The image has become an iconic one: five young men in dirty uniforms kneel in the middle of a dusty plain with their hands behind their heads. They squint in the blinding midday sun, their faces expressing anxiety and a measure of fear. A Turkish soldier leans to talk to one of them, appearing calm, even friendly. To one side another Turkish soldier whose face we do not see stands guard. This photograph has become one of the most famous images to come out of the Cyprus conflict.Footnote ¹ The men's kneeling posture, the fright in their eyes, and the apparent calm of the soldiers all evoke a vulnerability to violence. And like the bloody photo of a woman and her children murdered in their Nicosia home that was used for decades by the Turkish Cypriot administration, or like certain photographs of distraught women crying for losses that we can only imagine, the image of these five young men has been reprinted in pamphlets and brochures, newspapers and books, in ways that take for granted its power to evoke their uncertain fate.

These Greek Cypriot soldiers had been captured by the Turkish army during its 1974 intervention in/invasion of Cyprus,Footnote ² and until very recently their fate remained officially unknown. The photo of these men, their faces identifiable by loved ones, had been used to suggest that they and others taken prisoner could still be alive, leading to speculation that they might be languishing in Turkish prisons. This small hope had fuelled a politics in the Greek Cypriot south of Cyprus that emphasizes remembrance and a return to a prelapsarian past. In the official and popular Greek Cypriot version of the division of Cyprus, Greek and Turkish Cypriots lived peacefully together until a 1974 coup against the Republic of Cyprus' president, sponsored by a traitorous junta government in Greece, provoked a Turkish military invasion and the division. Greek Cypriots who lived in the north fled to the south, and Turkish Cypriots in the south fled to the north. For twenty-nine years the island was divided by a closed border.Footnote ³ During that period, a politics of remembrance emerged in the Greek Cypriot south that has been oriented toward return—return to one's lost village, the return of one's missing loved ones, and ultimately return to a moment before division.

As long as the checkpoints were closed, it was possible to imagine that loved ones might be trapped on the “other side”—a place that in most Greek Cypriot depictions was not only inaccessible but also dark and foreboding, an area “under occupation” and military rule. In 2003, the sudden opening of the ceasefire line allowed Cypriots to visit their homes and villages and to interact once again with those living on the “other side.” One result was a fracturing of imaginings of the “other side.” A world was revealed quite unlike the one Greek Cypriots, especially, had expected, where people narrated the past very differently. In Turkish Cypriot official discourse, and much popular discourse as well, the recent history of Cyprus is one of a Greek Cypriot struggle to unite the island with Greece that excluded them, and of continual attempts to exclude them after the island gained independence from British rule in 1960. That independence came with a power-sharing constitutional arrangement that included a Turkish Cypriot vice-president with veto powers and quotas on numbers of Turkish Cypriot legislators and civil servants. When President Makarios sought constitutional changes in late 1963, the result was the breakdown of the fledgling republic and the outbreak of inter-communal conflict. According to the common Turkish Cypriot version of these events, Greek Cypriot paramilitaries attacked and killed Turkish Cypriots, forcing about twenty-five thousand to flee their homes and compelling 90 percent of their community to retreat to militarized enclaves for a decade.

Even at that time, the bloody moment when the republic broke down was portrayed in Greek Cypriot official reports and newspapers as a “rebellion” of the minority that led to inter-communal strife. In my own interviews with Greek Cypriots who had lived in mixed towns and villages until 1963, they almost always said their neighbors left due to pressure by Turkish Cypriot leaders intent on provoking an intervention by Turkey and dividing the island. The knowledge that there had been inter-communal conflict did not erase the narrative of “peaceful coexistence,” which depicted that strife as part of a plan that political leaders had forced on an unwilling population. The reluctance of Turkish Cypriots to abandon their homes in 1963–1964 has often been taken as evidence that their leaders pressured them, although many in interviews said that those same leaders tried to arrange for their transport to safer locations. The looting and destruction of their homes immediately after their departure, an important element in Turkish Cypriot narratives of the period, is absent from descriptions by Greek Cypriots, who in several of my interviews insisted that Turkish Cypriots in their villages had handed their house keys to Greek Cypriot neighbors.Footnote ⁴

This narrative was badly damaged in August of 2009 by the revelation of the true fate of the five young men in the photograph. The UN-sponsored Committee on Missing Persons, whose work was reactivated and finally became effective after the 2003 opening of the checkpoints,Footnote ⁵ announced that it had found the remains of the five men in Djiaos, the village where the photo was shot, and that they had been killed shortly after it was taken. This incited immediate calls in the Greek Cypriot south for the prosecution of Turkey for war crimes, but just a few days later eyewitnesses came forward to reveal that the men had been killed not by the Turkish army but rather by the Turkish Cypriot fighters to whom they had been entrusted. The Turkish journalist who took the famous picture said that afterward he had witnessed the transfer of prisoners to the local fighters and then boarded a tank with the army. Only moments later, they heard gunfire and returned to find the prisoners' bodies. He had photographed them as they lay, as well as their hasty burial.

Both the Turkish journalist and the Turkish commander, much upset by the incident, reportedly had given statements to the Committee on Missing Persons more than a decade before, but the committee had failed to follow up on the report. The journalist claimed that later that same day he had been captured by Greek Cypriot paramilitaries who took his cameras and film. The famed photo first appeared in a right-wing Greek Cypriot newspaper, but the pictures of the men's bodies were apparently suppressed.

These revelations angered the families of the missing men. The sister of one complained to the Greek Cypriot Fileleftheros newspaper: “For thirty-five years, even though they knew they were dead, they kept us in the dark. We maintained the hope that our loved ones were alive. And now it turns out that for thirty-five years we were the victims of propaganda.”Footnote ⁶ At around the same time, Yiannakis Christodoulou, a Greek Cypriot fighter who had managed to avoid capture that day, confessed on a local television program, “We did so many [bad] things at Djiaos, it was only natural that whoever of us was caught was a goner.”Footnote ⁷

In fact, Greek Cypriot histories of the conflict have long suppressed discussion of what Turkish Cypriots might have done during the 1974 war, and have portrayed them also as victims of the Turkish army (see also Galatariotou Reference Galatariotou2008: 863). This, in turn, is part of a suppression of what Greek Cypriots might have done between 1963 and 1974, and of any suggestion that Turkish Cypriots in 1974 might have acted in vengeance.Footnote ⁸ But the flood of witness testimonies since the 2003 border opening, and especially information from investigations into the fates of missing persons, have so far revealed primarily Cypriot perpetrators. In the Greek Cypriot south, these are often portrayed as “Turkish fighters of the TMT,” a paramilitary organization created in 1958 to combat Greek Cypriot attempts to unite the island with Greece.Footnote ⁹ The problem with this rendering is that most eyewitness reports make it clear that many Greek Cypriots in 1974 were victims of revenge killings, often committed by Turkish Cypriot mücahits, or fighters, in military uniform who might have been mistaken for Turkish soldiers. Regarding the deaths of the five men, for instance, the journalist who was on the scene reported that the Turkish Cypriot fighters had pleaded to their commander that they had killed the prisoners to avenge loved ones.

