Shafak Nihat tells the story of Muratagha (Maratha)...
Sevgul Uludag
Caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Muratagha (Maratha) was a small village. It had only one school. In this school, there was only one classroom… In this classroom, all classes were taught the lessons of the elementary school…
I have a photo taken from that time… It must be either 1972 or 1974… Kids of all ages, stand with their teacher in this photograph. The teacher was Ahmet Yorgancioglu – he was the only teacher of the school… The school had no headmaster or any other teachers…
The photo is very striking for me because all of these kids have been killed and buried in a mass grave, together with their mothers by an EOKA-B team in August 1974… All kids, except one – Shafak Nihat whom we can see in this photo is the only one left alive because he managed to hide and save himself from the same fate…
We sit down to talk with Shafak… Born in 1960 his father came from Muratagha (Maratha) and his mother from Cihangir (Abohor-Ebikho). As a teacher his father taught at different villages and they went around the Karpaz area with him. When his father retired back in 1972, they settled in Muratagha (Maratha).
He remembers his elementary school:
`It was a nice school. It had only one classroom; it had a very nice garden with trees. Our teacher was Ahmet Yorgancioglu... From the third class onwards, he was my teacher... He was a very modern teacher... In 1974, I had finished the first year of secondary school. I used to go to the Namik Kemal Lycee and was staying at the dormitory at the top floor of the school. I would come back on the weekends to the village. Cemal Dayi had a village bus and I would come home to look after our animals... We had goats and some sheep. My task was to take them out... I used to take the animals about a kilometre away from the village... My father had land and I would bring the goats to graze on this land...`
Their house was not in the centre of the village – perhaps that's the only reason why he is alive today... Because the EOKA-B teams were focusing in the centre of the village...
On the 20th of July the villagers were arrested and brought to Peristerona Pygi and spent the night there… The next day, the women and children were sent back to the village. It was not just Muratagha (Maratha) but also Sandallar (Sandallaris) and Atlilar (Aloa) whose men remained in Pygi and women and children sent back to their villages. About a week or ten days later, the elderly men were also sent back to their villages. Shafak's father Hasan Nihat returned but his two elder brothers, Günesh and Mustafa İlker remained there... Later these prisoners would be taken to Limassol as prisoners of war...
From the research I have done and from what an old EOKA fighter, Dionisis Malas told me in his interview, what happened afterwards in the village was horrifying… Malas had a farm and a house in Ayios Sergios (Yeni Boghazichi). As he was in the village coffee shop one day, he heard the EOKA-B members boasting about raping the women of these three small villages. When Malas started arguing with them that what they were doing was wrong, they also went after him and wanted to kill him! Malas had to leave the village, and only return after about 10 or 12 days… Meanwhile the EOKA-B members went to his house, searching for him… His son, Stavros, who was barely 7 years old, remembers the terror:
`One of them put a gun inside my mouth and told me that if I don't say where my father is, he would shoot me! Imagine this! Those who put a gun in the mouth of a seven year old kid, how can you call them human?`
Stavros knew where his father was but he did not say it… Malas is married to a close relative of the late Archbishop Makarios, therefore he was close with Makarios… And he was in the task team set up by Makarios to follow EOKA-B members of the area… Therefore, Malas also became the target of EOKA-B…
So in the three small villages the rapes and the harassment of the women continued… On the 14th of August when the second round of the 1974 military operation of Turkey began, they panicked… Malas thinks that in order to hide the rapes, they killed all those alive in the three villages. He thinks, that was the reason behind the mass graves…
So they rounded up the women, children and the elderly of the villages and shot them and buried them in two different mass graves.
