As the past continues to be an integral part of the ‘Cyprus problem’, Cyprus serves well as a case study through which to explore how mnemonic formations of nationalism can render memory-making an obstacle to peace-making. The traumatic experiences of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s have left deep scars in the two communities. Memories of national struggles, intercommunal conflict, oppression, the creation of enclaves, a coup d’état, invasion, displacement and loss have become part and parcel of community remembrance. Contested memories of the violent past have also become a foundation for the (re)constitution of the two separate nations of the Greek Cypriot nation and Turkish Cypriot nation and for mnemonic formations of nationalism. From a Greek Cypriot perspective, nationalist memory-making relates to the colonial-era struggle for independence from Britain and a union with Greece as a motherland. For Turkish Cypriots, nationalist memory-making is primarily about obtaining independence from the Greek Cypriots. The competing narratives that each side often employs to tell the history of the island are a means of continuing a mnemonic battle that constitutes a barrier to any lasting resolution of differences (Papadakis, 2005; Papadakis et al., 2006). Although nationalism-inspired memories and recollections of the past predominate in the mnemonic formations, there nevertheless do exist some counter-memories within and beyond the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities that attempt to challenge these hegemonic mnemonic formations. Oral histories and multiple stories as well as individual memories narrated by eyewitnesses, and other grassroots accounts,¹ recall a different past that includes also peaceful everyday practices, co-existence and a shared Cypriot identity, narratives that both complemented and challenged official discourses (Aliefendioğlu and Behçetoğulları, 2019; Briel, 2013; Demetriou, 2012).² Some of these counter-memories have, in the context of Cyprus, sometimes been referred to as ‘cross-border memory’ (Briel, 2013: 34). Thus, two oppositional tendencies can be observed. On the one hand, memory-making in Cyprus is complex, multi-layered and entangled, reflecting a multiplicity of intersectional identities and memories. On the other hand, this process has largely been publicly overridden by a binary process dividing the memories into Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot forms of nationalised memories. Memory politics in Cyprus therefore tends to revolve around the on-going construction and contestation of the two sets of collective identities, collective memories and interpretations of the past. These narratives have to a large extent gained hegemony on both sides, while counter-narratives have been constructed in the margins (Aliefendioğlu and Behçetoğulları, 2019; Hadjipavlou, 2007).

The Cyprus conflict was at its peak before transitional justice became a commonly used tool to address the legacies of conflict. Unlike South Africa, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Cambodia, Cyprus has not been through any transitional justice process. As a consequence, there have been no judicial or non-judicial measures to address past wrongdoings, nor has there been a truth commission or a fact-finding report to search for the truth about the past, and reconciliation and reparations measures have likewise been lacking. According to Bryant (2012: 341), past conflicts and their aftermath have left a trauma or a wound, ‘visible in the rupture of partition as well as in politicized personal suffering’; traumas remain unaddressed and victims are left without dignity. Thus, the quality of the present peace can be said to lack notions of justice.

In Cyprus, divisive memory work on both sides represents stumbling blocks in a peace process that seems never-ending. In fact, it is perhaps more appropriate to speak of peace(s) in the plural, as peace is experienced and manifested differently on the two sides of the buffer zone. Many Cypriots seem sufficiently content with the ceasefire, the absence of direct violence and the negative peace that is upheld on the island and do not feel any direct need to push for further peace talks. Thus, memory-making seems inevitably to have an impact on the quality of peace in Cyprus, which suggests that a key realm for negotiating a shared peace on the island of Cyprus will be in the area of the politics of memory. Clearly, the violent past is a divisive issue, and how history is recalled has become a potential tool for the perpetuation of conflict. Yet, if entangled memories are allowed to surface, they may soften or modify the strong mnemonic attachments to the nation.

With the aim of contributing to the research on the interplay between memory-making and peace-making in Cyprus, this chapter will map sites, agents, narratives and events and their interactions as they shape the memoryscape of the two post-conflict societies on the island. Through the SANE analysis, this chapter compares and contrasts the Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot museums and commemoration practices to cast light on how nationalism predominates in the way in which memories are publicly articulated. We also map memory agents who uphold the officially endorsed mnemonic formations and those who challenge them. We review the events where such memory work is performed and the counter-memories that are not represented in the hegemonic mnemonic formations. We find that the competing mnemonic formations of nationalism centre around the two struggles for independence, and it is by looking at these that we can draw wider conclusions regarding how memory politics impacts the quality of peace in Cyprus.

The divisive past of Cyprus

The volatile recent past of Cyprus has divided the society and transformed the island into a frozen conflict sustained by competing nationalisms, divisive historical narratives and a bifurcated memoryscape. The study by Yiannis Papadakis and others (2006: 1) summarises Cyprus’s turbulent past in a poignant way: ‘Cyprus has experienced anticolonial struggles, postcolonial instability, the divisive effects of opposed ethnic nationalisms, internal violence both between the two major ethnic groups on the island and within each one, war, invasion, territorial division, and multiple population displacements, all facets of the notorious Cyprus Problem.’ This violent past has produced traumatic memories and unhealed psychological wounds that affect the present and threaten to colonise future mindsets.

The nationalist struggle turned violent when Greek Cypriot armed combatants formed the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA) in the late 1950s (Papadakis, 2005). EOKA represented a drive for enosis, or union with Greece, that was led by Archbishop Makarios on the political front while General Georgios Grivas headed the military organisation. The idea of enosis for Cyprus was opposed by the significant Turkish minority, which in 1958 embarked on its own armed struggle, calling for taxim of the island. This struggle was led by the Turkish Resistance Organisation (TMT), a paramilitary organisation created in 1958 by Rauf Denktaş and a Turkish military officer, Rıza Vuruşkan. The TMT’s focus was on combating Greek Cypriot attempts to unite the island with Greece, and subsequently on advocating independence for Northern Cyprus as a separate state (Papadakis, 2005). However, the two sides failed in their respective aims which paved the way for the creation of the Republic of Cyprus, headed from 1960 by Archbishop Makarios as president. This represented an end to British colonial rule.

