and she was blind. She didn't see anything. She used to call me: 'Maria, go and
get some water for me.' And I took her by the hand and we often sat together,
since I was alone, too (she had lost her husband early). The Turkish-Cypriots
were good, it is those from outside who have caused all the bad things." With the refugees, the notion of locality and
neighbourhood is salient primarily through its absence, through them
bewailing its loss by which they mean the loss of their homeland and of village
solidarity, of houses and family cohesion. It is not surprising therefore, that
after twenty-two years of being refugees, they still identify very strongly
with the now occupied places they come from. For non-refugees, the notion of locality is
very important, too. Greek-Cypriots strongly feel attached to where their
predecessors came from. Loizos (1975a, particularly p. 94-103) shows in his
study of a Cypriot village that village solidarity remains one of the
strongest bonds in the face of changes due to modernization and involvment in
politics. Villagers consider the benefits of their village membership greater
than those of getting involved in politics viewed by the villagers with great
scepticism. Villagers rely on the inside, their village rather than on outside
politics seen as potentially dangerous and disruptive. They spend a great deal
of time trying to neutralize potentially negative effects of outside politics
on village solidarity. However, I did not experience the notion of
locality to be as central as the notions I have chosen to discuss in detail
which is why I have only briefly touched on it talking about the Cypriot house.
Perhaps this is due to the invasion of 1974 and the subsequent dispersal of
families, neighbours and friends all over Cyprus. However, it is interesting
that even though neighbourhood does not seem to play such a prominent role in
people's daily lives these days, they nevertheless exemplify the good relations
between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots by means of the concept of the village and
of neighbourhood. This means that the notions people employ to reason about
other groups of people are indeed cultural, and not merely a reflection of
someone's personal situation or priorities. I have made this point already in
the discussion about the notion of religion showing that even outspokenly
non-religious persons use the very notion of religion to illustrate why the
Turkish-Cypriots are good and the Turks bad. Although they may not be exhaustive, I
believe that the notions I have chosen to illustrate my point are crucial to any
understanding of the processes of constructing group-consciousness amongst
Greek-Cypriots. I have chosen them - and not the notion of locality for example
- because they are most evident in my
own data, particularly in regard to participant observation. 2. Aspects of individual priority and gender At the same time as the processes of
constructing group-consciousness are based on culturally shared notions,
there is an individual aspect to the way people reason about others, this being
the emphasis on particular aspects. On the one hand, different emphases
are related to one's own priorities. For example, outspokenly non-religious
persons draw on the notion of religion to reason about in- and outsiders, but
they do not emphasize religion to the extent devout people do. On the other
hand, emphases are related to gender. Though I could not detect any fundamental
differences between what women and what men say about Turkish-Cypriots or
Turks, gender plays a certain role in the way people remember the Turkish-Cypriots.
For example, a number of women told me personal memories about either a
Turkish-Cypriot woman being the midwife of a Greek-Cypriot woman or vice versa.
Women mentioned Turkish-Cypriot neighbours looking after their children while
not a single man pointed to this in order to illustrate harmonious
relationships. Men, on their part, often refer to sitting together with
Turkish-Cypriots in the kafenion, an exclusivly male space. When women
recall the past in general, they often talk about turkalles, i.e.
