Like so many Cypriots, Meletis Apostolides has long been haunted by memories of a lost past.
All his adult life he has yearned to return to his boyhood home — and this week, nearly 35 years after war left what should be an idlyllic corner of the Levant brutally divided, the European court of justice brought him one step closer to fulfilling that dream. Even now, in late middle age, the architect can still recall the scent of the lemon trees, the smell of the sea, the dappled light that filtered through the citrus orchards of Lapithos, the village in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus where he and his ancestors were born.
“It’s never gone,” he says, homing in, with Google Earth, on the property his family was forced to flee when Turkey, in the name of protecting its minority on the island, invaded in 1974.
The Apostolides family — like 170,000 other Greek Cypriots forcibly displaced at the time — always thought they’d be back. Instead, with only minutes to gather their possessions and with the Turkish military entrenching its positions in response to a coup aimed at uniting the island with Greece, they found themselves turned into refugees and robbed of their past overnight.
“The only thing my mother, Andriani, managed to take were her threads and embroideries,” says Apostolides, 24 at the time. “We left photo albums, everything. People think that [my legal battle] has been all about money, when actually it is about roots, memory and culture. My family had lived in that part of the island since 1860.”
In Cyprus’ supercharged politics few issues excite more passion than that of properties lost during the conflict. In the war’s wake peace talks aimed at resolving the West’s longest-running diplomatic dispute have repeatedly collapsed on the matter of refugees’ rights and land exchange. Enraged by the European court’s decision to back Apostolides’s claim to property — since bought by a retired British couple — Turkish Cypriot politicians have threatened to walk out of reunification talks.
“Cypriots are very attached to their land. In England you had an industrial revolution, here we did not,” Cyprus’ former president George Vasiliou said. “Until fairly recently people lived from their land so it meant a lot to them, and before the invasion northern Cyprus was almost exclusively Greek. Then there is memory. That plays a role too.”
Like many on either side of the ethnic divide, Apostolides returned with his mother — and their title deeds — to see his home in 2003, the year that Turkish Cypriot authorities lifted restrictions on intercommunal travel.
“It was the first, and only time, that my mother would see it after the war,” he says.
When Apostolides pressed charges against Linda and David Orams, the English couple who built their dream home on his land in 2002, he never envisaged the case would cause such a furor.
“I decided to take legal action after a chance meeting with Mrs Orams on the plot in 2003,” he says. “She was out watering the plants and when I asked her who she was, she said ‘I am the owner of this villa.’ I said ‘I am the owner of the land’ and she responded by saying ‘well that was a long time ago.’”
Five days after the European court pronounced that the UK judiciary should enforce the decision of a Nicosia court to return the property to its original owner, and demolish the villa to boot, the affair looks set to run and run — not least among the estimated 6,000 Britons who have also picked up properties at bargain prices in the territory that is only recognized by Ankara.
But Vasiliou says: “Greek Cypriots may feel justice has been rendered, that property is sacrosanct. However, serious people on this island also know that the best way to solve this issue is through speeding up negotiations and reaching a settlement, not taking individual cases to court.”
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