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Christoforos Savva, one of the most significant Cypriot artists of the 1960s, was also a highly politicized individual whose leftist worldview paralleled his artistic development. Nevertheless, this side of Savva has not been thoroughly explored. Savva created two forms of art: cementografia and ifasmatografia. Ifasmatografies were based on the vernacular tradition of weaving, while cementografies used modern cement, which was coming to replace stone in building construction. Savva's art departed from contemporary nationalist art production, such as that of the painter Adamantios Diamantis, and it also diverged from the Western colonial/orientalist projections depicting a premodern Cyprus. Overall, Savva's oeuvre bore all the hallmarks of contesting both Cypriot nationalisms—the Greek and the Turkish—since it was inclusive and anti-nationalist in its essence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the Turkish government facing the 1964 Cyprus crisis applied the principle of negative reciprocity toward Greece and expelled Greek citizens living in Turkey. By doing so, Turkey aimed at pressuring Greece to bring the Greek Cypriot side to the negotiation table. Although Turkish policy proved to be a failure, the expulsions continued. The deportation resulted in the demise of the Greek minority in Turkey for the following reasons: first, there were intermarriages between the Greek citizens and the Greek minority; and second, Turkey's Greeks finally lost their hope of being treated as equal Turkish citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Greek-Cypriot media representations of national identities during negotiations on a United Nation Plan (the Annan Plan), aiming to reunite ethnically divided Cyprus under a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation. The study analyzed thematically 57 editorials and lead commentaries published in all the daily Greek-Cypriot Press from the presentation of the Annan Plan in November 2002 to April 2004, at which point two simultaneous referenda were held. The study's findings are consistent with ideas that national identifications are not static and provides an in-depth exploration of exclusive forms of Cypriot identities vis-à-vis more inclusive forms and vis-à-vis hellenocentric identifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Greek Cypriot nationalism has been in large part motivated by the misconceived idea of Cyprus becoming a modern, European society. Although Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, the perception of it by the European north as a culturally marginal Mediterranean society had not changed. This was amply demonstrated in 2013 when Cyprus applied to the EU for urgent financial assistance. It was forced to capitalize its banks through their customers' savings and, although this and other “corrective” measures were couched in seemingly rational economic terms, they were unmistakably a punishment and a civilizational lesson. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article has two main aims. First, it aims to challenge the widespread narrative in Cyprus studies that presents ethnic identities as historically inevitable and natural. Rather, identities need to be conceptualized as socially constructed. The second aim of this article is to problematize the argument that ethnic or national groups are homogenous actors. It underlines the need to deconstruct these supposedly unitary actors by making use of a class-based conceptualization of the state. By using such a conceptualization, the article will focus on the period between 1878 and 1974. It will start with a concrete analysis of the class structure in the Cypriot society and then will trace how different classes in both communities positioned themselves vis-à-vis political structures of power and how these positionings paved the way to the division of the island. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the structures of both the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot press in Cyprus in order to consider the role that gender plays in the construction and distribution of knowledge in Cypriot society. The question is whether columns published across the ideological spectrum in both the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot daily press challenge preconceived notions of gender in the broader communities or whether they reproduce and reinforce previously held patriarchal views of the roles of men and women as citizens in Cyprus. Such views, it is argued, have systematically marginalized women from visible participation in offering alternative futures for the Cypriot communities in Cyprus and relegated them to the position of secondary agents who more often than not play the role of bringing to fruition the imaginings of their male counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the reasons for the nonresolution of the Cyprus problem and for its legendary intractability. It starts by highlighting three distinct features of the Cyprus problem followed by a historical account, with emphasis on attempts at a settlement. The third and fourth parts examine the window of opportunity of 1999-2004 (Cyprus's European Union accession process and the Annan Plan) and the reasons for its spectacular failure, and the more recent negotiation (2008-10) that was initially promising but is now hanging from a thread. The last part focuses on nine reasons for the impasse that has made the Cyprus conflict impervious to reunification and resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As renewed talks for the reunification of Cyprus encounter familiar barriers, this essay urges the reader to consider the importance of language use in the Greek Cypriot community. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's work on speech and writing, it examines the political significance of Demotic Greek and the Cypriot Greek spoken every day, arguing that the conflicts of Greek Cypriot identity since decolonization are played out by the tension between the two forms of Greek. Demotic use invokes an essential Greek identity that excludes the Oriental, particularly Turkish, Other. However, its use remains primarily written even though it summons the classical philosophy and Greek Orthodoxy that celebrate speech, not writing, as the mode of self-expression. Paradoxically, the use of written Demotic presents a Hellenized version of Cyprus at the same time that it undermines one of the foundational principles of Hellenic culture. Cypriot Greek persists in speech, resisting the textual seduction and invasion by Demotic. It can, with its explicit, supranational diversity, be understood as a celebration of Cypriot difference that demonstrates the multi-faceted construction of identity on the island. Indeed, Cypriot Greek deconstructs the hierarchical opposition between Occidental and Oriental. In its difference from Demotic, Cypriot Greek invokes the polyculturalism of Cyprus, an instance of the diversity too often ignored and repressed in diverse locations across the Mediterranean and the Middle East with tragic consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An island constantly subject to foreign rule, Cyprus has a history of continual struggle and negotiation with larger powers. After a succession of various occupations and rulers, Cyprus became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1571 and remained a Turkish province until 1878 when Britain assumed administration of the island. On 1 April 1955, the Greek Cypriot anticolonial group EOKA started a campaign of violence against British rule and the result was a four-year revolutionary struggle organized and led by right-wing nationalists. Cypriot communists and Turkish Cypriots were forbidden from joining the EOKA ranks. Fought to a standstill, the British withdrew in 1959, and negotiations led to the creation of the independent Republic of Cyprus on 16 August 1960. Within three years of independence, however, violent inter-communal conflict began as a result of a Greek Cypriot determination to modify the constitutional safeguards that had been incorporated into the agreements of 1960 in order to protect the Turkish Cypriot minority. This resulted in the withdrawal of the Turkish Cypriot community from their constitutional role and position and the establishment of a 'green line' dividing the two communities in Nicosia, the island's capital. These enclave borders and the neutral zone that divided the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot areas of the city were guarded by the British and subsequently by United Nations troops for the following ten years. Progress towards a solution was slow and was ultimately overtaken by the actions of the military junta in Greece who, in 1974, launched a suicidal coup to take control in Cyprus. Turkey used the Greek coup as an opportunity to justify an intervention on 'humanitarian' grounds in order to protect the Turkish Cypriots. As a consequence of their involvement in Cyprus, the over-extended Greek military government was humiliated and fell, and democracy returned to Greece. The consequences for Cyprus were catastrophic as the Turkish military occupied 37 per cent of the island. International opinion supported the initial Turkish action insofar as it served to protect the Turkish Cypriots, but condemned the brutality with which it was conducted and the invasion of half of the island in which it resulted. As a result, several thousand Greek Cypriots were killed, hundreds disappeared, and about 70 per cent of the island's productive capacity fell into the hands of the Turkish army. The Turkish Cypriots, who had suffered from 1964, felt themselves to be liberated. Two hundred thousand Greek Cypriots found their land invaded and themselves homeless, living in tents for the whole of the summer of 1974. After 1974, the Greek Cypriot side immediately launched a policy of negotiation in order to have some of what was lost returned. The occupied north, the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, remains an unrecognized state and continues to struggle economically. It is currently recognized only by Turkey. In the politically turbulent years that followed 1974, the non-occupied south managed to rebuild itself materially and diplomatically and, more recently, to accede to the European Union on 1 May 2004 after a last-ditch UN-brokered reunification deal was rejected by an overwhelming majority of Greek Cypriots in a referendum they felt was unfair. The Turkish Cypriots and Turkey supported the UN plan, as a solution would give Turkey the green light to go ahead with its European Union accession aspirations and grant the Turkish Cypriots international access and substantial financial support. The following dialogue attempts to read and critique some contemporary Cypriot phenomena in light of this tragic legacy of strife, division and a history of ethnic trauma. Speaking to the current situation of Cyprus, this dialogue, written over the course of a month, took place between Spurgeon Thompson, Assistant Professor of English at Cyprus College, Nicosia, Stavros St. Karayanni, currently Visiting Scholar at the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver, Canada, and Myria Vassiliadou, Director of the Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Intercollege, Nicosia, Cyprus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Cypriots before and since independence in 1960 experienced a double patriotism that contributed to the prolongation of the conflict between the two communities in their country. They identified with the island on which they lived as well as with the nation, Greece or Turkey, from which their ancestors had come. These patriotisms changed after the landing of the Turkish troops in 1974 when Cyprus was split into two distinct sections clearly based upon Turkish and Greek ethnicity. An attempt is made here to describe the resulting insecurity that played a significant role in preventing a resolution of the conflict in 1984-1985. For inductive, theoretical reasons a deliberate effort is also made to isolate ensuing "consequences" and hence to salvage old and slightly new generalizations that perhaps transcend this particular conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]