Three years after independence, violence between the Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot community erupted in Nicosia and spread throughout the island. In the tumultuous years of 1963–1967, the Turkish Cypriot community experienced the brunt of the conflict, enduring a majority of the human toll with casualties and approximately 20 per cent of its population being displaced to refugee camps (Bryant, 2010; Hadjipavlou, 2010; Papadakis, 2005).³ The interethnic conflict led the British, who still maintained military bases on the island, to create the Green Line, a boundary intended to separate the two communities.

The lines of division deepened in 1974 when the Greek fascist junta, in collaboration with EOKA B, headed by General Grivas, launched a coup d’état to topple the Makarios government (Hadjipavlou, 2010). This event in turn prompted Turkey’s military intervention, which resulted in the division of the island as Greek Cypriots fled to the south and Turkish Cypriots subsequently sought security in the north. The Green Line became a de facto border, with a UN-endorsed buffer zone later added to it; few crossings were allowed until restrictions were relaxed in 2003. The Turkish intervention was celebrated as a peace operation by the majority of the Turkish Cypriots, but it was interpreted as an act of aggression and a violation of human rights and international law by many Greek Cypriots (Bryant, 2010; Hadjipavlou, 2010). This time, the Greek Cypriots bore the heaviest casualties, in terms of people killed, missing and displaced. The events of 1974 paved the way for the unilateral declaration of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) in 1983. The TRNC gave the Turkish Cypriots a sense of security in that they finally had a state of their own as well as a place of belonging. For Greek Cypriots, however, the declaration of independence in the north meant that the island was socially, politically, ethnically and spatially divided (Navaro-Yashin, 2012).

After 1974, rapprochement between the two communities became an official Greek Cypriot policy. This policy emphasised the common Cypriot identity and also meant active expressions of goodwill towards Turkish Cypriots in the present, in order to enable the future reunification of Cyprus. This connection between the past, the politics of the present and the future orientation was a result of an official re-evaluation of the past that took place after 1974 on the Greek Cypriot side (Papadakis, 1998: 152). The historical narrative that ‘people used to live together peacefully in the past’ provides the impetus for the Greek Cypriot demand for a future united Cyprus where everyone would live together peaceably once more (although this position does not specify how power should be shared). The historical narrative also provided a counter-narrative to the equally selective official Turkish Cypriot reading of the past as a ‘past of animosity and oppression’; that historical narrative implies that ‘the two peoples in Cyprus can never live together’ (Papadakis, 2003: 261) and suggests continued partition will be necessary in the future (Bryant, 2012).

The United Nations has had a long commitment to the Cyprus peace process. As Cyprus was to enter the European Union, renewed efforts were undertaken by the then Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. After several rounds of talks, a plan for Cyprus reunification, the so-called Annan Plan, was drafted, which proposed the establishment of the United Republic of Cyprus. It was a peace plan for Cyprus based on a bizonal and bi-communal federal structure that included a federal constitution and constitution for each constituent state, federal laws and a suggestion for a national flag and anthem. In the two separate referendums held in 2004, the Turkish Cypriots voted in favour of the plan, but the Greek Cypriots rejected it (Heraklides, 2004; Vassiliou, 2003). The results of the referendums added yet another event to the divisive history of the island and perpetuated the agonistic peace on the island.

As Bryant suggests (2012: 337), ‘the Cyprus Problem is a dispute over the future of partition’, but ‘it is necessarily also one over how the island came to be partitioned in the first place’. Thus, the on-going conflict ‘requires a constant mobilization of memory, and rejection of the present state of partition makes it impossible to “put the past behind us”’ (Bryant, 2012: 337). Today, many Turkish Cypriots argue that the legacy of the past legitimises the continued division of the island, while many Greek Cypriots, on the other hand, claim that this past legitimises the striving for reunification of the island.

The Cyprus memoryscape

The memoryscape shows Cyprus as a divided island captured in history, and the landscape is scattered with mnemonic traces of its violent past used as political tools in the continued production of the conflict. Abandoned cities, museums, monuments of heroes, colossal statues and flags are dedicated not only to the memory of what are regarded as heroic struggles, but also to the traumas and tragedies that have befallen the Cypriot people.

There are monuments that materialise the memories related to the Greek Cypriot struggle for independence from Britain (1955–1959) and enosis and the Turkish struggle for taksim and the military invasion of Cyprus in 1974, as well as to the two declarations of independence: for an independent Cyprus and for an independent TRNC. Most prominent in the memoryscape is perhaps the sealed-off city of Varosha, a suburb of the city of Famagusta located in the north of the island. It has been held by the Turkish military since the Turkish military invasion, and it is a testament to the division of the island. Previously, Famagusta was a tourist destination inhabited by both Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The Turkish invasion changed this and the Greek Cypriots fled in fear to escape the violence. Today, the city is known as a ghost town (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017: 37–40) and it has become a dismal legacy of the Turkish military intervention.