This essay takes the recent revelations surrounding this iconic image as an opportunity to reflect on how people have received the flood of information since 2003 about conflict-related violence. For many Cypriots, that information has begun to fracture certain understandings of the past, but the witness testimonies, new books and documents, and the discovery of remains have not fundamentally broken down familiar conceptual frameworks. The partition of the island and displacement of almost half its population led to the memory of the “other side” becoming institutionalized as a political strategy. At stake in these strategies is the division itself, this gash through the island, as one side seeks to eliminate the division and the other to solidify it. Greek Cypriot claims that all was well between Cypriots until Turkey divided the island have supported a political position that asserts that the division resulted from an illegal invasion of the legitimate Republic of Cyprus and that therefore the ceasefire line cannot be recognized as a border. By this line of reasoning, the most just solution of the political problem would be ejection of Turkish troops and a return to a unified state. Turkish Cypriots, for their part, claim they were victims of a plan—in some portrayals a genocidal one—to cleanse them from the island, which supports their calls for the establishment of a state in the north as a form of self-determination. That state's border should be recognized,Footnote ¹⁰ they assert, and any negotiated settlement should lead to a loose federation in which they will be able to remain in their own ethnic state.

David Lloyd has remarked, regarding Ireland, “Partition … operates like an unclosed gash, marking not only a past violence but one whose perpetuation in the daily practice of the state left it in a continual state of emergency” (Reference Lloyd2003: 480). He could well be describing Cyprus, where the partition is marked by a ceasefire line that is not internationally recognized as a lawful border.Footnote ¹¹ Although formally the Republic of Cyprus is the only legitimate government of the island and has sovereignty over its entirety, in practice the constitution is suspended and the state is in a perpetual state of emergency. Similarly, the unrecognized state in the north has de facto though not de jure sovereignty over its territory and citizens, but operates as a breakaway state in defiance of international conventions that have called for its dissolution. There is always the possibility that the ceasefire line will be erased or adjusted, especially since Cypriot leaders have been engaged since 1974 in discussions to solve “the Cyprus Problem”—the division of the island into two separate polities.Footnote ¹² The elusive resolution is usually referred to as “reunification,” even though both sides have long said that any solution would entail creation of a federation of two states that would look much like they do now.

“The Cyprus Problem,” then, in its Cypriot usage, might be seen as a way of describing the fissure that marks partition. In what follows, I argue that partition itself calls for a struggle that is predicated on both the impermanence of partition and the anticipation of violence, and which requires that the disputed past be continually brought into the present. Though the Cyprus Problem is a dispute over the future of partition, it is necessarily also one over how the island came to be partitioned in the first place. The struggle requires a constant mobilization of memory, and rejection of the present state of partition makes it impossible to “put the past behind us.”Footnote ¹³ Moreover, as I will contend, the fissure in the body politic is mapped onto bodies, especially through analogizing partition to a wound. This potent analogy, present in different forms on both sides of the island, has made the reception of new information about past violence into a raggedly political affair that has slowly begun to affect both interpretations of history and imaginations of political futures.

OF TIME AND VIOLENCE

Writing at a particularly bloody moment in England's history, immediately after the English Civil War, Hobbes observed that war is defined not only by moments of conflict but more importantly by a period of time in which we may anticipate violence. In this sense, as Hobbes suggests, “times of war” or “times of peace” can be seen not only as periods in history but as ways of organizing time itself.Footnote ¹⁴ Times of war acquire a sense of immediacy, a moment when time is compressed, and past and future fold into the present. Times of peace, on the other hand, acquire a sense of the expansive present, the eternal present, the present through which the past flows on the way to the future. I want to argue that this way of organizing time may be one of the key ways in which we recognize whether or not we are truly “at peace.”Footnote ¹⁵

Cyprus is a divided island that since 1974 has been stuck in a stalemate—not at an end of war, but its suspension. Life in the island is “peaceful” to the extent that the past three and a half decades have witnessed only rare and isolated instances of violence between persons of the two main parties to the dispute. But despite this lack of violence and the usual signs of war, no Cypriot would say that the island is at peace. Rather, the present is a moment of continual struggle in which each action attains immediacy and must be weighed for its potential consequences. The present is always the moment that may yet change everything even if in Cyprus very little ever seems to change. The present is both immediate and frozen, as though time itself needs a push into the future.

What is more, although the Cyprus conflict is frozen, as though someone has pressed the “pause” button, people know that the right trigger, pushing the right button, might begin the action again. The conflict seems to threaten to flare up at any time, if one makes the wrong move. The quote from Hobbes continues by comparing a time of war with the weather: “For as the nature of foul weather, lieth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together: the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary” (ibid.). The nature of war, in this assessment, is not simply violence but the anticipation of it.

Lives lived during times of war are lived in what Pradeep Jeganathan calls “the shadow of violence” (Reference Jeganathan, Arce and Long2000). Jeganathan deftly deploys the notion of anticipation to describe the ways in which “Tamil-ness” has been lived in southern Sri Lanka. Following David Lloyd, however, I would point out that a partitioned island is one in which the border itself comes to represent this shadow. Lloyd writes, “Partition is a settlement imposed under the threat of continuing violence; the border it establishes represents, in consequence, the suspension rather than the end of violence. The border in partition remains shadowed by the expectation of violence, violence that perpetually maintains the borderline as a fissure rather than a suture, sustaining antagonism rather than hybridity” (2003: 481). What I want to highlight here, as well, is the way in which the anticipation of violence brings the future into the present, requiring us to constantly “second-guess,” or act in a preventive mode. The future is always possible now, at this moment, viscerally present in the act of anticipation.

