Demarcating the „Cypriot Core‟

Ideology and Pluralistic Cyprocentric Identification in the post- partitioned Republic of Cyprus

Antonis Pastellopoulos Supervisor: Dr. A.T. (Alex) Strating UvA ID: 11665238 Second Reader: Dr. O.G.A. (Oskar) Verkaaik [email protected] Third Reader: Dr. B. (Barak) Kalir

MSc in Cultural and Social Anthropology Universiteit van Amsterdam Graduate School of Social Sciences 8th of June, 2018

This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Cypriot sociologist Caesar Mavratsas, who passed away in the autumn of 2017, and who had the courage, like so many

others, to engage in critical scholarship in a period when such scholarship was

neither welcomed, nor widely tolerated within the troubled island of Cyprus.

Declaration of Originality

I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy [http://student.uva.nl/mcsa/az/item/plagiarism-and-fraud.html?f=plagiarism]. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.

Abstract

Key words: Cyprocentrism, Cypriot identity, Postcolonialism, Cyprus Problem, Ideology, Republic of Cyprus, de-ethnicization.

The present thesis investigates the ideological positions over Cypriot identity; expressed in the left-wing extra-parliamentary political networks of the city of Nicosia, in the post-partitioned Republic of Cyprus. Drawing its data primarily from participatory observation, interviewing, informal conversations and photographs, accumulated during a period of three months of ethnographic research, it aims to contribute to the critical understanding of the ideological formations located in the island of Cyprus, through the documentation of a previously unexplored political ideological position. Most anthropological work on Cyprus has approached the island as a site of ethnic conflict, focusing on the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities as the starting point of analysis, often on a comparative basis. The present thesis offers a break with this approach, setting as its starting point of analysis ideology itself, arguing, on similar grounds as anthropologist Yael Navaro, that by approaching the Cypriot conflict from an ethnicizing gaze, its political dimensions become oversimplified and its complex, multilayered socio- political sites of conflict, invisible. By interpreting the accumulated data through poststructuralist theories of ideology, Benedict Anderson‟s concept of the imagined community and the theoretical insights of postcolonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, it is argued that the political position studied is characterized an imagined community distinctly different from the competing imagined communities dominating Cypriot institutional politics, characterized by symbolic processes of decolonization and anti-exclusionary political claims.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express here my appreciation for the Department of Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam, and in particular for Oskar Verkaaik, Kristine Kraus, Yolanda van Ede and Thijs Schut, whose insightful teaching was fundamental in enabling me to acquire the skills necessary for the production of the present thesis. A special note of gratitude must be reserved here for Marieke Brand, who went out of her way multiple times to assist both myself and other fellow students in our various moments of need. The present thesis would had not been possible without the careful guidance and supervision provided by Alex Strating, whose insightful comments, tolerant approach and supportive attitude; made the production of the present thesis in general a most enjoyable endeavor, as well as bearable in those frustrating and difficult moments that so often accompany the process of research and investigation.

A special note of gratitude must also be made here for my informants, the people with whom I spent a good three months of constant interaction, and without which the present thesis would had never materialized. It is an unfortunate contradiction that the acknowledgment of their role cannot be made here on a personal level, as this would destroy the preservation of anonymity that I have attempted to maintain throughout the text of the present thesis. I would also like to express here my appreciation for my parents Charis Pastellopoulos and Stalo Pastellopoulou, who have given me their unconditional support in what has been a most stressful and demanding academic year.

A most exceptional note of gratitude must however be here extended to Eduard ten Houten, who I had the good fortune to meet at the café of filmtheater Kriterion. Our shared conversations, exchange of ideas and infrequent encounters, as well the generosity, sharpness of intellect and kindness of his character, have contributed more than anything else in making these last three months in Amsterdam worth remembering.

List of Abbreviations

AKEL Progressive Party of Working People

DIKO Democratic Party

DISY Democratic Rally

ELAM National Popular Front

EOKA National Organization of Cypriot Fighters

EOKA B National Organization of Cypriot Fighters B

HAD Hands Across the Divide

RoC / the Republic Republic of Cyprus

TMT Turkish Resistance Organization

TRNC Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

UNFICYP United Nations Forces in Cyprus

Contents

1. Introduction ...... 1

1.1. Outline ...... 2 1.2. A Note on the Employed Terminology ...... 3

1.3. Historical and Contemporary Context...... 6 1.4. Situating the Research in the Literature ...... 11 1.5. The Field and the People ...... 14

2. Theoretical, Methodological and Ethical Considerations ...... 21 2.1. The Poststructuralist Analysis of Ideology ...... 21

2.2. Imagined Communities and the Postcolonial Condition ...... 22 2.3. Epistemology and Methodology ...... 25 2.4. Ethical Considerations...... 29 2.5. Reflections on my Positionality ...... 30

3. Signifying the Division ...... 32 3.1. Beyond Negation ...... 34

3.2. The Whole in Parts ...... 39 4. Hellenocentric Interpellation ...... 44 4.1. Constitutional Identities ...... 44

4.2. The Official Hellenocentric Narration ...... 47 4.3. The Fragile Meaning of Flags ...... 51

5. Cyprocentric Identification and Heterogeneity ...... 59 5.1. The Cypriot Surplus ...... 59 5.2. The Postcoloniality of Language ...... 62 5.3. A Pluralistic Cyprocentric Imagined Community ...... 67

5.4. Pluralistic Cyprocentrism, Nationalism and the Prospect of Bi-Communal Federation .... 74 6. Conclusion and Recommendations ...... 78

7. References ...... 84

Today is my day without hope no force can unite the United Nations as long as nations exist

 Taken from the first three lines of the poem „UN‟ by Cypriot poet Neşe Yaşın.

1. Introduction The thesis hereby presented is the result of an ongoing personal concern for the documentation, analysis and exploration of the non-dominant, academically marginalized political positions in the island of Cyprus, my country of origin. If it is to be placed within a particular paradigm in the study of Cyprus, it falls in line with the increasing shift of focus, particularly by new scholars and academics, from the Cypriot conflict itself, which has so long dominated academic research, to an emphasis on those social dimensions that have remained largely unexplored – gender and sexuality, grass root radical politics, marginal political ideologies, the history of the Cypriot political left and the effects of militarism (Panayiotou 2006, Panayiotou 2012, Kamenou 2012, Siammas 2013, Efthymiou 2014, Achniotis 2016, Pastellopoulos 2017, Karathanasis 2017). The thesis has been produced in the knowledge that such a shift has been taking place, and aims to contribute to this recent accumulating scholarship not as a final verdict on its object of analysis, but as an invitation to a broader discussion over the way Cyprus is thought of, discursively produced and academically scrutinized.

The present thesis explores the ideas, perceptions and senses over Cypriot identity located in the left-wing, extra-parliamentary political networks of the city of Nicosia, in the post-partitioned Republic of Cyprus. It offers an analysis of the identified key elements of a distinct and previously unexplored ideological political position; that can be placed within the broader category of Cyprocentrism. The category has been employed within the literature to signify political positions that are diametrically opposed to the Turkish and Greek Cypriot ethnic nationalisms privileged in the ideological landscape of Cypriot politics, positions that are fundamentally rooted in emphasizing the identification with a Cyprus divorced from the political notions of the Greek and the Turkish nation. The following research question has guided the process of the thesis‟ production from the period of fieldwork to the finalization of its writing:

What are the ideological elements comprising extra-parliamentary Cyprocentric ideology in the post-partitioned Republic of Cyprus, and in what ways does this Cyprocentric ideology pose a challenge to ethnic nationalism?

The present thesis argues that the Cyprocentric ideological perspective in question is differentiated from ethnic nationalism and other forms of Cyprocentrism by its identification with a holistic, abstracted notion of Cyprus, redefining the signification and accompanied

1 meaning of the existing division, while reclaiming the category of the „Cypriot‟ as an inclusive, internally heterogeneous demographic category. Through these reconfigurations of meaning, it is further argued that the present ideological position entails processes of decolonization, refusing to privilege any abstracted set of ethnicized and/or cultural groups, processes connected with the attempt to formulate an imagination of a Cyprus transcending the existing partition and the politics of exclusion that accompany it.

1.1. Outline A few points of clarification have to be made in relation to the structure and mode of presentation of the thesis. The first chapter informs the reader of the broader context of Cyprus, the relationship of the present work to the academic literature surrounding it; and introduces the field and the people that the present thesis concerns itself with. The second chapter outlines the key theoretical concepts employed, as well as the employed methodology and epistemology, moving on to reflect on questions of ethics and positionality. Chapter three to five comprise the analytical section of this thesis. There is no concrete attempt at formulating an overall narrative, an approach that while having its merits, was deemed too time-consuming, textually uneconomical and too artificial for the presentation of ideas and concepts; the schema that forms the core of the present thesis. Instead, the chapters and subchapters are organized thematically, as distinct long fragments that attempt to decipher the central elements of the Cyprocentric ideological position in question, by presenting a thematically organized and carefully chosen set of data, slowly accumulating within the subchapters of each chapter. I do hope that this manner of presentation, while perhaps lacking the elegance of anthropological narration, will make the selected topic of inquiry more comprehensible and accessible to the reader unfamiliar with the context of Cyprus.

The third chapter thus deals with the ways my informants attempted to renegotiate the existing division by the formulation of new signifiers in relation to it, while the fourth chapter approaches three ways by which the dominant ethnic nationalist ideology imposes itself in the Republic of Cyprus, concluding with one particular instance in which it has been recently symbolically challenged. Although this may feel like a sidetrack from the main object of analysis, it was deemed necessary for its proper contextualization, as the subsequent chapter would not be

2 comprehensible to the reader unfamiliar with the ideas, claims and general narration of Greek Cypriot ethnic nationalism. Chapter five discusses the claims of my informants in relation to Cypriot identity, explores their postcolonial dimension, particularly in relation to language; and argues that the centrality of this particular ideological expression of Cyprocentrism rests on the identification with the abstraction of Cyprus itself. It moves on to evaluate these findings in relation to Benedict Anderson‟s concept of the national imagined community, concluding the analysis with a discussion over the examined Cyprocentric position‟s support for the establishment of a bi-communal federation. The analysis is followed by the conclusion, discussing the thesis‟ relevance and implications in relation to the study of Cyprus, concluding with a critique and a general recommendation for a future anthropology of Cyprus.

1.2. A Note on the Employed Terminology The language used in discursive representations of Cyprus, as well as its ongoing division and the description of its inhabitants, forms a central aspect of the symbolic struggles surrounding the historical, political and ethical claims of the opposing sides in the ongoing dispute commonly referred to as the „Cyprus Problem‟. The most visible example remains of how one speaks of the break-away self-declared state called the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (TRNC). As anthropologist Yael Navaro notes, the TRNC “is always placed in quotation marks in references outside northern Cyprus and Turkey to highlight its questionable legal status” (2012: 97). By this simple discursive act, the ongoing sovereignty of the “Republic of Cyprus” (the state originally formed in 1960), over the whole geography of the island is symbolically reaffirmed in international relations (ibid). Other signifiers include the prefix “pseudo”, inputted in-front of any word suggesting the status of a state, most notably in media outlets, the statements of political parties and everyday speech. To pass this effect to the reader, anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis incorporated this linguistic aspect in his own; highly self-reflective ethnography: “I spoke to the pseudo-policemen, noting a small pseudoflag of their pseudo-state [the TRNC] on their uniforms” (2005a: 75).

Other signifiers yet include the “occupied territories”, or even “the Turkish areas (ta Turjika)”. In its reversed expression, discourses generated by the Republic of Turkey and the TRNC refer to the “Greek Cypriot administration” (Navaro 2012: 102), expressing their refusal to recognize the

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Republic of Cyprus as sovereign since the collapse of its bi-communal constitution in 1963, which saw the Turkish constitutional community losing all political representation within the functioning of the state. Although not as widely recognized, how one speaks of the inhabitants of Cyprus is also entangled within discourses of power; with the discursive representation of the local population shifting through the years, an aspect reflected in social and anthropological research itself. Thus anthropologist Peter Loizos and psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan talk of Cypriot Greeks and Turks (1979, 1975) in their published research of the 1970s, which was largely undertaken prior to the island‟s partition in 1974, while later researchers refer to Greek and Turkish Cypriots (Loizos 1981, Mavratsas 1998, Bryant 2004, Papadakis 2005a, Navaro 2012) – turning the subject compliment into the Subject of the discourse itself, expressing a commonality between the two abstracted groups.

The categories of the Turkish and the Greek Cypriot, although themselves often imprisoned in an endless binary, would had been sufficient for the terminology of this thesis, had in not been the case that it is precisely those very categories, among a number of others, that are disputed, negated and transformed by my informants and participants. To refer to them by the categories they themselves refuse to employ in their description of themselves would thus constitute an enormous misrepresentation, negating their claims at the very same moment that they are presented in textual form. Additionally, the aforementioned discursive and oral representations of political geography are almost completely rejected by my informants, replaced by terms particular to my research population. As much of this thesis revolves around self-definitions of identity, the re-negotiation of the representation of the island‟s division and the relation of those claims to the ongoing reality of partition, as well as to the dominance of ethnic nationalism, of which the aforementioned representations are an integral part, this thesis employs a differentiated terminology, standing outside the canonical representations of identity and political geography.

Thankfully, such dilemmas are not new, allowing me to borrow terms from existing discourses. For the signification of the division, I will be using the terms „north of the line‟ and „south of the line‟ when not speaking of the states themselves, the line referring to the buffer zone that cuts across the island, commonly referred to as the Green Line. These terms have been borrowed from the terminology utilized by Hands Across the Divide (HAD), a grass-root peace resolution women‟s group that generated the terms in its internal organizational structure to avoid the

4 reproduction of hegemonic discourses (Cockburn 2004: 166). The terms are utilized in the study produced by sociologist Cynthia Cockburn, from which they are borrowed (ibid). When referring to the opposing state mechanisms, I will be using the terms „TRNC‟ and „Republic of Cyprus‟ with no quotation marks, or any other additional features. Their role in the history of the ongoing dispute is covered sufficiently in the following subchapter.

However, I will not be using Cockburn‟s terms of “southerner” and “northerner” for the island‟s population, in order to avoid a complete negation of the cultural and positional characteristics of my informants. Instead, I will be using the terms „Greek-speaking‟ and „Turkish-speaking Cypriots‟, taken from the literary work of Sofronis Sofroniou (2015), who utilizes the terms in his novel Oi Protoplastoi (Οι Ππυηόπλαζηοι)1. I acknowledge that the terms outlined do not completely escape the political discourses surrounding the island; and that they themselves contain particular ideological connotations. They are however relatively autonomous from dominant signifiers, allowing for the latter‟s discursive de-naturalization, a necessary step if those discourses are to form part of the analysis without reinstating them to a hegemonic status throughout the presentation of this thesis.

1 The title is untranslatable. It refers to the first humans created by God in the Book of Genesis.

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1.3. Historical and Contemporary Context

Figure 1: Location of Cyprus with added geographical names for contextualization. Source: Contributed by User Vardion, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LocationCyprus.svg [Accessed: 08/04/18].

The island of Cyprus, located in the eastern Mediterranean and formally a part of the Ottoman Empire and later on of the British Empire, has had an admittedly troubling history. In contrast to other colonial people, the dominant ethnic identity which emerged in Cyprus in the late 19th century was Euro-centric, re-imagining Cyprus as a Greek island and its Orthodox Christian population as ethnic Greeks, while the largest minority saw a shift in its identity from Islamic to Turkish (Varnava 2012: 159). These transformations; intrinsically connected with the achieved hegemony of ethnic nationalism within each religious community, in turn determined the Cypriot anti-colonial struggle, which became dominated by Greek-speaking Cypriot ethnic nationalist ideals. Instead of independence, the anti-colonial struggle became dominated by the demand for Enosis,2 the annexation of the island by the Greek state, signifying, within Greek nationalist imagination, the return of Cyprus to its Hellenic origin (Hatay & Papadakis 2012: 28). In its turn, Turkish-speaking Cypriot ethnic nationalism responded with the demand for Taksim,3 the partition of the island on ethnic grounds (ibid). The two ethnic nationalisms symbolized and

2 The word translates to „Union‟. 3 The word translates to „Partition‟.

6 projected Greece and Turkey as their corresponding motherlands, symbolically locating Cyprus as their natural and historical extension (Bryant 2002: 509). AKEL, the left-wing party which has grown to dominate leftist politics since the 1940s, eventually sided with the Enosis cause, although its political predecessor, the Communist Party of Cyprus, had been the strongest supporter for independence (Katsourides 2014: 468).4

Figure 2: 1960 Demographic Map of Cyprus by color intensity. Blue indicates Greek-speaking Cypriots, red indicates Turkish-speaking Cypriots and green and orange indicate Maronite Cypriots. Source: Contributed by User Alexander-Michael Hadjilyra, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Cyprus#/media/File:Ethnographic_ distribution_in_Cyprus_1960.jpg [Accessed: 21/11/17].

After five years (1955-59) of anti-colonial pro-Enosis guerrilla warfare by the Greek-speaking ethnic nationalist group EOKA, a warfare that had deteriorated into inter-communal violence by 1958,5 Cyprus was granted independence in 1960, with Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom guaranteeing its territorial and constitutional integrity in the Treaty of Guarantee (Ladisch 2007:

4 AKEL succeeded the Communist Party of Cyprus as the Marxist-Leninist political party south of the line. Since the 1990s it has evolved into a moderate anti-nationalist social democratic party (Charalambous 2012: 158). 5 In response to EOKA, Turkish-speaking ethnic nationalists formed the pro-Taksim paramilitary group TMT. Part of the violence of 1958 also involved attacks, murders and general harassment of the Cypriot political left, with each nationalist group attacking leftists internal to their own community (Arslan 2012: 127).

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92).6 The constitution was primarily drawn up by representatives of the Greek and Turkish governments and was signed by archbishop Makarios III and doctor Fazil Kucuk, as the representatives of the two communities (Morgan 2010: 254). The newly formed Republic of Cyprus was constitutionally founded on the principle of bi-communality (Navaro 2012: 7). The Cypriot population was separated into the Greek and Turkish constitutional communities, entitled to equal participation in the sharing of state power and the decision making process, irrespectively of the population of each community (Ker-Lindsay 2011: 26). Special constitutional provisions banned the promotion and materialization of both Enosis and Taksim, while the smaller minorities, the Maronite, Armenian and Catholic Cypriot communities, were recognized only as „religious groups‟; and were forced to collectively choose between the Greek and the Turkish constitutional categories, with all three joining the former (Iacovou 1994: 43).

By 1963 however, the bi-communality of the constitutional order collapsed, after president Archbishop Makarios III promoted 13 constitutional amendments which aimed at the abolishment of the bi-communal character of the state; as a first step towards the achievement of Enosis (Milios & Kyprianidis: 114). The breakdown of the constitutional order was followed by intense inter-communal violence driven by paramilitary ethnic nationalist groups, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths, the complete loss of political representation for Turkish-speaking Cypriots, the de-facto abolishment of bi-communalism and the separation of the Turkish- speaking Cypriot population into enclaves, surrounded by Greek-speaking Cypriot military and paramilitary forces (Dodd 1993: 7). By 1964, United Nations Forces had been deployed on the island to pacify the conflict, in correlation with inter-communal negotiations aiming for a consensual agreement on its resolution. The presence of the United Nations in Cyprus, as well as its sponsored negotiations, have been a continuous element of Cypriot life ever since.

