Yannis Papadakis talk on 1st October, Day of the Independence of Cyprus - Presented on 5-10-2009 at English School, Nicosia

I would like to thank the English School for inviting me to give this talk.

It is not easy to speak today, because in all honesty, I am not a big fan of commemorations. I remember how bored I was when I was at school having to listen to such talks. And here I am now giving one to you! So first of all I have to beg your forgiveness.

Perhaps my difficulty with commemorations has to do with this specific commemoration. My first encounter with October 1st was a rather confusing experience. I also think that in Cyprus we have been unlucky with commemorations. I will come to this later.

Let me begin by how I remember my first encounter with the 1st of October.

It was 1 October 1990 and I was ready to begin my research for my PhD in Cyprus. Since October was the month that university began at the UK where I was enrolled for my PhD, I thought this would be a good time to start. I was in the house I had rented in Nicosia, full of hope. At this time of day, the streets would be busy, so I hoped to be able to meet people living in that area and talk to them about their relations with Turkish Cypriots. I stepped outside. All quiet. No was one around. I turned round, went back in, and closed the door behind me. I collapsed on a chair. So much for the triumphant beginning of my research. I turned on the radio. It was a national holiday, the anniversary of the independence of Cyprus in 1960. How could I possibly not have known this?

On reflection, I felt sure that when I was growing up in Cyprus, the anniversary did not exist. I left Cyprus when I was nineteen to study abroad. Now coming back, aged twenty-six, there it was on the TV, celebrated in all its glory with flags, parades, music and crowds. In my absence an anniversary had been born. The odd thing was that Cyprus actually began its independence on 16 August 1960. But today was 1 October! So we were triumphantly celebrating our anniversary on the wrong date. Outside, the main roads were full of flags – not just our state flag, the flag of the Republic of Cyprus. The flag of another state, Greece, was hanging next to ours. Another national anthem was playing, the Greek one. Ours was nowhere to be heard. Come to think of it, that was because we didn’t even have one. And this was supposed to be the anniversary of the independence of Cyprus. So, we forgot the anniversary of our birth for many years, and then about 30 years later we remembered it. Why?

These, as you understand, made me curious about commemorations. When I looked a bit deeper into the topic I realised how problematic commemorations are. Let me just give two examples, one from Greece and one from Turkey. Ataturk came to claim that the 19th of May was his birthday. As no records were kept at the time of his birth, it was not possible to know. The choice of his birthday was made late in his life by Ataturk himself because May 19th (1919) was the day when Ataturk and his forces landed in Samsun (Mango 2000: 26). This date is commemorated in Turkey as the beginning of the War of Independence. This choice made his life appear as a higher act of destiny. His own birth was the birth of the Father of the Turks, for this is what Ataturk means. He would become for many Turks their only Creator due to his secularising reforms aiming to eradicate the worship of God. But Ataturk would create a cult of worship around himself as the one and only true Father and Creator.

Did the ‘Greek Revolution against the Turks’, as it is habitually called, start on the 25th of March? No, this date was chosen later (Koulouri 1995), to make it coincide with the religious day when the Holy Mother miraculously conceived Christ while, of course, remaining Virgin Mary. Anyhow, the point is that by putting the two days together it was as if the beginning of the new state coincided with the beginning of God on earth.

Greek Cypriots, from what I read, tried to do a one-up on the Greeks. If the Greek day of Independence combined two meanings, they would go for three. According to a Greek Cypriot historian, Stavros Panteli (Panteli 1985: 271), Makarios wanted the struggle of EOKA to start on 25th of March 1955 – the beginning of the Greek War of Independence, the beginning of God on earth, and the beginning of the Struggle for Union with Greece, all in a single day. How cooler could it be! Sadly, due to unforeseen events, it had to start a week later. A stroke of bad luck then, made this commemoration coincide, out of all days, with April 1st, a date famous worldwide for rather less glorious reasons.

How come then the Day of the Independence of Cyprus was moved from 16th August to October 1st? The point of the change was precisely this, what we are doing, here, now, at this moment. The day was moved to a day within the school-calendar so that like it or not there would be a captive audience, namely yourselves, forced to listen to someone like me, pontificate on the meaning of this day. But this is a role I would not like to undertake. I do not want to impose a meaning on this day. I do not want to tell you why this day is important. I think that this day, especially this particular commemoration, reveals many of the problems related to commemorations which I would like to invite you to reflect upon.

