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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 marria |