ana sayfa > dosyalar > Looking at the house from inside (Chapter Three)
Ana Sayfa       Hamamböcüleri Ne?       English       Dosyalar       Arama       Site Haritasý       Arþiv

 

 Chapter Three: Empirical Part

 

I  Introduction

II The notion of the family

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

III The notion of religion

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

IV The notion of work

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

V The notion of food

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

VI The notion of the house

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

VII Further aspects

1. A note about the notion of locality and neighbourhood

2. Aspects of individual priority and gender

3. About 'The stranger'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ content | chapter 3 ]

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.

 

 

[ content | chapter 3 ]

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