Commemorations are sad days for me. I find them sad due to the violence, in fact, several kinds of violence, that they entail. One type of violence is violence towards history. Why should we ask you to celebrate this day, a day which for both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots spelled defeat of a kind – the defeat of enosis and taksim? It is only retrospectively in 1979 that one community chose to remember this day, after decades of trying to forget it, while for the other community this date is no commemoration and thus of no importance. This brings me to the second type of violence towards history, what I would like to call the violence of imposed forgetting. Any commemoration is not so much a call to remember as a call to forget. To forget all other days which are deemed unimportant. To forget in other words all other historical events which are destined for the rubbish bin of history. This is the problem with memory, and that is why remembering is always political. Memory is by definition selective as it is impossible to remember all, and what is chosen to be remembered is inevitably chosen for political reasons. Memory may in fact reveal more about the future than the past. It is the Greek Cypriot desire for a future reunited independent Cyprus, that has made Greek Cypriots retrospectively decide to commemorate the independence of Cyprus, when it emerged then as a unitary state. It is highly doubtful if at the time, there was any sense of glorious rejoicing about the granting of independence to Cyprus. Its symbol, the republic’s flag that is now venerated was then scorned by Greek Cypriots who much preferred the flag of Greece. This is what prompted ex-President Clerides to allegedly remark that: ‘Our flag in Cyprus could be the best in the world because no-one is prepared to die for it’.

Commemorations often entail violence against the dead by distorting the meaning of their struggles. Let me quote a Greek Cypriot politician who spoke after last Thursday’s grand parade: ‘Many people gave their lives so that we would live in an independent state (Polloi anthropoi edosan ti zoi tous gia na zisoume se ena anexartito kratos)’. This is a distortion of the aim of EOKA which was union with Greece, not independence. Nowadays one often hears of the struggle of EOKA being referred to as the struggle for the independence of Cyprus (agonas gia tin anexartisia tis Kyprou). Distorting the reason someone died is, I feel, an act of disrespect.

Which brings me to the parades. I have to confess I do not like parades. I hope this does not constitute a major crime, though in Cyprus you never know. I did not like parades even before I learned that it was the dictator of Greece, Metaxas, who instituted the tradition of the military parade there, which Greek Cypriots later followed.

I disliked them for other reasons when I was a bit younger than you. Let me start with my memories of the student parade, before I tell you of my memories of the military parades. If I remember well, the student parades had boys in front, girls at the back. At the time, this did not bother me. I thought it was simply natural. Something else bothered me. I was not a particularly well built boy, and in the parade it was always the well-built, tall, good-looking boys that had to be in the front. The shorties, the fatsoes, the weaklings, myself, you know, the… how shall I put this? … the bodily-challenged, all of us were clearly a problem to our teachers. That we were clearly a problem was something our teachers made no effort to hide from us. The solution, I remember, was to hide us somewhere towards the back and in the middle of the group. Do anything to make us disappear. Clearly, we were something shameful to be hidden. But there was some consolation. We were not the worse. Some were left out altogether. I remember how much we all used to laugh at the poor boys and girls who found it difficult to synchronise. I remember how they were paraded again and again in front of us, each one alone, sweating, swinging wood-like arms and legs from the tension and the stress of being publicly humiliated, before they were dismissed altogether. It strikes me now how close all this was to certain notorious ideologies based on the worship of the healthy, athletic and coordinated body. The European Court of Human Rights recognises the violence entailed by the obligatory participation of students and teachers in parades and has condemned this in various countries, including Greece.

But when it came to the actual day of the parade, I found myself secretly envying the ones who would not parade. They had the day off, whereas we had to gather early, all spick and span, shoes, hair and teeth all brushed and shiny, and then wait endlessly for our turn to come. Which brings me to the major reason for the change of date from 16th August to 1st October: the fear that no-one would bother with it given that it was smack in the middle of the holiday period when the capital is totally empty. Imagine the military parade taking place on 16th August among empty streets in Nicosia! The obvious advantage with that date would be that they would not need to close off any street; they would be empty in anyway. I think we should demand that the anniversary of our birth as a state be moved back to its true, authentic, historic date. We could argue that it disrespectful and historically inaccurate to commemorate this most important day on the wrong date. How will students ever get to respect history and historical facts, if we cheat on the anniversary of our own independence?