The memoryscape is shaped not only by material legacy but also by narratives of the past. One of the most divisive elements in the Cyprus conflict is the writing of the island’s history, a history invoked by both communities to justify and explain their politics in the present (Bryant, 2012; Bryant and Papadakis, 2012; Papadakis, 1993, 1994, 1998; Toumazis, 2014). The divisive memory work and the partition of memory in Cyprus have been thoroughly researched and well documented (Bryant, 2012; Bryant and Hatay, 2019; Papadakis, 2003). For example, Bryant (2012) explores the role of remembering and forgetting in maintaining a partition line that divides the island into the Greek Cypriot south and the Turkish Cypriot north. Her research further demonstrates that former spaces of interaction have been transformed into sites of past violence and that such spaces are marked by the absence of groups who once lived there. The partition line is also a legacy of the colonial past. Constantinou and Richmond’s investigation of the continuities and discontinuities of British rule in Cyprus highlights the partition line and underlines the diffusion of colonial power post-independence while discussing the tensions faced by the competing narratives and practices of post-colonial emancipation (Constantinou and Richmond, 2005). Also concerned with the bifurcated memoryscape, Papadakis (2003) maps the commemoration events that divide Cyprus, both across the partition line, but also within each community, while Bryant and Hatay (2019) reveal that commemoration practices and events wax and wane over time.

Constantinou et al.’s (2012) examination of the politics of cultural heritage within the two communities and across the ethnic divide clearly demonstrates what is at stake in terms of who belongs, whose heritage is to be preserved and whose is to be demolished. Traces of the shared past and memories were destroyed through everyday acts such as occupying houses left by Greek Cypriots, as well as through demolishing cultural heritage sites (Constantinou et al., 2012; Hadjipavlou, 2007). The destruction of material heritage tainted by having belonged to ‘the other’ was part of the intimate and emplaced violence of the conflict, and its traces are still visible in voids, empty spaces and ruins in the mnemonic landscape. As argued by Constantinou et al. (2012: 178), it is ‘quite common to see vandalized and ruined Greek Cypriot cemeteries, churches and houses in the north, and similarly to see destroyed Turkish-Cypriot cemeteries, mosques and villages in the south’. Such actions against cultural heritage help to promote exclusionary meanings to history as well as exclusionary ownership of the past (see Bryant, 2010).

Thus, the memoryscape of Cyprus has become bifurcated but also fragmented. Julie Scott (2002: 228) suggests that ‘casting the history of Cyprus as the history of the Greek/Turkish Cypriot national struggle presents problems of narrativity on both sides’. These ‘problems of narrativity’ are derived from a lack of nuances and selective representations of the past reproducing moral categories of good and evil primarily attached to the competing nationalisms underlying the Cypriot conflict (Toumazis, 2014). Thus, there is a strong dominance of a binary set of narratives as they pertain to either the Greek Cypriot or the Turkish Cypriot community, respectively. The results are two very different consolidated mnemonic formations that are the foundation for the politics of memory to control the past in order to maintain power in the present (see Barahona de Brito et al., 2001: 38). Yet, it is also fragmented. There are cracks in the mnemonic formations of nationalism as counter-narratives absent in the official hegemonic narratives are present in the margins.

Prominent anthropologists like Yiannis Papadakis have mapped and analysed the partitioned memoryscape of nationalism. Papadakis’s study of the two museums of national struggle in Nicosia is an excellent example of the selection and relationality of nationalist narratives presented and the material representations that reflect these narratives (Papadakis, 1994, 1998). His study is paralleled by an analysis by Toumazis (2014) of museum exhibitions in Greece and Turkey dedicated to displaying the Cyprus problem. The empirical analysis of this chapter builds on, develops and updates the important research on museums that display competing nationalist narratives, and on the mapping of commemorations in Cyprus, that has been carried out by Papadakis and Toumazis, while connecting it theoretically to the analysis of sites, agents, narratives and events as they reflect processes of memory-making and state-making in Cyprus.

Mnemonic formations: competing nationalisms

To understand the competing mnemonic formations of nationalism in Cyprus we need to explore the island’s recent past starting from when Britain assumed control over Cyprus in the late nineteenth century after three centuries of Ottoman rule. The British colonial administrators began to distinguish between the Turkish and the Greek Cypriots and treated the communities according to their ethnicity – a social stratification that had previously not been salient on the island – a practice that strengthened the growing division, and created fear and suspicion between the two communities (Apeyitou, 2003). Greek Cypriot nationalism was expressed in the narrative of enosis, a will to unite with Greece, justified by the argument that the Greek Cypriots and Greeks of Greece were culturally one and formed one nation and thus one state. The Turkish Cypriots, as a reaction to the Greek Cypriot idea of enosis, struggled for taksim, the partition of the island (Bryant, 2010). Both enosis and taksim reveal extreme or ‘blatant’ nationalisms (Billig, 1995: 43). This type of nationalism is related to the idea of the nation-state and a collective ethnic identity that is based on a shared past and emplaced geographically. Neither side opened up for a pluralistic memoryscape (Feindt et al., 2014: 32). There are two dominant ways of remembering, one connected with enosis and one with taksim; this risks silencing marginalised voices in each society, as often happens where memory politics is heavily dominated by a hegemonic actor, such as the state, and where ‘memory has been narrowed through hegemonic closure’ (Feindt et al., 2014: 32). Thus, memory work recalling the past is important on both sides of the divide in a country where nostalgia has become a patriotic and nationalistic duty. Yet, the mnemonic formations of Turkism (referring to a shared Turkish identity and closeness to Turkey) and Hellenism (referring to a shared Greek identity and closeness to Greece) are not uncontested (see Papadakis, 2003: 265) as each society reveals its own tensions. Thus, memory politics is linked to contemporary politics and is contested not only across the buffer zone but also within each of the two communities.

The mnemonic formations of nationalism shape a narrative aimed at fostering nation-building, designed for consumption by one’s own faction. This narrative is actively promoted by the states involved and influential memory agents. In the subsequent analysis, the SANE framework, encompassing sites, agents, narratives and events, serves as a guide to explore the mnemonic formations of Cyprus’s contrasting nationalisms. Additionally, it delves into counter-memories that challenge the dominant mnemonic structures, thus highlighting the complexities within the national narrative.

