1

The Politics of Cypriot Greek in Postcolonial Cyprus: Textual

Seduction in the Mediterranean

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cyprus, Derrida, Deconstruction, Greek, Identity, Nationalism.

Introduction

Southern Europe and the Middle East have understandably been the subject of much

recent attention in postcolonial studies, but this essay focuses on national identity in

Cyprus, a topic that has started to attract academic exploration.1 To build on this, against

the backdrop of reinvigorated bi--communal talks for a solution to the division of the

island, this article examines the relationship between Greek Cypriot identity and its two

versions of Greek, Cypriot Greek and the standard modern Greek, Demotic, in the light

of philosopher Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction. As a result, the reader is

urged to consider the complexities of Greek Cypriot identity, with an exclusive,

homogeneous Greek identity in conflict with an inclusive Cypriot identity open to the

2

Greek Cypriot, Turkish Cypriot, Latin, Armenian, Eastern European, and Asian

communities that constitute the contemporary demography of Cyprus.

Greek Cypriot identity has traditionally defined itself within the narratives of

Greco--Turkish antagonisms, as grouped with the forces of Hellenism against the

Turkish other. However, the war of 1974 radically changed the political environment in

Cyprus: a coup sponsored by the Greek junta prompted a Turkish invasion that divided

the island as Britain, the third guarantor of Cypriot sovereignty and the ex--colonial

power, looked on silently. As a result, new lived realities on the island have prompted

many Greek Cypriots to define themselves as Cypriots independent of both Greece and

Turkey, a stance that, whether fuelled by ideology or pragmatism, seeks the reunification

of the island. Michael A. Attalides identified sources of Cypriot consciousness that pre-

date 1974 but conceded that these were never cohesively formulated or articulated (57-

69). Yiannis Papadakis points out that only after 1974 were symbols of ‘Cypriotness’

introduced alongside symbols of ‘Greekness’, resulting in a ‘symbolic official double--

talk’ indicative of the ambiguity of Greek Cypriot identity (1998: 153). However, both

Attalides and Papadakis elide the importance of Cypriot Greek.2 Andreas N.

Papapavlou’s examination of bidialectalism ended with the proposal that Greek Cypriots

prefer Demotic because of a desire to align themselves with Greece prompted by the

ambiguities of ethnic identity in Cyprus, as well as the ‘educational policies […] that

inculcate Greek national values and probably discourage the development of Cypriot

consciousness’ (25). To take Papapavlou’s insight further, I will argue that the intractable

conflicts of postcolonial Greek Cypriot identity can be traced through bidialectal

language use. Moreover, I will also contend that Cypriot Greek performs, and has always

performed, a spoken Cypriot identity that, as Ian Chambers says of Mediterranean

history in its entirety, is ‘multiple and mutable’ (9).

3

For Derrida, speech is never complete, full, or stable. Derrida proposes that the

self--sufficiency of speech that phonocentric Western metaphysics, from Plato to

Ferdinand de Saussure, has assumed could only be guaranteed by an external point of

reference where unequivocal truth resides, a Logos. This Logos has always been linked

exclusively to speech and can be understood, by way of example, ‘in the sense of God’s

infinite understanding’ (1997: 11). In the absence of such divine guarantees, Derrida

argues that meaning results from the trace of difference, since we understand a term by

reference to its differentiating other, not any extra--linguistic origin that stabilizes speech.

Meaning, then, depends on the trace of, for example, ‘Turk’ in ‘Greek’, a trace that marks

‘the relationship with the other’ (1997: 47). An effect of this trace is to unfix, or

deconstruct, hierarchical binary oppositions; it implies a possible duality or identification

between terms thought of as opposites, where one term usually has cultural pre--

eminence over the other, so that the trace of the denigrated other is always already

concealed within the selfsame. Indeed, this critique deconstructs the opposition between

speech and its necessary supplement, writing, an opposition that Western metaphysics

has always sought to reinforce.

This essay appropriates Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics in order to

trace the shifting commitments of Greek Cypriot identity. On the one hand lies Demotic,

increasingly used to present the ‘Greekness’ of the Cypriot through the de-Ottomization

and Westernization of his/her language. Simultaneously, its official, pedagogical,

especially written use traduces the Occidental phonocentric history to which it appeals in

order to prove the Greek identity of the Cypriot. On the other hand lies Cypriot Greek,

which persists phonocentrically as the spoken language of a polycultural Cypriot identity

that resists the textual invasion of Demotic. In other words, Demotic is considered the

expression of an essential Greek identity, but its predominantly textual use undermines

the very notion of speech as the expression of inner self. Cypriot Greek, meanwhile,

4

deconstructs the opposition between Greek and Turk as it orally performs a Cypriot

identity that is fluid and multi--faceted.

