Cyprus and the Politics of Memory

History, Community and Conflict

Rebecca Bryant, Yiannis Papadakis, Rebecca Bryant, Yiannis Papadakis

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857734013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The island of Cyprus has been bitterly divided for more than four decades. One of the most divisive elements of the Cyprus conflict is the writing of its history, a history called on by both communities to justify and explain their own notions of justice. While for Greek Cypriots the history of Cyprus begins with ancient Greece, for the Turkish Cypriot community the history of the island begins with the Ottoman conquest of 1571. The singular narratives both sides often employ to tell the story of the island are, as this volume argues, a means of continuing the battle which has torn the island apart, and an obstacle to resolution. Cyprus and the Politics of Memory re-orientates history-writing on Cyprus from a tool of division to a form of dialogue, and explores a way forward for the future of conflict resolution in the region.

1

A CRITICAL COMPARISON OF GREEK CYPRIOT AND TURKISH CYPRIOT OFFICIAL HISTORIOGRAPHIES (1940_^S TO THE PRESENT)

Mete Hatay and Yiannis Papadakis

Introduction

This chapter is a critical overview and comparison of the official historical paradigms espoused by Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot historians since the 1940s, a tumultuous period in Cyprus. By showing how different histories were written from different positions, by different authors and during different periods, and how the political conditions and political goals which these authors implicitly or explicitly espoused affected their writing of history, a necessary critical space can emerge in debates on the history of Cyprus. As we show, not only does the plot change, so do the actors and the setting of the historical drama; this applies even within the same community when one compares different periods. In short, this chapter aspires to shift the debate in Cypriot studies from history to historiography.

The historical debate on the island has taken place within the parameters of a hard positivist stance due to history’s presumed role as the ultimate (if not also the sole) mechanism of legitimating political demands. All sides explicitly held on to the maxim ‘our (historical) truth, their (historical) propaganda’, which really meant ‘our (historically) legitimate political objectives, their (historically) false objectives’. Yet an examination of history-writing from a comparative and historical perspective starkly reveals the ways different historical narratives were constructed by employing different categories of actors (or protagonists) and by selectively choosing the periods or events to be emphasised in order to support one’s own side’s political demands. The choice of historians discussed here was predicated on their closeness to official views, whether due to their own positions in state institutions, their works being used or published by state-run public information offices, or their texts being approved as history schoolbooks. This is not to say there were no internal challenges to such histories, but these lie outside the scope of this chapter, though they are explored in other chapters in this volume (see Panayiotou and Chatzipanagiotidou).

Pre-1960 Historiographies

The twentieth century witnessed the gradual rise of Greek nationalism and, later, of Turkish nationalism, with Greek Cypriots supporting enosis, the Union of Cyprus with Greece, and Turkish Cypriots demanding taksim, the partition of Cyprus. From 1955 the Greek Cypriot struggle was led by an armed organisation called EOKA [National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters], and in 1958 Turkish Cypriots set up their own armed group, TMT [Turkish Resistance Organisation]. In 1960 Cyprus became an independent state, the Republic of Cyprus, an outcome that frustrated both communities’ political goals. Its population was 80 per cent Greek Cypriots and 18 per cent Turkish Cypriots.

Two Greek Cypriot historians emerge as representative of the period of the nationalist struggle for enosis – their work was published before the start of the armed EOKA struggle. Doros Alastos (1943; 1955) represents a more academic and complex vision of history, while Kleanthis Georgiades (1960 [1953]), a headmaster, represents a more popular version. Since during this period the Cypriot state had not yet been established, we cannot justify the choice of these historians in terms of their closeness to official views. However, the historiography of this period shows little variation in its attempt to assert the ancient Greek origins of Greek Cypriots, continuity with the ancient Greek past and the (transhistorical) inclusion of Cyprus within the Greek world (Hellenism). The implication of this, in terms of Realpolitik, was that Cyprus should be incorporated into the modern Greek state, that enosis should take place.

