A ditch that has been long dead/inactive
Yorgos Prodromou
Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Atenas, Greece
MEMORIAMEDIA Review 5. Art.2. 2020
photo: Maria Antoniadou / Memória Imaterial edition
All the names in this article have been changed, except from Mustafa.
In this essay I will narrate the murder of a Turkish Cypriot named Mustafa, by the Greek Cypriot Nikos Kiprianou. His killing took place in 1964, the period in which the Bi-Communal violence between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots reached its breaking point. The recounting of this story is based upon two oral history interviews I conducted in March 2015. The first one is with Yiannis and the second one with Andreas Vasiliou. The difficulty of this narration relies on the absence of an accurate archive which could tell the story of Mustafa, either in the form of an auto-biographical life-story, either through the recounting of a person who was close to him. I aim to show that this form of difficulty in the narrative could be confronted only through the process of letting the “brackets” and the “ellipsis” of the oral history recounting to speak by means of their vacancy.
Keywords: Cyprus, violence, conflict, Oral History.