I

Cyprus can be understood as both Oriental and Occidental. In an analysis of the diverse

ideological uses of the goddess Aphrodite in Cyprus, Papadakis describes geopolitical

perspectives of the island ‘as uncomfortably situated between Greece and Turkey, Asia

and Europe, Christianity and Islam, neither of one nor the other’ (2006: 247).

Conflations of East and West are certainly evidenced by descriptions of its geographical

location, which range from Europe’s outer limit as the Eastern Mediterranean, to Asia’s

buffer zone as the Near East, but they are also reproduced internally. Barren and winding,

the line that divides the two largest communities stands as a crooked reminder of the

violent desires of disambiguation that have plagued the island. South of that line, Greek

nationalism in Cyprus has always explained Cypriot society as European. Only the

communist party AKEL, the single party in Cyprus with a history of support from both

Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, was sceptical of Cyprus’s recent accession to the

European Union. Not only did accession constitute an important economic decision, it

also signified the validation of Cyprus as a European society. Obscured, but not

completely hidden, by the fiscal considerations of European Union membership is the

hope that a place within such a hegemonic structure will protect against Turkish

occupation of the entire island. European consciousness holds the same fear of the Turk

that dominates Greek Cypriot society, a fear that not only attempts to erase from

memory the Eastern influence on European society but also addresses Turkey’s

deplorable human rights record and the continued occupation of the north of Cyprus

from behind a veil of prejudice. If Europe, from the Renaissance onwards, has refused to

recognize the Oriental influences that helped mediate the Greco--Latin cultures that

5

constitute its classical foundations (Chambers: 150), the grievance in Cyprus against the

Turkish state demonstrates a European paradigm. On these terms Greek nationalists in

particular, self--narrated as in fraternity with the wider Hellenic struggle against the Turk,

can consider themselves a paragon of European existence. However, political events

since the onset of British colonialism in 1878 and throughout the last century have

proved the dispensability of Cyprus to the Occident: the United Kingdom and the

United States of America, in rapprochement with Turkey, have bartered the island in

exchange for geopolitical sway in the Middle East.

Consequent claims to Occidental Greek identity in Cyprus are, then, negated by

the Mediterranean’s Oriental undertow when Cyprus confronts the West. As Vassos

Argyrou urges us to consider, Cyprus will always be on the edge of Europe: ‘Irrespective

of how “Greek” Cypriots are, they will always be excluded from the “Occidental” core’

(39). Allied to this exclusion, the past failures of the Greek Cypriots to coherently

construct an alternative cultural identification to Greek, one that could encompass the

polycultural demography of the island, reproduces ‘the very ideology that constitutes

them as “backward” Middle Easterners’ (58). To facilitate the self-defeating ideology

Argyrou identifies, a place within Occidental discourse requires the strategic exclusion of

the Oriental Turkish Cypriot other within, the existence of a progressive and rational

Occident dependent upon the rhetoric of a backward and irrational Orient. Against this

strategy, however, operates the trace of Turkish Cypriot otherness that always marks

Greek Cypriot identity, a problematic antithesis of other and selfsame illustrated by Maria

Avraamidou’s short story ‘Paralogismos’.

Set in the town of Kyrenia after the events of 1974, ‘Paralogismos’ depicts the

unthinkable, or ‘paralogic’, love affair between a Greek Cypriot woman, Evtikhia, and an

unnamed Turkish, or perhaps Turkish Cypriot, soldier. At first, the narrative explores the

liberating potential of the relationship, which, as Mary N. Layoun states, offers ‘a

6

substantial textual recasting of the Turkish or Turkish Cypriot presence in Cyprus’ (97).