The inter-communal conflict reached its peak in the summer of 1974, when EOKA B, an ethnic nationalist Greek-speaking paramilitary group; in collaboration with the Greek military units stationed in Cyprus and the Greek military dictatorship controlling the Greek state since 1967, staged a coup overthrowing president Makarios, aiming to achieve Enosis by force (Papadakis 2005b: 85). The coup triggered the military invasion of the island by Turkish forces, with Turkey

6 The Treaty gave the right of intervention to each state for the purpose of re-establishing constitutional order, if the independence, territorial integrity or security of the Republic of Cyprus was under threat.

8 arguing for its right to do so under the Treaty of Guarantee (Ker-Lindsay 2011: 45). The events of 1974 resulted in the occupation of 38% of the island by the Turkish military, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Cypriots, numerous acts of mass murdering of Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking civilians and the de-facto ethnic and geographical partition of the island, with a United Nations-administered buffer zone (the infamous Green Line), separating the two opposing military forces (Kliot, & Mansfield 1998: 503-4). By 1975, internal displacement had resulted in two de-facto separated areas, with Turkish-speaking Cypriots on one side, and Greek- speaking Cypriots on the other.7 In 1984 the area under the control of the Turkish forces declared itself an independent Turkish Cypriot state under the name „The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus‟ (TRNC), but gained recognition only by the Republic of Turkey, remaining to this day an unrecognized state (ibid). The rest of the island remains under the control of the internationally recognized „Republic of Cyprus‟ (RoC), itself controlled only by the Greek constitutional community, but remaining recognized as the only sovereign state over the whole island (Alemdar 1993: 91). The constitutional provisions of bi-communality, frozen since 1963, remain unenforced until today.

Since 1977, UN-backed inter-communal negotiations have been taking place between the elected presidents north and south of the line, in order to reunify the island under a bi-communal federal structure through a new constitutional arrangement (Papadakis 2005b: 94). Theoretically this entails the formation of a federation consisting of a central bi-communal federal state; and two autonomous constituent states under the control of each community. The geographical area corresponding to the Turkish-speaking constituent state (which is expected to be less than the area currently north of the line), the bi-communal provisions of the federal level of government, the abolishment or not of the Treaty of Guarantee, as well as the number of Greek-speaking Cypriot refugees that would be allowed to return to their original homes, form a significant part of the central points under negotiation.

The internal status quo was only altered in 2003, with the unexpected permanent opening of checkpoints by the TRNC following mass political mobilizations north of the line, calling for a

7 Notable exceptions to this include the Greek-speaking Cypriots who stayed in Rizokarpaso village, as well as the Maronites who remained in the Kormakitis and Karpashia villages north of the line, Potamia, a mixed village located south of the line and Pyla, a mixed village which has found itself located in the buffer zone since 1974, and has largely been administered by the United Nations ever since.

9 federal solution and the reunification of the island (Rooksby 2012: 93). The opening of checkpoints allowed freedom of movement for citizens of the Republic of Cyprus throughout the whole island for the first time since 1974. A year later the Annan Plan, a proposed federal solution to the Cyprus Problem that was under negotiation and supported by the United Nations, was put on binding, parallel referendums on each side of the line. It was rejected by 75% of the citizens of the Republic and approved by 65% of the citizens of the TRNC (Papadakis & Peristianis & Welz 2006: 4). Following the referendums, the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union with the island remaining partitioned, with any changes to the regulations over the management of the checkpoints falling under the jurisdiction of the European Commission (European Council 2004: 9).

Figure 3: Post-Partitioned District Map of Cyprus. Source: Contributed by User Golbez, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyprus_districts_named.png [Accessed: 20/11/17].

Following the failure of the Annan Plan, new rounds of negotiations commenced in 2008, following the election of the AKEL leader Demetris Christofias to the presidency south of the line. The negotiations continued after the election of right-wing Nikos Anastasiadis in 2013, the only leader of a political party who had openly supported a Yes vote for the Annan Plan south of the line. The negotiations gained an increasing intensity with the election of pro-federation Mustafa Akıncı to the presidency north of the line. They reached their climax with the hosting of

10 an international conference in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, in July of 2017, accompanied by expectations that a final negotiated agreement was in sight (Smith 2017). The conference, which at its peak involved the leaders of each constitutional community, the foreign ministers of Turkey, Greece and the United Kingdom, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, as well as a representative of the European Union, eventually collapsed, resulting in the termination of official negotiations until the writing of the present thesis (ibid).

1.4. Situating the Research in the Literature With such a complex history of conflict, the reader will find it quite expectable that much of the anthropological and social research on Cyprus falls within what Joel Robbins has described as the “suffering slot” (2013) of anthropology. Psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan explored the conflict early on from a psychoanalytic lens in his work Cyprus - War and Adaptation (1979), while Peter Loizos, one of the earliest and undoubtedly most influential non-colonial anthropologists to study Cyprus, produced two ethnographic studies and one ethnographic film on the experiences of his fellow Greek-speaking co-villager Cypriot refugees (1981, 1985, 2008). The anthropology of memory was explored by Yiannis Papadakis in his Echoes from the Dead Zone (2005), a detailed narrative account exploring and contrasting the collective memories of the two communities, a topic of research enriched further by anthropologist Rebecca Bryant in her work The Past in Pieces (2012). Anthropologist Yael Navaro, in the The Make-Believe Space (2012), explored the experiences of Turkish-speaking Cypriots living under a non-recognized state prior to the opening of the checkpoints, while anthropologist Lisa Dikomitis explored and contrasted the feelings, experiences and attachments of Greek and Turkish-speaking Cypriot refugees over the same village located north of the line, in her work Cyprus and Its Places of Desire (2012).

The relationship of this thesis to the above paradigm of research is two-fold. On a first level, this thesis continues with a focus on the conflict, particularly in its intersection with notions of identity and the contestation over its discursive and symbolic representation. However, this thesis also presents in part a break with the above paradigm; and in particular with some of the implicit assumptions that are often uncritically reproduced with it. As Yael Navaro noted in her own research north of the line:

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In the discourses of international organizations as well as in much academic scholarship, there are two sides to conflict in Cyprus, “the Turkish side” and “the Greek side”… Although international discourses (including those of international organizations and states and in academic scholarship) construct and imagine “a Turkish side” to what is conventionally called “ethnic conflict in Cyprus,” in opposition to “a Greek side”, such an essential side does not exist. Those who have been discursively categorized as members of the same “ethnic” or “national group”…do not perceive or experience themselves as such (2006: 95).

As it will become evident in the following chapters, my informants do not view the ongoing division of the island as an ethnic conflict, do not accept; but protest against their given ethnic identities, replacing them with different ones, do not view their enemy or political antagonist in another ethnic group; and do not accept given narratives or symbols, but reclaim and reformulate them, generating new discourses and imagined communities. Yael Navaro‟s approach of “de- ethnicizing” (ibid: 84) the anthropology of Cyprus is thus taken unapologetically as the starting point of this thesis. As Navaro notes, “The intention is to focus our analytical lenses on political as opposed to “ethnic” conflict. There is a conflict to be studied…but it is not “ethnic” and it is not just between “Turks and Greeks,” the rubric that has so dominated imaginaries of Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey.” (ibid: 96) This approach opens not merely new ways of thinking and writing anthropologically about the Cyprus Dispute, but also new objects of analysis for the anthropology of Cyprus, objects which necessarily evade the binary of ethnic conflict, discursive ethnic identities and the subsumption of informants and participants under categories of identity given by institutional and structural centers of power. Whether this is in fact achieved in the present thesis remains to the judgment of the reader. The task at least, has been attempted.

As anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis notes in his analysis of Greek-speaking Cypriot narratives of collective identity, “[i]f anything unites Greek Cypriots in a community, it is their participation in a debate about what constitutes the nation, not some shared conception of "the nation” (1998: 162). The two prominent ideological positions surrounding this debate have been described by sociologist Andreas Panayitou as Hellenocentric and Cyprocentric (2012: 81-82). Hellenocentric positions prioritize Greece as the starting point of ideological discursive expression, while Cyprocentric ones prioritize the geographical, cultural and historical space of

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Cyprus, articulating claims over „Cypriot identity‟ in opposition to Hellenocentric discourses (ibid). Sociologist Caesar Mavratsas (1997, 1998), employing the same analytical terminology, explored the on-going ideological contestation between ethnic nationalism and bi-communal civic nationalism (Cypriotism) south of the line, a contestation rooted in conflictual imagined communities (Anderson 2006: 6). Ethnic nationalism is shown to prioritize the Greek nation, locating Cyprus as merely its marginal extension in the eastern Mediterranean, with Cypriotism emphasizing the two communities of the island as a sui generis meta-ethnic community, separating them from the „national centres‟ of Greece and Turkey (Mavratsas 1997: 721). As Mavratsas points out, ethnic nationalism has two parallel formulations, the Enosist formulation, which has officially been abandoned since 1974; and the hegemonic non-Enosist formulation, claiming the Republic of Cyprus as a mono-communal state for Greek-speaking Cypriots (ibid: 728). Right-wing institutional politics became associated with non-Enosist ethnic nationalism, while left-wing politics became associated with Cypriotism (Papadakis 2005a: 161).8

Cyprocentrism Hellenocentrism

Civic Nationalism Ethnic Nationalism

Cypriotism (Bi-communal Non-Enosist Enosist Civic Nationalism) Nationalism Nationalism

Figure 4: Reconstruction of the political ideological spectrum south of the line, based on the work of Andreas Panayiotou (2012), Caesar Mavratas (1997) and Yiannis Papadakis (1998). The spider diagram is founded on notions of collective identity. Arrows indicate political oppositional relations; solid circle lines indicate conditional relations.

8 It should be noted here that there is also a growing liberal Cypriotist faction, concentrated primarily within the centre-right wing DISY party.

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The aforementioned framework offers elaborate descriptive tools for the conceptual organization of ideological claims in the study of Cyprus. Its emphasis however on institutional politics has limited our understanding to the dominant political sphere. The present thesis, by focusing on the micro level of grass root, rather than institutional Cyprocentric positions, acts as an expansion of the contemporary understanding of identitarian claims in Cyprus, by exploring a Cyprocentric position which refuses to fit within the Cypriotist, civic nationalistic conceptualization of Cyprocentrism.9

1.5. The Field and the People What constitutes the field is widely recognized as being abstracted and constructed after the period of data gathering has come to an end (Ingold 2014: 386). In other words, the field is not experienced as a distinct; identifiable geographical space while research takes place and the individual anthropologist is absorbed in the mundane and stimulating aspects of the everyday life of her informants. The field is rather a useful analytical abstraction, isolating and unifying in retrospect the places, moments and geographical spaces most characteristic of the research population encountered by the individual anthropologist.

There were thus two distinct field sites I can here account for. The first and central field site was social space Karaolos10 in the capital city of Nicosia,11 the city located in the center of the island and partitioned since the inter-communal violence of 1963. The social space opened its doors in 2015 and has been organized based on the principles of self-management and direct democracy, with a set of individuals, many of which are members of grass-root political groups, acting as its collective assembly, meeting once a month to make consensual decisions on the events that will be hosted in the space, the work that has to be carried out and any other issue that might be

9 It should be noted here that in the Greek language, the word „Ethnos (Έθνος)‟, which is the root of the English word „Ethnicity‟, is also the Greek word for „Nation‟. The meaning of „Nation‟ is therefore always associated with an ethnic group within the Greek language, as there is no Greek word that adequately describes a non-ethnic nation. Subsequently, supporters of civic nationalism generally do not perceive themselves as nationalists, but in fact as anti-nationalists, as nationalism (ethnikismos, εθνικιζμόρ) is always correlated with an Ethnos, an ethnic group. 10 This is a pseudoname, literally meaning „snail‟ in the Cypriot Greek dialect. It is a reference to the Karaolos internment camp, which was used in Cyprus during British colonial rule for the detention of Jewish war refugees in the 1940s. 11 The city is the capital of both the TRNC and the Republic of Cyprus. It also has three different names. It is called Lefkosia (Λεσκωζία) in Greek, Lefkoşa in Turkish and Nicosia in English.

14 brought up in the assembly. There were regular events taking place at Karaolos throughout the duration of my research. Every Friday Karaolos opened up as a café/bar, there were film screenings twice a month and every Saturday „collective kitchens‟ were organized, where a couple of individuals cooked vegan and vegetarian food; with people gathering to eat together in the midday. The food was provided with the expectation of a small donation, collected to pay for the rent and other everyday costs that had to be covered to keep the space open. Additionally, more irregular events included presentations on pre-specified social, political or economic topics, usually by a single individual, as well as presentations by political groups active within Karaolos. It has not been uncommon for the social space to be utilized for other purposes, such as hosting poetry nights, although no such event was organized while I was carrying out my fieldwork. The social space acted as the central field site during the data collection period. It is there that my informants, as well as relevant political documents, could always be found, with informal political discussions often taking place. I therefore spent as much time as I possibly could at Karaolos, attending every event and being present whenever the social space was open.

Karaolos is however not a mere social space organizing events, but acts as the physical, tangible expression of what my informants call „Horos (Χώρος)‟ in political lingo, literally translating to „Space‟ in English. There is no direct English translation that could capture the meaning of the word Horos. The closest at hand is the word „Milieu‟, which can denote a particular social and/or cultural environment; however, this still does not adequately capture the meaning of the word within the context that was utilized. As Panos Achniotis observes, “the so-called „space‟ includes generally all those organizations and persons that are on the left of AKEL and aspire for a more radical and revolutionary political programme” (2016: 30). The „Space‟ represents the far-left of Cypriot politics south of the line, but it is not itself a political party, a particular grass root group or a collective with specific, easily identifiable membership. Perhaps the most direct way of describing the „Space‟, is by describing Karaolos itself on a busy day:

Spending my time at yet another collective kitchen at Karaolos, it is becoming evident that Saturdays are the most popular days of the social space. The building, located within a historic Nicosian neighborhood, consists of a large wooden door that gives way to a large, roughly rectangular room, its walls and windows decorated with political posters and stickers of past political actions, resembling in a way a displayed set of political

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memorabilia. A small kitchen area is located at the right far-end, with a banner over it reading “States watch over borders of class”, and an even smaller storage room at the left far-end, where an archive of magazines and leaflets of past political groups and initiatives can be found. Newer leaflets, brochures and magazines are on display just in front of the storage room, for anyone who wishes to grab a copy. The latest issues of Entropia, the magazine produced regularly by Syspirosi Atakton,12 one of the two anti-authoritarian political groups that are active within Karaolos, are placed on a small wooden table next to the entrance door. On top of them are placed the brochures of Antifa Lefkoşa,13 the other political group active within the social space. There is a relatively large and wide bookshelf near the kitchen area, where books on topics ranging from anarchist and socialist thought to the history of Cyprus, anti-capitalist economics, veganism and spirituality can be found. Two doors on the far end of each side of the room give way to two unisex toilets. The room is filled with small metal tables and plastic and wooden chairs for people to sit and enjoy their meal, after they have picked and filled their plates, located on a large plastic table in front of the bookshelf, alongside the cooked food.

Collective kitchens gather up approximately 25 to 65 people, most of which are politically active in some form or another, or have been so in the past. Environmental and anti-militarist activists, self-declared anarchists and feminists, members of the bi- communal pro-federation teachers‟ platform, members of past anarchist, extra- parliamentary leftist and grass root pressure groups and members of Syspirosi Atakton and Antifa Lefkoşa are regular visitors at Karaolos on Saturdays. Most individuals know each other on at least a casual level and consist of different generations, ranging from young to middle aged adults, with the former being the dominant age group. Beyond „politicized‟ individuals, the social space further attracts their friends and acquaintances, as well as the occasional unaffiliated visitor that may pass by a collective kitchen or a political presentation out of genuine interest or mere curiosity.

12 The name is untranslatable, losing much of its contextual meaning in English. An attempted translation would be „Cluster of the Disobedient‟. 13 The actual spelling of the group‟s name is „antifa λεσkoşa‟, which combines both Greek and Turkish letters, a political statement in-itself.

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The composition of the „Space‟ is thus ideologically heterodox, irreducible to a particular political group, a particular age group or even a strictly specific form of politics. It is rather better understood as a decentralized network of individuals and political collectivities, held together through the intersection of inter-personal relationships and progressive and left-wing ideological views. It is thus not surprising that no clear definition or universal understanding of what is included in the „Space‟ actually exists. Informants often talked of the „Space‟ in the general, the “Limassol Space” (social circles of far-left groups and individuals located in the city of Limassol); “our Space” when wanting to distinguish the political and social circles around Karaolos from other far-left political groups; and “the broader Space”, which usually included all aforementioned „Spaces‟ as well as more moderate past and present political initiatives, such as the bi-communal rapprochement movement, which aims to bring Turkish-speaking and Greek- speaking Cypriots together through personal, social and less politically charged activities. For the purposes of this thesis, the term „Space‟ is utilized to denote the groups, individuals and social circles in and around social space Karaolos.

As is implicitly noted in the above vignette, there are different population groups identifiable within Karaolos. These can be abstracted into three broad categories: Individuals who are currently politically active within the „Space‟; individuals who have been active in the past but are currently inactive; and individuals who are, and have been apolitical in relation to the „Space‟. My informants consist of individuals primarily from the first group. All were young adults living in Nicosia south of the line and were citizens of the Republic of Cyprus; born after the partition of the island. They were all regular visitors at Karaolos throughout the fieldwork period, knew each other fairly well; and most were also members of the Karaolos assembly and/or one of the two active political groups. All of my informants were supporters of the reunification of Cyprus based on a bi-communal federal structure; and had a generally high standard of tertiary education, with most holding or studying towards an undergraduate university degree and many holding or pursuing university education on the PhD level. This „kernel‟ group consisted of approximately 20 individuals during my stay in Nicosia, from which 7 were further interviewed.

The second field site was the walled city of Nicosia, south of the line – the oldest part of the capital city of Nicosia, located approximately 15 minutes from the social space by car, the

17 dominant mode of transportation in the island. The walled city is surrounded by the Venetian walls; built as military fortifications in the 16th century, and contains two of the three checkpoints located within Nicosia, where travelling from one side of the line to the other becomes possible with the showing of official identification documents to the stationed police officers of the TRNC and the Republic of Cyprus. Due to its ongoing partition, as well as the presence of two checkpoints, the walled city has acquired a certain symbolic significance – it has come to represent the division of the island as a whole and has also been used repeatedly as a geographical space for political protests, rallies and acts of symbolic violence (graffiti, political posters etc.). This is not merely due to the walled city‟s symbolic significance in relation to the island‟s ongoing partition – after 1974 the walled city south of the line came to be used as a geographical space for grass root political actions (Iliopoulou & Karathanasis 2014: 170).

As anthropologist Pafsanias Karathanasis has explored in his PhD thesis, the opening of the checkpoints in 2003 transformed the walled city‟s spatial position from the margin of the two sides of Nicosia; to “an in-between area, a threshold…its marginal character…changed into a borderline and therefore into a transitional character” (2017: 408). This previous marginal character had been explored by Papadakis in his own work, carried out before the checkpoints were opened – the walled city of Papadakis is a deteriorated space, forgotten at the a margin of a developing new city, where the elderly Greek-speaking residents lived “in the company of ghosts” alongside “many destitute people” (2005a: 147). Karathanasis explored and documented in great detail the persistence of grass root political initiatives in the walled city from the opening of the checkpoints in 2003 until 2011, most of which were driven by the far-left politics of the „Space‟: the opening of Kardaş;14 the first independent bi-communal social center, the emergence of a politicized youth subculture centered around Faneromeni square, the opening of squats and the activity of the Occupy Buffer Zone movement,15 where the street and later on the building located in the buffer zone between the police booths of the Ledras checkpoint were

14 The word is Turkish and translates to „Brother‟. 15 For the purposes of clarifying my positionality, I would like to state here that as a native Nicosian politically active from a young age, I was part of the Faneromeni youth subculture and was also present during the activities of the Occupy Buffer Zone movement. I therefore had an established connection with a number of my informants prior to entering the field. The dimensions of this are discussed in subchapter 2.5, which deals with questions of positionality.

