CYPRUS: Commemorations and cultural heritage at 50 years of the partition

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CYPRUS: Commemorations and cultural heritage at 50 years of the partition of Cyprus

Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou explored the pattern of cultural heritage destruction perpetrated by the Turkish occupation troops and the local Turkish-Cypriot administration in occupied Cyprus.

By Elizabeth H. Prodromou (*)

 

The Aegean Monthly (21.08.2024) – July and August of 2024 mark half a century since Turkey’s invasion and ongoing occupation of Cyprus, with the island’s de facto partition standing as an ugly reminder of the enfeeblement, at best, and the hypocrisy, at worst, of the Transatlantic leadership that recently decamped from Washington after celebrating NATO’s 75th anniversary.  Michael Rubin’s pithy summation of NATO’s (and the EU’s) unwillingness to address Turkey’s ongoing occupation of Cyprus 50 years on–”it’s stupid”1–points to the geopolitical risks and threats to a Transatlantic Alliance whose interests and values are degraded each day by Ankara and its quisling Turkish-Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar.

 

It’s possible that the current moments of commemoration of Cyprus’ half-century of division could help the international community to smarten up, by going beyond the self-absolving characterization of “the Cyprus Problem” as a “frozen, intractable conflict.”  I’m suggesting here the utility of training a lens on what’s often overlooked in the geopolitical risk calculus of Turkey’s continuing occupation of Cyprus–that is cultural heritage, which, in both tangible and intangible forms, expresses the intersections of identity, territory, and power.

 

Why consider the particular links between memory and cultural heritage when it comes to this July-August period in Cyprus, and why focus, in particular, on cultural heritage in the Turkish occupation zone?  Neither to diminish the importance of the whole cultural heritage ecosystem on Cyprus for possible reconciliation and reintegration of the island, nor to minimize the agency of both the Republic of Cyprus and Turkish-Cypriot leadership in working to protect the tangible and intangible heritage in all of Cyprus, a focus on the impact of Turkey’s invasion and occupation is instructive for Transatlantic actors concerned with ensuring that cultural heritage and cultural memory are incorporated into the protection of universal human rights.

 

A snapshot of the cultural heritage reality in Turkish-occupied Cyprus is sobering. By now, there is extensive documentation by Republic of Cyprus authorities, officials from the Church of Cyprus and other Christian communities, as well as the Jewish community; scholarly research and media coverage (although the latter mostly focused on the immediate aftermath of Turkey’s invasion) also provide photographic documentation and eyewitness accounts attesting to the pattern of cultural heritage destruction perpetrated by the Turkish occupation troops and the local Turkish-Cypriot administration.

 

Currently, the Director of the Office for Combating Illegal Possession and Trafficking of Antiquities of the Cyprus Police estimates that over 16,000 artifacts, including mosaics, murals, and icons, have been looted and trafficked internationally since Turkey’s 1974 invasion. Individual and institutional buyers of the pillaged cultural heritage from the Turkish occupation zone have extended as far afield as the United States, Germany, and Japan.

 

The June 2024 Historic Repatriation agreement signed by German and Cyprus authorities is a positive move that will return to Cyprus a haul of Maronite, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox heritage objects looted and trafficked by the infamous Turkish criminal Aydin Dikman. Still, operational and legal challenges to recovery and repatriation of Cyprus’ looted heritage are only part of the incomplete process of healing, justice, and peacebuilding embedded in the 50-year commemoration conjuncture.2

 

Such complexities underscore that Turkey’s cultural heritage policy in occupied Cyprus must be understood as a geopolitical project. Michael Jansen’s 2005 authoritative War and Cultural Heritage: Cyprus After the 1974 Turkish Invasion and his 2012 The Loss of a Civilization: Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Occupied Cyprus stands the test of time to the present moment.