Turkish soldiers raped Cypriot women (both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot) during

the war, crimes that compelled both the Cypriot Orthodox Church and the government

to sanction abortion due to the number of resultant pregnancies. Contrary to the

predominant cultural representations, ‘Paralogismos’ presents a Turkish soldier and a

Greek Cypriot woman who enjoy a consensual, romantic relationship. However, with a

pre--war vision of her village that invokes the Garden of Eden, Evtikhia’s recollections

foretell the ultimate ambivalence of Avraamidou’s short story: ‘Once the village was one

gigantic garden that stretched to the plain below and within it strolled monks dressed in

white’. As a demonic counterpoint to this idyllic image, the face of the soldier appears to

Evtikhia in the same moment ‘utterly unexpectedly’ (24). No distinction exists in the text

between Turk and Turkish Cypriot, and the possibilities of the romantic transgression are

emphatically delimited when the pregnant Evtikhia violently kills the soldier, a

homogenous, unidentified Turkish other. The bloody conclusion of ‘Paralogismos’

reinforces the divisions it initially challenges, but, in the form of the unborn child who

can be seen to represent the heterogeneity of Cypriot identity, the potential disruption to

Greek Cypriot nationalism remains.

Current debates continue to contest Greek Cypriot identity. For example, the

way in which schools teach twentieth--century Cypriot history has become an ideological

battleground, in particular the period from the end of British colonial rule and the

subsequent bi--communal unrest until the war of 1974. Spyrou claims that nationalist

discourse in Greek Cypriot primary schools employs a ‘monologic reading of identity’

that limits the discursive exploration of alternatives (2000: 64). Nevertheless, claims are

made from both ends of the political spectrum that private and party opinions invade the

classroom. This usually entails a demand from the right that the traditional, pro--Greek,

anti--Turkish slant be continued, while those on the left demand a restructured approach

7

that presents the island as the victim of nationalisms imported from Greece and Turkey.3

Thus the issue returns to how Greek Cypriot identity can be understood; it is either

Greek, and therefore defined as European and in opposition to Turkey, or it is non--

aligned and unhappily caught between Greco--Turkish ethnonationalisms. In practice,

then, any attempt to forge a pro--Cypriot identity is undermined by a constant

Westernizing, de--Ottomizing resistance. The fresh round of peace talks that began in

September 2008 and were accelerated in January 2010 between Cypriot President

Dimitris Christofias and Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat had to balance the

desire for reunification against the ethnonationalistic drives that exist on both sides of

the Green Line dividing Cyprus. In leadership elections held north of that line on April

18 2010, Talat lost out to right-wing conservative Dervis Eroğlu, who, with growing

support from a rapidly altering, increasingly pro--Turkish demographic, stands opposed

to reunification. At a crucial moment for the peace process the threat of

ethnonationalism returned.

Language use south of the Green Line exemplifies this impasse. The most

fundamental aspect of the eradication of the Turkish Cypriot other from within the

selfsame has been the emphasis on the use of Demotic since the mid--1970s, a

marginalization of Cypriot Greek and its Turkish and Arabic influences. Examples of

these influences include the frequently--used loan words ‘mashallah’, a compliment in the

name of Allah, and ‘inshallah’, used similarly as a term of hope. Alongside these are

innumerable everyday instances of alternate or loan words. For example, the Cypriot

Greek word for ‘cup’, ‘fentzhani’, becomes ‘flintzani’ in Demotic, while the word for

‘coffee pot’, ‘tzisveh’, becomes ‘briki’. Such quotidian Cypriot Greek words and phrases

are disavowed, a rejection of Middle Eastern idiosyncrasies that denote the otherness of

the Greek Cypriot, a process that extracts elements perceived to be exterior to the

Hellenic Cypriot core. De--Ottomization proves itself, then, to be a reaction to both the

8

Cyprus problem and the Osmanli history the island shares with Greece. Demotic thus

becomes a medium that establishes fraternity between the Greek and the Greek Cypriot

through a textual exorcism of Oriental, primarily Turkish Cypriot, spectres.

In 1976 Demotic was recognised as the language of Cyprus. As Andreas

Georghiou Karagiorges documents, Act 309 was passed into Greek law with the

provision that Demotic, the spoken language of Greece, be ‘recognised for the first time

as the official language of the state and the language of instruction in schools at all levels’.

Up until this point Katharevousa, a more complex version of Greek, had been used.

Karagiorges states that Greek and Greek Cypriot education ‘suffered from the lack of an

easily understandable language of instruction’ (147, 148). Cyprus whole--heartedly

adopted the provision, and also took on the Greek national anthem as that of the

Republic of Cyprus. However, whereas in Greece the language of the state was unified

with everyday speech, an unrealistic ideal with Katharevousa, in Cyprus the spoken

language, Cypriot Greek, would have to change of the people’s own accord in order to

match that of the state.