Cyprus certainly has not achieved a time of peace; indeed, the partition is officially marked by a “ceasefire line” that signals the always-present possible recurrence of violence. But this line also operates as Lloyd's “unclosed gash,” a wound on the body politic that must be healed. Histories of the Cyprus conflict have sought to explain this wound, and much of the popular and academic literature on this “gash” seeks a way to suture or heal it. This wound or gash both represents past suffering and reminds of the possibility of suffering in the future. It is in this sense that the ceasefire line also signals the impossibility of “putting the past behind us.”

A wound in Greek is a travma, or trauma, which is perhaps the most common way of describing suffering. At least since Freud, a trauma has been described as a wounding event that is not sufficiently incorporated into consciousness, is repeated again and again, and so becomes a neurosis. Much of the literature on trauma focuses on what enables us to “work through” trauma, or put it in the past, and on what, in turn, may provoke the “acting out” of trauma, causing the wounding to recur in the present. Here, though, I want to demonstrate how the analysis of communal wounds, like those in Cyprus, can be strengthened by attention to the relationship between time and suffering, and by incorporating anticipations of the future more fully into our descriptions of the wounds of the past.

While one can say that both past and present are always oriented toward the future, and while the role of the future in shaping the present has been a preoccupation of both phenomenology and historiography, here I will contrast what I call “thresholds of anticipation” with what Ricoeur and Koselleck, following Gadamer, call “horizons of expectation.” For Koselleck, “The horizon is that line beyond which a new space of experience will open, but which cannot yet be seen” (Reference Koselleck1985: 273), while for Ricoeur, “The horizon presents itself as something to be surpassed, without ever being fully reached” (Reference Ricoeur1988: 220). A horizon, then, is a future that is never fully realizable, always receding, but a threshold implies crossing into another space of time and a radical reorientation of the present. Apocalyptic histories may be said to represent thresholds by anticipating the destruction of the world as we know it and a radical reorientation of time and space. Furthermore, in messianic or apocalyptic time, the present is liminal, a “current situation” to be rectified by the “redemption” of the future (Bromley Reference Bromley, Robbins and Palmer1997; Kravel-Tovi and Bilu Reference Kravel-Tovi and Bilu2008; Robbins and Palmer Reference Robbins, Palmer, Robbins and Palmer1997). The etymology of “liminal” is “limen,” a threshold, a point caught between past and future, and life lived at a threshold of anticipation can be said to be one of a liminal present, a temporary state that in the case of Cyprus is signaled by the future, anticipated “rectification” of the border.

Similarly, while expectation implies a patient waiting for a future whose parameters are already in some sense known, anticipation implies an orientation to a future that may require our own action in order to realize or obviate it. Anticipation also implies imagination, contingency, and possibly anxiety. It is anticipation, I propose, which makes the wound a particularly potent site for imagining possible futures in times of war.

In a “time of war,” the past appears most viscerally not as the figure of the absent dead, but as suffering, and hence as a present wound. While numerous authors have associated “putting the past behind us” with the realm of the dead,Footnote ¹⁶ Elaine Scarry has convincingly argued that the use of wounds is an intrinsic part of what she calls “the structure of war”: “Injuries-as-signs point both backward and forward in time. On one hand, they make perpetually visible an activity that is past, and thus have a memorializing function. They also refer forward to the future, to what has not yet occurred, and thus serve an as-if function.” Scarry refers specifically to wounds on the body, but in divided societies the wound on the body politic represented by an “anomalous” partition is often assimilated to representations of wounded bodies. This appears to happen because of what Scarry refers to as the “reality-conferring” quality of wounds, which are both undeniably real and referentially unstable (Reference Scarry1985: 121). It is precisely the referential instability of injury to bodies that makes it available for representing other types of wounds.

In Cyprus, as in many ongoing conflicts, memory has been institutionalized as a wound, visible in the rupture of partition as well as in politicized personal suffering. I would argue, however, that when the future appears as a threshold of anticipation, wounds of the past come to refer both to an anticipated violence and, equally importantly, to a time when the wounds should be healed. In this way, past suffering is employed in the present struggle, not with the aim of mourning the dead (“putting the past behind us”) but rather in order to complete a history that remains contested in the present. What makes the future toward which such pasts are oriented into a threshold is the belief in a future, radical reorientation of the present. In such histories, the present is not simply a step on the way to the future; it is a temporary anomaly that must be patiently endured. Thus the wound also functions to represent the present as a time of suffering, one that must be endured on the path to a future when all will be righted.

Wounds in a time of war, as Scarry also says, are discursive (see also Levinas Reference Levinas and Lingis1969: 235–39), ways of giving reality to ideology and beliefs about the past. Because of their undeniable reality, they become a form of “proof,” a way to demonstrate to others the validity of one's cause. Their undeniability becomes a way of warding off the anxieties that might otherwise be produced by challenges to social order during conflict.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet wounds as discourse also contain their own sources of anxiety, especially in that, as a form of address, they open the door to communication with the other who is responsible for one's pain, to persuading them of the wrong being done.

As I will explain presently, it is precisely at this point that fissures appear in the narrative. That is because when a border is closed one can more easily use one's past suffering to construct a present struggle against an evil other who seeks to do violence to one in the future. But the opening of the checkpoints brought people face to face with real others with a different narrative of suffering that seemed to fracture, compete with, or even to deny their own. This, I maintain, is what has made disclosures of certain information about past violence or the fates of missing persons into challenges not only to institutionalized versions of Cyprus' history, but also to particular modes of political subjection.

THE TEMPORALITY OF THE WOUND

Keeping these reflections in mind, we turn now to ethnography. Not long after the 2003 opening of Cyprus' checkpoints, at a moment of both euphoria and anxiety, I returned to the island to conduct research on the ways that Cypriots were rethinking the past and relationships to place in the context of the radically new political situation. I chose to situate my research in Lapithos (in Turkish, “Lapta”), a formerly mixed town in north Cyprus whose Turkish population had fled in early 1964 in response to what they perceived as threats from their neighbors. During the Turkish military intervention of 1974, almost all the Greek population of the town fled, leaving only a few, mostly elderly persons who were later expelled to the island's south. Following the departure of Greek Cypriots, the town's original Turkish Cypriot inhabitants returned and settled in Greek Cypriot homes, their own having been destroyed. They were soon followed by Turkish Cypriot refugees from the south and settlers from Turkey.Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, some of those Greek Cypriots who had fled the north occupied properties in the south that Turkish Cypriot refugees had left behind. This process of removal and resettlement destroyed the island's heterogeneity: now the island's north was Turkish, and its south was Greek.