 

As a photographic and analytic treatment of Turkey’s “political-demographic partition of Cyprus…[as a rupture of]…the unity and integrity of a modern nation-state but also [as the erasure of the presence and memory of] the millennial cultural integrity and continuity of the island which has been at the crossroads of the civilization of the Eastern Mediterranean.”3

 

Cultural heritage destruction, appropriate, and trafficking is a form of memoricide, or “the everyday killing of memory”:4 the Turkish occupation regime’s “…methodical…and institutional obliteration of everything sacred to a Greek [and non-Turkish]  Cypriot”5 has been augmented by Ankara’s demographic engineering through settlement of populations from Turkey into the occupation zone in Cyprus, making indigenous Turkish-Cypriots today a minority compared to generations of settled mainland Turks. Cultural heritage policy aimed at the ethno-religious homogenization of the occupation zone makes it difficult to remember what once was; sites, peoples, and practices, the tangible and intangible testament to what once was, are erased as part of a remembered past and an imagined future.

 

The current July-August remembrance period underscores the 50-year destructive continuity of the intersection of geopolitics and identity politics of Turkification and Islamization in the occupation zone, since Turkificaiton and Islamization have been pursued, albeit with different valences, by Kemalist “secularist” and Erdoganist Islamist governments in Ankara.  Illustrative in this regard are the changes both to the demography of the human community and the physical space surrounding the 11th-12th-century church of Agios Synesios, the focal point of the small Greek Cypriot community that has remained in the town of Rizokarpaso in Turkish-occupied Cyprus.

 

Today, what was the all-Greek-Cypriot village of Rizokarpaso before 1974 is composed of the Greek Cypriots, estimated at less than 250 in number, as well as “…Turks and Kurds…migrated from the mainland of Turkey after 1974.”6 The front entrance to the church in the post-1974 architected town center looks directly across at a flag of the Republic of Turkey next to a huge bronze statue of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk atop a horse raised high on back legs; on the overlook hill behind the church sits a mosque.

 

The semiotics of size and positioning7 reflect the historical continuity between Ataturkist and Erdoganist conquest messages: at Agios Synesios, Kemal the “modernizer, secularist” is depicted in the conquest imagery of Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, who entered the Church of Hagia Sophia on horseback with the 15th-century capture of Constantinople–the intersection geopolitics and cultural heritage policy was summed up when Turkey’s top imam, Ali Erbas, inaugurated the reversion of the Hagia Sophia to a mosque with Ottoman sword in hand and with public statements referencing the “reconquest.”

 

The example of the Agios Synesios Church in Rizokarpaso raises important questions about the cultural heritage at the present conjuncture of Turkey’s 50-year occupation of northern Cyprus.  Is Turkey’s instrumentalization of cultural heritage as a tool of memoricide and geopolitical revisionism the only possibility when it comes to remembering the past and imagining and building a just, peaceful future in a reunited Cyprus?  Can cultural heritage spaces and practices contribute to the balance between justice and peace that is crucial to possibilities for a future Cyprus free of Turkey’s occupation? Can the entire cultural heritage ecosystem on the island, which involves the government of the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish-Cypriot administration, become a meaningful component of a settlement “…that will give everyone on the island a secure future”?8

 

By way of concluding thoughts in response to those questions, three points bare mention.

First, memory is the root of all commemorations and memorials, yet the meanings assigned to remembering at this year’s 50-year mark of Cyprus’ soft partition are complex and contradictory, depending on local or diasporic association with the competing political allegiances on either side of the UNFICYP (UN Force in Cyprus) Green Line.  Undoubtedly, Greek, Armenian, Latin, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Cypriots’ commemorations hold different meanings–partition, expulsion, heritage destruction–from the commemorations–golden jubilee, territorial gain, heritage reconfiguration–of Turkish Cypriots and Turks and others settled from Turkey and elsewhere.

 

Second, approaches to cultural heritage management may either reinforce commemorations as singularly traumatic or create the possibility for commemorations as signifiers of trauma-with-hope. Turkey’s 40,000-strong troop presence, coupled with the instrumentalization of cultural heritage for memory-identity homogenization in occupied Cyprus, falls into the trauma-only model.  But, there’s encouraging evidence on Cyprus of cultural heritage management initiatives that involve an agentive “…turn towards futurity,…a turn to positivity,”9  and the international community has a responsibility to support and amplify these initiatives.