Turkish-Cypriot women, because due to gender related activities in Cypriot
society, they basically have experiences with Turkish-Cypriot women rather than
men. 3. About 'The stranger' In his essay about 'The stranger', Schütz
(cf. Schütz 1964) noted as early as in 1944 that people of a particular culture
and background have an intersubjectively shared, historically built up idea of
how other people they have never met, strangers, supposedly are. The
'knowledge' about the stranger is not based on first-hand experience, but it is
anonymous and stereotypical. It is constantly recreated and learned through
socialization within one's own group. It is not critically examined until one
actually meets such a stranger. If this happens, the anonymous stranger becomes
a real person, in the face of which (negative or positive) stereotypes
cannot
be maintained, but "anonymous contents turn into definite social
situations, ... ready-made typologies desintegrate" (Schütz 1964: 98). Looking from the perspective not of a
stranger approaching an in-group other than his or her own, as Schütz does, but
from the perspective of the members of an in-group - in this case the
Greek-Cypriots - 'approaching' a stranger or groups of strangers - in this
case the Turkish-Cypriots and the Turks respectively -, Schütz' concept is
valuable for an understanding of different people's point of view. As far as the Turkish-Cypriots are concerned,
one needs to distinguish between different age groups. For those people whose
memory reaches back to the time before the ethnically based separation of the
Cypriot people took place in 1974, the Turkish-Cypriots are persons, not
strangers. However, very young people with no personal experience and memory of
the Turkish-Cypriots have been socialized (primarily in school) in a climate
of anti-Turkish nationalism which lacks a differentiation between
Turkish-Cypriots and Turks. Although the official ideology does not explicitely
brand the Turkish-Cypriots, they are simply ignored in history books which only
reiterate the centuries-old antagonism between Greeks and Turks. It is the lack
of discussion about the Turkish-Cypriots and their relations to the
Greek-Cypriots which causes some young people not to distinguish between
Turkish-Cypriots and Turks, but to lump them all together. For them, both
Turkish-Cypriots and Turks are strangers they have never met and probably never
will. They have no personal experience with which to counter the stereotypes
they learn. As far as people from mainland Turkey are
concerned and the Greek-Cypriots' perception of them, what I have discussed in
the previous chapters is precisely how ideas about 'the stranger' develop,
through which processes they are constructed, since almost no Greek-Cypriot
has ever actually met a Turk. The Turks are strangers to them all. Practically everyone shares stereotypical
ideas of the Turks from mainland Turkey. However, there are very few
exceptions which I have withheld so far. Interestingly enough, those very few
people who do not share the generally accepted view of the Turks, are
exactly those who have actually met Turkish people. I have got to know three
such Greek-Cypriot persons. One of them -which I have portrayed in the chapter
about the family and whose poems I have quoted - was taken prisoner by the
Turkish army invading Cyprus in 1974. As as consequence, he actually met
Turkish people, if under extreme and tragic circumstances. Having had very stereotypical views about
the Turks before, he changed his mind about them during his imprisonment,
because by meeting them, they became people and human beings rather than
strangers. He was a stranger himself approaching a group of strangers.
"The approaching stranger ... becomes aware of the fact that ... his ideas
of the foreign group, its cultural pattern, and its way of life, do not stand
the test of vivid experience and social interaction" (Schütz 1964: 98-9).
The second person I met who did not join in the general choir about the Turks
being, by birth so to speak, savages, is a man who has met several Turks
abroad. These two people are the only ones I know who have actually met any
Turks from mainland Turkey. The third person - I have portrayed him in the
chapter about the house - is an exception in that he refrains from judging the
Turks on the grounds that he has never actually met a Turk and therefore does
not know them. He opposes the idea of the stranger. I consider this friend of
mine to be exceptionally open-minded. I would like to end this note about the
stranger with another interesting example showing how even among the
Turkish-Cypriots there are some who are strangers and others who are not. A
41-year-old woman who comes from a formerly mixed village remembers the times
of intercommunal violence very vividly. I have quoted her telling me the story
of her mother giving birth early out of shock when Turkish-Cypriots attacked
their house emphasizing though that these were Turkish-Cypriots from another,
exclusively Turkish-Cypriot village, not their neighbours, not diki mas.
She added an analysis of the process by which an idea about a stranger is built
up herself: "There were Turkish-Cypriots who were different
(from those from our own village), those who did not know us, you know, just as
I now say that the Turks are bad, they (the Turkish-Cypriots from the other
village) talked about us like that because they did not know us, they said that
we, the Greek-Cypriots, were bad, since they did not know us, isn't it like that?
Ours (diki mas, the Turkish-Cypriots from her own village) were good.
