Abstract
This chapter explores the divisive commemoration of the battle of Erenköy, which has gained significance since the early 2000s in a resignifying of Turkish Cypriot history. Over time, the commemoration has shifted from a triumphalism symbolized in monuments to an act of mourning at the graves of the fallen. We show through this commemoration how actors have repurposed official narratives, deterritorializing them from the terrain of nationalist ideology and its countermemory and reterritorializing them in ways that look similar but are affectively quite different. We argue that this repurposing of the ritual produces an affect of agency among participants that is open-ended and future oriented.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter was written as part of a four-year interdisciplinary project, Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict (CRIC), funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme and led by Dr. Marie-Louise Stig Sorensen of Cambridge University’s Archaeology Department, with the Peace Research Institute Oslo’s Cyprus Centre as a project partner.
- 2.
A growing transitional justice literature on memorialization and commemoration attempts to address the ways in which stubbornly lasting memorials to violence and its victims may impede or promote peace (e.g., Duncan 2009; Hepworth 2014; Jinks 2014; MacDonald 2006; Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996). As numerous scholars of peace education have noted, one of the primary problems is how to enable mourning, and how to teach future generations about the conflict, without producing enmity (e.g., Cole 2007; Zembylas 2014). Although a full discussion of this problem is beyond the scope of this chapter, we wish to acknowledge that the commemoration discussed here is similarly contested. In that regard, this chapter offers the modest contribution of illuminating a ceremony that holds central significance in the Turkish Cypriot historical imaginary but is almost unknown in the island’s south.
- 3.
In this chapter, we will refer to the village only by its Turkish name, because this is the way in which it has entered Turkish Cypriot history, and it is the only name by which most Turkish Cypriots know it.
- 4.
From their establishment, probably sometime in the nineteenth century, the villages were Muslim and Greek-speaking. The village acquired its Turkish name during a flurry of toponym changes in 1958, when the Turkish Cypriot leadership of the time, in the form of the Turkish Cypriot Federation of Institutions (Kıbrıs Türk Kurumlar Federasyonu), undertook to change the names of all Turkish or Turkish-majority villages and neighborhoods. As we describe elsewhere (Bryant and Hatay forthcoming 2020), this was a process in which villagers were consulted and their approval sought.
- 5.
The Erenköy battle’s significance in Turkish Cypriot collective memory has constituted a side interest of both authors for more than two decades, with Bryant (2004) first writing about its continuing symbolic significance in the Turkish Cypriot political terrain and later about forms of historical revision (2012b). This chapter, then, is based on archival research, oral histories and memoirs, and interviews with former fighters and villagers over a period of about 20 years, as well as ethnographic research since 2008 on the battle’s commemoration.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
For observations on a very similar secular pilgrimage and ‘pilgrims’ motivations for undertaking the journey, see Hyde and Harman (2011).
- 10.
One anonymous reader of this chapter asked if Turkish Cypriots were not also dissatisfied, as the reader presumed that Turkish Cypriots worked for partition. In a previous article (Bryant and Hatay 2011) and a forthcoming book (Bryant and Hatay forthcoming 2020), we examine the institutions of a state-within-a-state that emerged during the enclave period of the 1960s, and the ways in which an unrecognized state emerged after the island’s division in 1974. In our survey of newspapers of the period of the 1960s and 1970s, and in around four hundred interviews with Turkish Cypriot displaced persons, administrators, and politicians, we did not encounter anyone who was dissatisfied with the 1960 Republic of Cyprus, although they did anticipate that it would not last. Both of these responses should not be surprising, as the RoC constitution gave a numerical minority of 18% the right to occupy 30% of the civil service positions, as well as a crucial veto right over legislation. Turkish Cypriots tended to be satisfied with the arrangement but also aware of Greek Cypriot dissatisfaction with the compromise.
- 11.
The two books of that title were written by former fighter Oktay Öksüzoğlu and Turkish Cypriot political leader Rauf Raif Denktaş, who had been banished from the island and made a secret landing there by fishing boat in 1964. Turkish Cypriot poet Mehmet Yaşın, in a history of Turkish Cypriot poetry, describes an “Erenköy Movement” and claims that these books of poetry “were like diaries that put the conflict on paper. They are full of frightening images, aggressive expressions, and a dark state of mind” (2005: 107). See also Kıbrıs Türk Milli Şiirler Antolojisi (1971).
- 12.
“The Fighters of the Cyprus Epic” (Kıbrıs Destanı Mücahitler), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdjWl7wwWYQ&t=686s
- 13.
- 14.
It was the discovery of the village’s function that led to the Greek Cypriot armed forces’ attack five years later, though there also appears to have been considerable misinformation involved, as the area is still commonly believed to have been a beachhead for the landing of Turkish troops. While Greek Cypriot journalist Makarios Droushiotis does say that most of those landing at the beachhead were Turkish Cypriot students, he claims that “in five days the Turks had landed 500 men a day at Mansoura” (Droushiotis 2006: 28). This would have amounted to at least 2500 fighters, whereas all memoirs and writings of men who were stationed there and villagers themselves state that the total figure was a bit over 500.
- 15.
For details on the troop build-up and the attack, see Report by the Secretary-General on the United Nations Operation in Cyprus, S/5950, 10 September 1964, pp. 21–22.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
‘ For a longer transcription of this interview, see Bryant (2012b).
- 19.
Figures provided by the Erenköy Fighters Association.
- 20.
Stefanos Evripidou, “Turkish Cypriots mark Kokkina ‘victory,’ as survivors recall bombings,” 9 August 2014, http://cyprus-mail.com/2014/08/09/turkish-cypriots-mark-kokkina-victory-as-survivors-recall-bombings/
- 21.
An anonymous reader asked if the affect of agency produced may be in opposition to Turkey, particularly as Turkish Cypriots’ relations with that country have grown increasingly tense in recent years as a result of political developments in Turkey and their effect on the island. We find that what the ceremony shows is in fact the affective complexity of that relationship, which may contain elements of both love and loathing, of both gratitude and resentment, at the same time.
- 22.
In what appears to be the only other academic study of commemoration and affect, Stockwell (2014) examines women’s narratives of violence both by the Argentinian government and by left-wing guerrillas to argue that “the affect generated by shared memories of trauma acts as an invisible yet potent cultural force” (p. 42). This seems to suggest that shared affect constructed through commemoration regarding others constitutes an important impediment to reconciliation. While our argument does not discount the role of mourning and trauma in the Erenköy commemorations, we point to the ways in which affect may be explicitly future-oriented.
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Bryant, R., Hatay, M. (2019). From Salvation to Struggle: Commemoration, Affect, and Agency in Cyprus. In: Sørensen, M., Viejo-Rose, D., Filippucci, P. (eds) Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1_3
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