 

Specifically, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the European Union (EU) should increase their funding to Cyprus’ Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage (TCCH),10 to encourage other entities (e.g. the Holy See, the A.G. Leventis Foundation) to continue their support for the work of the TCCH.  Additionally, the Heritage Youth Ambassadors (HYA) initiative deserves expansion in numbers, in order to develop the leadership skills and inter-generational training for cultural heritage preservation, protection, and practices that contribute to a durable peace on Cyprus. By ensuring that the composition of both the TCCH and the HYA includes representation from all Cyprus’ religious and ethnic communities, the stakeholders in cultural heritage management can imagine and enact a shared future.

 

Third, the 50-year moment of Turkey’s occupation of Cyprus should be recognized for what it is–a problem of global significance. The soft partition of Cyprus, and the cultural heritage issues associated with Ankara’s presence on the island, point to Turkey–NATO member-state and candidate country for EU membership, occupier of EU territory with 40,0000 troops positioned on the northern 37% of Cyprus, divider of an EU capital city in the cleaved Nicosia, and perpetrator of human rights violations in the Turkish-Cypriot-administered occupation zone11–as the gift that keeps on giving, to state autocrats and authoritarians and to non-state extremist groups alike, whose actions are wrecking anything that’s positive in what’s left of the Westphalian world order.12

 

(*) Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou is Visiting Professor in the International Studies Program at Boston College and Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

 

Sources

  1. Refusing to Call Cyprus Occupied Isn’t Sophisticated. It’s Stupid | American Enterprise Institute – AEI
  2. For reportage on the complexities and contestatations associated with heritage recovery and repatriation, see https://knews.kathimerini.com.cy/en/news/us-returns-over-80-cypriot-antiquities-in-repatriation-ceremony;https://newcyprusmagazine.com/cyprus-bringing-back-ancient-treasures-1974-turkish-invasion/; and, https://cyprus-mail.com/2024/06/19/cyprus-cultural-heritage-is-not-for-sale/. 
  3.  Jansen: 8.
  4. Useful discussions of memoricide include Ammar Azzouz, “Where Heritage Meets Memory, for Social Science Research Council Project on  “Resisting Memoricie: Destruction and Reconstruction.” (19 April 2022). https://items.ssrc.org/where-heritage-meets-violence/resisting-memoricide-on-the-destruction-and-reconstruction-of-memory/. Scott Webster, “Revisiting Memoricide: The Everyday Killing of Memory,” in Memory Studies (2023), “Preposterous” US-Turkey Deal Could Lead to Pillage of Cultural Heritage – GreekReporter.com; Resisting Memoricide: On the Destruction and Reconstruction of Memory – Items (ssrc.org); Turkey’s Cultural Heritage Cudgel – Religious Freedom Institute
  5.  Footnote, Jansen: 8.
  6.  Yara Safi, Hulya Yuceer, and Yonca Jurol.  “For Whom the Bell Tolls? Towards a Flexible Concept of Authenticity for Religious Heritage Buildins in Political COnflict Zones–Case of Northern Cyprus,” in Heritage & SocietyVol.15, No. 1 (2022): 2.
  7.  These descriptions are from ibid, as well as from my own visit as Vice Chair and Commissioner on the delegation of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (February 2011).
  8.  https://cyprus-mail.com/2024/07/14/our-view-hollow-rhetoric-been-political-constant-for-50-years/. 
  9.  Ann RIgney. “Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism Beyond the Traumatic,” in Memory Studies, Vol. 11 (3): 368-370.
  10.  https://www.tcchcyprus.com/.
  11.  Details of the Turkish-Cypriot administration’s repression of the range of human rights especially associated with religious freedom are outlined in the State Department’s 2023 Annual Report on Religious Freedom. Cyprus – United States Department of State. 
  12.  It’s worth mentioning that a NATO member-state, Turkey, makes Freedom House’s designation as “not free” in the democracy watchdog organization’s “Freedom in the World” annual report for 2023.  See Countries and Territories | Freedom House.

Further reading about FORB in Cyprus on HRWF website

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