I transcribed and translated the following documentary created as a project by journalism students at the University of Cyprus, which includes interviews with both Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot former residents of Agios Sozomenos. I am grateful to Danae Michael, Andreas Paphitis, and Raphaella Stavrinou for their work and letting me translate their video.
[NARRATOR:] Agios Sozomenos: a village of the Nicosia District, between Geri and Potamia. A small village, which was once shared by Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, living peacefully under mud-brick roofs. The only thing that separated them was a road.
If you happen to pass by the fields of the village, you probably don’t realize the history hidden in their soil. The fields were once playful, carefree places — symbols of unity, coexistence, and trust.
All of this until 6 February 1964, when the village’s fate would take a decisive turn. That was when the fields were transformed into symbols of suspicion, division, and conflict. The occasion for this transformation was the intercommunal strife of 1963–64, which could not have left the village unaffected.
On 6 February 1964, fighting broke out in Agios Sozomenos that left 6 Greek Cypriots and 7 Turkish Cypriots dead, and led to the abandonment of the village by all of its residents. Here, I present the narrative of those events as we can reconstruct them from the surviving sources.
The issue of Phileleftheros on 6 February 1964 led with the headline “Cyprus was Painted with Fresh Blood from Turkish Chauvinists”.
Turkish Cypriots who recount the event start the story on 21 December 1963, when there was also fighting over the water pumping station in Agios Sozomenos, or even 30 October 1963, when a Turkish-Cypriot shepherd was kidnapped. For them, the events of 6 February were part of a series of escalating events that disrupted peace in the village.
On Thursday 6 February itself, fighting broke out over the water pumping station (υδραγωγείο), which controlled water access to the larger villages of Athienou and Pyroi, as well as Agios Sozomenos itself. According to multiple Greek Cypriots interviewed after the events, a group of six police escorted an official of the municipality to the water pumping station in order to open a valve. As they were nearing the Alikos river near the village, they came under fire from an ambush of a handful of Turkish Cypriots who were hidden on the opposite bank. The automatic weapons riddled the Land Rover with bullet holes and killed the driver and one other passenger instantly, with the car veering out of control and a subsequent exchange of fire.
Reinforcements of Greek-Cypriot police arrived, and fighting continued between the two sides. (It’s unclear how many of those fighting were from Agios Sozomenos itself, although the police were certainly from other parts and the Turkish Cypriots involved in the ambush were from the village itself.) British troops were dispatched to calm the situation and tend to the wounded. The British took 4 to 5 hours to calm the situation, imposing a ceasefire and tending to the wounded.
The immediate result were 5 Greek Cypriots dead and 12 wounded, with 1 seriously injured person dying the next day. 7 Turkish Cypriots were reported dead and 15 wounded. (It’s worth noting that the village itself was predominantly Turkish; inhabitants say there were 30 Turkish-Cypriot families and 6 Greek-Cypriot ones, with census data from 1960 saying there were 172 TC inhabitants and 25 Greek Cypriots. One former resident said that most Greek Cypriots left the village even before fighting broke out, so that there were only two old Greeks left in the village on 6 February.) The Turkish Cypriot press subsequently claimed that there was no ambush per se, but rather 6 Greek Cypriots who came with the intent of terrorizing the inhabitants of Agios Sozomenos. Nonetheless, it is clear that the fighting started with conflict over the water pumping station when the Land Rover driven by Greek Cypriot police was attacked by Turkish Cypriots.
The dead Greek Cypriots were honored in Parliament the next day, and given funerals in their own villages and cities. Particularly notable is the case of Demetris Chamatsos, who was an 18-year-old student at the vocational school in Nicosia. Today, there is a statue dedicated to him in the nearby village of Dali. Among Turkish Cypriots, an 11-year-old boy named Ismail died in the fighting.
The village was evacuated under the supervision of British forces, with most Turkish Cypriot villagers going to the nearby enclave of Louroujina (Akincilar). They subsequently moved to other parts of Cyprus, with many ending up in Nicosia and many other in Argaki near Morphou (Güzelyurt). The remaining Greek Cypriots joined those who had fled earlier in the nearby villages of Geri, Pyroi, and Potamia. When Turkish Cypriots returned to the village several years later, they found the mosque destroyed and many of the houses in ruins.
This event took place within the context of rising tensions between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and the breakdown of constitutional order, commonly known as the “disturbances” of 1963–64. In the aftermath of the fighting in Agios Sozomenos, many political actors appealed for calm (including President Makarios, AKEL, and the Confederation of Trade Organizations). Nonetheless, the situation continued to escalate. On 4 March 1964, the Security Council agreed to adopt Resolution 186, which established the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus. UNFICYP continues to patrol Cyprus until today.
For more information on the aftermath and context of these events, see the following two excellent films, which feature both testimony and archival footage:
Primary sources
I consulted the following sources in detail to construct the above narrative:
I wrote this as a short ten-minute presentation of an ongoing research project on Agios Sozomenos. For more information, please visit the landing page here.
If you visit the abandoned village of Agios Sozomenos when the wind blows the right way, an unmistakable scent wafts through the air: cow manure. Green stalks of barley stood proud in the fields nearby when I arrived on one sunny day in spring. Visitors stream to the ruins every day — farmers done with their chores, suburban office workers taking the day off, wannabe Instagram influencers, and seemingly everyone in-between. It doesn’t take long to start wondering: just why does this place attract so many different people? Answering this question, I argue, helps us see how this site functions as a public thing that brings people together, in all their plurality, around a common object.
This is the final paper written for a Fall 2018 course with Nancy Jacobs called Southern African Frontiers. I have given the first three paragraphs below — for the rest, please see my full paper here!
