Cyprus and its Places of Desire by Lisa Dikomitis

Author:Lisa Dikomitis [Dikomitis, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848858992
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2012-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Larnatsjiotes place soil on their mother’s grave in Nicosia

Greek Cypriot refugees do the ordinary things they used to do when they were still living in the village (e.g., collecting water, picking fruits and walking through their fields). Now, these activities are no longer ordinary. They have become rituals that can be conceptualized as ‘acts of memory’, even if performed in the actual locale they want to remember. The ritualization of these sensory-affective performances can be seen as ‘nostalgia’, as a strong desire to reenact experiences.

One evening, I observed two brothers in front of a computer screen with a huge pile of pictures next to them and dozens of others spread out on the table. They were discussing the different localities in Larnakas, pointing them out on Google Earth, enlarging the maps on the screen until they became blurred, and noting on the back of the pictures the name of the location and sometimes the name of the Greek Cypriot owner. I have witnessed several occasions where refugees extend, in a certain sense, their journey to the village by turning their attention to the tangible reminders of their visit once they are back in the city. They rearrange the flowers with utmost care, drink the water, cook food with the bay leaves they collected, eat the fruit, watch the video footage and look at pictures. In that sense, the ‘acting out of memory’ continues long after they left the village.

Pilgrims and Tourists

Greek Cypriot refugees attempt to recreate the religious and cultural cartography of the village through these ‘pilgrimages’. The sense of continuity and community, which is less apparent where they live, is to a certain extent re-established in the rural locality where refugees coincidently meet. The movement between their present houses in the south and their villages allows them to exercise agency and recreate community. However this can only be done in a fragmentary manner, because they have to return to the city. Depending on their attitudes towards religion and religious practice, the rituals vary from familiar religious routines to ad hoc rites. The religious cartography of their villages has changed (little chapels have disappeared, churches have been desecrated and all other religious paraphernalia are gone), so these refugees have reconstructed the symbolic geography of their villages through their return visits.

Those refugees who engaged in frequent return visits found some comfort, as they told me, in the religious and secular rituals they performed in their villages. Although they would never get used to the sight of their altered village, undertaking these kind of ‘pilgrimages’ is an opportunity to reconstruct its social space. Anthropologist Elzbieta Gozdziak argued that ‘the spiritual context of human suffering should provide a foundation for understanding and responding to the suffering of refugees. ( . . . ) Rituals play an instrumental role in trauma healing’.25 That they were able to carry out religious and secular rituals helped the refugees’ come to terms with the new reality of being able to cross the border and visit their villages.

Although

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