II

Demotic invokes a Greek identity rooted in phonocentrism by problematizing

phonocentrism. Since 1976 the linguistic object in Cyprus has been defined chiefly by the

written word on the page, and this written word of Demotic articulates state pedagogy,

literature, the media, and the alienated other on the computer screen. Moreover, in

accordance with the Greek nationalist drive to Hellenize Cyprus entirely, this use of

Demotic must also alter the speech of the Greek Cypriot. In other words, it must usurp

and disprove the phonocentric tradition that understands speech as the symbol of inner

experience, and writing as nothing more than the representation of speech. However,

this philosophical tradition cannot be separated from the ancient Greek lineage to which

9

Cypriot Hellenism appeals, a lineage that, as Derrida explains, considers writing as merely

the ‘signifier of the first signifier, representation of the self--present voice’.

Phonocentrism, then, sees speech, not writing, as the ‘immediate, natural, and direct

signification of […] meaning’ (1997: 30). Here Aristotelian and Platonic elevations of

speech are crossed with Christian apotheoses of the Word as the cultural vectors that

constitute contemporary Greek identity converge. The divine reason connects truth,

rationality, and language, as in the New Testament: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and

the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John. 1.1). Paradoxically, Demotic

denotes the classical ontology and Orthodoxy of Greek identity at the same time that its

establishment in Cyprus disrupts the foundational notions of these aspects of Greek

identity. On the one hand, it calls on the ‘Greekness’ of the Greek Cypriot but, on the

other, its predominantly written existence undermines ‘Greekness’ as a spoken

expression of inner self.

As a result of these conflicts the invasion of speech by writing can be clearly seen

in Cyprus. Taktakallas, a district of old Nicosia, offers an illustrative example. Previously

known as Tahtakallas to Greek Cypriots and Tahtakalle to Turkish Cypriots, it was a

mixed community and, from the 1950s onwards, home to the Olympiakos coffee shop,

an epicentre of extreme Greek nationalist activity heavily implicated in the

ethnonationalistic violence that ravaged the area and led to the division of the capital in

1963. Still written into the constitution of the Olympiakos football club is the provision

that the team’s green and black colours, which honour the fallen heroes of Hellenism,

will change to blue in the event of union with Greece. Today the area goes by the name

of Taktakallas, with the emphasis on a hard, more Demotic ‘k’ rather than the softer,

Arabesque ‘h’ of previous appellations. Subtle, phonetic differences such as this give

Cypriot Greek overall a distinctly different sound to Demotic. Textual prescription of

pronunciation, however, does not always succeed, even with the most likely

10

sympathisers: sit on the terraces at an Olympiakos match and fans, in particular those of

a certain vintage, offer encouragement to their ‘Tahtakallites’.

Demotic’s textual existence subverts the Saussurean definition of writing as a

replication of ‘already constituted units of signification, in the formation of which it has

played no part’ (Derrida 1997: 31). Written down in order to defy the everyday, spoken

persistence of Cypriot Greek, Demotic does not form new units of signification but

imports written units of signification alternative, and supposedly superior, to the

language a young child learns at home, a language addressed as a dialect in need of

purification. In this sense the use of Demotic in Cyprus can be understood as

graphocentric. More than that, it is also grammatocentric because its apparent need

tempts us, by way of comparison, to see the syntax and diction of Cypriot Greek as

deficient. A performance of refinement, use of Demotic has come to denote modern

urban progression differentiated from the denigrated village associated with Cypriot

Greek. Indeed, the sound of Cypriot Greek often draws scorn and ridicule that

distinguishes between the correctness of the progressed city--dwellers and the uncivilized

practices of villagers. Papadakis rightly contends that Greek Cypriots often see Cypriot

Greek as dirty, and to speak cleanly one must adopt Demotic (2005: 12). To take this

further, when a Greek Cypriot adopts the written Demotic as his or her mode of speech,

he or she accepts a frame of assumptions that constructs Demotic as superior to Cypriot

Greek. Or, to put it another way, when a Cypriot speaks Demotic he or she articulates a

Hellenized conception of Cypriot identity rather than the polycultural identity that

Cypriot Greek signifies.

