Chronicler of the enclaved of Cyprus
They live in the village of Ayia Triada, halfway up the Karpasia peninsula with its sleepy roads set amid thickets of pine, palm and olive – though also in the pages of Achaeans Coast (2004), an art exhibition (now in book form) by Toula Liasi.
Toula, a Cypriot artist based in the Netherlands, is the chronicler of the enclaved, those Greek Cypriots who never left their homes in the occupied north after the invasion. They included her late mum and dad – who passed away in 2015 and 2019, respectively – and even Toula herself, for a year as a teenager in 1974-75.
Achaeans, the first of several projects on this theme (her latest is called Synchronising History), is composed of portraits of her fellow villagers – but the poignant footnotes, in the book she shows me, are the handwritten dates she’s appended below each photo, noting when the person in question died since the book was published.
Almost all are gone now. There were about 12,000 enclaved to begin with, all in Karpasia, but only a handful remain: a few hundred up the road in Rizokarpaso (Dipkarpaz in Turkish), about 25 – down from over 1,000 – in Ayia Triada (Sipahi) itself, and exactly one Greek Cypriot left in Ayios Andronikos (Yeşilköy), waiting for the end since his wife passed away.
The UN still come up to Ayia Triada every Wednesday, bringing food supplies as they’ve done for 50 years, says Toula over coffee and watermelon in her family home. “Rice, flour, sugar, coffee… But now they bring Pampers [i.e. adult diapers] too!” she adds, laughing ruefully. “And brown bread, because they’re diabetic. Stuff like that…”
Toula herself has been living in The Hague since 1980 (she married and divorced there and has a son and daughter, both in their 30s), but coming back to Ayia Triada increasingly often. What kind of person is she? “Patient,” she replies. “With a sense of humour,” like her dad. Optimistic. Calm. Above all a practical person, a doer. She appreciates the Dutch – a nation of doers, unlike the circumlocution and ‘what will people think?’ we get in Cyprus.
“Art is always intertwined with life” goes the aphorism – set beneath a gallery of photos from her childhood – on Toula’s website, though for years she painted what she calls “heavenly landscapes”, inspired by Holland’s big skies and spectacular light. Only with Achaeans did she switch to photography – and, more importantly, start making art directly inspired by Cyprus, her own experience and that of her village.
The story of the enclaved, especially in Ayia Triada, is surprising – above all in having unfolded quite passively. I’d assumed there was a flashpoint, a battle of sorts where the Greeks resisted and the Turkish authorities agreed to let them stay – but in fact it’s more a case of a situation that dragged on and on, a reluctant co-habitation that finally became the reality.
“We never expected that the struggle would be so long,” admits 76-year-old Yiannakis Panteli, one of the few remaining Greek Cypriots, who’s been here – tending to his beehives, goats, and olive and carob trees – his whole life, including five decades of living among Turkish settlers.
The settlers came from Trabzon, on the Black Sea, in 1976. When they arrived, they were clueless. Toula’s heard stories of the newcomers storing clothes in the refrigerators of their new homes, or using the bathtub as a feeding-trough for animals. Relations were fraught at first – the settlers stole fruit from the trees to survive – but mostly peaceful in the 49 years since. “They treat us like we’re their fellow villagers,” she explains subtly. “Not like they’re our fellow villagers, because there’s more of them”.
The Greeks of Karpasia might’ve fled in 1974 – as, for instance, the inhabitants of Famagusta did. But they never got the chance.
The first invasion didn’t touch the peninsula. Toula recalls sorting clothes and bedsheets with her cousins in the weeks after, to donate to refugees from Kyrenia. “So we didn’t think [the Turks] would come back.”
On August 14, war broke out again. “There were lots of troops in Karpasia, but they withdrew them so the Turks wouldn’t kill them… They withdrew around midday. But they didn’t tell us anything.” By the time the locals thought about escape, it was evening and the only road to the peninsula was closed.
A few days later, soldiers began to arrive. They gathered the inhabitants of Ayia Triada in the village church, had them kneel on the floor, then the women were told to go home while all men between 18 and 60 were taken prisoner. Toula’s dad was gone for 40 days, with no news. He returned in early October, mostly unharmed but so emaciated that he had a loop of string holding up his trousers.
Meanwhile the women were sleeping all together, fully clothed, for safety. Toula recalls them hearing soldiers on the roof, and being terrified – but in fact the Turks were merely stealing almonds, which had been left there to dry.
She herself was almost 17 at the time, an artistic girl who liked to read and draw, already dreaming of going off to study and seeing the world beyond the village. (Even now, she’s as much Dutch as Cypriot – in being completely non-religious, for instance.) Toula was just the kind of girl to keep a diary – and her diary from 1974-75 has indeed been published (as Tetradio Anamniseon, or ‘Exercise Book of Memories’), a remarkable document of the 13 months between the first invasion and her departure in August 1975, part of an agreement between Denktash and Clerides to allow high-school graduates out of Karpasia.
The brief daily entries blend tragic history with mundane teenage problems. “Horrid, sad. I didn’t go anywhere,” writes young Toula on New Year’s Day 1975. “Dad found a 555,” she adds – a packet of cigarettes, presumably in her room. “Fortunately he didn’t say anything.”