Sites: museums of national struggles

Museums representing the state are sites that can produce social ensembles of agents, narratives and events to present the foundational myth of the state. The museums of national struggle in Cyprus have therefore been sites of national representation. They inevitably refer to collective identities, the nation, nationalism, as well as the myth of the origins of the state and the becoming of the state (Papadakis, 1994: 400). They are similar to traditional war museums in the sense that they are part of the state propaganda, represent the state’s historical narrative and, as such, participate in processes of memorialising past conflicts. The museums refer to material representation in which artefacts bring something absent to the fore. These museums can be seen as ‘mnemonic signifiers’ as they refer to ‘socially relevant figurations of memory’ (Feindt et al., 2014: 31). They freeze the conflict in time and space, Pozzi (2013: 10) remarks. The two museums focus on the legacy of the two national struggles for independence – the Greek Cypriot struggle for independence from British rule and reunification with Greece, and the Turkish Cypriot struggle for Northern Cyprus to be independent from the south of the island. They demonstrate that a conflictual cultural heritage may transcend pure historicity. The two museums of national struggle on either side of the buffer zone in Nicosia certainly fail to engage with counterhegemonic narratives of the past. As we shall see, they do not unsettle the hegemonic narrative of nationalism and do not provide space for multiple voices. Other museums, however, display a more complex, historical narrative that may challenge the hegemonic nationalist ones at the museums of national struggles.

The Greek Cypriot Museum of National Struggle

The Greek Cypriot Museum of National Struggle was founded to reflect the Greek Cypriots’ struggle for independence from British colonial rule and to commemorate the EOKA fighters who fought and lost their lives during that conflict.⁴ According to its own publications, the museum is also to serve ‘as an inspiration to future generations with regards to the duty to participate in liberation struggles’ (Karyos, 2013).⁵

The museum is located in the square near the Archbishopric (the Greek Cypriot ecclesiastical centre) and parts of the museum are located on premises owned by the latter.⁶ It displays documents, photographic material and some personal belongings of leading figures of the struggle, as well as other memorabilia related to the period. At its entrance, the aim of that struggle is defined as that of enosis. In prominent display are the volumes from the 1921 and 1950 referendums, when Greek Cypriots voted in favour of unification with Greece. Nationalist leaders Archbishop Makarios and General Grivas feature prominently in the museum’s displays, alongside the EOKA fighters. The EOKA oath sworn by all the EOKA fighters is also introduced. At the centre of one of the exhibition halls is a replica of a hideout, as an illustration of how brave EOKA fighters in the island’s Troodos Mountains were able to use surrounding vegetation as camouflage.⁷

Figure 2.1Sign at the Greek Cypriot Museum of National Struggle (photograph by Annika Björkdahl, February 2020)

The focus on the violent deaths of combatants denies visitors the opportunity to learn about their individual lives and collective actions. In a sense, it conditions visitors to view the soldiers as victims or heroes throughout the exhibition. On display are collections of personal belongings, mostly clothes, books and guns that belonged to dead fighters. Exhibiting emblematic photographs of violent deaths is aimed at triggering nationalistic emotions among local visitors and empathy with the Greek Cypriots among international visitors (Toumazis, 2017). The armed combatants are portrayed as ‘protectors of the nation, heroes and finally as martyrs and icons after their deaths’ (Toumazis, 2017: 84). The exaggeration of stereotypical male behaviour, with an emphasis on physical strength, aggression and heterosexuality, demonstrates a hypermasculinity that is closely connected to the performance of war and the ultimate sacrifice for the cause. It silences other forms of masculinity that exist in parallel and suggests that masculinities are fixed rather than fluid.⁸ Moreover, it teaches young schoolboys who are taken to the museums as part of their history curriculum a toxic masculinity that is scarcely conducive to inclusion and empathy with ‘the other’, or reconciliation and a respect for human dignity.⁹

In the exhibition space, symbols connected to ancient Greece and Orthodox Christianity, such as the sacred lamp, candles or the photos on the wall of the dead, honour the men that died in the struggle against the British. The structure of the museum space and its curation lead the visitor down a path to a room with a replica of a gallows. This is, as pointed out by Papadakis (1994: 402), ‘the most emotionally charged room in the museum’. Accompanied by letters written by EOKA fighters executed by the British, with some portraits, it is a powerful symbolic statement of nationalism.¹⁰

Certain absences and presences are interesting to analyse in this space. Although the British are narrated as the enemy, few photos actually portray British soldiers or other representations of colonial power. Instead, the British presence comes to the fore through their actions, that is, the destruction of property, evictions and killings. While the Turkish Cypriots, or Turks as they are referred to in the museum, are given less attention and space than those of the British, the way in which they are represented in the museum as British collaborators is significant. As Yiannis Papadakis so poignantly points out, the British are ‘symbolically represented as “soldiers” who “kill”, while the “Turks” are represented as “barbarians” who “slaughter”’ (Papadakis, 1994: 406). Such representations shun nuances and subtleties and reinforce the other as a historical nemesis.