By extension, then, Greek identity in Cyprus can be described as both

graphocentric and grammatocentric. Demotic does not represent speech in Cyprus, does

not, without agency, represent spoken signifiers. Instead, it reproduces the speech of the

Greek other, reproduces the signifier of the Greek other’s first signifier. This

11

reproduction attempts to extinguish the trace of the Oriental other marked in the

selfsame by Cypriot Greek. Post--reproduction, writing permeates speech and constitutes

the Greek Cypriot’s sense of national identity: the Demotic on the page, when spoken, is

understood as the representation of an inner reality, the Cypriot’s Greek soul. Once

more, in order to spontaneously express a natural inner self, Demotic penetrates speech

so as to establish that inner self as Greek. Simultaneously, this artificial establishment

undermines the very notion of speech as an expression of a fixed, innate, and obvious

inner self. Or, to put it simply, the use of Demotic highlights the cultural construction of

an identity it sets out to prove as inherent, straightforward, and effortless. This violent

intrusion into the inner system of speech, this complication of the organic bond between

signified and phonic signifier, this sign of the body that is the mark of writing’s original

sin, necessitates the admission and essentialization of Greece’s passion in Cypriot spirit,

breath, and speech. We speak as we write when representation and the represented mix,

resulting in, as Derrida sardonically argues, ‘a dangerous promiscuity and nefarious

complicity between the reflection and the reflected which lets itself be seduced

narcissistically’. Derrida’s tone mocks the phonocentric fears of writing’s influence, but

the result of this tendency is to obscure any point of origin. Succinctly put, there is no

cause, beginning, or foundation, only difference, because ‘what can look at itself is not

one’ (1997: 36). For the Greek Cypriot, this split is always already an alienation, as the

use of Demotic does not double the phonè of the selfsame but of a Greek other to

which the selfsame attempts to assimilate. The very possibility of such assimilation

scorns the foundational point of the assimilation, which is that the phonè expresses a

true, unalterable Greek self.

Demotic signifies Greek historical glories that entice the Greek Cypriot, and this

textual seduction produces a centrifugal tendency in the national identifications made in

Cyprus. The very ‘Greekness’ of the Cypriot depends upon the narrative of Mycenaean

12

ancestors who settled in Cyprus during the Bronze Age and Hellenized the island, an

arrival generally understood as Cyprus’ Occidental turn. A mnemotechnic agency, the

seductive Demotic attempts to remind Cypriots of their Greek souls at the same time

that it usurps the Cypriot Greek language understood to link Cyprus to the Ancient

Greek home of the Mycenaean. Standing before such Gordian Knots, Greek Cypriots

administer Alexander’s logic. For example, when faced with the ideological limitations of

modern Greece, Greek Cypriots cut through the tangled bonds of Demotic with a sharp

return to the primacy of the phonè, to the Cypriot Greek popularly considered as far

closer to Ancient Greek than Demotic. Greeks of today are commonly regarded by

Greek Cypriots as contaminated with negative Oriental idiosyncrasies, a legacy of the

Ottoman Empire. Stereotyped as idle and disorganised, dishonest and disrespectful, the

modern Greek stands in contrast to the industrious and progressive, that is, more

Occidental, Greek Cypriot. Such unhidden insolence contrasts the outward civility the

Cypriot learnt to perform under British rule. Confronted by Greek vulgarity, Greek

Cypriots turn to their speech for justification of their older Hellenic identity, as it brings

them closer, in a linear, temporal sense, to the cradle of Western civilisation. Argyrou

urges us to consider this paradox in Greek nationalism as the everyday belief that ‘there

are two ways of being Greek, and that the Cypriot way is superior’ (56). In contradiction,

then, the Greek Cypriot others the Greek in order to be Greek.

The ideological contradiction in the Greek Cypriot’s use of Demotic can be put

in Derridean terms. Cypriot Greek persists in speech despite the drive to decontaminate

it, so the possibility of a polycultural Cypriot identity continues phonocentrically.