On both sides of the island, institutions soon emerged that engaged the past in the ongoing struggle through calls either to remember or to forget. While these institutions were officially intended to “resolve” the conflict, they had the paradoxical effect of recreating social and political realities in such a way that each side denied reality to the “other side.” For instance, Greek Cypriot refugees from northern Cyprus still vote in parliamentary elections as though they are resident in their former villages, and those villages have “mayors in exile” who, until recently, have had no access to those villages and no contact with the Turkish Cypriot mayors who actually live there and manage them. These institutions deny the legitimacy of a government in the north, a denial rooted in a particular interpretation of the recent past and of the events that divided the island. To refuse to recognize the Turkish Cypriot mayor of a village is to say that they are a puppet of an illegitimate occupation regime; to recognize that mayor would be to accept the legitimacy of Turkish Cypriot claims that their government was formed through a fight for self-determination whose basic aim was security.Footnote ¹⁹

The persistent institutional denial of a state in the north is buttressed by an insistence in all official documents, media, and public discourse on calling the island's north a “pseudo-state” (psevdhokratos), with “pseudo-ministers,” “pseudo-mayors,” even “pseudo-police.” Children are taught in schools about “our lands under occupation,” and learn details of folklore, folksongs, and traditions of villages that they have never seen. Refugee organizations constitute the single largest interest group in the south outside the party structure, while the common phrase in everyday language to refer to the north is ta katexomena, “the occupied areas.” Refugee organizations and refugee activists such as those that I met have made the concept of the “occupied” and “enslaved” lands so ubiquitous that restaurants, stores, sports teams, theatrical and musical events, and children's programs take the names of sacrificed heroes and lost villages, such as “Enslaved Kyrenia.” Further, the insistence on denying the de facto state in the north is strengthened by a particular politics of remembrance, most clearly represented by the slogan around which refugee organizations have for more than two decades focused their efforts: “Dhen Xechno,” “I do not forget.”Footnote ²⁰

Most of the institutions, laws, and signs that constitute this public construction of history are not so visible as is a slogan. Rather, they make up the very ground of quotidian life, the way in which one lives that life and gets things done. Such institutions are so ubiquitous that they form a certain landscape, a setting of everyday action and interaction, which normalizes and even naturalizes an emphasis on invasion and occupation (see also Roudometof and Christou Reference Roudometof, Christou, Eyerman, Alexander and Breese2011). These institutions are also buttressed by a particular kind of temporality that emphasizes not only ancestors and roots but also the temporariness of the present, framed by a future in which occupation must eventually end.Footnote ²¹ Both the politics of exile and its institutional expressions endeavor to create a sense of the temporary, even as the passage of decades has gradually begun to erode that sense.

Indeed, the landscape of life since the island's division has been filled with markers of the temporary, including the belief in the temporariness of the division and a future return to lost homes. The places where displaced persons now live have been cast as temporary homes, places of refuge, in which the seeming permanence of the present is illusory.Footnote ²² But the belief in return also depends on memory, and one way in which memory has been buttressed is through people's writings about their former villages. Like Palestinians, Greek Cypriot refugees have produced innumerable memory books that memorialize their village, discuss its folklore and traditions, lionize its famous sons and daughters, and mourn those who have been lost (Slyomovics Reference Slyomovics1998).

Three such books have been written for Lapithiotes at different periods since their displacement. While one describes how “the intruders of Attila are now enjoying the use of the rich orchards, the water and the gardens” (Fokaidhis Reference Fokaidhis1982: 117) that had once been theirs, a second, published in 2000, three years before the opening, employs photographs taken by foreigners who visited the north. These show buildings in disrepair and broken tombstones and are accompanied by a narrative that summarizes the current condition of the town. It describes its current residents, including both Turkish Cypriots and settlers from Turkey; the state of many of its buildings; the development of a tourist area near the sea on Turkish Cypriot land; and the relative abandonment of agricultural pursuits. For someone who knew Lapithos before, the narrative asserts, the condition of the town is cause for both disappointment and hope: “There is disappointment because of the general state that one sees, and hope that the temporary residents, the Turkish Cypriots and the settlers, are disinterested in the town, in its houses and its buildings, simply because they feel that they are not their own” (Municipality of Lapithos 2001: 274–75).

This section of the book is the first time in more than 250 pages that the narrative mentions Turkish Cypriots, and although it refers to the “native” Turkish Cypriots, and to hotels built on Turkish Cypriot land, it also repeatedly describes Turkish Cypriots and Turkish settlers living in the town as its “temporary residents” (prosorinoi katoikoi). This emphasizes a vision of the future that is consonant with a return to “the way things once were” (ibid.). Yet while in this landscape of the temporary Turkey is an ever-present force, Turkish Cypriots seem to fade from the scene and indeed cannot have a role. The peculiar disappearance of Turkish Cypriots is manifest in almost all official and semi-official writings and discourse. Significantly, one of the stated aims of the Lapithos refugee association is “cooperation with those Turkish Cypriot organizations and Turkish Cypriots who desire liberation from the Turkish army of invasion and occupation” (ibid.: 276), in other words, cooperation with those who desire the same thing as their Greek Cypriot compatriots. During debates in 2004 over a proposed plan to reunify the island, Kyrenia municipalities united in rejecting the plan, proclaiming at a meeting of several thousand displaced Kyreniotes that they would “negotiate a better plan for both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots.”Footnote ²³ Within the particular context of Cyprus, these statements imply that Greek Cypriots must speak for their Turkish Cypriot compatriots, who have been enslaved by the Turkish military and can have no voice of their own.

In Greek Cypriot institutions of memory, a sense of temporariness is created by emphasizing that Turkey is an occupying invader that has unjustly seized their lands and so must leave, while magically erasing the will of Turkish Cypriots with whom they lived in the past. Any reader of official and semi-official books, stories, pamphlets, and other narratives that describe lost villages must be struck by the forceful, constant presence of Turkey and the curious absence of Turkish Cypriots, who are relegated to ghostly figures in a landscape of memory.Footnote ²⁴

In contrast to such a politics of remembrance oriented toward return to a prelapsarian past, many researchers working on Cyprus have observed that, after 1974, Turkish Cypriots were encouraged by their leadership to forget (e.g., Bryant Reference Bryant2004; Hadjipavlou-Trigeorgis Reference Hadjipavlou-Trigeorgis and Calotychos1998; Sant Cassia Reference Sant Cassia1998–1999; Reference Sant Cassia1999). Families of missing persons were told that their loved ones were dead, while refugees from the south were encouraged to forget their former homes. In general, Turkish Cypriots were exhorted to put their lives before 1974 behind them, especially their lives with Greek Cypriots. What I want to emphasize here, though, is the way in which the demand to forget has been stamped in the present as a form of struggle through institutions that represent ever-present reminders of suffering in daily life.