18 occupied for several months by protestors, until they were forcibly evicted in April of 2012 (Karathanasis 2017: 417, Ilician 2013: 74, Ioannou 2016: 25).

Figure 5: Isolated map of the walled city of Nicosia. Black indicates the buffer zone (limited here to the walled city), Red indicates Ledras Street, the main commercial street within the walled city; and Yellow the Ledra Street checkpoint. The Pink and Green circles are my own additions, indicating Faneromeni square and the approximate position of the Ledra Palace checkpoint, in relation to the Republic‟s police position south of the line. The Ledra Palace is also the headquarters of the United Nations Forces in Cyprus (UNFICYP). Source: Eirini Iliopoulou (2016: 59).

While the walled city is still central in the politics of the „Space‟, as well as to the rapprochement movement, particularly in relation to the ongoing division, the area has been substantially gentrified since 2012, with Faneromeni square and its surrounding streets, described by Karathanasis as the central point of the politics of the walled city, having been transformed into a commoditized space packed with modern cafés, bars and restaurants. Much of my time was spent

19 in the walled city, especially when Karaolos was closed; and specifically at a coffee shop16 located near Faneromeni square, which has been a regular hang around area of my informants, as well as of marginal political groups, before and after the gentrification of the walled city (ibid: 227). There I had the convenience of continuing my research when Karaolos remained closed, but also the chance to observe and explore the contradictory official and unofficial symbols that characterize and surround the walled city south of the line.

16 In contrast to cafés, Cypriot coffee shops (kafenio) serve primarily traditional alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages and do not serve espresso-based coffee. Within the walled city south of the line, modern versions of the coffee shop have been connected with alternative lifestyles shaped in large part in opposition to the dominant consumerist lifestyles of the city (Karathanasis 2017: 228).

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2. Theoretical, Methodological and Ethical Considerations

2.1. The Poststructuralist Analysis of Ideology In his contributions to the theory of ideology, Louis Althusser defined ideology as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (2008: 36). This relationship was for Althusser primarily determined by institutional structures interpellating (addressing) the subject, resulting in the internalization of the dominant ideological values by the subject itself (2008: 17). Althusser‟s structural understanding of ideology and the process of interpellation was faced with two intrinsic limitations. Firstly, the emphasis on structure downplayed the significance of non-institutional ideologies in influencing political action, leaving them outside of the scope of analysis. Secondly, the process of interpellation was never adequately theorized on the micro level, resulting in a theoretical framework unable to adequately explain how subjects internalize a particular ideology and more importantly, how they are able to shift from one ideological position to another (Zizek 2009: 27-28).

Poststructuralist theoretical frameworks have expanded our understanding by utilizing the Lacanian concepts of the Symbolic and the Real in addressing the limitation of Althusserian theory. For Lacan, the Symbolic is the social sphere situated within language, mediated through the interrelation of signifiers in an ongoing process of the representation of the world (Stavrakakis 1999: 20). Language however does not stand outside of ideological Symbolic orders or forms an independent social sphere from them, but is itself already located within them (bid). As philosopher Slavoj Zizek points out, the process of ideological signification is itself conditioned through the interplay between floating signifiers and master signifiers (2009: 95). Floating signifiers are signifiers which hold no particularized meaning in-themselves, entailing a specified meaning only in reference to a master signifier, while a master signifier remains self- referential within a Symbolic order, conditioning meaning while mediating its own meaning as self-evident (ibid). An example internal to Cyprus is the relationship between the master signifier „the nation‟ and floating signifiers such as „freedom‟ in ethnic nationalism, where „the nation‟ becomes a self-referential tautology, conditioning the meaning of „freedom‟ to mean the freedom of „the nation‟, restricting the freedom of the individual if it is perceived to threaten the integrity of „the nation‟ itself (Kitromilides 1979: 24). The crystallization of the meaning of floating

21 signifiers by differential master signification therefore results in the mediation of contradictory and antagonistic notions attached to the same floating signifier. The recognition of a master signifier becomes possible with a close critical engagement with the particular ideological Symbolic order itself, through the identification of self-referential signifiers upheld as self- evident tautologies in a specified ideological context.

The identification of the Subject with a particular signifier produces "the necessary illusion of a fixed meaning" (Evans 1996: 149), a meaning situated within, and connected to, a particular ideological Symbolic order and its corresponding internal structure of master signification. The Symbolic sphere is however unable to capture and represent the totality of human experience, a failure whose effect entails the impossibility of a permanent, fixated identification of the subject to the signifier. As political theorist Yiannis Stavrakakis points out, “[w]hat we have then…is not identities but identifications, a series of failed identifications or rather a play between identification and its failure” (1999: 29). That remainder of experience which resists Symbolic representation is termed in Lacanian theory the Real (the term does not denote actual reality). In the Zizekian formulation, the Real acts as a disturbance to the smooth function of the Symbolic (2009: 192). An encounter with the Real is a traumatic experience which destabilizes the overall process of signification, decentering the subject in its relation with the signifier and its corresponding Symbolic order, an experience which becomes re-symbolized within an alternative order of signification (2009: 192). As it has been argued elsewhere (Pastellopoulos 2017: 20), the events of 1974 constitute a social traumatic event which constitutes the encounter with the Real in Cypriot political and everyday life, an experience which becomes re-symbolized through new ideological Symbolic orders reinterpreting the events and effects of the war, with Cyprocentrism and non-Enosist ethnic nationalism being the clearer ideological expressions of this process (Loizos 1981: 132).

2.2. Imagined Communities and the Postcolonial Condition In his analysis of the historicity and emergence of nationalism, Benedict Anderson coined the concept of the “imagined community” (2006: 7). The term aimed to describe a community characterized by the imagined connection of its claimed members, even though those very members would never be able to meet all of their corresponding co-members in their lifetimes

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(ibid: 7). As Anderson explained, a community is imagined “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion […] In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (ibid: 6). While the term has been utilized primarily for the description of national communities, imagined to inhabit a particular geographical area, which may or may not be currently under the control of an existing nation state, Anderson used the term to describe communities beyond the nationalist imagination, such as “the imagined community of Christendom” (ibid: 42), where the community of believers formed an imagined community transcending continents, state borders and localized cultures, producing a distinct holistic imagined community that did not correspond to the nationalist imagination characterizing so much of the politics of the 19th and 20th centuries – a politics which is seeing a reemergence through the demands of independence raised from Scotland and Catalonia; to the unofficial independence referendum in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (Flamini 2013: 53, Guibernau 2014: 21, Meintjes 2018: 1).

For Anderson, the form of imagination is what separates nationalist imagined communities from their competing equivalents, in that the nation is imagined as “limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (2006: 7). The nation is therefore always imagined as finite, limited to a specific geographical area, an area which corresponds to either an existing, or a desired potential nation state. The nation, as an imagined community, defines its current and potential membership in relation to an imagined limit, and therefore nationalism, even in its most liberal formulations, is characterized by a fundamental point of exclusion – nationalism is antithetical to humanism, precisely because it defines itself in opposition to an external or internal Other (Yack 1996: 208).

Anderson‟s concept may remain a simple one, but it is ever relevant in the discussion of the politics of collective identity, which are largely characterized by claims over the definition or collective values of a particular imagined community, its geographical and demographic limitations, or even by the challenging of a particular imagined community by another – the last

23 case still characterizing to a large extend the political ideological lines of contemporary Cypriot politics (Papadakis 2005a: 161, Navaro 2006: 95, Mavratsas 1997: 721). But in contrast to the imagined communities of the European continent, or even the postcolonial world, Cyprus presents itself as a peculiar case, in that the hegemonic imagined communities which emerged in the first half of the 20th century claimed Cyprus as a part of nation states external to it, nation states which failed however to annex the island and incorporate it as part of their sovereign territory. Yet Cyprus has seldom been approached from a postcolonial lens. This is paradoxical, as the history of the island is burdened by expansionist claims and violent interventions by the British, Greek and Turkish states, the permanent stationing of Greek and Turkish military troops,17 as well as internal conflicts and contestations over the identity of its inhabitants and its positioning in historical narrations (Panayiotou 2006: 269, Ker-Lindsey 2011: 15, Varnava 3012: 179). South of the line, these contestations extend from claims over the status of Cypriot Greek in relation to Demotic (Modern) Greek (Christofides 2010: 436),18 to conflicts between Cyprocentric and Hellenocentric imaginations/narrations of identity and history (Panayiotou 2012: 75), to bi-communal initiatives against ethnic nationalism (Papadakis 2005b: 90), as well as postcolonial political positions tracing back to the 1980s (Pastellopoulos 2017: 28).

Much of what I encountered in the field in informal conversations, interviews and documents, becomes comprehensible and apparent when perceived through a postcolonial perspective. Postcolonial theory is therefore employed as a supplement to Anderson‟s theoretical insights, particularly Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o‟s work on the cultural hierarchies characterizing colonial and postcolonial societies in relation to the status and role of language (2005: 15). I have also made use of the concept of the „Cypriot surplus‟, a concept developed by Andreas Panayiotou in his analysis of Cypriot consciousness, to describe those elements of the Cypriot experience that resist their subsumption and homogenization by ethnic nationalism (Panayiotou 2005). The critical insights of Étienne Balibar (1991), Eric Hobsbawm (1991) and Frantz Fanon (2008),

17 One cannot avoid stressing the point here, by including the fact that the position of Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard, the highest military position in the military force of the Republic of Cyprus, is always held by a Greek citizen, rather than a citizen of the Republic. 18 Cypriot Greek refers to the vernacular dialect spoken by Greek-speaking Cypriots, which is commonly non- comprehensible to the speaker of Modern Greek. Turkish-speaking Cypriots speak their own dialect of Turkish, which is also largely incomprehensible to a Turkish speaker from mainland Turkey. While Cypriot Greek acted as the lingua franca of the inhabitants of Cyprus prior to 1974, today this function has been taken on by English, as the knowledge of Cypriot Greek by Turkish-speaking Cypriots has largely depreciated after almost 50 years of partition.

24 which all fall within the social constructivist framework adopted by Anderson, have also been employed when deemed useful in the initiation or clarification of a particular argument. The inclusion of postcolonial theory is perhaps the most significant theoretical aspect of the present thesis, as its utilization offers not merely a casual explanation of the phenomena encountered in the field, but contributes on a theoretical level to the de- ethnicization of the anthropology of Cyprus.

2.3. Epistemology and Methodology Methodological considerations remain of central importance in the undertaking of anthropological and social scientific research. The consistency, manner and employed methods by which data are collected and organized; form the empirical basis upon which an anthropological analysis can develop, expand and conceptualize its object of analysis in a meaningful and transferable manner (Emerson & Fretz & Shaw 1995: 170). More importantly, however, the epistemological nature of the accumulated data should first be briefly discussed, as epistemology, in critically evaluating how knowledge is produced and established, is located at the foundation of how data itself is to be understood (Wilson 2004: 14).

Social scientific epistemology has been largely shaped by Immanuel Kant‟s sharp distinction between phenomena and noumena – the first signifying the external appearance of the object in question, while the latter indicating the object in-itself, in its unapproachable essence, divorced from our direct perception (1998: 347). For Kant, the phenomena are the observable dimension of particular noumena, but the noumenon itself is incomprehensible, remaining outside of the field of observation and therefore of analysis – for the thing-in-itself is unapproachable, located outside of our perception and therefore outside of our capacity to understand it, and therefore to produce a knowledge of it (Guyer & Wood 1998: 38). Transferring this distinction from epistemological philosophy to the field of anthropology, one can state that what is encountered in a particular field is neither the essence nor the universal elements of the unified whole of the anthropological object in question, but a plethora of observable phenomena, divorced from any innate essence, corresponding to the recorded, accumulated and potential data that the anthropologist takes as her empirical basis for her anthropological endeavors. Phenomena, in being unable to offer us access to their corresponding noumena, entail the necessity of their

25 scrutinization and interpretation – they do not speak to us in-themselves, but have to be deciphered through the employment of abstract reasoning that can produce a sense of meaning to an otherwise untranslatable accumulation (Weber 1964: 88). The present thesis is fundamentally rooted in this epistemological position, and approaches the employed data as phenomena that become comprehensible only through their theoretical interpretation and therefore, though a conscious process of abstraction.

Full time ethnographic research was undertaken from the 22nd of December, 2017, until the 29th of March, 2018. During this period, multiple methods were employed for the collection and accumulation of data. The primary research method was that of participatory observation, which entailed an ongoing, expanding engagement with my informants and the political and casual activities within which they were involved in, ranging from political actions, social gatherings and structured meetings, to informal conversations, casual encounters and everyday socialization. Participatory observation was undertaken in its most intense expression at Karaolos, but also at the regular hangout places of my informants, primarily within the walled city south of the line. I kept a journal for the whole duration of the research, and regularly wrote down ethnographic notes, particularly of informal conversations, key events; thick descriptions and of my theoretical interpretations. From the above, informal conversations were the most rewarding in terms of relevance, as they more directly addressed the perspectives and beliefs held by my informants.

As part of participatory observation, I also spent a substantial amount of time walking through the walled city of Nicosia south of the line, taking photographs of symbols (graffiti, flags, monuments, stickers and checkpoints), particularly if they related to notions of identity and the ongoing division of the island. I undertook three pre-arranged such „expeditions‟, each time changing my walking route to cover as much of the walled city as possible. In total, 404 photographs were taken. The collection of political documents formed another layer of data. Documents were primarily collected from Karaolos, within which most political texts of extra- parliamentary Cyprocentrism could be found. The documents collected consisted both of the documents distributed to the visitors of Karaolos, as well as of documents found in the Karaolos archive. In total, 12 magazine issues, 46 leaflets and 8 brochures were collected.

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As noted above, I carried one-on-one interviews with 7 of my informants, all of which were part of the „kernel‟ group of the „Space‟. All interviews were carried out in Cypriot Greek, with the exception of one interviewee, who felt more comfortable expressing his/her thoughts in English. All interviews were in an informal setting (either Karaolos or a coffee shop) and were semi- structured, focusing primarily on the themes of self-identification, the terms employed regarding the island‟s division, the existence (or not) of a common Cypriot identity and the interviewee‟s perspective of who is to be considered a Cypriot. I preferred to carry out interviews around themes, rather than to employ a fixed set of pre-designed questions, in order to allow my informants the possibility of expressing and expanding their answers however they felt fit, minimizing my control of the discussion. I carried all interviews in March, as I considered it necessary to first become closely familiar with my informants through participatory observation, prior to the formulation of the themes of the interviews. Although this approach entailed the risk of failing to carry out all interviews, particularly in the case of an informant‟s repeated re- scheduling of the interview date, I consider this decision justified, as the themes employed in the interviews would had not been identified without the preceding two months of participatory observation. Carrying out interviews early on in the fieldwork period entailed the greater risk of focusing on themes irrelevant to my informants‟ claims, as well as to the context within which they are formulated. All interviews were fully transcribed, with interviews in Cypriot Greek transcribed in Greeklish, the unofficial writing of Greek with Latin characters, as the phonetics of Cypriot Greek cannot be adequately expressed in the Greek alphabet. Although an unorthodox approach, transcribing the interviews in Greeklish also made transcribing less time-consuming, reducing significantly the time gap between transcription and analysis. All interview extracts, with the exception of the one carried out in English, as well as all extracts from documents, unless otherwise stated, were translated by me. I do not disclose the pseudoname of the interviewee who gave an interview in English, to avoid the possibility of identifying that particular individual.

The close familiarization with the accumulated data was followed by thematic coding, establishing common themes found in all data sets through a repeating scrutinization of their interrelation. The established themes determined which data were deemed relevant and which were to be disregarded, an unfortunate decision that is however necessary given the limited available space and the enormous amount of data collected in the field. The establishment of

27 themes found in all types of collected data aimed to also counteract the possibility of falling for what Jerolmack and Khan have described as the “attitudinal fallacy” (2014: 23) – the generalization and inference of social action from the verbal account of an individual‟s sentiments, recollections and stated beliefs (ibid). Although the present thesis is concerned primarily with beliefs themselves, rather than social action itself, the evaluation of established themes through the employment of different data types reduced the possibility of engaging in the attitudinal fallacy. While they were included in thematic coding, I have taken the decision to largely exclude documentary sources, a decision which I find most unfortunate, but which was deemed necessary due to the limited space available for the present thesis.

Ethnographic research, much like most of social scientific research, is necessarily complicated, as its object of analysis is in reality not an object at all in the philosophical sense, but a subject – or rather, a complex set of relations between subjectivities, historical institutions and their products (a written text, a legal decree, a conversation, a protest and so on) that are situated both in a process of becoming (of undergoing change), as well as in a process of reproducing the established social relations within which they are located (Bourdieu 1996: 125). These processes are not material things positioned outside of the researcher, to be observed passively in the fashion of the experimental method; and the anthropologist is never quite independent of them, but always entangled in the processes themselves – in the moment of attempting to research, she is already positioned within the interrelations under investigation, she is an intrinsic part of them. And while an ethnographic account is the product of the individual anthropologist‟s observations, engagements and experiences, the written ethnography is never an actual representation of the experience of being in the field, but rather the post-fieldwork representation of the collected data by means of a constructed textual linearity and theoretical interpretation (Ingold 2014: 388) – it is in one very real sense a useful fiction, attempting to represent what could never be adequately textually represented in all its complex interrelations, unique particularities and infinity of variables (Scheurich 1995: 239-240). What is therefore offered in the present thesis is nothing more than a frozen image permanently engraved in text, which, much like a film negative; can tell us of what it has captured only after it has been processed into a photograph, but can never adequately transfer to us the actual experience of the moment it depicts.

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2.4. Ethical Considerations Ethical considerations remain fundamental in the undertaking of anthropological research, particularly in the carrying out of participant observation, where the distinction between data gathering and the invasion of privacy can often become blurred. To maintain consent I informed verbally my informants about the topic and aims of my research from the first week of its initiation. I continued to do so throughout the period I was in the field, particularly when encountering new individuals or was questioned further about my research. In the moments where elaboration was not possible, such as time-limited informal encounters with new individuals, I weighted gained data based on their personalized or impersonalized content. Thus data generated within the aforementioned context, such as noted informal conversations and journal entries, which entailed deeply personal and/or emotional information on the part of the encountered individual, are not included within the data presented in the thesis.

As my informants are actively involved in grass root political initiatives, organized through closed horizontal assemblies, where the information shared is not expected to be projected to the public sphere, I consciously did not document such information in my note taking, the writing of thick descriptions and through participatory observation as a whole. I deliberately avoided gaining access to closed assemblies, especially if those were connected with a particular political group, even in cases in which I was invited. This decision, although limiting my integration within the field, was informed by my ethnical position of avoiding gaining information that my informants would clearly object being documented in a public, or even a private form, such as in my field notes. I had rather emphasized attending public events and interacting in informal encounters during participatory observation, rather than achieving the maximum integration possible in the social networks of my informants. This dimension allowed me to remain in a relative margin, shifting constantly from an insider to an outsider. It proved helpful not only in the process of disassociating from the field, but also in preserving the trust and mutual respect between me and my informants without suspicions that I am overstepping perceived boundaries. I have also deliberately avoided identifying actors behind specific acts, such as the writing of graffiti; and the destruction or removal of state symbols, as these acts are considered illegal by the police force. To maintain the maximum security for my informants, I considered it necessary not to merely avoid documentation of the particular actors engaged in the aforementioned activities, but to avoid gaining such knowledge in the first place. Although part of the data

29 consists of graffiti and other acts of symbolic violence, these are approached as phenomena without identified individual actors, and no data is provided linking my informants to them.