Both writers were explicitly sympathetic to the enosis movement then gaining ground in Cyprus (Alastos 1943: pref.; Georgiades 1960: introd.). They were actually writing before the EOKA armed struggle, however, Georgiades in 1953 and Alastos in 1943 and 1955, though their works were later reprinted a number of times. Their primary aim was to prove the existence and persistence of a Greek people on the island whose natural national aim could only be their incorporation into the Greek state. The arrival of the Mycenaeans in Cyprus during the 14^th century BC provided the beginning of their historical narrative, and scant attention was paid to the pre-Greek period. From that point onwards, the intention was also established. As Alastos (1955: xv-xvi) put it: ‘The central theme in this volume is persistence, the persistence of the Cypriots in their customs, beliefs and national attachments despite the many violent storms that time and again have rocked their world’.

From the viewpoint of these Greek Cypriot historians, the history of Cyprus was one wherein Cyprus was represented as what Michael Given has aptly called ‘a pedigree of resistance’ (1991: 18). The story that emerged was the continuous struggle of the main actor (the Greeks) against the various rulers of Cyprus, a struggle whose end could only be the incorporation of Cyprus into the Greek state. Racial considerations were given significant weight in this stage of Greek Cypriot historiography, to establish the continuity of Greek Cypriots from the ancient to the modern period as the same actor throughout the historical narrative.¹ This was not outside the prevalent historiographical spirit of the age, however, and was followed by others, including the British.

The main ‘voice’ Greek Cypriot historians were trying to oppose, as Given argues, was that of the British imperialists, who were engaged in an effort to counter Greek Cypriot claims by presenting Cyprus as a ‘pedigree of subjection’ (1991: 6–28). They argued that the history of Cyprus proved its inhabitants were no distinct race or ethnic group but an amalgam of various peoples, making them a subject race that required guidance by a benevolent imperial authority (Given 1991: 7). This Orientalist outlook denied the existence of Greek Cypriots as a distinct historical actor and thus denied them a ‘voice’ that could posit political claims. Kitromilides and Evriviades (1982: 33), for example, in reviewing Alastos, point out that his work was a response to the colonial perspective of Hill, the major British historian of Cyprus at the time.

With respect to identity, these authors argued that in Cyprus there were Greeks and Turks. The term ‘Greek Cypriot’ was hardly ever used, and the term ‘Cypriot’ was always synonymous with ‘Greek’ (Cypriot). Georgiades, for example, spoke of uprisings of ‘Cypriots and Turks’ (1960: 213) during the time Cyprus was under Ottoman control. Greeks and Turks in Cyprus were regarded as extensions of the corresponding nations of the ‘motherlands’. It was taken for granted that Turkish Cypriots must also be descendants of the Turkish soldiers and colonisers that came to the island when it became a part of the Ottoman Empire, an issue that would be fervently contested during the following period.

Halil Fikret Alasya’s (1939) Cyprus History and Its Main Antiquities (Kıbrıs Tarihi ve Belli Başlı Antikiteleri) may be seen as the first history of Cyprus written by a Turkish Cypriot and published in Cyprus in the Latin alphabet. There was, in fact, an earlier book, Turks of Cyprus (Kıbrıs Türkleri), written by a Turkish Cypriot history teacher, İsmet Konur, and published in Turkey in 1938. But the British authorities apparently found this book to be controversial, possibly because of its criticism of the British administration, and they banned it on the island. Despite the insistence of the Turkish History Thesis that the Ottoman Period constituted the ‘dark ages’ of Turkish history, Alasya took a different route, probably because he could only explain the presence of Turks in Cyprus by reference to the Ottoman period. In the following sentence, Alasya explained his motivations for writing:

Foreign researchers writing about Cyprus history, and especially about its Ottoman period, constantly write against it. They claim that an administration that lasted for 308 years was a barbaric administration. In order to demonstrate the truth, I have used [archival] evidence as much as possible (1939: 6.).

He explained this aim in more detail in his final book, Cyprus in History, written in 1988 while he was an advisor to the Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash:

While I was still in lycee, I didn’t see any Cyprus history written in Turkish. I was very upset at reading books written by foreigners that were biased, full of claims that bore no relation to historical truth, and that portrayed the Ottoman State in a bad light. (Alasya 1988: xxiii)

He describes how, in response, he went to Istanbul to study and wrote two theses on Cyprus’ Ottoman history. ‘I answered the opinionated writings of foreigners’, he said, ‘with the documents that I found in the archives’ (1988: xxiii).

In his first book, Alasya (1939) dealt very briefly with the pre-Ottoman period, and most of the book dwelled on the period of Ottoman rule. To prove the Ottoman period was not a ‘dark age’, he also included a section called ‘Main Antiquities,’ providing photographs and historical accounts of numerous monuments, the majority from the island’s Ottoman period.