Unlike in the south, where suffering has been portrayed as an open wound, one to be healed at some unknown point in the future, in the north suffering has taken the form of rupture or, to expand the metaphor of the body, amputation. This wound is visible and persists, but has been in some sense “healed.” At the same time, it is always present as reminder of the sacrifice that allowed one to continue to live. This rupture can be seen in a politics that has called the invasion a “peace operation” (barış hareketi) and emphasizes partition as final, and also in institutions of the everyday.

In the immediate post-war period, the flight of Greek Cypriots from their homes in the north and of Turkish Cypriots from the south led to a refashioning of much of the north. Turkish Cypriots originally from there whose homes were destroyed in the 1960s, and also Turkish Cypriot refugees from the south, settled in abandoned Greek property, early on by lottery and later by a system that rewarded former mücahitler, or fighters, and privileged families of şehitler, or “martyrs”—those who had been lost in the violence. In fact, almost all able-bodied men had been fighters during the 1964–1974 period, and most everyone in the Turkish Cypriot community was related in some way to a martyr. The state gave pensions to martyrs' immediate families, and in its first years former fighters received salaries and university scholarships and many were rewarded with work in the new administration.

Throughout the new society, then, Turkish Cypriots were tied to the administration, to their new homes, and to their new communities in ways that also entailed a constant remembrance of their sacrifices. Arguments about the fair distribution of resources centered on the measurement of those sacrifices, whether material or personal. Turkish Cypriots formed associations of former fighters and of refugees, not for purposes of remembrance but rather to achieve a fairer distribution of Greek Cypriot property and the issuance of title deeds. Once the government began to issue title deeds to such property in 1995, the associations disbanded. This theme continues in the Turkish Cypriot equivalents of the Greek Cypriot memory book, which describe not lost villages but the missing and the dead. Likewise, official propaganda has used photographs of burned and mutilated bodies to emphasize a requisite break with that past. These representations present the wound as a rupture, a type of amputation, and they use personal suffering to argue not for remembering or recreating the past but for forgetting it.

Institutions that have arisen in the north since the division have not only insistently reminded Turkish Cypriots of their sacrifices but have also stamped the landscape with what can be seen as anxious signs of finality. This has included a reinvention of the landscape that Greek Cypriots have called a form of Turkification: flags have proliferated and been engraved on mountainsides; monuments to Atatürk and Turkish Cypriot martyrs have multiplied. Towns and villages that did not already have Turkish names were renamed, sometimes after the villages in the south from which their Turkish Cypriot inhabitants had come. But these names were often prefaced with the word yeni, or “new”—Yeni Boğaziçi, Yenierenköy—emphasizing not a longing for the past but a sense of starting over. Streets were similarly renamed, some after important politicians or public figures but many more after martyrs. For instance, the two main arteries of Lapithos bear the names of two young men whose murder by Greek paramilitaries in 1963 provoked the exodus. Some streets are named for fighters from Turkey who were killed in the military intervention and whose families were given property in the town. After 1974, streets bearing the names of Greek heroes were renamed after Turkish martyrs. A statue of Atatürk was erected at one of the main entry points to the village, and a memorial to martyrs stands in the middle of a roundabout in Lapithos' busiest road. Turkish Cypriots quickly occupied Greek Cypriot businesses and replaced their signs in Greek with ones in Turkish. The town's two mosques were renovated, and the largest church in the village, Ayia Paraskevi, also became a mosque that served the town's upper quarters.

And yet these signs of anxious finality and triumphalism have been mapped over incomplete erasures; signs of the town's former Greek occupants remain. A monument to fallen heroes of the Greek Cypriot anti-colonial organization EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston, or National Organization of Cypriot Fighters), erected in 1960 by the town's Greek inhabitants, still stands in the square in front of the municipal office, though its inscription has been scratched out. As in many places on the island, one may still turn a corner to find a wall scrawled with Greek political graffiti. Some signs in Greek were never removed, and the architecture of many houses still displays the neo-Hellenic fad that hit the island's middle classes in the mid-twentieth century. Damaged cemeteries and churches decay amid neighborhoods and alongside major thoroughfares.

The new life in the town has been erected through a constant recollection of the need to forget, to put the past behind. This institutionalized remembrance takes form not only in monuments and street names but also in the distribution of houses, paychecks, and the other rewards and privileges that keep past suffering constantly in view. Still, there remains something unspecified and diffuse about this memorialization. Not only are there no statues to heroes or individual martyrs, but I even had difficulty at first pinning down exactly how many Lapithos Turks had actually been killed during the inter-communal fighting. At the beginning of my research, one local political official insisted the number was twenty-one, but when I later examined the monument in the village center that commemorates the deaths, I found that most on the roll were born and had died elsewhere. When I asked the mayor about this, he gave me a list of thirty-five names, though he explained that not all were necessarily originally from the town; some were dead or missing relatives of families now living there. It turned out that eight were said to be originally from Lapithos, but when I took the list to the local representative of the Association of Martyrs' Families and Disabled Veterans, he recognized only three who were.

Such imprecision blurred the certainty that I sought but mirrored an uncertainty that is inherent in stories about the conflict. There is a diffuseness in them in that their meaning appears to run beyond the bounds of words or facts and to say, “It could have been any of us, or all of us.” Like the brutal representations of the dead that were once so common throughout northern Cyprus, the mute witness of these lists of names seems to point to an unidentified threat, the constant possibility of recurrence. They point to an absent presence, that of their former Greek neighbors, an other that is always there and yet cannot be seen or fully known, a threat beyond the frame. This was the argument that official histories made, more explicitly, for the permanence of division: namely, that there was an ever-present threat from an absent other whose motives could never be known or trusted. The temporality employed in these representations is a threatened permanence, a potentially temporary peace.