For the purposes of maintaining anonymity, all participants‟ names, as well as the names of particular places, are replaced with pseudonames throughout the presentation of data. Additionally, any gathered information that could identify a specific informant (for example, stated hometown in an interview, personal information, life events); have been edited out of the presented transcripts, notes and vignettes. As Cyprus is a small place and the city of Nicosia, where I carried out my research, is even smaller, the possibility of identifying individuals based on simple personal information is ever-present. I therefore maintained the position of preserving anonymity at the maximum possible level throughout the writing of this thesis, as the opinions expressed, as well as the political activities that my informants are involved in, could be cause of harassment by the police as well as by opposing far-right groups, as has been the case in the past (Karathanasis 2017: 146). The present thesis therefore contains no life histories and information about my informants is kept to a minimum. On the same grounds I do not disclose the exact geographical location of the social space I carried research at, even though it is open to the public and information about it is openly available online. I have refrained from using pseudonames for political groups, as their names and positions are publicly known and projected by the groups themselves, and their publicly shared material (brochures, magazines) form another layer of the collected data, making the preservation of the groups‟ anonymity impossible, as well as unnecessary.

2.5. Reflections on my Positionality As it has been noted above, I was no stranger to the field or its people. As a participant in past political actions, I was already familiar with Karaolos, my potential informants‟ hangout areas, as well as the political lingo surrounding them. This gave me a tremendous advantage, as I required no gatekeeper – I had access to the field from the first day of fieldwork, as well as connections to a number of people, many of which eventually became my informants and interviewees. I faced no barriers of entry for any public or semi-public event, any political action, or any informal situation, such as joining a table discussion at a coffee shop when arriving and finding my informants there. I faced no barriers in regards with language, being a native speaker

30 of the Cypriot Greek dialect spoken south of the line, which is, as a general rule, incomprehensible to people from mainland Greece. During fieldwork I joined the Karaolos assembly as a full member; undertaking particular responsibilities as part of this membership, such as cleaning the social space, participating in the meetings of the assembly and occasionally helping in the organization of film screenings. I therefore held the position of an insider early on in my research. This position was only limited by my decision to abstain from becoming a member of political groups, which placed me as a relative outsider in relation to them, since I could not attend their meetings and closed assemblies.

The main challenge faced by my positionality was therefore not access, but going native to an extent that could compromise critical reflection and theoretical conceptualization of my accumulating data. In terms of representation, this has been addressed by employing descriptive terminology that is neither the one employed by my informants, nor the one dominating academic and political discourse over Cyprus, allowing me to explore the signifiers and concepts encountered in the field with a relative distance. During research I followed the advice of my supervisor to theoretically abstract from the data while data collection was taking place. Much of my field notes are therefore a mixture of noted down data, followed by my attempts to theoretically interpret and analyze them on the spot – a mentally tiring process, which has however allowed me to be in a continuous dialogue with my collected data, in a systemic process of abstract theoretical interpretation that necessitated critical thinking and mental disassociation from the immediacy of the field. This approach has been proven exceptionally rewarding, as much of my notes contained the theoretical interpretations and thematic conceptualization found in the following chapters, which I doubt I would had been able to identify with such ease; had I not engaged in continuous theoretical abstraction while being in the field.

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3. Signifying the Division In the ongoing dispute that has become part of everyday life in Cyprus for more than half a century, how one speaks of the island‟s division is never a matter void of political claims and ideological contestations. South of the line, this takes the form of a continuous negation – the dominant language employed aims to delegitimize the TRNC, symbolically refute its existence and project a particular understanding of what exists north of the line in relation to the Republic of Cyprus. Linguistic patterns dominate public discourse south of the line, located in political language, media coverage, school curriculums, everyday speech and the official terminology employed by the Republic of Cyprus itself. Take this typical case, found in a standard article in Phileleftheros, the leading Greek-worded newspaper in Cyprus; which reports the procedures set up north of the line for the potential return of members of the Maronite religious group to the villages they had to abandon in 1974:

Information from the occupied areas [katexomena] mentions that in a meeting that occurred yesterday, at the so called presidential mansion, the next steps that will be taken were discussed and a committee was appointed for the interactions with the Maronite religious group. The meeting was presided by the “deputy minister of the presidency” Gurdhal Houndauoğlu, with the participants being the “deputy minister of the prime minister” Metin Beyoğlu, the “deputy minister” of economics Kudret Akay, the “deputy minister” of internal affairs Guyrcan Kara, the “director” of the “ministry” of Foreign Affairs Kemal Kioprolou, the advisor of the Turkish “embassy” Beyami Kaliontsu and the “president” of the “committee of immovable property” Eiffer Sait Erkmen[...]The so called vice president of the pseudostate, Serdar Denktaş, was revealing of the steps that will be taken for the Maronites (Phileleftheros 2017a, Italics added).

Here the repeated use of quotation marks aims to delegitimize the claimed official positions of the individuals involved. The use of the term “so called” implies that the titles and terms employed are fictitious, while the term “pseudostate”, in reference to the TRNC, projects the claim that no state, de-facto or not, exists at all. The discourse is inherently held together by the term “occupied areas”, conditioning the meaning of the overall narrative – the area north of the line is under illegal Turkish military occupation and therefore all political institutions, official titles and claims of independence are a falsity and should not be recognized. In relation to the

32 term “occupied areas”, the term “free areas”, which is implied through the term “occupied areas” itself, is often used to refer to the areas managed by the Republic of Cyprus south of the line, completing the signification of meaning attached to the two sides of the division. These terms and patterns, which repeat themselves daily throughout public discourse and everyday speech, are carefully located within the broader, dominant narrative over how Cyprus and its division is to be understood – a narrative which; as political scientist Nicos Peristianis observed, defines the Cyprus Problem as “an issue of "invasion and occupation" by an expansionist aggressor (viz.Turkey), and not a matter of "bicommunal differences”” (2008: 227). This narrative positions 1974 as the pivotal point of modern Cypriot history, removing, as Yiannis Papadakis noted, the events of the 1960s as part of the narration of the conflict in Cyprus (2005a: 83). How one speaks of the two sides of the Green Line is thus entangled within a binary relationship of legality and illegality, recognition and non-recognition, truth and falsity and remembering and forgetting, located at the intersection of historical narratives, ideological projections and political claims.

It is within this contextual structure of signification that I encountered a set of very different signifiers throughout the everyday interaction with my informants. The terms “so called”, “occupied areas”, “pseudostate”, “free areas” and the characteristic use of quotation marks were absent in every casual interaction, in every political document and in the everyday language employed. Instead, the division was replaced by the relatively simple terms „north (voras)‟ and „south (notos)‟, terms that were otherwise rarely encountered (if encountered at all) when speaking with people south of the line. At an initial level, the terms appeared to be employed as a common basis for communication with Turkish-speaking Cypriots, a set of signifiers which negated the dominant language from both sides of the divide and could thus be employed independently from them, through a non-nationalistic common terminology. Antigone, a young adult Greek-speaking Cypriot university teacher actively involved in the „Space‟ clarified to me; in relation to the usage of the term „north‟, that

You don‟t write it with a capital letter, which implies that it is the Northern Republic. It is also a way of defining the two areas when writing texts with Turkish Cypriots, because we encountered this problem when we began to work together on antimilitarist actions and we had to write a text from which the same discourse had to come out from both of

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us, and we couldn‟t write Republic of Cyprus or TRNC, we couldn‟t write Republic of Cyprus and occupied areas, we wrote in the beginning north and south, and we had north with a capital letter [North], and we received criticism from Turkish Cypriots that were in our group, that we should write it with small letters so that it doesn‟t imply the TRNC, because there are some Turkish Cypriots that don‟t even accept that. But you will never hear a Turkish Cypriot talking of occupied areas. Why should I have a different discourse than them? To place another division between us?

The impression I initially received from the use of the terms corresponded with Antigone‟s clarification. The terms appeared initially to be used in a similar fashion to the terms documented by Cynthia Cockburn in her study of Hands Across the Divide. For HAD, the terms were employed on an official level – they were part of the group‟s constitution, employed in an attempt to transcend the frictions of the division by agreeing on a common terminology in relation to its members, a terminology which escaped the contradictory and nationalistically charged language employed within each side of the division (2004: 166). In this sense, the terms acted as a political tool, able to produce a bi-communal political discourse which contradicted and transcended the official claims of each side in the ongoing dispute over Cyprus. The political utility of the terms „north‟ and „south‟ was also addressed to me by Diogenes, a young adult Greek-speaking Cypriot who was a member of the Karaolos assembly, who said that “They might be kind of long when placed in a sentence, but they are the most ok specifications we have found so far”.

3.1. Beyond Negation As I spent more time at the social space however, I noticed that these terms were not merely employed in political texts or interactions between Turkish-speaking and Greek-speaking Cypriots, but contained a logic of their own, being employed within the most casual of conversations amongst Greek-speaking Cypriots themselves. In other words, they did not function as a mere linguistic tool for the production of an agreed, homogeneous bi-communal political discourse, but were an integral part of how one casually spoke of the two sides of the Green Line:

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It was a sunny Saturday at the social space and as people finished eating at the collective kitchen, many moved on to sit on the pavement opposite the entrance of Karaolos, a place reserved for those who admittedly enjoy the sun. As I approached, lighting up a cigarette, I noticed the discussion between two Greek-speaking Cypriots, Antigone, a university teacher, and Selene, a recently graduated undergraduate student, developing in Cypriot Greek – what to do for today. “Should we go to the north?” Selene suggested, triggering a discussion around known venues in the walled city north of the Green Line. It is at that moment that I realized that „north‟ (voras) and „south‟ (notos) are terms used by my Greek-speaking Cypriot informants amongst themselves and in an everyday, casual manner, terms that I never hear in the broader society south of the line, and that had come to replace all other terms of spatial signification over the island‟s division. This observation reminded me that this was not the first time I encountered the casual use of these terms. Only a few days ago, I had a chat at the kitchen area of Karaolos with Penelope, a young adult Greek-speaking Cypriot university teacher. I was describing to her my experiences traveling north of the line with my father, to which she responded excitingly “You should take me along when you go to the north with your father”, replacing the term that I was using throughout my whole narration („occupied areas‟). Atalanta, a Greek-speaking PhD student that was also present during our chat, absorbed with sorting out the kitchenware, turned and said to me in a dismissive manner, combining enough jokiness that avoided her comment being viewed as an insult: “Occupied areas. Ts ts ts”.

The terms „north‟ and „south‟ were thus an integral part of the casual language of my informants, constituting the key signifiers by which they related to the ongoing division of the island. Dominant terms received negative status among the people of the „Space‟, perceived as connected with discourses attached to an ethnic nationalist rhetoric. The dismissal of Atalanta in my usage of „occupied areas‟ instead of „north‟ was not the only time I encountered criticism of how I spoke of the area north of the Green Line. In a casual internet chat I had with Antigone, which started to erupt into an argument on my part, she too dismissed my use of the term in a much more direct manner:

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Me: From 8 o‟clock in the morning, until 7:30 at night, I was at the occupied areas [katexomena]. Antigone: Hahhahha You never lose a chance to go to the north Me: Yeah something like that Antigone: But why do you call it occupied areas? You will confuse me and I will start to say it Me: Because it is Antigone: It is not? Me: I may also say Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus if it comes to me, I don‟t care, but in Greek I almost always say occupied areas. In English I usually say north and south, it doesn‟t work for me to say two words for a geographical space, „occupied territories‟.

Antigone: They are not occupied areas. It would be if we weren‟t negotiating.

Me: [very long comment arguing the control of the TRNC by Turkey] If you want to say north and south, gladly do, but I will continue to say occupied areas. As I will continue to say that the Republic of Cyprus as it stands is an unconstitutional illegal construct of Makarios. Antigone: Yes but you don‟t say it with a single word for the Republic of Cyprus. Also, „occupied areas‟ is connected with „liberation‟ and not „reunification‟

For Antigone, the term „occupied areas‟ was intrinsically connected with ethnic nationalist political claims. Her last comment captures her overall understanding of the meaning of the dominant language surrounding the division of Cyprus. The distinction between “liberation” and “reunification” characterizes the two political camps in relation to the proposed bi-communal federal solution of the Cyprus Problem. For Antigone, the term „occupied areas‟ was intrinsically connected with claims of “liberation” – a term employed by ethnic nationalist politicians and groups who reject federation, a term burdened with claims of ownership over the area north of the line; connected with militarist approaches to the Cyprus Problem (Efthymiou 2016: 19). “Reunification” is a term employed primarily by the AKEL party and the rapprochement movement, implying the formation of a bi-communal federal state in place of the de-facto partition which currently exists.

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Figure 6: A sticker by an ethnic nationalist student group in the walled city of Nicosia south of the line, representing all key claims of the „invasion and occupation‟ narrative over the Cyprus Dispute. Source: Photograph taken by the author.

In our interview, Antigone provided two key reasons of why she refuses to use the term and prefers the terms „north‟ and „south‟:

First of all, the term „occupied areas‟ defines something that is occupied from someone, which that someone refuses to give. I understand that the Cyprus Problem is a problem between the two communities which has not been resolved until this moment, and that from the moment that the two communities will find between themselves some compromise solution, in which both will be able to live together in a new state, the area will no longer be occupied, it will not be something that will be held by Turkey and it will say „I‟m not giving it to you, you will not find a solution‟. So this is one of the reasons I cannot call that side „occupied areas‟. The second reason is because the nationalists of this side use the term. It is also a bit problematic to think that on that side the state is something that enforces itself on what the people must do and that on this side the state is a democracy. And to place this difference between the two. North and south

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do not do this; they are simply geographical specifications. You don‟t mean the state on that side, they are geographical specifications.

For Antigone, the term „occupied areas‟ carried with it two particular meanings – on the one hand, it was seen as intrinsically connected to ethnic nationalist discourse and on the other, it was understood as a term which does not recognize the Cyprus Problem as a problem between the two communities, but as a problem exclusively of Turkish invasion and occupation. These two reasons are however interconnected, as the narration of the Cyprus Problem as a problem of Turkish invasion and occupation, rather than one of inter-communal conflict, is also the dominant ethnic nationalist narration.

The abandonment of the term comes to signify the refusal to accept the dominant narrative south of the line; and its replacement by „north‟ and „south‟ is here seen as a replacement of the politically charged language by neutral terms, mere geographical distinctions which both negate and challenge the dominant narration. As Antigone further explained,

I think that I do it primarily for the nationalists on this side, because for them it is also a shock, or even for most people, instead of telling them „occupied areas‟ to tell them the word north, it may make them think that you differentiate your position from mainstream politics, and also ask you why do you call it that, and you enter into a process of explaining your positions.

The relationship between ethnic nationalist discourse and the desired abandonment of anything resembling it was a central aspect of any response I received when asking for a clarification over the usage of the terms „north‟ and „south‟. In a discussion I had with Atalanta, the distinction between official language and geographical specifications was also highlighted:

Atalanta: We once had to write a text in an NGO I was part of, and back then you had to produce a text in the politically correct language based on the legal framework and how it is used by diplomats.

Me: Occupied areas, occupation regime?

Atalanta: Yes, or „self-identified‟ or place quotation marks, anyway, I think this was one of my first times. Now I feel north and south closer to me. Ok, we say many times that

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side [poda] and this side [poji] instead of north and south. I don‟t know when this change occurred, it was certainly within this space [shows Karaolos] that the change came to me, instead of saying I am going to the occupied areas. What does that mean for me? Precisely because you place the specification geographically, I get out of the nationalist narrative, and it expresses me more than saying one of the things they taught us.

The responses of my informants quickly became a puzzle to me. It was not that they continued to emphasize their opposition to nationalist politics and the terminology they employ, an aspect that resembles HAD, but that their perception of the terms „north‟ and „south‟ entailed an aura of topographical objectivity – they were described by most of my informants as standard geographical terms, signifying the north part and the south part of the island of Cyprus. This is not to suggest at any point that Antigone, Atalanta, Penelope and the rest of my informants did not recognize or neglected the fact that the island is politically partitioned and heavily militarized by opposing military forces – quite the opposite, as this was an everyday reality that was central to their concerns, as well as to the political positions of the „Space‟ (Achniotis 2016: 30).

3.2. The Whole in Parts The puzzle presented itself in their description of the employed terms as “simply geographical specifications”, as Antigone described them. Describing „north‟ and „south‟ as geographical specifications suggested that while the terms were employed in opposition to ethnic nationalist ideology, the terms themselves were independent of ideology itself. „North‟ and „south‟ were presented primarily as descriptions of geographical space, as neutral signifiers that merely described the geography of the island. Yet, areas specified as „north‟ and „south‟ were not strictly north or south at all – as the buffer zone cuts though the island in an asymmetrical, shifting fashion, areas designated by my informants as „north‟ could be geographically southern of areas that were designated as „south‟.19 Unlike HAD, which clarified the different parts of the island in relation to the Green Line, and therefore in relation to a specific, politically formed barrier, the

19 For example, the village of Louroujina, as well as the abandoned city of Varosha, which has been turned into a Turkish military base since 1974; are part of the „north‟. However, they are all located south-east in relation to the part of the walled city of Nicosia that is south of the Green Line; and is therefore part of the „south‟.

39 terms employed in most of the descriptions of my informants appeared to have been naturalized.20

Ektoras, a young adult Greek-speaking Cypriot man, who was also an active member of the Karaolos assembly, was the only informant who specified the terms in relation to the Green Line:

Me: Which terms do you prefer?

Ektoras: Eh, north and south, I kind of like this geographical distinction, well because of the Green Line, a physical thing which divides the north and the south has been formed, and in our everyday life I consider [the terms] more useful and desirable, and on the political level I think it was needed in order to escape from the discourse we learned in primary school.

Me: The nationalist discourse?

Ektoras: Yeah. Ok occupation is one aspect, but I don‟t think that it is necessary to remind through language and in everyday life that that side I will be going at a party in two weeks, or tomorrow to buy tobacco or whatever, is OCCUPIED [shakes spookily hands in the air], and not just the north part of this island.

At a first impression, Ektoras‟ descriptions of the terms appeared to follow the same pattern: the island is naturalized into a topographical „north‟ and „south‟, right after it is pointed out that the two sides are formed by the physical barrier of the Green Line. In the above description, the Green Line forms a tangible barrier between two geographical areas. But as the discussion continued, Ektoras began to describe the terms in relation to the island‟s potential reunification:

Ektoras: Also, I think that it‟s like bringing a bit closer the situation after the solution. I mean, slowly slowly [siga siga] what I observe is that it began by me saying north, and slowly slowly, and I see this in other people as well, by learning what the Turkish Cypriots call the places on that side now,21 we use those names. It is like a vague identifier for that side but by getting to know it more and more we use much more

20 It might be worth noting here that the terms „east‟ and „west‟ were never used by my informants to describe any area or place in the island. 21 The names of streets, cities, squares, buildings and villages were largely replaced by new Turkish names after 1974, as part of a broader process of Turkification (Ladbury & King 1988: 364).

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particular names, and squares or this or that, like we do on this side. Yeah I just mean generally that when I go to that side and I want to explain to someone about something on this side, who doesn‟t know the places and so on, I will tell him „in the south there is this thing‟, if he knows, if he is someone who comes often and knows, I will tell him something more specific, so the generic north and south start to become useless and so on.

Me: You said after the solution.