I find it sad, actually not so much sad, I find it fearful and get a shiver when I watch a military parade. What I do find sad is for any state to mark its most important historical day with a military parade. Is this the best it can do? Are guns what these people are most proud of? Do they have no other things to show for themselves? I think it will not come as much of a surprise to you that I am not that fond of military parades either, with their blatant worship of guns. In parades, the nation appears synchronized, equal, united, strong, and of course male, all walking in the same direction, with the same rhythm towards the same future. Man and machine blend, with man having become the ultimate killing machine. We know of course that these are only meant for defence, but here in Cyprus we also know all too well that when you look at the guns of the others on the other side, they don’t appear so innocently defensive. We are still in a state of war, some will say; in Cyprus there is no peace, only a cease-fire. This is the usual but-Cyprus-is-a-special-case argument, so we are allowed to engage in certain unpleasant practices. Even so, the question still is: are guns the way to solve this?

During the inevitable public broadcast of the parade, the commentators on television and radio constantly remind us what the parade demonstrates. If we are to believe them, the parade demonstrates the high level of readiness of our army and the high fighting spirit of our soldiers. As if they are just brought to parade one day out of the blue, and they were not practicing for this for weeks on end; as if they were there out of their own free will.

Another kind of violence lies in the serious atmosphere that surrounds these days. There is something almost holy in the seriousness with which these days are treated. The famous sociologist Durkheim described ritual as society worshipping itself, through the worship of its totem. In our case, we don’t even need the totem, we are perfectly happy to directly worship ourselves. But this has to be done with serious religious-like reverence and any attempt to perhaps also laugh a bit at ourselves seems like an act of sacrilege.

What are we to make then of this day? A day with meaning on one side, without meaning on the other. A day whose interpretation has changed in both sides. As Attalides (1979: 50-51), a Greek Cypriot sociologist, suggests, independence was received as a defeat by Greek Cypriots but as a victory for Turkish Cypriots (even if this was not their primary aim). Yet, it is Greek Cypriots who commemorate and celebrate it after having ignored it for decades, while it is Turkish Cypriots who totally ignore it. All these considerations, I think, provide us with ample ground for reflection both on commemorations and on historical interpretation.

The same religious-like reverence I previously described often accompanies the teaching of history. History is presented as a holy truth whose questioning is an act of sacrilege. I hope that I have shown already that in history there can be different perspectives related to the meaning of the same historical date, and that people may later even change their own minds about them. We endlessly debate in Cyprus on whose history is correct, ours or theirs, the left’s or the right’s, and what we miss in all this, is the most obvious. That history is and can only be an open and continuing debate. An open and continuing debate among informed perspectives, I should add. Does this mean then that anything goes? No. I repeat, that it is a dialogue among informed perspectives and what the rules of history as an academic discipline try to determine is what will count as informed. I take it that the role of history educators should be to provide you with the tools to reach such informed perspectives, not to tell you what to believe. I often feel that the problem in Cyprus is the outright dismissal of all other perspectives apart from one’s own. In other words, the lack of true dialogue among various perspectives.

It is getting time for me to close this talk, and before doing this I would like to apologise once more. At certain places during my talk, I have used a ‘we’ that is also problematic. Some of you may have realised what I mean.

Let me end with this thought. Cyprus has been compared to a child that no-one wanted. Its birth was contingent, in the sense that no-one had actually planned for an independent Cyprus to emerge, and clearly the two involved communities were not aiming for this. So, I would like to close by reminding us all that our lives are the greatest contingency. We have nothing to do with being alive. We did not will our birth. Our very existence has not been an act of our will. Does this mean we should not embrace our lives? Does this mean we can not find meaning in our life? The question is who will determine this meaning. Yourselves, or your parents and the older generations? The same applies to Cyprus, its history and to this historical date.

References
Attalides, Michael. 1979. Cyprus: Nationalism and International Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Koulouri, Christina. 1995 Μύθοι και Σύμβολα μιας Εθνικής Επετείου (Myths and Symbols of a National Anniversary). Komotini: Publications of the Dimokritio University of Thrace. (or see http://alex.eled.duth.gr/Htmlfiles/omilies/omilia1.htm)
Mango, Andrew. 2000. Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey. Overlook Press: New York.
Panteli, Stavros. 1985. Νέα Ιστορία της Κύπρου (New History of Cyprus). Athens: Floros.