Shafak and his family went into hiding early in the morning on the 14th of August 1974, when they heard shots around 6 o'clock… Shafak, his mother and his sister hid in a storeroom of the house, where they had his grandmother's remaining furniture… He hid himself in `havetta` (wheat) while his mother was hiding in the chimney of an old fireplace. His father was hiding in straw in another place…
So the EOKA-B members came here as well, breaking the door of the house, looking for them, not managing to find them… Shafak remembers praying:
`Oh God, please! Let them not hear the beating of my heart!`
Ιn his hiding place, Shafak waited for hours… He does not recall this but later, his mother told him that at one point he got out of the barrel made of earth, full of havetta, took off his t-shirt, cleaned his sweat and went back into the barrel again…
Towards evening when everything was quiet he got out, going round the house, seeing the broken door, drinking some water…
Later a strange sound began – girchh, girchh, girchh… What was it? They realized that someone across their house was getting water from the well… Shafak, after telling his mother of this, went out to check… Perhaps it was his uncle, getting water from the well to give to his animals. In fact, it was… He found his uncle and they moved to his house… There was no sign of his father…
The following day, they realized that they were alone in the village… All the houses were empty… They also found his father – he was apparently hiding in the straw at the back of the house…
The village looked deserted… When the Turkish army moved in, they told them their stories and went away for a night to stay in a camp, later returning to their village… Together with his uncle, Shafak started tending to the animals whose owners had disappeared… He would get on a donkey and bring the animals to a well to be given water…
The authorities had checked whether there was a large group of women and children in Limassol – perhaps they were taken there as prisoners of war? But no, there was no such group…
As a child, Shafak used to go to a rubbish dump to check whether he could find things that he could play with… He used to collect the empty shells of batteries that UN soldiers had thrown away… That day too, he went there on his donkey to look at the rubbish dump…
`The shape of the rubbish dump had changed… I realized that there were now, three or four pyramids in the rubbish damp… There was a terrible smell of deterioration… As I came closer, at the top of a pyramid, I saw a hand sticking out of his pyjamas… So, I said to myself, here is where the missing people of our village are!`
He had discovered where the villagers from Maratha-Sandallaris were buried… This was the mass burial site… The EOKA-B members had killed and buried them here… All the babies, all the mothers, all the children were buried here, in this rubbish damp…
At first the EOKA-B members had brought a bulldozer from Peristerona Pygi but it wouldn't work. So they went to a nearby village and took someone with his bulldozer to come and bury the women and children. When the bulldozer operator came and saw what he was about to do, he abandoned his bulldozer and ran away from there… They killed and buried the women and children and tried to also burn them…
What Shafak had discovered was a mass grave… And during the opening of the mass grave, he was there… He saw his school mates being brought out – he recognized each and every one body being taken out of the mass grave…
`The smell was terrible… Everyone had handkerchiefs or masks… I didn't. I just went around, looking and seeing… Now, as a grown up, as a teacher, no smell can turn my stomach…`
Because he had smelt death…
Though a bright student, Shafak's marks started going down in class… But he managed to survive with the scars of the mass grave imprinted in his heart and soul… Today he is a teacher at Minarelikeuy (Nea Chorgo Kythrea) Elementary School.
`I never abandoned the village… I go there to plant in my garden… My mother lives there… I go at least two or three times a week` he tells me… `Perhaps this also helped me, I mean not abandoning the village…`
He remained, taking care of his village. Even though he lives in Nicosia, he goes regularly to Muratagha (Maratha) to water his plants, to tend his garden and to be present as the only child, remaining alive from his class…
Tony Angastiniotis, the outcast Greek Cypriot film director who now lives in the northern part of the island, in his documentary, also had Shafak speaking about his experiences. Tony went on a journey of discovering these mass graves and when he tried to show his documentaries in the southern part of the island, he could not find any television station to show them... He became an outcast, having to leave the southern part to come to live in the northern part of the island... His book in three languages, Turkish, Greek and English called `Trapped in the Green Line` tells of his experiences and the story behind the documentary he made called the Voice of Blood... Shafak Nihat also has a part in this documentary…
`Tony showed this film one night at the Atatürk Cultural Centre… Later a woman from Istanbul approached me… "You must be really affected by all of this, you must have got some psychological treatment" she told me… "No" I told her… "We did not… We never had such an opportunity…" We went through a trauma and we are not even aware of it… This trauma must have had an effect on my life…
Despite all this, we, as Turkish Cypriots don't hold grudges… We can't speak of feelings of vengeance… Even after this, we are not a community to speak of vengeance…`
Go and meet Shafak one day, to see with your own eyes that he is real… Go to these villages and look around for yourself, to see what sort of destruction extreme nationalism brought to this country… Go and smell it and feel it in your heart and soul… Building peace on this island is not easy – we must start from the destruction in order to be able to build a future… The two main communities of the island must acknowledge the crimes of the past and must apologize to each other… If we close our eyes to the past, it would be very difficult to build a future together…`
(The interview with Shafak Nihat was published in the YENİDÜZEN newspaper between the 9th and 16th of January 2007 in Turkish as a serial on my pages called "Cyprus: The Untold Stories" – Sevgul Uludag).
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