Ektoras: Yes; that we are not waiting. Maybe this is a small aspect of what others call solution from below, which is not definite, is not catholic, but from the moment that it is something that it is in our hands and we can do it, maybe we can talk of that side and this side, and us and them, whoever this „them‟ is, with the terms that would slowly take over if this division was destroyed progressively, or from one day to the next.

Ektoras‟ connected the terms with an imagined reunified Cyprus, with the “situation after the solution”,22 where a federal bi-communal structure is expected to replace the existing partition. For Ektoras, the terms constituted a language corresponding to the political geography of such an imagined reunified Cyprus – where „north‟ and „south‟ form its corresponding parts as some of the “terms that would slowly take over if this division was destroyed”. In getting to know the side north of the line, Ektoras emphasized that the “vague identifier” of „north‟ became less and less significant, that the language employed became less abstract and more specific, more local and therefore more familiar.

Antigone‟s position that the areas north of the line are not „occupied‟ becomes comprehensible through Ektoras‟ positioning of the terms „north‟ and „south‟ in an imagined reunified, federal Cyprus. As Antigone stated, “from the moment that the two communities will find between themselves some compromise solution, in which both will be able to live together in a new state, the area will no longer be occupied… this is one of the reasons I cannot call that side „occupied areas‟”. The imagination of reunification comes to negate the dominant terminology surrounding the existing division, replaced by terms which correspond to a post-solution political

22 The term „the solution‟, when applied to the Cyprus Problem, almost always means the transition to a bi- communal federation, the type of solution that has been under negotiation since 1974. This applies even more so to my informants, who were all strong, uncompromising supporters of bi-communal federation.

41 landscape. The terms come to constitute a symbolically holistic Cyprus, even while the existing reality is that of partition:

It was a sunny day in the early afternoon and I was sitting at the walled city coffee shop, enjoying coffee over small talk with two women in their 20s, Calliope, a Greek-speaking Cypriot in her mid-20s who has been involved in the „Space‟ for years, and her Turkish- speaking Cypriot friend who I had just met. Our conversations took place in English. An elderly tourist couple from Italy was sitting on the opposite table, and asked us politely what we suggest they should do for the next day, as it was going to be their last in the island. Calliope asked them “Have you been to the north?” to which they replied that they haven‟t. She suggested they took their time going around the walled city, “in the south and the north side”, to experience the city as a whole. They asked us if we go to “that side” and our companion responded, “I‟m actually from that side”, leaving the tourists with a rather confused expression. They then started to ask about the experience of the “border”, but Calliope was quick to respond “We don‟t talk about that between ourselves anymore. We don‟t see the border anymore. We would like it not to be there but… We imagine the city to be whole”.

The “geographical specifications” symbolically negate the existing partition, with the language employed becoming a language that transcends the existing political contestations, perceiving Cyprus as having two Parts but remaining a constituted Whole. „North‟ and „south‟ are thus never in contradiction – they act as the harmonious Parts that complete the imagination of a reunified Cyprus. The terms become comprehensible when perceived as a schema of a federal consciousness, intrinsically linked with the desire for the island‟s reunification, an imagined pivotal historical event positioned in an indefinite future historical time. The meaning of the terms was conditioned by my informants‟ identification with an imagined political geography of a reunified island, which projected in the Now what was hopefully expected to materialize in the foreseeable future.

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Figure 7: Stencil in the walled city of Nicosia south of the line, reading “Cyprus (in Greek) Cyprus (in Turkish) Enosis (Union)”. The stencil is a pro-reunification parody of the Enosist ethnic nationalist slogan “Hellas, Cyprus Enosis” that dominated the 1950s and the 1960s. On the right, the same stencil at a different location vandalized, with the Turkish word for Cyprus graffitied over. Source: Photographs taken by the author.

This meaning was however not exhausted to mere representations of the Parts of an imagined Whole, but corresponded to the broader perception of how my informants understood themselves in relation to Cyprus and its inhabitants. This dimension was explicitly highlighted by Selene, who explained in our interview that

For the same reason I rid myself from the Greek part of my Cypriot identity, or in the way I present myself, in the same way I rid myself from the geographical equivalent of this, I‟m not from the Greek side, I‟m from the south side, which also connotes a certain hope that things will not… This is not the way that things always were and this is not the way that things will always be, hopefully. And so it is not the Greek side it is the south side which is – even if it does stay the way it is, it is not the Greek side, there‟s a multiplicity of other nationalities, there‟s no reason why a majority needs to define itself both within self-identificatory terms but also as geographical terms.

Selene‟s position opens questions that remain ever relevant in the study of contemporary Cyprus. What exactly has been gotten rid of here and what has remained? What can “Cypriot identify” mean when the ethnic prefix has been removed? And how is this identity related to “other nationalities” located in the island? But the scrutinization of these questions will have to be temporarily postponed, as they cannot be approached without fist examining how the hegemonic Greek Cypriot identity is interpellated in the Republic of Cyprus, south of the line of the division.

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4. Hellenocentric Interpellation

4.1. Constitutional Identities 1. The Greek Community comprises all citizens of the Republic who are of Greek origin and whose mother tongue is Greek or who share the Greek cultural traditions or who are members of the Greek-Orthodox Church;

2. The Turkish Community comprises all citizens of the Republic who are of Turkish origin and whose mother tongue is Turkish or who share the Turkish cultural traditions or who are Moslems;

3. Citizens of the Republic who do not come within the provisions of paragraph (1) or (2) of this Article shall, within three months of the date of the coming into operation of this Constitution, opt to belong to either the Greek or the Turkish Community as individuals, but, if they belong to a religious group, shall so opt as a religious group and upon such option they shall be deemed to be members of such Community […]

4. A person who becomes a citizen of the Republic at any time after three months of the date of the coming into operation of this Constitution shall exercise the option provided in paragraph (3) of this Article within three months of the date of his so becoming a citizen…

 Article 2 of the Constitution of the Republic of Cyprus

The constitution of the Republic of Cyprus remains in many respects, a fascinating document. From its very first page, it subsumes its citizens into ethnicized categories and attaches to them particular cultural and genealogical characteristics, under which a binary structure of two ethnic constitutional communities is formed: the Greek and the Turkish. Children of citizens are automatically assigned to the ethnic community of their father; and so are the wives of male citizens. Individuals that did not strictly fit the definitions of each community at the coming into force of the constitution were given the task to decide under which community they would be registered, within 3 months. If more than a 1000 individuals were members of the same religion (outside of Islam and Greek Orthodox Christianity), they were given the right to be registered as

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“religious groups”, and thus decide collectively in which constitutional community they would belong. This is the legal logic by which the Maronite, Latin (Catholic) and the Armenian Cypriot population came into being as legally recognized collectivities belonging to the Greek community, with the bizarre logical conclusion of registering Armenian Cypriots, an ethnic group, as a religious group belonging to another ethnicized community.23

Citizen of the Republic

Greek Turkish

Armenian Maronite Latin

Figure 8: Spider diagram representing the constitutional identities entrenched in the constitution of the Republic of Cyprus, in relation to their hierarchy. Notice that all religious groups fall under the Greek identity, as they had to be registered under one of the two constitutional communities in 1960.

By the moment you finish reading the Second Article of the constitution, the individuals that form its body politic are already subsumed under two ethnic categories for the never-ending future – Part 4 of Article 2 guarantees that no new citizen, irrespectively of his or her ethnic origin, will be left outside of the two constitutional ethnic communities, or in simpler terms, no citizen can ever be legally just a „Cypriot‟. The term „Cypriot citizen‟ is in fact nowhere to be found in the text of the constitution. The term employed is „citizen of the Republic‟; and a citizen

23 The fate of the Romani Cypriot community was perhaps the most tragic, as they received no recognition as either a religious group or a minority, and were therefore registered only as „Turkish‟ within the Republic of Cyprus, with all that this has entailed in the troubled history of the island (Symeou et al. 2009: 512).

45 of the Republic is always either a Greek, or a Turk.24 As political scientist Costas Costantinou noted, “[p]ostcolonial Cypriot identity is quintessentially and inescapably hyphenated; and hyphenated across a fixed Greek–Turkish axis. Being simply and singly Cypriot is a constitutional impossibility” (2007: 248). The official languages of the Republic are declared to be Greek and Turkish.

With the collapse of bi-communality in 1963; and the partition of the island in 1974, the constitution‟s articles on bi-communality have been in suspension, with the control of the state remaining in the hands of the Greek constitutional community. The constitutional articles were however rarely amended, leaving the ethnicized categorization of citizens strictly in place. In the Republic of Cyprus, citizens are still categorized as either Greek or Turkish; and additionally as members of the three religious groups –in contemporary everyday terminology, these distinctions correspond to the terms Greek Cypriot, Turkish Cypriot, Armenian, Maronite and Latin.

The extent of the discursive homogenization achieved through the employment of these constitutional categories becomes visible when attempting to deconstruct the official demographic categorization of the population south of the line. Official statistical figures depend on the aforementioned categories in their organization of statistics, and those categories are themselves uncritically employed in most available academic research. The official population census of 2011 is a prime example. Out of the 667,398 people attributed as citizens of the Republic living south of the line, 98.7% (659,115) are defined as „Greek Cypriots‟, although the category itself includes “everyone who stated Cypriot nationality as their second citizenship” (Civic Registry and Migration Department 2011: Table ζη1), as well as any individual who has gained citizenship at any point in their lives, irrespectively of their actual ethnic origin or their self-identification. Individuals with double citizenship are categorized as citizens throughout the statistics organized by ethnicity, making different ethnic groups holding Cypriot citizenship invisible. The other statistical measurements, that of country of birth; and of a parent‟s country of birth, would had shed some light, had in not been the case that there is no distinction between citizens and non-citizens of the Republic in their organization.

24 It is worth noting that in contrast, in the Annan Plan proposed in 2004, the term „Cypriot citizen‟ was regularly employed, while the terms „Greek Cypriot‟ and „Turkish Cypriot‟ were employed to denote the internal citizenship status of Cypriot citizens in relation to the two constituent states of the proposed bi-communal federation.

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The official census thus makes invisible the ethnic heterogeneity of the citizens of the Republic, through their discursive homogenization into pre-obtained categories of ethnic and religious groups.25 Within an island where ethnic identity is highly politicized; and an integral aspect of the Cyprus Dispute, such processes of statistical homogenization act as a reaffirmation of the demographic dominance of the Greek constitutional community, by presenting that community as ethnically unified, distinct and homogenous – as an a category that cannot be discursively altered, irrespectively of the actual demographic changes and senses of identity found among its signified members.26

4.2. The Official Hellenocentric Narration As Étienne Balibar has argued, the “history of nations…is always already presented to us in the form of a narrative which attributes to these entities the continuity of a subject” (1991: 86). This subject is presented as an ahistorical, continuous collective entity, passing from one historical event to the next and arriving at the present as an intact truth from time immemorial. This is also characteristic of the imagined community of Benedict Anderson – the national community is not merely imagined in the Now, but is imagined as having existed all along, as a self-evident collectivity that precedes history (Anderson 2006: 11).

Such is also the case in the Republic of Cyprus, where the narration of history in the public school system presents the island as having an undisputed ethnic character stretching back to antiquity. Unlike other states however, the Republic subsumes the history of Cyprus under the history of a foreign state, Greece, within the official curriculum, with Cypriot history allocated less teaching time and briefer narration (Papadakis 2008: 131).27 When the history of Cyprus is presented, it is the story of a Hellenic island surviving from the conquests of foreign powers with its ethno-cultural identity intact:

25 In contrast, one can note here the example of the United States, where the individual states his/her self-perceived ethnic or racial identity for the measurement of the demographic composition of the country (U.S. Census Bureau 2011: 4). 26 This has been the central reason informing my decision to exclude any demographic statistics in the contextualization subchapter. 27 Although I obtained copies of the books and spent quite some time reading them, I decided to refrain from developing an in-depth analysis here and I am instead simply quoting Papadakis, as my conclusions are essentially the same.

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All the books employ the term Cypriots (Kyprioi) as equivalent to Greeks (Ellines), often within the same sentence or paragraph…As a secondary schoolbook puts it in the foreword: “Many peoples passed over Cyprus or conquered her.… But her inhabitants safeguarded her Hellenic character created since the Mycenaeans settled in Cyprus….” This “Hellenization thesis,” reproduced in all relevant schoolbooks, has attracted considerable academic critique, mostly though from outside Cyprus. According to the logic of this model, others (Turkish Cypriots, for example) have (historically speaking) no rightful place in Cyprus, hence the category “Cypriots” is constantly used in a manner that excludes them. As the previous quote indicates, the arrival of the Mycenaeans is considered the most important historical event that has sealed the Hellenic character of Cyprus….Just as, according to the logic of ethnic nationalism, the Byzantines are treated as Greeks, the Ottomans are presented as Turks…Given that for Turkish Cypriots the ascription “Turks” is constantly employed (except for rare references to “Turkish Cypriots” at the very end of the books), this presents them as part of the larger historical category of Turks, who are depicted as a bloodthirsty, hostile and barbaric people…[H]istory begins with the arrival of “Greeks” in Cyprus; the “Greeks” (of Cyprus) are depicted as the protagonist and moral center of the story from whose perspective events are evaluated, and 1974 subsequently emerges as the tragic end…[T]he use of the narrative form is predicated on a notion of continuity, in this case of the presence of a single central actor, namely the (Greek) nation from beginning to end. (Papadakis 2008: 133-134)

This highly Hellenocentric perspective produces a narrative of the Cypriot-as-Greek, where the „Cypriot‟, as a universalized historical category, becomes equated with the „Greek Cypriot‟, with other ethnic groups becoming both invisible and excluded from the category of the Cypriot itself.28 The Cypriots are here however not a distinct people in-themselves, but rather are ethnic Greeks whose geographical location happens to be the island of Cyprus. This is the delicate balance of identity attempted to be achieved by the term „Greek Cypriot (Ellinokiprios)‟, corresponding to the meaning ascribed in the combined flying of the Greek and the Republic flag, a dimension which is addressed in the following subchapter. It is within this logic that in the

28 Like most ethnic nationalist narratives, this narrative identifies and locates the key historical enemy of the nation, which is in this case the Turkish nation.

48 preface of the key history book for secondary education it is stated that “the teaching of the history of Cyprus…was deemed necessary so that children can know better the History of their particular country” (Pantelidou et al. 2016: 3). Cyprus is here described as a “particular country” precisely because, according to this Hellenocentric worldview, the homeland of Cypriots is mainland Greece and not merely the island, as Cyprus is itself simply Greece‟s cultural, ethnic and historical extension. The subsumption of Cyprus under Greece, as well as the Othering linked to the promotion of a Hellenocentric identity through the school system, was both discussed and opposed by my informants:

It was another Friday night at Karaolos. With smoking being prohibited by a decision of the space‟s assembly over a year ago, the entrance, accompanied by two small tables and chairs, has gained the status of a sub-space, where more isolated conversations take place over smoking a cigarette. It was on such a conversation that I stumbled upon as I exited the building to light up my cigarette. Paris, a Greek-speaking middle aged university professor, was talking to Artemis, a Greek-speaking middle aged primary school teacher, about his child‟s pride in participating in the primary school‟s anniversary celebrations of the Greek Revolution of 1821, a commemoration of the events which led to the creation of the Greek state, with children performing plays and songs in front of other schoolchildren. Paris was mentioning how above the stage a banner was placed reading “Mother Greece”. Artemis was noting her own experiences as a primary school teacher in Nicosia: “We have a teacher that shouts at migrant kids „Don‟t speak other languages. Is this not a Greek school? Is this not a Greek school?‟ She‟s been forcing them to sing the [Greek] national anthem and as you pass by the door you hear „I recognize you by the fearsome sharpness‟29. She told a kid from Syria to go back to her country and the head teacher said of the incident „It‟s not racism; she is just expressing her views‟”. I made a negative comment to receive Paris‟ response, as he was smoking erratically his cigarette: “Nothing has changed, nothing! They still teach Enosis! What they were telling you when you were there, what they were telling me when I was there, not a single thing has changed”.

29 This is the first line of the Greek national anthem.

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Hellenocentric narration is further entrenched through the official commemorations of the Republic. Out of the 15 official holidays, 9 are Greek Orthodox religious holidays and another 4 commemorate historical events30 – the Greek Revolution of 1821, the war and subsequent resistance of Greece to the Axis Powers in World War II, the beginning of the EOKA struggle in 1955 and Independence Day, which commemorates the declaration of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960. Additionally, the military coup of 1974 and the first phase of the Turkish invasion are commemorated with the sounding of air raid sirens in the early morning hours of the 15th and 20th of July, the corresponding dates of the events of 1974 (Cyprus Mail 2017).31 The historical timeframe expressed by the official commemoration of events appears linearly in the following way:

Greek Revolution Greek-Axis War EOKA Struggle Independence Coup and Invasion (1821) (1940-44) (1955-59) (1960) (15th and 20th of July of 1974)

Figure 9: Diagrammatic representation of the official holidays and commemorations of historical events in the Republic of Cyprus, as they would appear in a historical timeframe.

This projected historical genealogy positions Cyprus as part of the broader Greek world, identifies the peak of the Enosis struggle as the prominent Cypriot historical event, moves on to the independence of the island and concludes with the historical tragedy of the events of 1974. All other Cypriot historical events are absent from official collective memory;32 with the island‟s independence commemorated not as a bi-communal state, but as the achievement of the EOKA

30 The other two are New Year's Day and May Day. 31 It should be noted that the coup is officially attributed to the Greek military junta and the EOKA B paramilitary group, rather than the Greek nation or the Greek state, a distinction that is essential in preserving the projection of a harmonious relationship between Greece and Cyprus. 32 In order to clarify the argument, it is worth mentioning here notable historical events that are absent – the bi- communal insurrections of the 19th century, the 1948 bi-communal miners‟ strike and the inter-communal violence of 1963-64.

50 struggle,33 accompanied by Greek flags and the Greek national anthem – the anthem has been declared as the official anthem of the Republic of Cyprus since the late 1960s, with the Republic having no distinct Cypriot anthem for itself (Papadakis 2005a: 46).34 Through this combination of commemoration, historical narration and employed symbolism, the Hellenocentric position is raised to the point of hegemony, interpellating Cyprus as a Hellenic island whose historical and contemporary center is the „national center‟ of mainland Greece, with Cyprus positioned at its periphery (Mavratsas 1997: 721).35

4.3. The Fragile Meaning of Flags The positioning of flags is a familiar imagery found throughout modern cities. The flag of the state, placed throughout the urban landscape of a city, demonstrates its sovereignty over the area, representing, as Eric Hobsbawm noted in his historical study of nationalism, “the palpable reality to [an] otherwise imaginary community” (1991: 71). A state flag is aimed at representing materially the unity of an abstracted body politic, universalized and standardized by the continuous familiarization of the individual with the symbol of its representation. The flag is in this sense a signifier of ideological interpellation par excellence – it directly addresses the subject as a particular member (or not) of an abstracted, universalized category of individuals, while symbolically appropriating the surrounding geographical space as the physical extension of this particular imagined community.

That the walled city of Nicosia is filled with flags is therefore unsurprising. What becomes however quickly noticeable is which flags are flown, what they represent within the Cypriot context and the combinations within which these flags are found throughout the walled city:

33 EOKA was strongly opposed to an independent Cypriot state and refused to accept anything less than Enosis, union with Greece. The celebration of the Republic of Cyprus as an EOKA achievement emerged as part of a revised historical narrative after 1974, a narrative which excluded Enosis as a contemporary demand (Papadakis 2005a: 122). 34 It is also worth noting here that the celebration of Independence Day began only after the partition of the island in 1974, since independence was perceived as the exact opposite to Enosis (Papapdakis 2005a: 46). 35 One cannot avoid but note the resemblance of this dialectical relationship with what Frantz Fanon describes as the unequal postcolonial cultural relation between the metropolis and the periphery in Black Skin, White Masks, where the culture of the periphery is marginalized and/or negated through the promotion of the history, language and culture of the metropolitan center (2008: 9).