Conversely, Derrida’s treatment of writing as an equal that invades speech contradicts the

phonocentric tradition from which Greek ancestry, via the predominantly pedagogical

use of Demotic, demands lineage. Descendants of the Mycenaeans, and therefore

children of a Hellenic world that gave birth to Western civilization, Greek Cypriots

13

encounter an aporia in the establishment of their Greek identity: the graphocentricity of

Greek nationalism in Cyprus breaks with the classical, phonocentric tradition of which it

claims to be a part. That is to say, the graphocentric approach excludes the Greek

Cypriot from the very genealogy he or she wishes to prove, so that in the attempt to

claim Greece’s relation to classical ontology as Cypriot history, the Greek Cypriot

subverts that philosophical tradition. Put simply, in Cyprus an Oriental Cypriot identity

makes its presence felt in speech, connecting the spoken word and self--present identity

in a classically Occidental way. Alternatively, an Occidental Greek identity subverts the

Occidental philosophical tradition that privileges speech: the written Demotic questions

any natural connection between speech and self--present identity at the same time that its

use attempts to prove a self--present Greek identity in Cyprus. Use of Demotic presents

Greek identity as a natural, obvious, and organic Cypriot trait, but that preference,

particularly in speech, over Cypriot Greek, the idea that a different register denotes a

different person, underscores the very construction of what appears natural, obvious, and

organic.

III

Cypriot Greek contains, despite the drive to decontaminate it, the mark of Cypriot

polyculturalism. Demotic invades Cypriot Greek speech in an attempt to homogenize it,

to cleanse it of the Oriental other’s influence; it is ‘a text governing my talk’ (Derrida

1973: 132). Yet this attempt to access a real, stable, original Greek concept is self--

defeating. Meaning, as Derrida informs us, results from the trace of difference in

language, not by reference to anything in the world. That is to say that no first--hand

correspondence exists between words and free--standing concepts, so, as we have seen,

‘Greekness’ cannot be accessed beyond its construction in language. In social and

political practice, efforts to homogenize language use in Cyprus only serve to stress the

14

dissimilarities between Greek and Turkish Cypriots without the guarantee of a

homogeneous Occidental Greek identity. The Greek Cypriot finds him/herself in

conflict, caught between speech and writing, the Orient and the Occident, words and

concepts. A Greek Cypriot talks like a Cypriot and writes like a Greek. Not only that, a

Greek Cypriot talks like a Cypriot divided from ‘Cypriotness’ and writes like a Greek

divided from ‘Greekness’. It is, however, the heterogeneity of Cypriot Greek speech that

questions the very terms that frame this conflict.

Hybrid, regionally varied, and fluid in its supranational vocabulary, Cypriot Greek

articulates a cross--border identity. Some of its words and phrases are recognised across

Europe, throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and on the Subcontinent. In this

sense, Cypriot Greek is a paradigm case of all languages. The need to focus on it rests on

two factors. First, the current context, where new bi--communal talks aimed at the

reunification of Cyprus continue. These talks follow the relaxation of crossing

regulations along the Green Line by the Turkish Cypriot authorities in 2003, which, as

Spurgeon Thompson stresses, has ‘opened Cyprus to a valuable kind of intercultural

exchange’ (290). Cypriot Greek has been crucial to this exchange. Many Turkish Cypriots

of a certain age can still use the Cypriot Greek they learnt before the war of 1974, and

the language breaches the walls that historical and political narratives tend to build

between the co--existence of the past and the present separation. My intention is not to

demonize the inevitable use of Demotic, in which exist the marks of otherness that make

up all languages, but to emphasize that the denigration of Cypriot Greek also denigrates a

particular view of Cypriot society. And, of course, in an ironic, chiastic twist, Cypriot

Greek’s persistence in speech can be used as an entry point to a nexus of possible

identities distinct from those denoted by the written Demotic. Cypriot Greek survives

despite the imported nationalism of Greece (and, in the north, Turkey) because, for the

attentive listener, it can be separated from the myth of origins that constitutes

15

ethnonationalism in Cyprus. Cypriot Greek thus speaks, to those who care to listen, the

negated history of perpetual change and exchange that makes up the Mediterranean and

the Middle East. Indeed, the broad influences so clearly on display in Cypriot Greek –

especially in the use of unaltered Turkish, Arabic, French, and Italian words, and the

alternative uses and pronunciations of words also used in Demotic – reflect the fluid,

unfixed, heterogeneous Cypriot existence. To summarize, Cypriot Greek performs the

formulation of Cypriot identity, making audible its perpetual movements and encounters.

So, secondly, Cypriot Greek offers us access to the disavowed alterity of the entire

Mediterranean and Middle East, to the differences throughout the region too often held,

with dreadful consequences, to be strictly incompatible.

In Cyprus in particular, Cypriot Greek presents an alternative to the Greco--

Turkish antagonisms that have co--opted the island’s historical and political narratives.