The Turkish Cypriot Museum of National Struggle

Let us now turn to the Turkish Cypriot Museum of National Struggle; built in 1978 on the Venetian Walls of Nicosia, just east of Kyrenia Gate, it is located next to a Turkish Cypriot army camp. Its declared purpose is to commemorate and educate about the struggles undertaken by Turkish Cypriots from 1878 to the present day.¹¹ It is organised in chronological order, with different spaces assigned to different periods. The exhibition has a documentary character and uses mostly two-dimensional material such as newspaper articles, documents, books, posters, photographs and maps. A limited number of three-dimensional objects, such as guns and other firearms as well as personal belongings, are on display as the museum presents visitors with a tightly curated narrative.¹²

Figure 2.2Sign outside the Turkish Cypriot Museum of National Struggle: ‘How happy is the one who says he is a Turk’ (photograph by Annika Björkdahl, February 2020)

The first section of the museum covers the period 1878–1955. The year 1878, when the British took over the island, is generally considered to be the start of the Turkish Cypriot struggle. However, very little information is on display from that period. The second exhibition space covers the period 1955–1974. There, much emphasis is placed on the Turkish Cypriot trauma, tragedy and killings at the hands of the Greek Cypriots and the honoured heroes and martyrs among the TMT fighters. In contrast to the Greek Cypriot museum the British colonial power is basically absent, which stands in contrast to the prominent presence of the Greek Cypriots. The exhibition closes with the end of the struggle, that is, the declaration of independence on 15 November 1983 and the establishment of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, as well as the military intervention by Turkey in 1974. These are important events highlighted through photos, documents and written statements.

Nationalist ideas are clearly reflected in the ways in which events are selected and represented, for example through an emphasis on massacres, but also in the choice of themes to remember traumas and struggle, that is, with an emphasis on overcoming a strong enemy (Papadakis, 1994). The brave TMT fighters are in the spotlight as the heroes of the permanent exhibition and there are several stories of individual heroism by the fighters. The soldiers killed in struggle are referred to as martyrs, and the names of the fallen soldiers are listed on a stone wall that visitors pass as they leave the exhibition. Unlike many contemporary museums of war around the world, the exhibition that weaves together the artefacts on display at the Turkish Cypriot museum does not attempt to restore the human dimensions of the soldiers or to emphasise their vulnerability.

Similar to the Greek Cypriot museum, the Turkish Cypriot museum also mirrors the nationalistic sentiments of its motherland. While both the north and the south of Cyprus have their respective flags, these flags are conspicuously absent within the museums; instead, the museums prominently display the flags of Greece and Turkey. In the Museum of National Struggle in the north, symbols, representations and narratives of the past clearly express continuity with the Ottoman past and identification with Turkey and the Turkish nation. When the museum was inaugurated, it also reflected ambitions in Turkey at that time to modernise and westernise the Turkish state. The content of its displays has an anti-religious character that reflects secularising aspirations at the time of its inauguration. This content has not changed, despite the increased Islamisation of Turkey’s politics under Recip Erdoğan as president. The secularism and absence of religious symbols contrast with the presence of such symbolism in the Greek Cypriot museum. The fact that the Turkish Cypriot museum is situated adjacent to an army camp and the Greek Cypriot one is located just next to the Archbishopric also reflects this (Papadakis, 1994: 404).

Women are strikingly absent from the exhibitions and the nationalist narratives in the two museums. Nationalism often tends to portray women as vulnerable, as mothers of the nation, as widows or as grieving victims. Yet here women are denied even this type of presence. Only a brief recognition of women is accorded in the Turkish Cypriot Museum of National Struggle, through a photo of a few women in uniform fighting in the TMT ranks. In the Greek Cypriot museum, a bullet that killed one of the very few female EOKA fighters, Loukia Papageorgiou, is on display.¹³ Other women activists are forgotten, one such being EOKA member Androula Kouspetri, whose code name was Agamemnon. Kouspetri was a messenger and organiser who also undertook traditional care work for EOKA. Her importance in the struggle is recognised in a collection of personal short stories by EOKA fighter Renos Lyssiotis (2016), as the woman behind the idea of having a donkey surrender to the British – an incident captured in a photo that appeared on the front page of all the newspapers. Although the photo showing the donkey surrendering is given prominence in the exhibition, Kouspetri is not mentioned by name in the text that explains the item.

Both museums focus on the experiences of individual soldiers, the trauma and sacrifices of the civilians, and the heroic struggle against a stronger enemy. The museums also act as memorials for the soldiers who lost their lives in battle. Museums like these are clearly institutions that care for and conserve the past through the careful curation of selected mnemonic narratives. The two museums are little inclined to serve as spaces to explore potentially divisive issues within their respective communities or to openly criticise the Greek Cypriot state or the de facto Turkish Cypriot state. They do not provide space for counter-memories. Thus, these two museums hold in place the memory of past struggles and trauma and exhibit the nationalism that persists in Cyprus, which represents an obstacle to efforts to move towards the unification of the island and a durable peace.

Alternative sites for alternative memories

Other museum spaces, such as the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, present contemporary art projects that at times engage with and destabilise these mnemonic formations by exhibiting work from both sides of the Green Line. In February 2020 a temporary exhibition at the Ledra Palace Hotel in the buffer zone, a building which had been the UN peacekeepers’ base until 2019, included works by Greek Cypriot artists that had been left behind in the north as a result of the Turkish invasion. After being exhibited the works were to be returned to their former Greek Cypriot owners.¹⁴ In this context it is worth highlighting a two-part documentary film entitled Parallel Trips by Cypriot directors Panikos Chrysanthou and Derwis Zaim, which is intended to give a voice to survivors of the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. It addresses issues of the interconnectedness of such complex processes of remembering, and how these are mobilised as symbolic resources in political manoeuvres (see Briel, 2008, 2013). It is an example of how independent initiatives and creative activities outside the curated official institutions of memory and history may contribute to opening up spaces for voices and memories not currently acknowledged within the dominant mnemonic formation.