It’s all here: Turkish patrols, curfews, the return of prisoners, visits from the UN and the Red Cross – but also cutting each other’s hair (in the days before barbers and hair salons), watching films on TV, cooking apples flambé.
“Vienna talks have started. High hopes,” she notes on April 28. “Emotional seeing the women’s march [to Famagusta] on TV,” she writes nine days earlier. “Christos beaten up for sitting sideways in the coffee shop,” she reports in March. (The men were beaten if they failed to salute passing officers, and would always sit facing the street for that reason.) “School started,” she writes in May – adding with classic teenage snark: “We go there mostly for entertainment”. To be fair, most teachers had already been forced to leave at that point.
That’s how it went: teachers forced to leave, then priests. Later on, a boarding school was built in the Republic for enclaved children – so the kids left, usually followed by their parents.
Once you left, you couldn’t come back. Toula herself only returned to Ayia Triada 20 years later, in 1995, and then only because of her Dutch passport. (She’d seen her parents occasionally, in pre-arranged visits south of the Green Line.) Up the road, in the town of Yialousa (Yeni Erenköy), the entire Greek Cypriot population was violently evicted. In Ayia Triada, however, there remained a core of ordinary people who’d never been forced to leave – so they stayed.
“My dad would say, ‘Should I close up the house and give them the key, then start yelling and protesting “I want to go home”? It makes no sense’,” recalls Toula. “So they stayed, year after year, hoping something would happen.”
Her parents had another reason for staying: Toula’s older brother Yiannakis, who’d been home from studying in Greece, got caught up in the troubles, and was forced to fight in both invasions.
Her diary is studded – especially in the second half of 1974 – with references to Yiannakis. Someone said he was a prisoner in Turkey. Someone else (a Turk) claimed he was in England. (“Big news!” says the diary.) That’s why her parents stayed on, so as not to abandon their son who – they hoped – might return any day.
He never did. In 2014, Yiannakis’ remains were located in a mass grave, along with those of four other soldiers. They appear to have been executed, probably on August 14 at the start of the second invasion.
A photo of his skull, with a bullet hole in it, is among the exhibits in Where Have You Been?, Toula’s exhibition – “dedicated to the missing persons of Cyprus” – from 2018.
It’s hard to decide what’s more shocking here: her brother’s death, or her macabre remembrance of that death. But this is the way art works – not just intertwined with life but commenting on it and in fact redeeming it, taking its trauma and transforming it into a story. Toula recalls repeating the events of her Enclaved Year to herself, over and over, after leaving Cyprus. It was like living them again, she admits – but the more times you re-lived them, the less they hurt.
“You have to put some distance in order to create,” she explains. “I see it’s my brother’s skull – but you also have to see it with fresh eyes, otherwise it won’t be art. Otherwise you’re doing it to make people cry, let’s say, which I don’t consider… Which was not my purpose.”
Easy to see how her practical, secular nature deals with the past – and the plight of all the enclaved of Karpasia – in the most direct, practical way, by taking its artefacts and confronting them head-on, without blinking. That’s even more true of the projects after Achaeans Coast, which have moved on from people – people die, after all – to focus on objects, especially (in her latest project) the objects in this very house, the one we’re sitting in, her old childhood home in Ayia Triada.
The house is still a house – but it’s also one big art installation, full of old objects (“nothing after 1980”) that belonged to her parents and grandparents.
Photos and certificates, of course – but also empty bottles of lemonade and Coca-Cola, boxes of lighter fluid, ceramic jars, walking sticks, 45rpm vinyl records of old Greek songs. Her cradle, from when she was a baby. A bag of flour – once distributed by the UNHCR “to Cyprus population” – has been turned into a cushion. One glass cabinet is full of books, another coffee cups, another bowls and salt and pepper shakers. It’s obviously art, thus for instance an ‘exhibit’ of small boxes (for oil, Strepsils, razor blades) has been arranged for aesthetic impact. But it’s also a tribute.
To whom? Her parents, of course, “who loved their house and everything in it” – but also to people like Yiannakis Panteli, her 76-year-old neighbour who’s still a bit dazed to have remained in this limbo (he’s never even learned to speak Turkish) for so many years. Does he regret having stayed?
“Regret, no,” he replies. “I’m in my home [the Greek ‘topos’]. But it’s burned us out, this situation… Your relatives, your friends, your fellow villagers – all gone. We stayed. We stayed, and – well, here we are. What did we accomplish? Nothing. Just a lot of promises, and they do nothing.”
50 years have passed since the invasion, even since the Vienna talks (“high hopes”!) and the women’s march. Cyprus talks continue, edging into self-parody now – but the dwindling number of enclaved in Karpasia tells its own story. And there’s something else too: the north is being developed at a furious pace, land being cleared all around Ayia Triada. It really does feel like the end of an era.
Toula Liasi’s own story is a little happier. She’s had a good year, artistically speaking: a new project, a play about her life (Toula, directed by Diomedes Koufteros) staged in theatres, Where Have You Been? about to open at the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation in Athens in October.
Above all, she seems to be home again – in the literal sense of being back in the village, but also the larger sense of having turned her art to this place that means so much to her. “In the Netherlands, it’s my house,” she says. “But here, it’s home.” 50 years can’t diminish that.