After the Greek Revolution of 1821, the subsequent creation of the Modern Greek State

led to Greek nationalist ideas in Cyprus that unsettled Ottoman rule. With the onset of

British rule in 1878, Greek nationalism found its voice. By way of reaction, Turkish

nationalism grew in Cyprus after the establishment of the Modern Turkish State in 1923.

Antagonism and conflict replaced co--existence as national identity was removed to

Athens and Ankara. Enosis, the demand for union with Greece that was the major

ideological foundation of Greek nationalism in Cyprus, fuelled the rise against British

rule by EOKA (the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) that led to independence

and the formation of the Republic in 1960. But that same ethnonationalism in Greek and

Turkish communities also encouraged the failure of the Republic’s initial constitution,

based on the Zurich--London agreements that Archbishop Makarios III, the first

President of Cyprus, famously claimed ‘created a state but not a nation’.

A new, unified political community in Cyprus, a realization dependent on a single,

shared national identity, never fully occurred. The de jure loss of the ‘Greek’ and

16

‘Turkish’ prefixes to the consequently repudiated ‘Cypriot’ term contradicted the

mainstream Greek Cypriot desire to identify with Greece against the Turkish other.

Simultaneously, the Turkish Cypriot minority, once the dominant community on the

island and now forced into legal equality with the Greek Cypriot majority, turned towards

the nationalistic fervour of Atatürk’s Turkey. Niazi Kizilurek states that the brutal failure

of the Cypriot state can be attributed to the threat perceived by the ruling elites to Greek

and Turkish national identities: Greek Cypriot leaders were determined to Hellenize

Cyprus while Turkish Cypriot leaders refused the ‘Cypriotisation’ of their community

(37). By 1963 the spectres of British rule, which encouraged ethnonationalism with the

cynical recruitment of Turkish Cypriots in the failed attempt to vanquish EOKA, had

also returned to haunt Cyprus. Displaced nationalisms and un--exorcised colonial policies

combined as inter--communal violence raged. How, precisely, Cyprus should be defined

was the issue that led to every gunshot, every bomb, and every blow.

A different spectre also haunts Cyprus in the form of Cypriot Greek. If the dead,

the refugees, and the missing, are the victims of a violent historical struggle to eliminate

the intricacies of Cypriot society, with Demotic use a textual instance of that drive,

Cypriot Greek exemplifies an alternative history ignored, suppressed, and ridiculed by

Greek nationalists, Turkish nationalists, and apologists for Anglo-American abuses: it is

the language of peaceful co--existence. It is a voice that calls across the Green Line, that

blazing marker of difference that divides the island and stands as the legacy of a desire to

‘un--Cypriotize’ Cyprus. Spookily, the Green Line, which cuts a jagged, deserted swathe

from east coast to west, bears an uncanny resemblance to the division once envisaged on

paper by Britain, the so--called paper tiger. Textual practice, it seems, has often impacted

on Cypriot society. However, when Greek Cypriots speak in Cypriot Greek they do not

just use a regional variation of Demotic: they resist a history of textual seduction by the

fixed, homogenized space of modernity and its linear concept of the nation. Ultimately,

17

they use a language that verbalizes the irreducible nature of ‘Cypriotness’. As Christofias

and Talat’s replacement, Eroğlu, negotiate a possible unification of Cyprus, the Green

Line at which they meet commemorates the catastrophes visited on all Cypriots, events

inseparable from the attempt to hold apart the Oriental and Occidental influences on

Cyprus, a narrative written in Demotic. Deconstructing this binary opposition, Cypriot

Greek invokes the polyculturalism that, in the recent climate of rapprochement on an

increasingly diverse island, can be celebrated as the very condition of Cypriot identity.

Works Cited

Avraamidou, Maria (1979) ‘Paralogismos’, O Teleftaios Khorismos, Nicosia: Kypros Printing.

Argyrou, Vassos (1996) Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Attalides, Michael A. (2003) Cyprus: Nationalism and International Politics, Möhnesee:

Bibliopolis.

Bryant, Rebecca (2004) Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus, London:

I.B. Taurus.

Chambers, Iain (2008) Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity,

Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1997) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore,

MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

---. (1973) Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B.

Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Karagiorges, Andreas Georghiou (1986) Education Development in Cyprus, 1960-1977,

Nicoisa: [n. pub.].