Figure 2.3The Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC) (photograph by Annika Björkdahl, February 2020)

Agents: selective memory-making

Memory agents are actively involved in a discerning process of making memories, converting specific individual memories into collective ones. Simultaneously, they endeavor to translate these collective memories into political narratives. These agents wield significant influence, possessing the capability to mold, modify and solidify political memories to serve specific objectives. As frequently emphasised, agency is intrinsically tied to power dynamics. The exercise of agency is either enabled or disabled by the prevailing material and immaterial structures (Ahearn, 2001: 112; Giddens, 1984). As we will see in this section, memory agents have rarely been inclined to explore issues that are potentially divisive within their own communities or to openly criticise the state through these museums as venues.

Memory agents in the south

Memory agents uphold the mnemonic formation of Greek Cypriot nationalism, but this is not necessarily a homogenous group as past and present memory politics showcase. Papadakis (2003) has pointed out that there is left–right dimension in memory politics in Cyprus. Since the events of 1974, Greek Cypriot politics has been sharply divided between the left and the right in the south of the island. Within the Greek Cypriot community, the two dominant parties, the left-wing party the Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL) and the right-wing party Democratic Rally (DISY), each read the history of the island through different lenses. They also present different narratives of a complex past and hold different views of the future. The mnemonic formation of nationalism is largely challenged by the political left, including AKEL, and by the bi-communal movement, a citizen-led reconciliation movement (Papadakis, 2003) that provides a space for counter-memory work. The right is closely connected with EOKA and tends to be the party of choice for EOKA veterans (Papadakis, 2003). The exclusionary mnemonic formation of nationalism is mainly upheld by the political right including the DISY, associations of former EOKA members, the Archbishopric of Cyprus, as well as associations of displaced Greek Cypriots. However, over time DISY has changed its politics from being a staunch supporter of a Hellenic Cyprus to being the only party that openly campaigned for the Annan Plan in 2004 (Yakinthou, 2012: 237).

The left and the right consequently also have different views on the importance and role of the Museum of National Struggle, which is sometimes also dubbed the EOKA museum. Among agents on the right of the spectrum is the Association of EOKA Fighters, which makes its contribution to keeping memories of the struggle alive by organising and taking part in anniversary events, often side by side with DISY. The association is one of the main stakeholders influencing the Museum of National Struggle, as its members provide the objects, letters, photographs and narratives on display there. The former curators of the museum have all been EOKA members and have seen their main task as being to protect the memory of the fallen heroes and commemorate their struggle.¹⁵ The association therefore continues to be an important pillar of the mnemonic formation of nationalism in the south and exerts the strongest influence over the narrative communicated by the museum’s permanent exhibition. Moreover, the Archbishopric of Cyprus, which owns parts of the museum premises, has indirect influence over the museum. The Cypriot Orthodox Church has for some years engaged in memory work on its own account to consolidate collective memories of past suffering and to uphold the hegemonic nationalist narrative. Government institutions, such as the education ministry through its Cultural Department and Cultural Services, are important stakeholders in the Greek Cypriot Museum of National Struggle. The ministry funds the museum, and the funding has been maintained irrespective of whether a left-wing or a right-wing political party is in power.¹⁶

Memory agents in the north

Turkish Cypriot memory agents have been key to making memory out of the suffering of their community. Similarly to what happens in the south, the nationalist memory politics is produced mainly by right-wing politics, the former TMT fighters’ association, the army and of course the strong influence of Turkey. The Democratic Party (DP) and the National Unity Party (UBP) constitute the dominant right-wing political force in the north, collectively securing a substantial majority of the electoral support (Papadakis, 2003). The political right narrates the history of Cyprus as one of Greek expansionism, beginning under the Ottoman Empire, continuing with the persecution of Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus and culminating in the 1974 coup d’état aimed at the annexation of Cyprus to Greece, which provoked Turkey to intervene. Thus, it is the Turkish Cypriot right that is promoting its own nationalist reading of history, drawing on the mnemonic formation of Turkism, which in a way mirrors the historical narrative of Hellenism adopted by the Greek Cypriot right (Papadakis, 2003: 264). There is a prevailing sentiment among the political right that the eventual establishment of the TRNC represented a triumphant outcome after a protracted period of struggle, and there seems to be a determination to persist in advancing this cause. This form of nationalism and othering may appear old-fashioned and out of step with the times, yet the representations of the Turkish Cypriots’ suffering are visible at the museums and at the crossings where you enter the buffer zones, and not just to the casual visitor but also to those who do not agree with this interpretation of the past. This materialisation of memory also contributes to freezing the past and perpetuating the conflict.

The Turkish Cypriot left, including the largest left-leaning party the Republican Turkish Party (CTP), the smaller Communal Liberation Party (TKP), trade unions and activists in the bi-communal movement, as well as individual academics within the Turkish Cypriot community, have attempted to provide alternative histories of the past, contesting the nationalist narrative (Papadakis, 2003: 263). However, those who challenged the hegemonic narrative, expressing criticism of Turkey or sympathy towards the Greek Cypriots, were labelled as traitors ungrateful to Turkey.¹⁷ Despite these harsh circumstances, the bi-communal movement continues to bring to the fore memories, testimonies and voices that provide recollections of the past where peaceful co-existence between the two communities was not uncommon, and that challenge the dominant nationalistic one.

The mnemonic formations of nationalism have proved difficult to challenge, contest or dismantle, even for those in political power. The election of two left-wing candidates – Demetris Christofias of AKEL as president of Cyprus in 2008 and Mehmet Ali Talat of the socialist Republican Turkish Party (CTP) as leader of Northern Cyprus in 2005 – was seen as a significant break with the past. The leaders were regarded as a clean slate who had no previous relationship with, respectively, EOKA or the TMT, nor with the Greek Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot nationalist movements (Yakinthou, 2012: 234). Although in power at the same time and sharing some views about the future of the island, both leaders were trapped in the hegemonic nationalist mnemonic formations and were unable to challenge the nationalist narratives that permeated politics and society in the north and south of the island.