"
[41]Maria Hadjipavlou sees this fact as one of the obstacles on the way towards a solution (personal communication). [42]Another young woman born in 1975 for example said that she could tolerate Turkish-Cypriots and even Turks as long as they behave, so to speak. For her, the Turkish-Cypriots are foreigners as any others as well who can be accepted as long as they do not cause any trouble. They clearly are outsiders though and have no right as such to live in Cyprus. [43]For a discussion of the notion of the family in Cyprus, see Loizos 1975a (particularly 63-84), 1981 and Peristiany 1965, 1968, 1976a who conducted fieldwork between 1954 and 1988 when he died. [44]Cf. Peristiany 1968: 84. As on a Greek island described by Just, the agnatic concept of soi "plays no part in social life at all" (Just 1991: 121) in Cyprus either. [45]For a discussion of the dynamics of marriage strategies and the resources - property as well as power and prestige - sought and employed, see Sant Cassia 1982. The situation seems to have been somewhat different in the late 1970s when he did fieldwork in the Pafos area. There is still a third party involved in initiating a potential marriage, and the first meeting takes place at the third party's house, but this role is not a female one as Sant Cassia tells us, though I must add that I have only limited information about this. In the one case I observed, the whole family was involved and went jointly to see the potential groom for their daughter. [46]For further biblographical references, see Herzfeld 1982. [47]The general purpose of Kenna's paper is to show the link between names and rights to property and the continuation of both through the generations of each gender. [48]For a discussion of the politics of changes in dating public celebrations, see Stamatakis 1994: 215-221. [49]This is also visible in the ideals of Orthodox painting which has often been misinterpreted as rigid and lacking art. It is explicitely not the aim of an Orthodox icon painter to immortalize himself through his art, rather, he is trying to copy the original holy painting as precisely as possible without leaving any personal marks. [50]Surnames relating to places of origin or residence for example are different in that respect. [52]See also Pitt-Rivers 1976 and Kenna 1976b. Pitt-Rivers interpretes the function of the 'compadrazgo' as caring for the individual side of a person rather than her or his membership of a collectivity. He understands 'compadrazgo' as a relationship between individuals as individuals rather than as members of families. Kenna suggests that through kumbaria the discrepancy between "the ideal of family independence and the necessity for ties outside the family" (1976b: 361) is bridged. However, I cannot agree with her description of bonds of trust and cooperation on a Greek island which she says are solely based on the nuclear family. At least in Cyprus, this does not seem to be true to me. Both authors, but particularly Pitt-Rivers, also point to the factor of patronage involved in kumbaria relationships. [53]For a cross-cultural analysis of baptism and compadrazgo (in Orthodoxy kumbaria) see Bloch & Guggenheim! 1981 discussing the ideological functions of these institutions. Bloch & Guggenheim interprete rituals of godparenthood as second, spiritual birth portrayed as purer than natural birth. This implies a devaluation of women as birth-givers and institutionalizes power over them as well as over men. Orthodox baptism and kumbaria is a typical example of Bloch & Guggenheim's argument which is visible for instance in the fact that during Orthodox baptism, the physical mother and father do not play an active role at all, but are degraded to mere spectators of the ritual somewhere in the back of the community witnessing it. Also, after having given birth, a woman is considered unclean and therefore, she is not allowed to enter the church for forty days after which the baby is supposed to be taken out of the house for the first time being brought to church. There it is blessed by the priest under the entrance to the holy part of the church and then taken to kiss the holy icons by its father. Only after this ritual does the mother enter the church, too. [54]Artemis Antoniou is a Cypriot poet writing partially in the Cypriot dialect and a friend and informant of mine. !hftn I wish to thank Maria Tsimouris for helping me with the Greek texts in this study including the summary at the end. [56]There is exten!sive literature on the concept of 'honour and shame', developed by Peristiany (1965) and updated by him some thirty years later (Peristiany & Pitt-Rivers 1992). For a critique of this concept see Dubisch 1993. [57]The Kykko monastery in the Troodos mountains is one of the most important ones in Cyprus. [58]For more information about the Evil Eye in Greece, see Herzfeld 1981, Dionisopoulos-Mass 1976. Turkish-Cypriots seem to share the belief in the Evil Eye and in the ways of protection against it with Greek-Cypriots. An elderly Turkish-Cypriot woman once gave me an egg decorated with crotcheting from which a blue eye-bead is dangling as a protection against evil. [59]Interestingly, I was told the exact opposite by an elderly Turkish-Cypriot woman who lives in the North of Cyprus. She considers the Turkish-Cypriots much more secular than the Greek-Cypriots: "They always went to church a lot, we only rarely went to the mosque." [60]Everyone still refers to Istanbul as Konstantinupolis. because hardly anyone is aware that Istanbul, too, is a word of Greek origin, meaning 'in the city' (Just 1989: 74). [61]Linobambaki may be translated as 'those who are neither linen (lino) nor cotton (bambaki) and refers to those Greek-Cypriots who officially converted to Islam in order to escape heavy taxation. They were both: officially Muslims and secretly Christians. [62] Doing research in Pyla, the only still mixed village, would be the only possibility of studying religious syncretism on a larger scale i!nvolving more than just very few individuals. [63]Among them the contributors to Loizos & Papataxiarchis 1991, particularly Du Boulay (also 1986), Dubisch and Iossifides. [64]Civil marriage has only been introduced a few years back. [65]See, for example, Loizos 1981: 37-39, but many