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The Greek flag dominates the landscape south of the line. It is found on every Orthodox Christian church, on every military post, alongside monuments, at schools, at the archbishopric palace, at the occasional apartment building and at private institutions, including the Olympiakos football club, and the veteran associations. The flag of the Republic of Cyprus, the official flag of the state administering Cyprus south of the line, is present alongside all official buildings of the state mechanism – within the walled city, it is however almost always found alongside the Greek flag and raised at the same height with it. The flag of the Republic is rarely found independently of the flag of Greece, with the notable exceptions of the Maronite church, which raises it alongside the flag of Lebanon; and the Ledras checkpoint, where the flag is flown alongside the official flag of the police force. These occasional exceptions do not however alter the dominance of the Greek flag as the most encountered symbol south of the line, outnumbering that of the Republic at every corner. A similar situation exists north of the line – the flags of the TRNC and of the Republic of Turkey are flown side by side on every military watch post, with the Selimiye Mosque,36 the tallest building north of the line, standing decorated with the flags along its two grand minarets. On a day with clear visibility, the horizon is enriched by the Kyrenia mountain range, where the Turkish and TRNC flags have been literary ingrained on rock after 1974, made visible mostly to the inhabitants south of the line. The visibility of flags across the divide is an entrenched element of the conflictual claims found within the walled city and across Cyprus as a whole. It is no wonder that I had to explain to a young German tourist only a while ago that he is not currently in Greece; and that on the other side he is not looking at Turkey.

My frustration was as much justified as the tourist‟s misinterpretation. The walled city, dominated by the flags of foreign states, creates the appearance that each side is merely an extension of those states themselves. In an initial encounter, the flags of Greece and Turkey, which represent nation-states with specified, geographically limited borders, by dominating the landscape of the walled city, appropriate symbolically the geographical space under the imagined community of each corresponding nation and project Cyprus as their extension.

36 The mosque is also known as the Cathedral of Saint Sophia. It was built as a Roman Catholic Church under Lusignan rule and was subsequently turned into a mosque with the conquest of Cyprus by the Ottoman Empire. It is perhaps the most emanating pre-modern building in Nicosia.

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Figure 10: Three Greek flags located around Phaneromeni square, today one of the most popular leisure areas within the walled city. Source: Photograph taken by the author.

The use of the flags of Greece and of the Republic has been a central point of symbolic contestation within Greek-speaking Cypriot politics. When raised on its own, the Greek flag usually represents the refusal to accept the flag of the Republic as a respectable symbol for the representation of both Greek-speaking Cypriots and Cyprus as a whole. It is within this logic that George Charalambous, the 2013 presidential candidate of the far-right ELAM party (Katsourides 2013: 568), stated in an interview in response to a question as to why his party never flies the Republic flag, that “the Cypriot flag was designed by a Turkish Cypriot. In 1963, with the known events, the Cypriot flag was abolished for us. Our flag is for us the flag of the nation, the Greek flag with Cyprus in its center. Cyprus is a Greek state, its nation is Greek” (Sigma Live 2014). The flag of the Republic, which was indeed designed by a Turkish-speaking Cypriot and established as the official flag of the Republic in 1960, was designed to deliberately exclude religious symbolism and colors traditionally associated with Greek and Turkish identity. It is designed as a white flag with the geographical area of the island drawn in its center in bright orange, with two olive branches crossing each other underneath, symbolizing peace. As a symbol of a bi-communal state, it was aimed to emphasize the peaceful co-existence of the two constitutional communities and act as an official post-ethnic symbol of unity (Fairfield 1959: 246).

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Figure 11: A Greek flag placed on an apartment balcony in the walled city south of the line. Source: Photograph taken by the author.

In contrast, the use of both flags is preferred by most political parties, including the ruling right- wing party DISY and the third largest party DIKO, whose supporters have routinely used both flags during campaigning for the presidential elections of 2018. The flags are also flown side by side on official commemorations, including Cyprus Independence Day, the day commemorating the independence of Cyprus from the British Empire. In mainstream politics, the isolationist use of the Republic‟s flag has been the monopoly of the left-wing party AKEL, the second largest party, which, holding a Cypriotist position, uses the Cypriot flag as an anti-ethnic nationalist symbol in its politics, reinstating its original, bi-communal meaning.37

37 Additionally, AKEL employs the term “Cypriot people (Kypriakos Laos)” when referring to the population, a term that entails both Turkish-speaking and Greek-speaking Cypriots, while other political parties tend to talk of “Cypriot Hellenism” and “Turkish Cypriot compatriots”.

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Figure 12: The common combination in which the flag of the Republic is encountered within the walls. Source: Photograph taken by the author.

It is precisely this latter symbolic signification which is negated when the flag of the Republic is flown side by side, at an equal height, with the Greek flag – the de-ethnicized symbol becomes ethnicized and the ideological effect is direct: The state is independent; the identity and culture of its geographical space are however Greek. The Greek flag thus reaffirms what the flag of the Republic negates, appropriating it under the broader ethnic nationalist narrative imagining the island as a Greek geographical entity. This delicate balance of interpellation, found repeatedly as one strolls through the walled city south of the line, is further reinforced by the predominance of monuments emphasizing the moments of Cypriot history connected with the Enosis cause, as well as historical events from the modern history of Greece.

This delicate balance of signification, so familiar to the resident south of the line, was symbolically attacked in a political action that involved the removal of flags in the summer of 2017. In the early hours of the 15th of July, the anniversary day of the Greek-backed coup of 1974, Greek flags were removed from the Pancyprian Gymnasium, the church of Saint Anthony

55 and a National Guard post, all located within the walled city of Nicosia (Michael 2017). In their place, pro-reunification flags were raised, depicting two doves defecating on a Greek and a Turkish flag. Such a flag was also placed on the Liberty Monument, erected in memory of EOKA, and located on the southern walls of the walled city.

Figure 13: The flag design of the flags that were raised in place of the removed Greek flags. The dove is a widely recognized symbol for peace, while the text in the middle reads „Reunified Cyprus‟ in both Greek and Turkish. Source: Image taken from the uploaded video depicting the removal of the Greek flags, referred to below.

This political and symbolic act was made known through an edited video that was widely circulated on the same day through social media, originally uploaded by the Leftist Movement „We Want Federation‟, an extra-parliamentary pro-federation group formed to promote bi- communal federation south of the line.38 The video was accompanied by the following statement, in both Greek and Turkish:

Peace in Cyprus means the reunification of the country and its people. This presupposes the overturn of the dominance of Greek and Turkish nationalism on the political, ideological, and symbolic level. We are not bothered that some of our compatriots self- identify as Greeks or Turks. What we do not accept, however, is that they are imposing on us their Hellenism and Turkism on all levels, undermining in this way the

38 As I noted in my subchapter on ethics, I refrained from identifying individuals involved in such acts, and have no knowledge of the individuals who carried out this action. The video is available here: https://www.facebook.com/CyLeftistFederationMovement/videos/1910192442530898/ [Accessed: 01/06/18]

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independence of Cyprus and barring its reunification. In Cyprus, which was partitioned by the interventions of the Greek and Turkish state, the flags of those states preserve and reproduce on a daily basis the double crime of 1974.

The video is accompanied by textual commentary for every flag removal, explaining the connection of the particular institution with ethnic nationalism.39 For the Pancyprian Gymnasium, the accompanied text criticizes the “one-sided narration of history” taught in public education, which promotes the “idea that Cyprus is subsumed completely under the Greek nation”. For the National Guard post, the accompanied text reminds the viewer of the role of the National Guard in the inter-communal violence of 1963, as well as its involvement in carrying out of the coup in 1974, while for the church of Saint Anthony, the accompanied text attacks the role of the Church of Cyprus in education, its involvement in politics and its promotion of “hate and nationalism”. For the Liberty Monument, the accompanied text criticizes the nationalist idea of liberty, stating that “Liberty is not connected with nations and nationalism. Liberty means the freedom of a life without barbed wire, military barracks and divisions. Freedom in Cyprus means the reunification of the country”. The video finishes with the placement of all removed Greek flags in a paper box, with the delivery address filled in for the Greek ministry of Foreign Affairs, addressed to Nikos Kotzias, the current minister of Foreign Affairs of Greece, suggesting that the rightful place of the Greek flag is mainland Greece itself, and not the institutions and official structures of Cyprus.

It is worth noting that Greek flags were removed only from institutional buildings, rather than from private homes and premises, which are more accessible and easier to remove, as well as that no flag of the Republic was removed. This symbolic political act, much like the slogan „Ayşe go home‟,40 which has occasionally emerged north of the line (Cyprus PIO 2012), is a call for the removal of foreign influences on Cyprus, here symbolically articulated through the momentary decolonization of public space from dominant symbols corresponding to an externally located nation-state – by removing the Greek flag and replacing it with a pro-

39 I was aware of this action prior to the initiation of fieldwork. The action was referred to by a number of informants during the fieldwork period, with the video of the action used also in one satirical presentation on nationalism. 40 The signaling phrase for the initialization of the Turkish invasion was famously “Ayşe is going on vacation”, given by Turkish Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit on the 20th of July 1974 (Athanasiades 2017: 67).

57 reunification flag, what is symbolically challenged is the very essence of the Hellenocentric narrative, its corresponding imagined community; and the privileged position of the identity of the Cypriot-as-Greek. While the imagery of the raised flag can appear insulting, especially out of its intended ideological context, it was not inspired by an anti-Turkish and anti-Greek sentiment, a sentiment that I never encountered amongst my informants, but by the opposition to the dominance of ethnic nationalism, which the flags themselves represent within the island of Cyprus. As one informant told me during a discussion concerning the action, “I‟m not telling anyone not to raise the flag on their private premises, but it has no place on Cypriot [official] buildings”.

Figure 14: The pro-reunification flag flying alongside the flag of the Republic next to an abandoned National Guard post. Source: Image taken from the uploaded video depicting the removal of Greek flags.

But if the worldview of Hellenocentrism is rejected in such a direct, polemical manner, what has replaced it? What is the ideological lens through which my informants perceive Cyprus and its inhabitants, and what imagined community is entrenched within it? The next chapter explores these dimensions, alongside the questions raised in the previous chapter, addressing the complexity of the claims over Cypriot identity encountered in the field, in an attempt to draw the core ideological elements of the Cyprocentric position of my informants.

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5. Cyprocentric Identification and Heterogeneity

5.1. The Cypriot Surplus In his theoretical explorations of Cyprocentrism, sociologist Andreas Panayiotou coined the concept of the „Cypriot surplus‟ (Panayiotou 2015). This surplus was for Panayiotou that cultural, local and existential remainder particular to Cyprus, which refused its subsumption under a Hellenocentric homogenization, able to destabilize and potentially even dethrone Hellenocentrism from its hegemonic structural position (ibid). What constitutes this surplus is the difference of Cyprus in relation to its Hellenocentric abstraction. The stubborn persistence of the spoken Cypriot Greek and its symbolic non-reconciliation with Modern Greek, the historical and continuous contemporary presence of non-Greek-speaking Cypriots as political subjects, the fundamentally different historical experience of Cyprus in relation to mainland Greece and the existence of an independent Cypriot state, are only some of the elements concentrated within the concept of the Cypriot surplus. Any single one of these elements, if emphasized and stressed in opposition to Hellenocentrism, can produce a differentiation of Cyprus vis-à-vis its proclaimed motherland, forming an unbreachable distance expressing itself through a differentiated self- identification – in a single word, Cypriotness.

Like Selene, the rest of my informants rid themselves from “the Greek part” of their “Cypriot identity”, or rather, refused any ethnic prefix as part of their self-identification. Similarly to bi- communal Cypriotism, my informants‟ Cyprocentric self-identification was understood as a challenge to ethnic nationalism, an aspect that has already been indicated in the discussion over the signification of the division.41 Penelope‟s rather extended response to my question of why she identified simply as a Cypriot, is characteristic of the responses I received:

I think there are two reasons. The first is meant geographically. There is this island, Cyprus, and I was born and raised on this island. Therefore I am a Cypriot. I don‟t mean

41 All of my informants were highly critical and unapologetically opposed to ethnic nationalism; and often pointed out that their negation of ethnicized self-identification was influenced by their rejection of the claims of ethnic nationalism, which depend on those very identities remaining in place. I will not be stressing this point further, as this aspect is by now, in my view, self-evident.

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it ethnically; I don‟t feel anything from that perspective. The other reason, well I don‟t remember much from the school discourse. I mean, how specific identities were reinforced on us or on me in lyceum, probably „Greek Cypriot‟ as well. Ok, „Greek of Cyprus‟ is not even up for discussion, it means something very specific, they emphasize it in school and in society, that ethnically you belong to this group, and you are the majority, and you have to demand specific things against the minorities that live on the island. And I guess in some way, by saying „Cypriot‟, it means for me that I don‟t think that I have to fight over anything with other people that are on the island at this time and this period, I don‟t have to fight with them over who is going to elect the president or over land and villages, without saying that it is not important that some people want to return back to the homes they were driven out from. Yeah, I want my identity not to denote that, I guess. I say this, but it is given to me that Cypriot, the geographical concept of „Cypriot‟, does not mean that I am supposed to be superior to someone that arrived on this island later on.

My informants‟ non-ethnicized Cypriotness was entangled with two claims – on the one hand, it often entailed the recognition of a particular Cypriot surplus; and on the other; it expressed the identification with an abstracted image of a holistic Cyprus in-itself, in opposition to the ethnic nationalist vision locating Cyprus as an extension of a nation-state outside of it. Take for example the following conversation I had with Daphne, a Greek-speaking Cypriot young adult who was a regular visitor at Karaolos and often contributed to the various political initiatives of the „Space‟:

Me: How do you self-identify?

Daphne: As a Cypriot.

Me: Why?

Daphne: Because I speak Cypriotand I was born in Cyprus. I do have roots from elsewhere… But I feel Cypriot. I don‟t feel Greek Cypriot either. There is this mentality

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of saying we are Greek Cypriots or whatever. I feel that I am in Cyprus. I don‟t speak Greek to anyone, even though it is the language I was taught in school, I speak Cypriot.42

For Daphne, the everyday use of the dialect forms the Cypriot surplus, as the dialect is here perceived as falling in contradiction with the Greek language itself. To speak “Cypriot” is for Daphne at the very same time the act of not speaking Greek – in the above vignette, Cypriot Greek, in being compared in such a direct manner with Modern Greek, receives the status of a language in-itself, being situated independently of Modern Greek, as an autonomous linguistic entity. The claim of feeling as being “in Cyprus” is located within the same structural logic – by “being in Cyprus”, Daphne is precisely expressing that she is not in Greece and thus Cyprus, as an abstracted entity, becomes the self-referential point of identification, negating the logic of Hellenocentrism, where Cyprus is only the Particular to the perceived Universal of the Greek motherland.

Selene‟s elaboration over what she considered „Cypriot identify‟ to be, expressed directly the search for a Cypriot surplus, the identification of a localized element particular and specific to Cyprus itself:

Me: Do you think that there is any kind of Cypriot identity?

Selene: I think Cypriot identity is defined by what it is not. It‟s a process of deduction, to arrive at what maybe someone‟s Cypriotness is – I‟m not Greek for example, I‟m not highly religious, subjectively of course, I think you can have, even in a Cypriot identity you can still embrace your religion. I don‟t. I‟m not a nationalist; I do not participate in certain national holidays. And slowly slowly you begin to arrive at a Cypriot, or what we tend to demarcate as a Cypriot core. Once you strip all these things away, [things] which are constantly imposed within the mainstream narrative of history, of identity, of everything. Which enforces itself as either Greek Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot. Once you strip these things away you arrive at your Cypriot identity. I think that‟s one aspect of

42 South of the line, the Cypriot Greek dialect is simply called „the Cypriot dialect (Kypriaki dialektos)‟, or just Cypriot (Kypriaka). It is worth noting that there is also a specific verb within the dialect which describes the act of a Cypriot speaking Modern Greek (kalamarizo). The verb is formed by turning the word „kalamaras‟ into a verb, a Cypriot Greek word exclusively used to describe a mainland Greek, who is in this way differentiated as not being a Cypriot (Karathanasis 2017: 138).

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how I think about it. So it‟s harder to say what it is than [what is not]. […] On a primary stage, personally, I think that my Cypriot identity is rooted in the space of Cyprus as Cyprus, and not so much as culture, having been raised in the city, I know a few traditions that take place in villages or whatever, but I didn‟t have that upbringing, in contrast, it [the upbringing] was very secular and secluded both religious and traditional terms, it was removed from this… So I don‟t have that, those roots, and so, I‟m left with space and language, the two pillars I think, of my Cypriot identity, the way the space feels in a certain way like home, and it‟s the way language feels like a sort of secret code, that I and those other Cypriots know. And it‟s often used in this way when we are dealing with Greeks and others; it always comes back as a sort of secret code, especially with phrases and ways of speaking that are close to our hearts, and idioms and all of that. Yes, it‟s this triptych of [geographical] space, language, and the renunciation of the aspects of a Greek Cypriot identity, which determines the most…

For Selene, to arrive at the “Cypriot core” presupposes the negation of a set of cultural and political elements located outside of Cyprus itself – it is the refusal of Hellenocentric subsumption. By this process of negation, Selene identifies three elements of her Cypriotness. The negation itself, the speaking of Cypriot Greek, identified here as a language unbreachable by native speakers of Modern Greek; and the geographical space of Cyprus. Selene‟s statement that her “Cypriot identity is rooted in the space of Cyprus as Cyprus” encaptures the broader process of identification – “Cyprus as Cyprus” is the identification with Cyprus-in-itself, an identification with an abstracted entity that is identified with through the parallel negation of other abstracted competing entities, such as Cyprus-as-Greece, Cyprus-as-Turkey, Cyprus as a homogenized, ethnicized topography in general.

5.2. The Postcoloniality of Language The careful reader may have noticed that Cypriot Greek receives a significant status in the above extracts. The dialect/language, which is characterized by a vocabulary consisting of Arabic, French, Italian and Turkish loanwords, as well as a differentiated syntax and phonetic pronunciation from standard Modern Greek, has been an ongoing point of contestation between ethnic nationalists and Cyprocentrics south of the line, often ridiculed and denounced by the

62 former (Christofides 2010: 425-426).43 Cypriot Greek remains in a position of symbolic denunciation, ascribed with a general status of backwardness, incivility and rudeness in comparison to „proper‟ Greek (Demetriou 2015:73), with Cypriot Greek not taught throughout the educational system and its use being discouraged in schools, formal settings, media coverage, political speeches and formal writing (Papadakis 2005a: 12). It is within this context that the claim of Cypriot Greek as a distinct language emerges as a political claim, a claim that I encountered multiple times during the duration of my fieldwork:

It is the middle of February and I have sent over to Antigone the description of a public presentation I will be giving in Karaolos, so that she can create the event page online. The presentation revolves the topic of my undergraduate sociological dissertation. I was asked repeatedly if I was interested in presenting it, an offer that I eventually accepted. I thought that I was finished with the arrangements until the presentation date – but I received a message about an hour later from Antigone, asking “Can we remove the term „Cypriot Greek dialect‟?” I had written in my description that the presentation would be in the Cypriot Greek dialect, the vernacular commonly spoken south of the line, which is heavily differentiated from mainland Greek. I responded with “Do as you like” receiving her clarification “Because we do not consider it a dialect”, implying that it should be referred to as a language. We agreed to just remove the word „dialect‟, leaving the text reading „The presentation will be in Cypriot Greek‟.