In February 2018, the Parliament of South Africa established a committee to explore whether and how to “make it possible for the state to expropriate land in the public interest without compensation.” In order to hear testimony from across South African society, the committee organized public hearings in all provinces from 26 June to 4 August 2018. Many spoke of how white farmers — less than 9% of South Africa’s population — still own 67% of the land a quarter-century after the end of apartheid. Redistributing this land, for many, is a clear step toward redress of historical injustices perpetuated by white settler colonialism. Others invoked the specter of Zimbabwe, where land seizures led to economic freefall and long-term political instability. While few testifying before the committee opposed land reform in principle, many argued against the arbitrary abrogation of property rights and the concomitant sprawl of government power.
On 6 September 2018, the committee heard seven hours of oral submissions in Cape Town. One of the first to testify was the head of Indigenous First Nation Advocacy South Africa (IFNASA), Anthony Williams, who claimed to represent the Khoi-San community. Williams argued in favor of land expropriation without compensation. For him, this meant not just amending the constitution to correct for the injustices of apartheid (which only really began after World War II) but also to allow for land claims prior to 1913. Williams decried the focus on Bantu-speaking communities and further asked why his submission was the only one heard from the Khoi-San community. Committee members in turn expressed skepticism over Khoi-San claims to indigeneity, concern over racial stratification, and suggestions of alternative recourse for the redress sought.
This vignette serves to frame my paper. I will attempt to corral a teeming mass of evidence to provide some kind of response to two questions prompted by Williams’ testimony. First, when and why are Khoi-San land claims expressed? Second, how and why are they received? The framework of my investigation follows the three concepts mentioned in my title: continuity, representation, and redress. The first section will thus explore the history of South Africa from 1652 to 1994 to help understand the kinds of continuity and rupture experienced by the Khoi-San. The second section will focus on representation of the Khoi-San in the quarter-century since the end of apartheid in 1994. In each section, I do not want to reproduce the wealth of scholarship that has preceded me. Instead, I illustrate several examples that will help guide us back to the testimony of Anthony Williams before the Constitutional Review Committee. Through these examples, we will begin to discern common tropes that undergird discussions about the Khoi-San: allochrony, continuity, “truth and reconciliation” nationalism, and strategic essentialism. I contend that to understand Anthony Williams’ testimony, and hence the situation of the Khoi-San in contemporary South Africa, we must be sensitive not just to immediate cause-and-effect (as with political debates over the Khoi-San today) but also to alterity and the longue durée of history. This process of talking and listening to the Khoi-San sheds light on questions of redress in South Africa and around the world.
I recently found out that my proposal for an independent concentration in Critical Thought and Global Social Inquiry has been approved! Just what does this mean, and why am I so happy about it?
First of all, a few words on what an independent concentration is (at Brown). Apart from the standard concentrations (majors) we offer, every student has the opportunity to design their own course of study. This concentration proposal must be reviewed and approved by a subcommittee of the College Curriculum Council, the same body that approves regular concentrations. The process of proposing an IC is supervised by the Curricular Resource Center, which has multiple peer student staffers who meet regularly with students who want to create an IC. The actual proposal is long and rigorous. Furthermore, the committee almost as a rule rejects first-time applications; there is a heavy emphasis on the process of proposing an IC as a conversation between the committee and the student with the aim being to create a well-articulated, coherent, and rigorous course of study that aligns with Brown’s wider educational goals. I personally found this process extremely rewarding: it helped me process my interests and a few thoughts that had been rolling around in my head (many because of courses I had taken). I am now much more articulate about these interests and I have a much better idea of how they align with my broader life goals. Although the process of creating an IC is arduous, for me it was well worth it.
To explain what my Independent Concentration is about, here’s an excerpt from my proposal (which you can find in full here):
What is Critical Thought and Global Social Inquiry? It is the study of global social phenomena such as postcolonialism, nationalism, and global justice through the philosophical lens of critical theory. I think dialectically about both the institutions derived from the Enlightenment and the practices, communities, and identities developed and deployed in resistance to these institutions. I am thus equally invested in studying the universal and metropolitan on the one hand and the particular and peripheral on the other. As a field of study, I imagine my Independent Concentration as a conversation with a number of figures invested in this dialectic – chief among them Edward Said, Hannah Arendt, and Cornel West. In many ways, this field of study is constituted by its intellectual genealogy: while investigating questions about how societies cohere, how politics functions, and how the past shapes our present (and drawing on sources from many times and places), what distinguishes Critical Thought and Global Social Inquiry is its distinctive perspective. This reflexive, provisional approach is gathered from the theoretical consciousness developed through the philosophical tradition of critique. Given my commitment to provisionality and reflexivity, I do not intend through this concentration to provide conclusive answers to the questions I described above. The fundamental aim of Critical Thought and Global Social Inquiry is instead to develop concrete questions, modes of interpretation, and resources for action that resonate across different commitments and backgrounds. Through my concentration, I develop a map – a way to navigate the incredible diversity of thought and experience our world has to offer.
I begin by giving a short introduction to baybayin, followed by a brief history; both these sections mostly summarize previously published material. I then consider variation in baybayin before ending with contemporary concerns of identity and ideology, considering especially how baybayin is implicated in Filipino nationalism. Please feel free to browse to any of these sections — I hope my writing is useful to you!
Overview
A portion of the Tagalog catechism from the Doctrina Christiana. Source: Paul Morrow.
Baybayin is a writing system native to the Philippines, attested from before Spanish colonization through to at least the eighteenth century.1 The word baybay means “to spell” in Tagalog, which was the language most frequently written with the baybayin script. Apart from Tagalog, baybayin (with some necessary changes) was used to write Ilocano (Iloko), Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Bisaya, and Bikol. The identification of baybayin with languages other than Tagalog is a contested subject, as I describe below.Continue reading “Baybayin and nationalism”→