other authors also show the connection between state and church politics in
Cyprus. [66]For a discussion of patron-client relationships in Cyprus, see Loizos 1975!a, 1977a; Attalides 1977b. For contributions about patronage in other Mediterranean societies, see Gellner & Waterbury (eds.) 1977. [67]For a detailed discussion of working relations between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots and the labour movement between 1910 and 1982, see Katzikides 1988. [68]Here he refers to the joint miners' strike in 1948 which, lasting for over four months, was "the longest one in the history of trade unionism in the island" in which "the unity of the rank and file of the strikers of both communities remained to the end unbroken ..." (Kyrris 1977: 83). [69]For an alternative situation in a Greek town, see Cowan 1991: 182-184. [70]For a cross-cultural discussion of the symbolism of food creating kinship, see Carsten & Hugh-Jones 1995. [71]For a discussion of the somewhat different symbolism of food in a Macedonian town - stressing the different social meaning of food within and between families - see Cowan 1991. [72]Interestingly enough, Maratheftis (1989:14-15) chooses food as an example to illustrate the relationship between researcher (himself, a Greek-Cypriot living abroad) and informants (his family amongst whom he conducted research). [73]I was told that in the past weddings went on for three days whereby the first day consisted of eating resi and other special kinds of food. On the second day the couple !actually got married in church and on the third the whole village danced together. [74]The Orthodox Lent could easily be interpreted within Bloch's theory of 'rebounding violence' (1992b) since the two crucial stages of the process of transforming 'prey into hunter' are obvious in Greek Orthodox Lent: firstly, the expulsion of earthly vitality (symbolized t!hrough the abstinence from nutritious food and particularly meat) and secondly the recovery and consumption of a new, transcendental vitality and life (symbolized by all food and particularly meat eaten after the Holy Communion). "... the recovered vitality is mastered by the transcendental. Unlike the native vitality of the first stage which must be driven out of oneself, the vitality reintroduced in the second stage is taken from external sources and is consumed as the food of the transcendental subject, often literally through the mouth" (Bloch 1992b: 5-6). [75]On the meaning of photographs for Greek-Cypriots, see Loizos 1981: 171-2, 186. [76]For a discussion of the contributions of women to the decoration of the interior of the house, see Pavlides & Hesser 1986.! [77]For a discussion of inner and outer spaces in Greek houses and the boundaries between them, see Dubisch 1986a & b. [78]See, for example, Pavlides & Hesser/Du Boulay/Dubisch in: Dubisch 1986; and Du Boulay/Iossifides in: Loizos & Papataxiarchis 1991; Loizos 1981, 1977b. [79]For a discussion of changes within the tradition of the d!owry house due to historical circumstances, cf. Loizos 1975 b. But see also Sant Cassia 1982 who writes that the changes discussed by Loizos never applied to the Pafos area. Loizos worked in the area of Morfu. In an article written shortly after the division of Cyprus (1977b), Loizos notes that the tradition of the dowry house has been weakened. Nowadays though, this tradition seems to be very strong again. [80]Pavlides & Hesser 1986 however discuss the reduced influence women can exert on the construction of houses in modernizing societies of rural Greece. [81]This type of residence is not unusual in Greece either, cf. Loizos & Papataxiarchis 1991: 9-10. [82]Sant Cassia (1982: 654) speeks of ipso facto marriages. This he interpretes as a political move by the woman's parents in order to keep the groom. [83]Iossifides (1991: 140-1) notes that the house and the family are "vitalized" through women even in a patrilocal context (unlike in Cyprus) where "the house and the name of the ikoyenia define male ide!ntity". [84]See Du Boulay 1974, 1986, 1991 who particularly stresses the spiritual and sacred aspect of the house. [86]There are quite a lot of foreigners, mainly English people, living in the Pafos area today; they buy the best places and build most expensive houses. [87]The focus of the contributions to this new discussion of the concept introduced by Peristiany in 1965 which was "a preface to the anthropology of the Mediterranean" (Peristiany & Pitt-Rivers 1992: 1) lies on the notion of grace and its relation to the sacred. "If individual will is the essence of honor, the essence of grace is the will of God" (Pitt-Rivers 1992: 222). Peristiany's contribution deals with the notion of honor and grace in a Cypriot village. [88]A similar line of argument is taken up by Herzfeld (1981) discussing the Evil Eye in Greece and interpreting it as an expression of boundary maintenance between insiders and outsiders rather than as an isolated phenomenon. [89]For an excellent discussion of the central position of the house in Basque society, see Ott 1992. There, the house is " a spiritual, social, and moral entity" (p. 196) linking the realm of the living and that of the dead which is also related to issues of gender and to the concept of 'inside versus outside', of social order and disorder. [90]Cf. Loizos 1981: 176-81 discussing the consequences of the flight in terms of women's association with the interior of the house. [91]About the dispersal of the families, cf. Loizos 1981: 172-76.
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