This concern with language is directly reflected in the political texts of the „Space‟. The writing of political documents in Cypriot Greek is a characteristic which makes political groups such as Syspirosi Atakton, the most active political group within Karaolos, stand out in relation to the broader Cypriot political scene. Brochures promoting bi-communal federation, banners in political protests, graffiti, narrative descriptions; political analyses and poetry found throughout the Entropia magazine, political leaflets and online posts form a comprehensive and

43 It should be reminded here that the distinction between a language and a dialect remains an arbitrary, and fundamentally a political one. Examples are all around: Luxembourgish as an independent language from German, Maltese as an independent language from Arabic, the variations of vernacular Arabic as dialectics of a single, holistic Arabic language and the claim that Cantonese and Mandarin constitute dialects of a common Chinese language. Sociolinguist Max Weinreich famously summarized this observation in the statement “a language is a dialect with an army and navy”, attributed to an unnamed audience member of one of his lectures (Wardhaugh 2010: 28).

63 accumulating set of texts written in Cypriot Greek, providing an unprecedented visibility to the dialect/language in a written political form.44

This emphasis on Cypriot Greek as a language should not mislead the reader in perceiving that for my informants, the use of the dialect/language is equated with Cypriot identity. As it will be shown in the next subchapter, the category of the „Cypriot‟, as envisioned by the „Space‟, is too pluralistic to be restricted to a particular spoken vernacular – in fact, if this was so, the „Cypriot‟ would had been again reduced to the Greek constitutional community, excluding most other ethnic, lingual or cultural communities from being accepted as proper Cypriots. A careful overview of the 9th issue of the Entropia magazine, which had language as its main theme, paints a more complex picture of the claims associated with the „Space‟. The issue included articles addressing the multi-lingual historical and contemporary reality of Cyprus – including Cypriot Greek, its survival as a first language amongst particular Turkish-speaking Cypriot communities,45 the Maronite Arabic (Sanna) dialect/language that has been historically spoken by the Maronite Cypriots of the Kormakitis village, the ongoing codification of the Cypriot Sign Language and the publication of the first bi-communal dictionary, which collected the common words found in both Cypriot Greek and Cypriot Turkish (Syspirosi Atakton 2016a: 2).

How are we to make sense of this stressed emphasis on linguistic plurality? What is being claimed by bringing these dialects/languages into visibility, scrutinizing and identifying them as parts of a broader Cypriot surplus? The answer emerges as soon as Cyprus is approached as a postcolonial society, encompassing the contradictions inherited by the internal and external attempts at its cultural, linguistic and political subsumption and homogenization under the expansionist claims of competing nation-states and their corresponding local nationalisms.

44 It is a great limitation that this point cannot be pursued further due to the present thesis being presented in English, as the significance of the usage of Cypriot Greek is immediately being lost with a text‟s translation. It should be noted that the use of Cypriot Greek is not exclusive or imposed, as texts are also often written and/or translated in English, Modern Greek, and Turkish, primarily for reasons of accessibility. 45 I had noted in the section on terminology that the terms employed in this thesis do not completely escape the political discourses surrounding the island. The terms have reached their descriptive limit in this particular sentence, as there are Cypriots whose first language is in fact Cypriot Greek, but who are nonetheless part of the Turkish constitutional community. It should also be pointed out that by ascribing the terms Greek-speaking and Turkish- speaking, a cultural subsumption is unintentionally achieved by negating the dialects/languages that are in fact spoken by the signified populations, from their corresponding discursive signifiers. Inventing a new terminology is always a problematic and difficult process and in the present case, it is one that was unable to completely eradicate subsumption from its employed discursive categories.

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Postcolonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his explorations of foreign language imposition in colonial and postcolonial Kenya, described its effects as a cultural unequal relation of power, a power between the colonizer and the colonized. By merely replacing Europe with Greece and African with Cypriot, Thiong'o‟s observations could very well have had been written as a description of the postcolonial experience of Cyprus:

[S]ince the new, imposed languages could never completely break the native languages spoken, their most effective area of domination was the third aspect of language as communication, the written. The language of an African child‟s formal education was foreign. The language of the books he read was foreign. The language of his conceptualization was foreign. Thought, in him, took the visible form of a foreign language. So the written language of a child‟s upbringing in the school (even his spoken language within the school compound) became divorced from his spoken language at home. [...] For a colonial child, the harmony between the three aspects of language as communication [language as co-operation, language as speech and language as writing] was irrevocably broken. This resulted in the disassociation of the sensibility of that child from his natural and social environment, what we might call colonial alienation. The alienation became reinforced in the teaching of history, geography, music, where bourgeois Europe was always the centre of the universe. […] Since culture is a product of the history of a people which it in turn reflects, the child was now being exposed exclusively to a culture that was a product external to himself. He was being made to stand outside himself to look at himself (2005: 17).

For Thiong'o, language is not merely a mode of communication, but is also itself a culture, it transfers and preserves “the collective memory bank of a people‟s experience of history” (ibid: 15). The divorce of a person from writing and reading in the language of his/her speech, is for Thiong'o at the very same time the formation of an alienation of that person‟s perception in relation to him/herself, the broader society within which s/he is located and fundamentally, a fracturing of his/her very identity. Unaffiliated scholar R.M. Christofides described the cultural dimension of language quite poetically in his deconstruction of the linguistic terrain of contemporary Cyprus:

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A different spectre also haunts Cyprus in the form of Cypriot Greek. If the dead, the refugees and the missing are the victims of a violent historical struggle to eliminate the intricacies of Cypriot society, with Demotic [modern Standard Greek] use a textual instance of that drive, Cypriot Greek exemplifies an alternative history ignored, suppressed and ridiculed by Greek nationalists, Turkish nationalists and apologists for Anglo-American abuses: it is the language of peaceful coexistence. It is a voice that calls across the Green Line, that blazing marker of difference that divides the island and stands as the legacy of a desire to „un-Cypriotize‟ Cyprus. […] [W]hen Greek Cypriots speak in Cypriot Greek they do not just use a regional variation of Demotic: they resist a history of textual seduction by the fixed, homogenized space of modernity and its linear concept of the nation. Ultimately, they use a language that verbalizes the irreducible nature of „Cypriotness‟. […] [T]he Green Line at which they [the presidents of the two sides] meet commemorates the catastrophes visited on all Cypriots – events inseparable from the attempt to hold apart the Oriental and Occidental influences on Cyprus, a narrative written in Demotic. Deconstructing this binary opposition, Cypriot Greek invokes the polyculturalism that, in the recent climate of rapprochement on an increasingly diverse island, can be celebrated as the very condition of Cypriot identity. (2010: 426).

Claiming Cypriot Greek as a language and utilizing it in writing is thus perhaps the most direct expression for the demand of a decolonization of Cyprus – claiming Cyprus as an entity in-itself, with its particular language and therefore its particular history, culture and separate historical experience. But as the dialect/language of the largest linguistic community, Cypriot Greek is itself located in a particular position of power entailing the possibility of a different, but nonetheless very real process of cultural homogenization.46 This is the key point made by one of my informants in his/her online entry „Is there a non-colonial language in Cyprus?‟ (Nvp 2017)47 posted on Kontrasusta, one of the many website initiatives of the „Space‟. Antigone casually pointed this aspect out when I asked her how she identified herself:

46 The most notable examples are the diminishing use of Armenian amongst Armenian Cypriots, and the near extinction of Cypriot Arabic (Mavratsas 2003: 206). It should be also noted that by referring to Cypriot Greek as simply the „Cypriot‟ dialect/language, as it is common south of the line, Cypriot Greek itself is ascended to the level of the universal, negating all other dialects/languages from claiming an equal position of recognition. 47 The article was written in English.

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I self-identify as a Cypriot, it is a bit of an issue if you will say simply Cypriot, or if you will say Greek or Turkish Cypriot, sometimes you need to do it, in particular with the language, when they ask you „What language do you speak?‟, I will not tell them Cypriot, I will tell them Cypriot Greek, so that I can define that, to say that there is also another Cypriot language or dialect anyways, in Cyprus, that it is not only us. And „Cyprus‟, I also want to demarcate it. So that in our speech we don‟t mean the Republic of Cyprus alone when we speak of Cyprus. To make clear that we speak of that side or this side, of the Republic of Cyprus. That it doesn‟t include the areas of the other side.

This refusal to subsume Cyprus and Cypriots under the Greek-speaking Cypriot community, or in fact any preordained fixed set of communities, an aspect expressed in Entropia‟s focus on the multilayered linguistic landscape of Cyprus, is the very essence of the Cyprocentric position promoted by the „Space‟. The comprehension of this position remains unattainable as long as we do not address who the Cypriots are claimed to be; and what is the perceived commonality holding them together as an abstracted category of culturally, linguistically and ethnically diverse heterogeneous individuals.

5.3. A Pluralistic Cyprocentric Imagined Community “Multizonal, Multicommunal, Multicultural Cyprus”

 Graffiti on the pavement of Ledras Street‟s buffer zone.

South of the line, the main challenge to ethnic nationalism has been Cypriotism, the bi- communal civic nationalist position which has come to dominate anti-Hellenocentric politics. From a Cypriotist perspective, Cypriot identity entails a set of common cultural characteristics identified as part of both the Greek and the Turkish constitutional communities. Such claimed characteristics include common cultural traditions (dances, food, folk music etc.), the common history of past inter-communal co-existence, and the historical presence of both communities in Cyprus (Mavratsas 1997: 730). Within this approach, bi-communality becomes the pivotal point of identification, imagining the island as a bi-communal topographical space, with the island‟s ethnicized historic inhabitants sharing a common cultural heritage and therefore a common, universalized Cypriot identity, over and beyond their corresponding ethnic background

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(Pastellopoulos 2017: 30). When entering the field, I expected to find a similar belief amongst my informants – some claimed universalized culture corresponding to their notion of Cypriotness that would encompass, at least on a discursive level, all individuals that my informants considered to belong to the de-ethnicized category of the „Cypriot‟.

This expectation was completely mistaken. For those involved in the „Space‟, the „Cypriot‟ was not reducible to a common set of cultural elements particular to either those understood as being Cypriots, or those perceived as describing themselves as such on both sides of the divide. As it has been explored to some length in the previous subchapters, cultural claims over Cypriotness were expressed by a number of informants in relation to their self-identification. These claims however were not generalized and attributed to all Cypriots. Although this may appear at first as a contradiction, it is perfectly harmonious with the perspective of my informants, as the „Cypriot‟ is; in their own understanding, a category that is pluralistic, multicultural, and therefore ethnically, culturally and linguistically heterogeneous. Take for example Daphne‟s response to my question „Who are the Cypriots?‟, a question that is never a trivial one within the context of Cyprus:

Me: Who are the Cypriots?

Daphne: Those who feel Cypriot are Cypriots. They are all Cypriots. Those who live in Cyprus are Cypriots. I mean, either Greek Cypriots or Turkish Cypriots, or someone who came from India for example, and lives in Cyprus, if he feels that this is his country now, for whatever reason, he is a Cypriot and I would not go and tell him that he is not a Cypriot. That‟s all.

Me: What about people who think of themselves as Greeks.48 Or people in Cyprus from mainland Greece (Elladites). Are they Cypriots?

Daphne: They are. But ok. If someone considers himself Greek for nationalist reasons, why would I go and tell him this or that? Whatever one feels and believes.

48 It should be pointed out, for the purposes of avoiding misrepresentation, that even the vast majority of ethnic nationalists would not dispute that they are also Cypriots, but would stress their Greek identity and subsume any claim of a unique „Cypriotness‟ under it, as a particularity of the broader Greek world, in a similar way of how the Cretan Greek dialect/language and Cretan culture are signified as local expressions of a broader Greek culture.

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The category of the „Cypriot‟ is here expanded beyond its Cypriotist bi-communalism or its ethnic nationalist mono-communalism, becoming a vastly inclusive, pluralistic and heterogeneous identity. The meaning ascribed to the category by Daphne, far from the exception, was the norm in the responses I received by my informants:

Me: Who do you consider Cypriots?

Ektoras: Whoever passed by Cyprus and was either brought up here, or his life was shaped significantly within this country and wants to call himself a Cypriot.

Me: Those who don‟t call themselves Cypriots?

Ektoras: What do you mean, for example migrants?

Me: Not necessarily, for example someone who will tell you he is Greek.

Ektoras: They are also included within this identity; it‟s just that they themselves don‟t self-identity as such. I am thinking of kids whose parents are not from Cyprus, and they studied half of their gymnasium years and their lyceum here, and if you ask them they feel Cypriots, especially if they are migrants that know that they will spent the rest of their lives here, they feel that they are also Cypriots, that the connection is not with the country they came from.49

Me: Would you also include the settlers?50

Ektoras: Yes. For me, the children of settlers are Cypriots, now how they identify… I mean, my assumption for them is that they also belong into the schema of the Cypriots. […] And I see that other people, who may not have grown up here, and came here in the last 4 to 5 years, but feel that this place is their base, self-identify as Cypriots. And this is

49 I have to point out that my general observations confirm Ekotaras‟ point. There is a growing number of people who do consider and describe themselves as Cypriots, even though their parents have no ancestry from Cyprus themselves. 50 The term „Settlers‟ refers to the significant and growing number of migrants from mainland Turkey who have moved to the area north of the line after 1974; a process reinforced by Turkish and TRNC immigration policy (Jensehaugen 2014: 59). Their permanent and growing presence has given rise to strong anti-settler sentiment on both sides of the divide (Christiansen 2005: 155), often with the viewpoint that they constitute the materialization of a colonialist demographic policy by Turkey (Loizides 2011: 365).Their presence in a potential reunification is one of the thorniest issues surrounding the Cyprus Dispute, particularly amongst Greek-speaking Cypriots.

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the beauty of this identity, that it is kind of welcoming, kind of open. And it is open and welcoming because it is kind of indefinable.

Much like Daphne‟s perspective, Ektoras‟ view perceives the category of the „Cypriot‟ as vastly inclusive, overcoming both the claims of ethnic nationalism and Cypriotism. Selene‟s perspective followed the same logic:

Me: Who do you consider to be the Cypriots?

Selene: As a first answer, I always include, those living on both sides, who also do themselves identify as either Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, I consider them as a bundle of Cypriots with, um, different cultures, or differences, um, but also within that I would put migrants who grew up in Cyprus, I‟ll also consider Cypriots, so it goes beyond the bi-communal aspect of it and I‟ll put in, um, those who, are they called first or second generation [clarification] second generation, but those that they might had been here their whole lives and whose to rid them of their self-identification with this place that they‟ve grown up in. Even though they haven‟t been born here. So I think, I respect people‟s self- identification with the space. If they consider themselves Cypriot then they have every right to do so.

The same pluralistic perspective was expressed in the interview I held with Atalanta, although in a much shorter response:

Me: Who do you think are the Cypriots?

Atalanta: On the one hand, anyone who identifies as a Cypriot. But also anyone who lives in this place and feels that s/he is connected. I don‟t think it is a privilege, alright, if you look at it from a strict legal perspective there are the conditions from those who give citizenship and so on, but beyond that, I think it is whoever self-identifies as such. Who was either born here or came here and through the years… Either you are living years here, and feel that you are part of this place, regardless if you are a migrant, refugee and so on.

While the responses I received from my informants were not completely identical, they were all expressions of the same principle – the category of the „Cypriot‟ was not determined by ancestry,

70 citizenship status, a set of ethnicities, some form of an identifiable, shared culture (language, religion, common traditions, common history etc.) or even self-identification. And while my informants had de-ethnicized their own identifications, refusing to identity as „Greek Cypriots‟, they did not position this claim as a necessary pre-condition for being categorized as a „Cypriot‟. This is in fact perfectly compatible with my informants‟ perspective – just like a particular claim to one‟s subjective Cypriotness is refused the privilege of determining the „Cypriot‟ in the abstract, likewise, self-identification as a plain Cypriot is refused the privilege of being the precondition for defining someone as a „Cypriot‟. For my informants, the category entailed the very absence of homogeneity; and was therefore indefinable in terms of a positive, universalistic description – it is the very absence of such a description, a category acting as an umbrella for the contemporary and perceived future heterogeneity of the island‟s permanent residents, compatible with multiple ethnic identities, cultures, family background and so on.

My informants refused to define Cypriot identity in general terms – even though they could make claims of their own sense of Cypriotness; they positioned such claims subjectively (Selene‟s use of the word “personally”, for example), and refused to formulate a generalized, abstracted and universal notion of a Cypriot identity. To my question regarding the existence of a common cultural element amongst those they perceived as Cypriots, Antigone bluntly responded with “Why should I define it, who am I to do that?”, Atalanta limited her response to describing the identity itself as “like Queer, it is in a constant change, being built and re-constructed”, while Penelope told me that “For me it is a question that doesn‟t have much significance, I mean, I don‟t feel that it is significant”, adding that “there are many groups with multiple backgrounds who can be considered Cypriots”. Ektoras provided a more elaborated response:

I believe, and this may be a political opinion, that it does not need a definition, and this is what I say, it is a new form of identity that stands there, perhaps with its contradictions, but by attempting to define it, you create a very static thing which excludes people from it. Who might even be people who have grown up here; who have parents from here. There is no „one size fits all‟ definition.

I was thus unable to find a clear claim of a common Cypriot identity amongst my informants, a claim which directly corresponded to the inclusive category of the „Cypriot‟ they had formulated. Wherever I looked, I encountered ambiguity. I had a clear answer as to what the imagined

71 community corresponding to the category was not limited by, but no clarification as to what linked the heterogeneity of the category together – what made a Cypriot a Cypriot. It was only in the discussion I had with Antigone that I received some form of clarification:

Me: And that which connects all this together is [interrupted]

Antigone: The connection with the geographical space.

Me: With the space? But which space? Is there a common characteristic between these people?

Antigone: It‟s also, how you define identities. For now, identities are defined by the paper that states that you belong to this country that has these borders; you vote for the president of that country, I don‟t perceive it in this way, where you belong, it is I believe where you feel that you belong, and basically it is your identification with some space. Alright, there are countries that have flexible borders, but Cyprus is an island, and it is very easy to say that I belong to that geographical space, because it is finite, it is specific, there is a sea around it, and so you will say „I belong to Cyprus‟.

For Antigone, what holds the category together is the identification of the people ascribed to it, with the geographical space of Cyprus itself. For Antigone, the Cypriots maintain an emotional connection with Cyprus, a connection which has emerged subjectively through their lived experience – this connection is also, I may add, an identification with an abstraction of the island itself into a signifier, the signifier of „Cyprus‟, the linguistic and discursive representation of the island‟s geographical space. It is this imagined and real connection with the geographical space; that forms the basis upon which the discursive grouping of such a heterogeneous population within the category of the „Cypriot‟ becomes possible among my informants. The identification with the signifier „Cyprus‟ is found throughout the expressions of my informants even though it is not named as such – it is Penelope‟s “geographical concept”, Atalanta‟s feeling of being “part of this place”, Selene‟s “space of Cyprus as Cyprus”, Daphne‟s feeling of being “in Cyprus” and Ektoras‟ “place” as “base”.