Karseras, Athena (2009) ‘MPs to Hear English School Concerns’, The Cyprus Weekly,

January 30 – February 5, p.4

18

Kizilurek, Niazi (1998) ‘The Politics of Separation and the Denial of Interdependence’,

The Cyprus Review 10(2): 33-39.

Layoun, Mary N. (2001) Wedded to the Land? Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis,

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Newton, Brian (1972) Cypriot Greek, The Hague: Mouton.

Papadakis, Yiannis (1998) ‘Greek Cypriot Narratives of History and Collective Identity:

Nationalism as a Contested Process’, American Ethnologist 25 (2): 149-165

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/646690> [accessed 25 February 2009].

---. (2005) Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide, London: I.B. Taurus.

---. (2006) ‘Aphrodite Delights’, Postcolonial Studies 9 (3): 237-250.

Papadakis, Yiannis, Gisela Welz, and Nicos Peristianis, eds. (2006) Divided Cyprus:

Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Papapavlou, Andreas N. (1998) ‘Attitudes toward the Greek Cypriot Dialect:

Sociocultural Implications’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 134: 15-

28.

Postcolonial Studies (2006) 9: 225-328.

Shakespeare, William (1997) Othello, ed. by E. A. J. Honigmann, The Arden Shakespeare,

Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson.

Spyrou, Spyros (2000) ‘Education, Ideology and National Self: The Social Practice of

Identity Construction in the Classroom’, The Cyprus Review 12 (1): 61-81.

---. (2002) “Images of ‘the Other’: ‘The Turk’ in Greek Cypriot Children’s Imaginations”,

Race, Ethnicity, and Education 5 (3): 255-272

<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713693077~db=all

~order=page> [accessed 25 February 2009].

Thompson, Spurgeon, Stavros St. Karayanni, and Myria Vassiliadou (2004) ‘Cyprus After

History’, Interventions 6: 282-299.

19

1 Over a decade ago, Yiannis Papadakis focused on the competing histories and identities

in Greek Cypriot society (Papadakis, Yiannis (1998) ‘Greek Cypriot Narratives of History

and Collective Identity: Nationalism as a Contested Process’, American Ethnologist 25 (2):

149-165 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/646690> [accessed 25 February 2009]), an

anthropological study of Cyprus that has gathered pace in the new century (see Bryant,

Rebecca (2004) Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus, London: I.B.

Taurus, Papadakis, Yiannis (2005) Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide,

London: I.B. Taurus, and Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict (2006)

Yiannis Papadakis, Gisela Welz, and Nicos Peristianis eds., Indiana: Indiana University

Press). Elsewhere, Spyros Spyrou’s ethnographic fieldwork has critiqued the role of

education in the construction of national identity in Cyprus (see, in particular, Spyrou,

Spyros (2000) “Education, Ideology and National Self: The Social Practice of Identity

construction in the Classroom”, The Cyprus Review, 12 (1): 61-81, and (2002) ‘Images of

“the Other”: “The Turk” in Greek Cypriot Children’s Imaginations’, Race, Ethnicity, and

Education, 5 (3): 255-272

<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713693077~db=all~order=

page> [accessed 25 February 2009]). In 2006 Postcolonial Studies focused on Cyprus in a

special issue edited by Papadakis, bringing to an international academic audience the

tradition of coffee--fuelled intellectual reflection that has long been the everyday

response to Cyprus’ complex political and cultural issues (Postcolonial Studies (2006) 9: 225-

328). Two years earlier, an excellent dialogue in Interventions between Spurgeon

Thompson, Stavros St. Karayanni, and Myria Vassiliadou demonstrated the potential for

exchange between current Cypriot socio--political debates and contemporary critical

practices (Thompson, Spurgeon, Stavros St. Karayanni, and Myria Vassiliadou (2004)

‘Cyprus After History’, Interventions 6: 282-299). This article continues the spirit of that

20

discussion in Interventions with an examination that looks to interrogate both Cyprus and

the critical frame through which it looks at Cyprus.

2 For an authoritative introduction to Cypriot Greek, see Newton, Brian (1972) Cypriot

Greek, The Hague: Mouton.

3 See, most recently at the time of writing, Karseras, Athena (2009) ‘MPs to Hear English

School Concerns’, The Cyprus Weekly, January 30 – February 5, p.4. The English School,

in the capital Nicosia, is perhaps the most prestigious private secondary school on the

island, and parental concerns over the provision of history became a political issue in

early 2009.