His apologetic and defensive history began with the Ottomans’ reasons for conquering the island. Sokollu Mehmet Paşa resisted plans to invade the island, but he was undermined by a foreign agent (whom Alasya calls a ‘typical Jew’) who convinced Selim II to conquer the island for its wine (1939: 23–24). In this case, the ‘good’ Sokollu Mehmet Paşa was undermined by the decrepitude and weakness of the Ottoman ruler and a foreign agent who used him. In similar fashion, Alasya claimed that during the conquest of Famagusta, Lala Mustafa Paşa had the commander Bragadino tortured and killed because he had broken an agreement and killed Turkish prisoners. This argument is still used today in most of the nationalist history books that deal with the period.

Similarly, Alasya found that throughout the Ottoman ‘age of decline’ in Cyprus, most incidents of seeming Ottoman misrule could actually be attributed to the manipulation of foreign agents and to the Church of Cyprus:

In the seventeenth century, at a time when the structure of the empire was shaken, the propaganda of local Christians and spies from outside the island encouraged certain soldiers who were not worthy of their positions to revolt, going so far as to draw swords on the governor and to kill some of the ağas and military officers (1939: 94).

In Alasya’s version of history, the island’s Christians had the right to communicate directly with the central government about their grievances, and if they were exploited, it was by their own priests: ‘[The evidence] shows both to us and to the foreigners that those who exploited the people were not the Turks but were those of their own kind who were in charge of them’ (1939: 67). Even though Alasya kept his distance from certain claims of Kemalist historiography, he occasionally denounced Ottoman rulers as corrupt when it served his version of events on the island, or perhaps to demonstrate his secular Kemalist loyalty (1939: 23–24).

In contrast, İsmet Konur’s book accepted the Turkish History Thesis, declaring that the Hittites who controlled the island in the 14^th century BC were Turks, hence tracing ‘Turkish’ rule on the island to about three thousand years earlier (1938: 11). Although the book was banned on the island, it was read by the writers of later history books, who used certain of its claims. One of the most important of these was the attempt by Konur to demonstrate that the island and its people were not Greek – a theme that would recur time and again in later histories:

It’s quite clear that in the Byzantine period, the fact that Greek was the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire meant that Cypriots, even though they are not Greeks, began to speak Greek and with time declared themselves Greek, forgetting their true identity, and these constitute the Greeks of Cyprus today (1938: 13).

Both Alasya’s and Konur’s books – written in the 1930s and, in the case of Alasya’s book, used by Turkish Cypriots until the late 1950s – reflected the views of the period’s educated Turkish Cypriot elite. Alasya’s defensive writing about the Ottoman period, which cast Turkish Cypriots as the most innocent community on the island, reflected a widespread view. In terms of identity categories, Konur referred to Muslims of the island simply as ‘Turks,’ while Alasya used ‘Ottoman’ and ‘Turk’ interchangeably to refer to Muslims of the Ottoman period in Cyprus. At the same time, Alasya used ‘reaya’ (flock, or non-Muslim Ottoman subjects), ‘Christians,’ and ‘Rum’ to refer to Greek Orthodox Cypriots.

1960–1974 Official Historiographies

After the 1960 declaration of Cyprus as a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Modalities of Time, History and Memory in Ethnonational Conflicts
• 1. A Critical Comparison of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot Official Historiographies (1940s to the Present)
• 2. Beyond the History Textbook Debate: Official Histories in Greek Cypriot Geography and Civics Curricula
• 3. Hegemony, Permissible Public Discourse and Lower Class Political Culture
• 4. The ‘Leftovers’ of History: Reconsidering the ‘Unofficial’ History of the Left in Cyprus and the Cypriot Diaspora
• 5. Senses of Belonging and ‘Belongings’ and Making ‘Home’ away from Home
• 6. Imagining Homelands: Poetics and Performance among Cypriot Armenians
• 7. The Fractures of a Struggle: Remembering and Forgetting Erenköy
• 8. Correcting the Record: Memory, Minority Insecurity and Admissible Evidence
• 9. On the Need to Belong to a Non-Cypriot History
• 10. Truth, Memory and the Cypriot Journey towards a New Past
• List of Contributors
• Index
• eCopyright