Memory agents in the margins

Civil society actors have occasionally tried to destabilise the mnemonic formations of nationalism, whether in cooperation across the divide or separately. The bi-communal movement has been most effective in encouraging different readings of the past and promoting alternative understandings of the Cyprus problem. Bi-communal activists, along with academics, are often unacknowledged memory agents whose work gives voice to silenced and forgotten memories. Examples of such memory work that challenges hegemonic nationalist narratives are two major initiatives: The Life Stories Project by Olga Demetriou and Rebecca Bryant and the oral history project entitled Completing the Incomplete History of the Turkish Cypriot Community: Portraits Drawn through the Narratives of Women. Through such projects memory agents focus on reconciliation through remembrance and by doing so interrupt official history with unofficial histories. In some ways, these memories have all found a way into the public memory-making. Moreover, the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) has been at the forefront in trying, through education and by supporting revisions of history curricula and textbooks, to provide a less nationalist version of history.¹⁸ The AHDR is developing the Cyprus Critical History Archives as a unique digital resource containing digitised and catalogued Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot newspaper articles on intercommunal relations and conflict-related violence during the 1955–1964 period, providing different perspectives on specific events so as to better understand the complexities of the Cyprus conflict (CCHA Website).¹⁹

Figure 2.4Graffiti by the Green Line (photograph by Annika Björkdahl, February 2020)

Memory work by members of minority communities in the north and in the south reveals cracks in the hegemonic mnemonic formations of nationalism. One example is the Armenian–Cypriot writer Nora Nadjarian (2006), whose poetry attests to the fractured memories of the Armenian diaspora in Cyprus, a community whose memories and past have been marginalised by the hegemonic formations of nationalism on the island. As Nora Nadjarian claims, ‘memories are not an amorphous mass, they are not experienced equally by their subjects and they always represent what has been called “inherited labour”’ (Stoler, 2006 cited in Briel, 2013: 33).

Often missing from memory politics are women’s recollections of the past. Collected micro-narratives of displaced women in the north and in the south contribute both to upholding the mnemonic formations of nationalism and to revealing cracks in the hegemonic metanarrative. The narratives and memories of Turkish Cypriot women who had lived much of their lives in the mixed villages of Cyprus, and had experienced displacement or segregation as a consequence of conflict, hardly mentioned any hostility or antagonism between them and their Greek neighbours until the mid-1950s. Instead, they recalled helping each other with domestic duties, childcare and farming (Aliefendioğlu and Behçetoğulları, 2019: 1480; see Hadjipavlou, 2007, 2010). When the crossings opened in 2003, new experiences with ‘the other’ brought the past to the present, and helped to reinterpret the past in the light of new experiences (Hadjipavlou, 2007: 60). Greek Cypriot women who crossed the Green Line to see their homes and villages returned with reconstructed memories, experiences, stories and feelings.²⁰ Hadjipavlou (2007: 61) cites a Greek Cypriot family who visited their old home in the north after almost thirty years and were sad to find that a Turkish settler family from Turkey had been given their house. ‘The people who now live in our house are very nice. They kept these photographs of my family and some valuables, like embroideries, and have now given them to us. I wonder if they knew that one day we shall return’ (Hadjipavlou, 2007: 61).

Other marginalised voices in memory-making are youth on both sides of the divide. In interviews with Turkish Cypriot youth, they recognised that nationalism shaped everyday lives in the TRNC. For example, they went on school excursions to the Turkish Cypriot National Museum of Struggle and to the smaller Turkish Cypriot Museum of Barbarism as part of the history curriculum, and they revealed that they felt uncomfortable when they visited these museums. Similar sentiments were found among Greek Cypriot pupils and their parents visiting the Greek Cypriot Museum of National Struggle.²¹ Many young voices have been at the forefront challenging the mnemonic formations of nationalism in the north and in the south, calling for a more nuanced form of remembrance.²² In their view, ‘putting the past behind us’ should include acknowledging the suffering on both sides and moving towards the future. Although these micro-narratives can contribute to challenging the binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’, it has proven difficult to acknowledge and incorporate minorities, youth and women’s narrated memories and experiences in the nationalist meta-narratives.

Narratives: nationalist stories

Struggle is a prominent feature in the official nationalist mnemonic narrative of the recent history of Cyprus. While the island was under British colonial rule, both Greek and Turkish nationalist ideologies gained ground. The national struggle-narratives play a significant role in commemoration and state-building as they have political purchase in the present. There is a nationalist narrative highlighting the Greek Cypriot struggle to unite the island with Greece and the Turkish Cypriot narrative of partition of the island.

Greek Cypriot nationalist narratives

The emergence of nationalisms in Cyprus is a consequence of a range of processes, including the nineteenth-century Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, modernisation and an emerging Greek national consciousness that impacted on traditional Cypriot society. The development of a Greek national consciousness and identity, and the emergence of a nationalist middle class among the Greek Cypriots, led to the formation of two ethnic communities of Greek and Turkish Cypriots (Kizilyürek, 2002).

The hegemonic historical narrative that reinforces nationalism refers to the Turks and the British as foreign rulers of Cyprus. The narrative indicates that the island was Greek from the fourteenth century BC. In this narrative, Cypriot clearly means Greek, while the ‘Turks’ and the British are regarded as foreign conquerors (Papadakis, 1994). This implies that the Turkish Cypriots do not share the collective Cypriot identity and are thus not proper Cypriots, but newcomers to the island. The nationalist narrative constructs a symbolic divide between Cypriots, meaning Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots. However, when rapprochement developed, the notion of a common Cypriotness was revisited and the memories renarrated to also include memories of peaceful co-existence. For a long time, Greek Cypriots suppressed and silenced stories of Turkish Cypriots’ actions during the 1974 war, and portrayed the Turkish Cypriots as having likewise been victims of the Turkish army (Bryant, 2012). According to Bryant, this was, in turn, part of a forgetting of the violence perpetrated by Greek Cypriots against the Turkish Cypriots between 1963 and 1974, and served to undermine suggestions that the acts of Turkish Cypriots in 1974 might have been motivated by a desire for vengeance. The knowledge that there had been intercommunal conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots did not challenge the narrative of ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the two communities in the official Greek Cypriot narrative (Bryant, 2012).