Here institutions of memory are built upon particular temporalities understood through the figure of the wound—either one that will ultimately be healed through a return to wholeness, or a wound as rupture that represents sacrifice for a future in which there can be no return. In the image of the wound, however, such temporalities are, in a sense, out of time: the future is always yet to come, and final. These are apocalyptic histories, in which a day of judgment will conquer the other and heal all wrong. In apocalyptic histories, past and present are compressed in anticipation of a future whose time is not known, and suffering is the mark of those who will be redeemed. This apocalyptic aspect of these histories becomes especially visible in the religious imagery employed with relation to bodies, which is partially shared by the Muslim and Christian traditions, but with significant and revealing differences. As we will see, this imagery can tell us more about the role of the threatening other who always appears outside the frame.

THE SPEAKING WOUND

On both sides of the island, both the temporality of the wound and the sense of a threatening other are most perceptible in representations of suffering bodies, or of the land as a body in pain. So, in some Greek depictions of the island's division, barbed wire cuts across a map of Cyprus and drips blood. In others giant barbs of the wire pierce the land like a crown of thorns. These depictions evoke both vulnerability and the saintliness of martyrdom. The Church of the Missing, built by the father of a missing person, depicts missing Greek Cypriot men as early Christian martyrs, imprisoned and in rags.Footnote ²⁵ Such representations not only portray suffering but also evoke a sinister enemy. Just as a painting of a prisoner in chains refers to an oppressor beyond the frame, so the wire that binds the martyred island refers us obliquely to the forces that have imprisoned it. The barbs point also to a whole set of experiences evoked by the fall of a drop of blood.

In many Turkish Cypriot representations, rupture has been shown through mangled bodies, burnt corpses, and mass graves. Only a few years ago these images were visible throughout the north, in photographs at the checkpoints and in schoolbooks, and in memorials to martyrs such as the large monument to the mass graves of Muratağa and Sandallar. Perhaps the most famous example is a nondescript house in the Kumsal district of Nicosia, now infamous as the Museum of Barbarism. It was the site of “the Kumsal massacre,” in which, in early 1963, the wife of a Turkish army doctor and her three children were all murdered as they hid in the bath. Photographs of the bodies were projected around the world, the house was turned into the museum, and the story was repeated as the most horrible example of Greeks' capacity for committing atrocities. These images of innocence and grotesque suffering focus on wounds, specifically on the wounds of the dead.

Suffering was also framed through more victorious images, especially those of 1974: planes flying in V formations, parachutists floating in the Mesaoria dawn, and the marching of Turkish troops. These show a rupture defined by death—the death of communities, the death of an entire past—that is encapsulated in the deaths of şehitler, or martyrs. It is also framed by the prophetic and even apocalyptic tales that circulated in the period leading up to 1974, which are now read back into the history of the division: stories of women in the enclaves counting the ninety-nine names of Allah as they prayed for Turkish troops to arrive; stories that their prayers caused their own fighters to appear to the Greek forces as if they were ten times their number; prophetic stories that correctly predicted where Turkish troops would land. This is an eschatology of sacrificial death and a form of communal rebirth, one in which the past is cut away.

Greek Cypriot representations, in contrast, express loss as an open wound: a community torn from its homes, people torn from their loved ones, an island torn in two. It is a loss framed through absence: missing homes, missing men, and a land that for thirty years could not even be visited. This is an eschatology of absence and waiting, defined by people's sacrifices in the present for a future that they may not see, a day of judgment that will right the wrongs that have been inflicted. The missing, the lost, and the land itself embody a rupture defined by sacrifice: the lost land is enslaved, the missing are imprisoned like Christian saints, and the dead are like the sacrificed Christ.Footnote ²⁶

While Greek Cypriots have come to see their losses as representing the future return of a past and a lost territory, for Turkish Cypriots their losses have come to signify the irrecoverability of the past. In Greek Cypriot depictions, wrongs are made visible as a wound that cannot heal, worn on the body politic in the way that wounds may represent the suffering of the saints. They bear witness to a truth that is not visible and a future whose time is not known. Some representations evoke this meaning directly, such as the large black cross next to the Ledra Palace checkpoint upon which hangs a black map of Cyprus with three points that drip blood that represent the hands and chest wound of Christ.Footnote ²⁷ The wound that cannot be healed testifies to a wrong that cannot be righted.

Turkish Cypriot şehitler both represent and point to a past that is irrecoverable, while the missing and dead of Greek Cypriot narratives point to a past that was truncated, and to a land that is recoverable but absent. But while the Turkish şehit is a martyr in death, Christian martyrdom is signaled by suffering. In the Turkish lexicon, those lost in the violence are şehitler, or martyrs, even when their deaths were accidental. For example, the first şehit of Lapithos, İsmail Beyoğlu, died along with three of his friends in 1957 in the Omorphita, or Küçük Kaymaklı neighborhood of Nicosia when a bomb that they were making from a water pipe exploded. In the Greek lexicon, the land is enslaved, the missing imprisoned, and the dead denied the rites of burial. Not only does martyrdom become a way of giving meaning to lost lives, but it does so in a lexicon that makes those losses meaningful as part of the losses of the community.

These images acquire political potency because of an intrinsic link between suffering and seeing that is expressed in both the Greek and Turkish languages through the etymological relation of martyrdom and witnessing. The word martys in Greek refers to both those who suffer and those who bear witness. In the Christian tradition, the martyr is one whose deeds bear witness, while the witness for the faith is one whose act of witnessing is a martyrdom. This symbolism has also taken on ethnic overtones through the Greek Orthodox tradition of neomartyres, the neo-martyrs, those who became martyrs for the faith under Islamic and especially Ottoman rule (see Constantelos Reference Constantelos2004; Mazower Reference Mazower2004; Vaporis Reference Vaporis2000).Footnote ²⁸ As one author writing on the subject concludes, “The blood of the neo-martyrs was not shed in vain, for it inspired and nourished Greek Orthodox Christianity under Turkish persecution” (Constantelos Reference Constantelos2004: 69). What unites martyrdom in the Greek Orthodox tradition, and especially in the tradition of neo-martyrs, is various forms of oppression that must be endured and resisted. The body of the martyr “witnesses” the strength of faith in, among other contexts, a future when wrongs will be righted and truth will be revealed. In turn, that truth is denied by an oppressor—in this case ethnicized as Ottoman Turkish—who refuses to “see” the truth in the body of the martyr.