The Cypriot is thus, in the last instance, a person who, spending a significant part of his/her life in Cyprus, identifies with „Cyprus‟, and „Cyprus‟ is itself constituted by a multiplicity of

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„Cypriots‟ identifying with it – this self-referential, tautological structure embedded here in the meaning of „Cyprus‟ is what is described in the analysis of ideology by Slavoj Zizek (2009: 95) as the master signifier, that self-referential signifier which conditions the broader meaning of floating signifiers without itself being signified. The identification with the master signifier „Cyprus‟ is precisely what conditions the meaning of the category of the „Cypriot‟, the heterogeneity and openness entailed within it, and the signification of a holistic Cyprus. Without such an identification, the whole meaning we have been discussing so far collapses, in the same way that by removing the identification of the subject with the signifiers „bi-communality‟ and „Hellenism‟, Cypriotism and ethnic nationalism lose their signified meaning.

The perspective of my informants, which I will take the initiative here to name „pluralistic Cyprocentrism‟ for the purposes of distinction, is contrasted with the other two ideological positions in the table below.

Ideological Position Hellenocentrism Cypriotism Pluralistic Cyprocentrism

Master- Hellenism (the Greek Bi-communality Identification with signifier Nation) „Cyprus‟ Imagined Cyprus as an ethnic, Cyprus as a sui generis Cyprus as an ethnically, Community historical and cultural geographical space, demographically and extension of Greece characterized by a culturally heterogeneous common bi-communal, geographical space usually cultural identity Identity Cypriot-as-Greek Cypriot-as-bi-communal No defined common identity, Cypriot-as- heterogeneous Position Mono-communalism Bi-communalism Pluralism

Inclusion in Privileging Greek- Privileging the Greek and Any individual who has the Category speaking Cypriots, other Turkish Constitutional formed a connection with of the Cypriot constitutional groups Communities (entailing Cyprus, regardless of may or may not be constitutional religious ethnicity, family lineage, signified as Cypriot groups) citizenship status or minorities cultural heritage

Figure 15: Comparative table of the key ideological claims of the three political positions surrounding collective identify south of the line, informed by the work of Andreas Panayiotou (2012), Caesar Mavratas (1997), Yiannis Papadakis (1998) and the findings of the present thesis.

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5.4. Pluralistic Cyprocentrism, Nationalism and the Prospect of Bi-Communal Federation The careful reader may have noticed that while I stated that I carried out 7 interviews, I have included in the preceding chapters and subchapters extracts from only 6. This is because my 7th interviewee, Diogenes, differentiated himself significantly from the rest of my informants. Diogenes refused to identity as a Cypriot, and simply stated that when asked he says “I‟m form Cyprus”. When I asked why he refused to do so, his response was “Because these are dark paths, when you start using words in this way. […] From starting to identify with a country to nationalism, it is a slippery slope. […] It doesn‟t mean that it will necessarily happen, but it is a possibility that I don‟t want to open”.

The response I received from Diogenes directly addresses the key question that needs to be asked – namely, is pluralistic Cyprocentrism merely just another case of non-ethnic nationalism? Much Like Anderson‟s description, pluralistic Cyprocentrism entails an imagined community, limited to a specific geographical space; and similarly to the project of nation-building, there is a connection with a conception of a future state, that of bi-communal federation. There is however a great danger for misrepresentation and misinterpretation in describing pluralistic Cyprocentrism as a form of nationalism. While my informants supported openly and passionately bi-communal federation, they were very aware that it does not correspond to their conception of the category of the „Cypriot‟. Paris expressed sharply the general perspective in two mere sentences, during an informal conversation:

When I speak with a crypto-nationalist, I will emphasize the Turkish Cypriot, because the Cypriot will be immediately equated with the Greek Cypriot. I consider myself a plain Cypriot, the point however is from where the attack is coming. If federation eventually passes, I will be one of the first to attack bi-communalism.

The support for a bi-communal federation was not perceived as an unconditional support for bi- communalism, such as in the case of Cypriotism, or for the promotion of a common bi- communal Cypriot identity, but for the island‟s reunification within the context of past ethnic violence and the existing division. The relationship between the island‟s reunification and the

74 desirable senses of identity is directly addressed in Syspirosi Atakton‟s brochure „Yes to a Federal Cyprus‟,51 which was widely circulated in Karaolos:

We support the BBF [Bi-communal, Bi-zonal Federation] solution, not as a “painful compromise we are forced into in order to avoid the partition”, but as the ideal institutional solution (“Even if Federation didn‟t exist, we would have had to invent it”52…), since it recognises the historical, geographical, and political reality of Cyprus; it gives autonomy to the communities but also space for coexistence for those who do not place themselves, nor recognise ethnic identities. We will have the opportunity, to redefine identities of “one-Self” and the “Other”, and the notion of borders. We will thus be able to create new identities; ones which will not be based on exclusions, since they will be relational and they will not rely on divisive dichotomies. Rather, they will be formed and transformed based on our contacts and relations between us, and between us and our environment (Syspirosi Atakton 2016b).

Thus the support for federation is here perceived as a support for the constitution of conditions of coexistence, conditions that are not restricted merely to those who identify with the constitutionally entrenched ethnic identities, but which also include those who refuse them. The federal reunification of the island is thus attributed a set of potential conditions enabling the possibility of reorganizing identities outside of ethnic binaries and exclusionary definitions, as a political terrain entailing the possibility of post-national identification, of the real, rather than the symbolic transcendence of the existing ethnic divisions. This highly speculative ideological position, which projects a possibility in an unknowable future, indicates precisely that the desire is not for a bi-communal federal state itself, let alone of a bi-communal common Cypriot identity, but for a Cyprus divorced from existing and potential structures of exclusion, a Cyprus without a Cyprus Problem – with the possibility of its materialization perceived as necessitating the island‟s reunification, without reunification being itself the sufficient condition.

51 The brochure was published in Modern Greek, Cypriot Greek, English and Turkish. The quote is taken from the digital English version of the text. 52 The quote is taken from a pro-reunification article from the early 1990s that was published under a pseudoname in the anti-authoritarian Cypriot magazine Train in the City (Trotsky 1993: 7).

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The aforementioned perspective draws its logic from the refusal of my informants to engage in a politics of homogenization, of cultural essentialism and of privileging a specific, fixed conception of Cypriot identity, which would pre-suppose an element of exclusion at the very moment of its articulation. I was unable to locate any fundamental point of exclusion entailed within the ideological claims of pluralistic Cyprocentrism – the inclusiveness entrenched in its claims appear diametrically opposed to even the most liberal form of nationalism, as that very conception organizes (in principle) its membership on the acquisition (or not) of a state‟s citizenship, as well as on a set of shared values (Tamir 1993: 125). Furthermore, pluralistic Cyprocentrism lacks a fundamental „national‟ enemy as well – the only clear political enemy is perhaps nationalism itself, with which it is located in an ongoing dialectical relation, a dimension easily observable throughout the extracts presented in the present thesis. By claiming the term „Cypriot‟ for itself, pluralistic Cyprocentrism attempts to redefine it outside of the existing notions of exclusion, contradicting and challenging competing notions of the Cypriot.

That this political process entails the possibility outlined to me by Diogenes cannot be denied. But the very materialization of this possibility would negate the central ideological position of pluralistic Cyprocentrism, the refusal to define, emphasize and construct a fundamental point of exclusion – posing the question of whether, in such a development, it would still be the position I have been describing throughout the present thesis. As it stands when I encountered it, however, pluralistic Cyprocentrism is the most anti-nationalist position observable within the political discourse surrounding identity and the Cypriot conflict, south of the line – in refusing to define Cypriots in relation to the Republic of Cyprus, or a potential federal Cypriot state, as well as in refusing to formulate a strict definition of Cypriot identity and Cypriotness, it stretches the inclusiveness of the category of the „Cypriot‟ to its conceptual limits, with any individual having the potentiality of being included in the category itself. Perhaps more interestingly, pluralistic Cyprocentrism is one of the rare instances where a politics of decolonization can be identified as being in play.

Whether the support for bi-communal federation is contradictory to the identified ideological elements of pluralistic Cyprocentrism; will be left here to the judgment of the reader. The question is an intrinsically complex one to answer, with any attempt to do so here, within the limited space of the present thesis, entailing an element of condescendence. The political

76 complexity which characterizes the contemporary Cypriot experience leaves little room for the naivety of simplicity, and positions appearing contradictory in the eyes of an outsider, often ascent to the status of consistency when perceived within the context they were originally formulated.

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6. Conclusion and Recommendations The present thesis aimed to examine and document the ideological elements central to the political position that has been here termed „pluralistic Cyprocentrism‟. In the first analysis chapter, it was argued that the employment of differentiated terms by my informants in relation to the existing division; did not merely neutralize the ideologically charged language commonly employed south of the line, but that it also indicated the desire for a reunified Cyprus, through the act of ideologically projecting terms corresponding to a post-solution political landscape within the present reality of partition. „North‟ and „south‟ were described as terms carrying a specific logic of their own, forming an imagined Whole consisting of two Parts, a Whole which symbolically transcended the existing division by reorganizing the descriptive language and meaning that surrounds it.

The next chapter examined three ways by which Hellenocentric identity interpellated the claim of the Cypriot-as-Greek through the institutions of the Republic of Cyprus. It was argued that the entrenched identities of the constitution of the Republic produce a specific form of discursive homogenization, while also allowing for their discursive reproduction, through the employment of ethnicized constitutional identities in the demographic organization of the Republic‟s citizen population. In the next subchapter, the official Hellenocentric narration was examined through the brief scrutinization of the public educational curriculum and the official commemoration of historical events, making the argument that Hellenocentrism subsumes Cyprus under Hellenism, projecting it as a cultural, historical and ethnic extension of Greece, thereby positioning Cyprus as a particularity of the broader Greek nation, as a peripheral part of an imagined ethnic community outside of itself. This argument was continued in the next subchapter, which explored the everyday interpellation of Hellenocentrism through the flying of flags within the walled city of Nicosia, as well as the delicate ideological synthesis formed when the flag of the Republic and the flag of Greece are flown alongside each other. It moved on to examine one particular instance in which this ideological synthesis was symbolically attacked and challenged; by the act of removing Greek flags and replacing them with custom made pro-reunification flags, indicating a radically different understanding over Cypriot identity, connected with an alternative perception of its corresponding imagined community.

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The final chapter aimed to address this imagined community by examining the claims of my informants in relation to their own sense of identity, as well as to the broader category of the „Cypriot‟. The first subchapter borrowed the concept of the Cypriot surplus in order to explore how particular cultural, historical or existential elements escaping Hellenocentric subsumption; enable the formulation of a de-ethnicized sense of a Cypriot identity. It moved on to scrutinize the importance of language by examining the claims of my informants over Cypriot Greek from a postcolonial lens, only to conclude that Cypriot Greek itself is not considered the key entry point for belonging in the category of the „Cypriot‟, as the emphasis on vernacular language by the „Space‟ extends to all vernaculars spoken historically in the island of Cyprus, refusing to symbolically privilege one over the others. In the following subchapter, it was argued that for my informants, what constitutes the inclusion of individuals within the category of the „Cypriot‟ is the identification with the signifier of „Cyprus‟, an emotional attachment with an abstracted notion of the island, regardless of one‟s ethnicity, family lineage, citizenship status or cultural heritage. Instead of projecting a common Cypriot identity, the very notion of a universalized commonality is refused; and Cypriot identity, if it to be argued from a pluralistic Cyprocentric perspective to exist at all, it is the very ethnic, cultural and demographic heterogeneity of historical and contemporary Cyprus, the very absence of cultural and/or ethnic homogenization itself. The final subchapter briefly explored the relationship of the „Space‟s support for bi- communal federation and the identified ideological principles of pluralistic Cyprocentrism, in relation to the possibility of describing pluralistic Cyprocentrism as a form of non-ethnic nationalism, concluding that such a characterization would be both unfounded and misrepresentative.

In constructing a vastly inclusive, internally heterogeneous imagined community, pluralistic Cyprocentrism offers a direct challenge to the ideological foundations of Hellenocentrism, by re- claiming the category of the „Cypriot‟ in opposition to the exclusionary logic of ethnic nationalism, but also of the structurally dominant ideological alternative of bi-communal civic nationalism, a position which entails its own exclusionary dynamic. In its refusal to privilege either a single, or a set of abstracted ethnic and/or cultural groups over others, it presents itself as an alternative actively engaged in a process of discursive and symbolic decolonization, ideologically transcending the existing binaries of identification, binaries that can be traced in with no sense of exaggeration, back to the reformation of the Ottoman millet system by the

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British colonial administration. By doing so, pluralistic Cyprocentrism is producing a radically differentiated sense of consciousness in relation to Cyprus, its corresponding permanent population and the ongoing reality of its partition. It is able to do so because, and not despite of, the ambiguity which characterizes its central claim over the category of the „Cypriot‟, a claim that contradicts the very principles of its oppositional ethnicized and bi-communal imagined communities. The perspective of pluralistic Cyprocentrism, however internally contradictory it may appear to the reader, is an ongoing process through which the imagination of a reunified, inclusive Cyprus is reconciled with its violent and traumatic past – a process attempting to make possible the imagination of a Cyprus without a Cyprus Problem; and of an identity leaving no room for the politics of discrimination that have historically accompanied it.

There can be no doubt that pluralistic Cyprocentrism is a comparatively marginal political perspective, a minority view that may or may not be exhausted amongst the individuals comprising the Karaolos „Space‟. I am not here making the argument that the ideas and politics of pluralistic Cyprocentrism have the capacity to re-structure the general understandings of identity internal to Cyprus, to challenge or shape official state policy or even to alter in any substantial way the political status quo existing in the island. What the present thesis has attempted to do however, in investigating and documenting pluralistic Cyprocentrism, was to contribute to the questioning and challenging of the existing „ethnicized‟ academic paradigm surrounding Cyprus. The findings of the present thesis are in perfect harmony with Yael Navaro‟s observation that “[t]hose who have been discursively categorized as members of the same “ethnic” or “national group”…do not perceive or experience themselves as such” (2006: 95). What was in fact encountered in the field was a political contestation between exclusionary politics and their refusal, the cultural colonialism of Hellenocentrism and its attempted decolonization, the privilege of ethnic identity and its symbolic dethronement. As Navaro noted, to critically make sense of the Cypriot conflict necessitates the abandonment of its characterization as an essentially „ethnic conflict‟, in order to explore the multilayered relations entailed within it – to comprehend it as a political conflict with its own dimensions, contestations and contradictions (ibid: 96). I believe that the present thesis has contributed positively to such a project, by exploring one such dimension, in which the conflict is neither understood, nor expressed as an ethnic dispute, but as a political conflict over the claimed contents and meanings attributed to different notions of imagined communities, the colonial, decolonial, exclusionary

80 and inclusionary elements entangled within them; and the possibility of the island‟s reunification.

If we can momentarily grand ourselves the assumption that a collective political position emerges only after a significant change has taken place on the everyday level of social interaction, the presence of pluralistic Cyprocentrism opens a plethora of questions concerning the changes that are taking place in contemporary Cyprus. There is available evidence to support the view that senses of identity have been undergoing a significant alteration. In 2015, the University of Nicosia published the findings of a survey it had conducted among both Greek- speaking and Turkish-speaking Cypriots, concerning their senses of identity. Its results, even if not perfectly representative, were peculiarly interesting: 57% of Greek-speaking Cypriots responded by saying that they felt as either “Cypriot” with no ethnic prefix; or as “more Cypriot than Greek”, 34% stated feeling “equally Cypriot and Greek” and only a mere 9% reported feeling plain “Greek”, or “more Greek than Cypriot” (New Cyprus Association 2015: 2).53 The responses of Turkish-speaking Cypriots were even more overwhelming; with 88% responding that they felt “Cypriot” with no ethnic prefix (ibid). The same survey included a question concerning the possibility of fostering a common Cypriot identity, with the majority of Greek- speaking and Turkish-speaking Cypriots having a favorable view of such a prospect (ibid: 4).54

If the attitude of Cypriots in relation to their identity has been shifting from an ethnocentric to a Cyprocentric position, this has been overwhelmingly missed in most of the academic literature, which continues to take for granted the discursively given identities that are expressed politically within the island, at best reducing Cyprocentric identification to a particular case of the political left. The vast inclusiveness characterizing the position studied in the present thesis; should not be taken as representative of Cyprocentric identification in general across the Cypriot societies on the two sides of the divide, as these societies are characterized as much by tendencies of racism

53 The results for Greek-speaking Cypriots are in line with the data of a 2000 survey presented by political scientist Nicos Peristianis (2008: 236). 54 The same survey showed significant differentiation in the understanding of what minimal qualifications are required to be considered a Cypriot, as well as in the perceptions surrounding citizenship (ibid: 3). These data indicate that far from having a single, unifying sense of Cypriotness, differentiated, or even possibly contradictory senses of Cypriotness may be developing on each side of the division, senses that may well be corresponding to the project of state building characterized by the continuous existence of a mono-communal Republic of Cyprus, as well as the entrenchment and standardization of the TRNC in the everyday life of the island (Peristianis 2008: 237).

81 and xenophobia, as they are of the Orientalized caricature of Mediterranean hospitality that is so often promoted by the local tourist industry (Hatay 2008: 165, Law et al. 2014: 84). In one respect, the schema of the diametrically oppositional axis of ethnic nationalism and Cypriotism, which has informed much of the literature surrounding Cyprus, may well be by now outdated, as there are indications that the Greek and Turkish Cypriot identities are themselves beginning to be employed in opposition to the broader national identities of mainland Greece and Turkey, entailing claims of autonomy; without necessarily connecting such claims to the federal reunification of the island and the reconciliation of the two communities (Karathanasis 2017: 145, Şahin 2011: 594). One cannot avoid noting here that the re-emergence of Cypriot Greek in writing; as well as in contemporary cultural production, and the increasing artistic engagement with the re-interpretation of Cypriot history and tradition, signify that processes of identity formation are far from stagnant, but on-going and vibrant, remaining largely unexplored from an anthropological lens (Stylianou 2010: 218, Demetriou 2015: 73, Socrates 2015: 35).

What then does being Cypriot mean to the broader population of Cyprus? How do people with no Cypriot ancestry negotiate and claim a Cypriot identity within the contemporary Cypriot context? How is Cypriotness produced and reaffirmed outside of political institutions? What new social Others are constituted in relation to the constitution and re-constitution of particular senses of Cypriotness? And how are we to understand the Cypriot conflict, if it is indeed the case that an increasing number of the island‟s population no longer identifies strongly with the interpellated notions of ethnicity?

These are some of the pressing questions that can be raised when Cyprus is not viewed through an ethnicizing lens, but rather as a social, political and postcolonial space burdened with an accumulating set of unresolved historical contradictions. The need to produce a new terminology in the present thesis, merely to be able to speak of its topic of inquiry, indicates the great limitations of the dominant ethnicizing paradigm in the study of Cyprus. A future anthropology of Cyprus needs to, to borrow again Yael Navaro‟s term, de-ethnicize not merely the conflict itself, but the very way the two societies across the Green Line are discursively represented and thought of, the very way in which they are analytically comprehended. It needs to start looking beyond flags and banners, political speeches and United Nations resolutions, beyond the Cyprus Dispute itself, and instead turn to the meanings, feelings and perceptions that the residents of the

82 island ascribe to themselves and their fellow co-islanders. Such an anthropological endeavor needs to resist the urge of homogenization; and instead explore the fragmented senses of identification and belonging located in contemporary Cyprus, in all their uncompromising contradictions, politically charged dimensions and postcolonial particularities. A future anthropology of Cyprus needs to first decolonize itself, if it is to remain relevant to the social, cultural and economic transformations of contemporary Cyprus, transformations that will remain largely undetectable by it, as long as its fundamental object of analysis remains the image of a static, ethnicized conflict, rather than the everyday experience of Cyprus itself, in all its complexity, obscurity and confusion.

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