In Arabic, the same ambiguity inheres in the word shahit, which is most commonly used to mean he who dies for the faith, usually in battle. It is in that sense that it has entered Turkish as şehit. But the ambiguity is retained even in Turkish, where şahit means a witness, someone who has şehadet, or the ability to see. In the Turkish Cypriot lexicon, the death of a şehit points to a truth, and the martyr becomes in death a witness of it. I spoke with a former Turkish Cypriot schoolteacher from Lapithos who had written a novel ostensibly based on her experiences, though she told me that she had drawn upon other stories that she had heard in order to make the work represent “what we all had suffered.” Near its end, Greek paramilitary soldiers bury two small Turkish Cypriot boys alive, but a wind carries the voice of one of them toward Turkey: “The wind took the little boy's cries and carried them wave by wave to the north.… Hearts were seized by fury” (Baran Reference Baran1993: 213). In this vision, although the boy dies, his voice is carried to Turkey, where it echoes and is heard by those who will eventually come to save the community. In common parlance, the şehitler did not simply die for a cause; their deaths simultaneously witnessed the attempt at their effacement and the truth of the future that was to come.

In this sense, suffering may be given meaning only through a future when the truth of that suffering will finally be revealed. The semantic ambiguity of the suffering of the martyr has made it particularly amenable for political uses, offering as it does a meaning that, by referring to something outside the frame, cannot be directly challenged. Depictions of barbed wire dripping blood, a martyred and enslaved island, or a dead woman and her children in a bath can crystallize a set of experiences, contradictions, and questions that refer to a force beyond the frame. The image acquires power not through directness but instead through the uneasy link between suffering and seeing.

For Turkish Cypriots, the martyr's fate witnesses, and the person who sees must also be a witness. At the same time, the martyr asks that the viewer recognize something that is past, a completed eschatology. This differs from Greek Cypriots' portrayals of lost lands and imprisoned martyrs, which draw the reader or viewer into a frame in which the oppressor continues to threaten and may at any moment come through the door. They draw the viewer into an eschatology that is unfinished and ask the viewer to act. So, while the şehitler demand recognition, Greek Cypriot martyrs point to an injustice that must be righted.

These representations gain their power through the uncertain relationship between suffering and seeing. But in doing so, they produce another ambiguity, for they point both to an other beyond the frame, the cause of one's suffering, and to that other as an absent presence, the real other who is addressed by one's representations, who cannot see but should. In the face of their own catastrophes, people on both sides of the divide often asked, “How can they not see our suffering?” This question is implicitly about history, but is more importantly about humanity. These representations both dehumanize the absent other and simultaneously present the possibility of the other's humanity by asking that they recognize one's suffering, that they see.

The images of suffering and wounds that I have described work within a particular economy of signs to produce affects that, by definition, cannot include certain others. They mark the other as the one on the other side of the ceasefire line, the absent/present other whose competing narratives prevent the efficacy of one's own. The inability to reconcile these social constructions of reality is understandable enough when difference can be projected onto a border.Footnote ²⁹ But the inability to reconcile becomes more problematic when interaction is possible, when boundaries become less tangible. The opening of the checkpoints produced a confrontation with the other's images of their own suffering that were framed in culturally specific ways, and often employed religious symbolism. These images produce powerful affects—emotions of sorrow, hatred, loss, and anger—in those for whom they have meaning, but not for those who stand outside their frame (see also Scarry Reference Scarry1985: 129–30; Butler Reference Butler2009).

When the checkpoints were opened, although many people tried to encounter and understand the suffering of the other, they were often confronted with what they perceived as the other's inability to see, to recognize their own suffering. While the suffering of the other was made visible, it was also often not “seen,” or was seen in ways that seemed insufficient to those who had suffered.Footnote ³⁰ And so while the frame that was the border was in the process of breaking down, new frames were created within which the humanity of the other remained in question.

THE BORDERS OF MEMORY

We return now to the revelation with which I began this article: of the fate of the five young men in the famous photograph. Stories about what had happened to them had long circulated in the Turkish Cypriot community, and I had heard some years earlier that Turkish Cypriot fighters had killed them on the spot. But when this open secret was disclosed it upset certain segments of the community. What most troubled them was the continuing revelation that many Greek Cypriot deaths during 1974 that had always been blamed on the Turkish army in fact occurred at the hands of Turkish Cypriots. While the army was certainly responsible for deaths, most of the witness testimonies published since the 2003 opening had, to that time, pointed to Cypriot violators, and more and more face-to-face revenge killings committed by Turkish Cypriots had been revealed.Footnote ³¹

Increasingly, the Turkish Cypriot response to these revelations has been to recall their own suffering, to remember deaths of relatives and difficult years that they had previously tried to forget. In one instance of quid pro quo, the most politicized newspaper in the north published a patently fabricated report brought to them by a “witness” who claimed that in late August 1974 Turkish troops who landed on a well-known beach in north Cyprus had beaten to death 320 Greek Cypriot prisoners being loaded onto boats there.Footnote ³² This “witness” explained that he was tired of only Turkish Cypriots being blamed for the deaths of missing Greek Cypriots, and that Turkey should also be held accountable.

In the circumstance of ongoing political division, even the process of truth-seeking is hampered by the continual struggle to prove suffering, or to create scapegoats and avoid blame. Certain frames that were being shaken even before the checkpoint openings have now been reconstituted in new and equally divisive forms. For instance, the slogan “Dhen Xechno,” though ubiquitous, emotionally potent, and revered, has recently also been maligned and satirized.Footnote ³³ One columnist was led to comment, “‘Den Xechno’ is the vacuous message all our governments, parties, campaign groups, and schools have been trying unsuccessfully to instill in people since the Turkish invasion. It is now a national cliché, which most people laugh at when they see or hear anyone mentioning it.”Footnote ³⁴

I have argued at length elsewhere that the opening of the checkpoints did not destroy the slogan but rather changed its emphasis (Bryant 2010a). Originally a slogan of struggle, many had gradually come to see the call for people to remember their villages as simply a nostalgia for a lost past. The checkpoint opening, however, revived the necessity for struggle. For instance, a friend told me that her young niece one day brought her a drawing that she had done in school of a tourist site in the island's north. When my friend offered to take her there, the little girl replied, horrified, that they could not go. When asked why not, she replied, “Because it is occupied by the Turkish army, and they won't let us in.” Clearly, while the girl's teachers would expect her to learn relatively soon that it is, indeed, possible to go to this and other places in the north, they wanted her to experience that visit in a particular way, through a framework that sees that village as “occupied,” “enslaved,” and unavailable to Greek Cypriots until it is fully restored to its “rightful” owners.

Slogans such as “I do not forget” have not fully disappeared, then, but have instead taken on new meanings. Whereas before 2003 “Dhen Xechno” referred to an anticipated revival and recreation of a lost life that would take place at the moment of return, the slogan's more abstract meaning is now emphasized, reminding refugees not to forget about the violation of their rights. Refugee organizations have, for instance, discouraged displaced persons from visiting their villages, calling this a tacit recognition of the government in the north and so an impediment to “real return.” The slogan has been revived as a call to struggle, a denial of the present and a refusal to relinquish the past's return. As one woman from Lapithos who has been active in the refugee association put it to me, “The image I have of Lapithos is a beautiful one. Either everything will go back to the way it once was, or we will continue to live in our dreams.” Not forgetting thus means much more than simply remembering; it now indicates the capacity to deny the present's transformative influence on the past.

In the north, before the ceasefire line opened there had been an even more radical rethinking of uses of suffering, and in fact it was this rethinking that led to protests against the long-time government of Turkish Cypriot nationalist leader Rauf Denktaş, and ultimately to the opening itself. Many people had started to demand that textbooks be rewritten, and the mayor of north Nicosia had removed the photographs of burned and mutilated bodies once displayed to tourists as they crossed the main Nicosia checkpoint on the ceasefire line that divides the city.

One of the focal points for this radical rethinking was criticism of the aforementioned Museum of Barbarism in Nicosia, a catalogue of gruesome death that culminates in the bathroom where the family was murdered. There, photographs show the three children and their mother huddled in the bath, pieces of flesh torn away by the force of the bullets. The bloodied bathrobe and pajamas that they wore are preserved under a glass case, and the bloodstains, though faded, still form a recognizable pattern on the walls. “I refuse to go there,” a friend who lives near the memorial told me, and many people I know deplored that teachers take their young pupils to the museum. “It's just breeding chauvinism,” they complained, and many young people have even begun to doubt the stories that surrounded the incident.

Before the checkpoints opened, caricatured uses of suffering had already lost their effectiveness, particularly for youth, and were being called into question. These images froze the past in the present, and seemed to prevent young people, especially, from moving on to the future. Paradoxically, images intended to encourage forgetting were countered with the claim that it was “time to put the past behind us.” Until this time, suffering had been emphasized as sacrifice; Turkish Cypriot dead were placed on the pyre of the past. In these narratives, the arrival of Turkish troops appeared to be the end of history, or the beginning of a new history in which Turkish Cypriots had been “liberated,” and in which their migration to the north was an özgürlük göçü, a “freedom migration.” But as Turkish Cypriots began to feel more and more that they lived in what they called an “open-air prison,” as they began to see the power that had liberated them as an oppressor, they realized that the past was not finished but threatened to return.Footnote ³⁵

One way in which it did so was through the breeding of chauvinism that could lead to further conflict. The crude representations of suffering that implied a barbarian other beyond the frame began to seem an old-fashioned form of nationalism that was out of step with the times, and young people were at the forefront of a movement to remove from power the statükocular, those who had tried for so long to maintain the status quo. The “status quo” came to signify the unchanging present, mired in a past that had been insistently forgotten. Many voices were now saying that the only way really to put the past behind was not through forgetting but through remembrance. Before the opening of the checkpoints, many people began calling for recognition of the other's suffering, a recognition that would give that other humanity and so allow them finally to forget.

Here, “putting the past behind us” meant acknowledging everyone's suffering and moving toward the future. Nicosia officials had removed explicit photographs at the Ledra Palace checkpoint even before the opening, and soon after, Turkish Cypriot educators began working to change the history textbooks by eliminating elements that might promote chauvinism. Especially after the checkpoints opened, most people expected some form of reciprocity, that Greek Cypriots would also want to “forget the past” in the interests of creating a common future. People repeated that “France and Germany put the past behind them, and so can we.” But Turkish Cypriots were soon disappointed to find that all the signs and symbols across the checkpoint remained intact, and schoolbooks there did not change. Indeed, in some quarters of Greek Cypriot society, changes in Turkish Cypriot representations of the past were seen as concessions, admissions of the “real” history.

Weary of the constant invocation of suffering, many Turkish Cypriots expressed astonishment at Greek Cypriots' inability to “put the past behind us.” This became especially clear a year after the checkpoints opened when Cypriots voted at separate referenda on a United Nations plan to reunify the island. While Turkish Cypriots supported the plan, Greek Cypriots overwhelmingly rejected it, leading to disappointment and rancor in the north. And within a year of that, Turkish Cypriots were faced with a new intrusion of the past into the present: a number of Greek Cypriots filed lawsuits against foreigners and Turkish Cypriots for use of their property in the north, and used the open checkpoints to deliver summonses. Many Turkish Cypriots in Lapithos began to feel threatened, and almost all of the younger people with whom I spoke complained, “We've changed, but now we see they haven't changed.” They soon began to think that forgetting the past and moving on to the future was not possible unilaterally but depended on a similar move by their former neighbors.

By the time the checkpoints opened, nationalist discourse had been shaken, but with the visits of Greek Cypriots and especially their rejection of the reunification plan, Turkish Cypriots again began to stress their own suffering, this time as a challenge to what they saw as an attempt to erase it. “Of course they suffered, but we suffered more,” I heard repeatedly. This acknowledgment would inevitably be followed by the conclusion, “We have to put the past behind us. We don't want to go back.” In this moment, their own suffering was remade and brought back, now not as sacrifice but as struggle.

Fighters' unions again became vocal, and large flags and new monuments began to appear. Although some of the new symbols and memorials were local reflections of rising nationalism in Turkey,Footnote ³⁶ others were sponsored by Turkish Cypriots who now emphasized a very local nationalism, a dedication to the unrecognized state for which they had fought. A nostalgia for the decade when Turkish Cypriots lived in enclaves developed during this period, as writers in newspapers pined for a time when “everyone had worked together” (Hatay and Bryant Reference Hatay and Bryant2008). New memoirs by fighters and local histories of enclave life began to give substance to their suffering, now not only as sacrifice but also as a struggle that they had undertaken together.

As with the slogan “Dhen Xechno,” many Turkish Cypriots may now joke that it is very difficult to find a house on a street that is not named for a martyr. Many are tired of the constant recollection of suffering, the insistent invocation of the dead. Nevertheless, since the checkpoints' opening, and especially in response to the Greek Cypriot emphasis on keeping wounds alive, Turkish Cypriots have, as I have said, begun to emphasize their own suffering anew, but now they are portraying it not only as sacrifice but also as struggle, not as a past that was completed, but as a past that must not be allowed to return.