The Turkish Cypriot nationalist narratives

Turkish Cypriot nationalism can be understood as a response and a reaction to Greek Cypriot nationalism and was thus conditioned by it. Identifying with the island’s Ottoman past, this nationalism developed into a monolithic national force, partitionist in nature, and became increasingly uncompromising and militant as a consequence of the violent conflict of the 1950s and 1960s (Apeyitou, 2003). The hegemonic nationalist narrative depicts the history of Cyprus to begin under the Ottoman Empire, then challenged by Greek expansionism, continuing with the persecution of Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus and culminating in the 1974 coup d’état aimed at the annexation of Cyprus to Greece, which provoked Turkey to intervene. Thus, Turkey and the Turkish Cypriot political elite were fully committed to the idea of taksim or partition. A Turkish Cypriot nationalist cited in Apeyitou (2003: 89) observed that the new generation of nationalists changed the slogan from ‘Cyprus is Turkish’ to ‘partition or death’. Thus, nationalism was firmly established in the north as well. As Turkish settlers immigrated from Anatolia, Turkey, bringing a different more rural, religious culture to the island, the Turkish Cypriot narrative changed slightly to emphasise the difference between the Turkish from Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots. At the same time, the government in Turkey led by the AK Party provided funding to build new mosques in the TRNC to strengthen the connection with Islam and contemporary Turkey. This development was perceived by many Greek Cypriots as a ‘Turkification process’, and by leftist Turkish Cypriots as a process of Islamization of secular Turkish Cypriots endangering Atatürk’s historical secularisation reforms (Constantinou et al., 2012). Such tensions within the nationalist narrative demonstrate the multi-layered and contested dimension of nationalism.

Silences in the nationalist narratives

The many absences and silences in the historical narratives amount to the marginalisation of certain actors and their narratives by the mnemonic formations of nationalism and their dominant nationalistic narratives. Among these are memories of Cyprus’s minority communities, of Turkish migrants to the TRNC, of migrant workers and refugees. All these voices are silent. Needless to say, both museums deny the existence of any bi-communal Cypriot nationalism, or Cypriotism, a nationalism that highlights the shared Cypriot culture, heritage or economic, political and social rights. Contemporary tools and strategies of information and communication technologies, which would allow for interactive practices and multiple perspectives, and assist visitors ‘in the construction of the museum’s narratives’ as well as to ‘accommodate conflicting voices’ are typically absent (Bull et al., 2019).

Events: political commemoration of nationalist anniversaries

Nationalism is not only narrated or on display at the museums but is also performed at a number of commemorative events organised by the political elites on either side of the divide. Such events are meaning-making, performative, mnemonic practices that aim to forge collective identities. The political divisions evident in Cyprus are often related to the commemorations of the past and political memory, and commemorations remain an important ritual in a context of nationalism. Commemorative events attain their significance when integrated into a narrative that articulates a certain history (Papadakis, 2003: 253–4). The Greek and the Turkish Cypriots’ commemorations continue to feed antagonism between the two communities. These nationalist commemorative events are, however, not cohesive and unchallenged, nor are they always bought into by their target audiences.

A closer investigation of the commemorative events in the north and in the south reveals that the two communities are less homogenous and cohesive than they might at first appear. Yiannis Papadakis’s (2003) comparative analysis reveals a distinct left–right division within both communities, in addition to the north–south divide. In a sense, the commemorative events are not merely reflections of the two exclusive nationalisms that run through the communities on either side of the divide.

Greek Cypriot commemoration practices

The Greek Cypriots have a tradition of observing Greek Independence Day on 25 March, the date the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire began (Katsourides, 2017). The date is an official national holiday in Greece and in Cyprus, and is observed in the Greek Cypriot south. This commemorative event has, however, over time come to be mostly associated with the right-wing DISY (Papadakis, 2003). The right also independently organises a highly controversial commemoration of the 1974 death of General Grivas on 27 January each year.²³ These commemorative dates are performative events that reproduce annually a combination of a will for independence and enosis (Papadakis, 2003: 257). Thus, the right aims to unite Cyprus’s ritual commemorations and national anniversaries with the commemorative calendar of Greece. One nationalist anniversary celebrated by both the right and the left in Cyprus (as well as throughout Greece) is Okhi Day (‘No’ Day) on 28 October, commemorating the 1940 event when Greece refused to bow to an ultimatum from the fascist regime of Italy during the Second World War. In the southern part of Cyprus, this date is also used to express protest against the Turkish invasion of 1974. The date is also commemorated by the Greek and the Greek Cypriot diaspora around the world, and one can find parades and festivities in major cities in the United States, Canada and Australia. This meaning-making event is a nationalist performance where some political parties connect the historic event to present-day politics in Cyprus (Andreou, 2020). Since 1960, 1 October has been a public holiday in Cyprus, as the anniversary of the independence from Britain after the EOKA struggle of 1955–1959. This day sees the most important commemoration event organised by the Greek Cypriot left, although the mnemonic practices of Independence Day parades are a performance of Greek Cypriot nationalism by the military. Instead of a display of Greek flags, however, the Republic of Cyprus flag features prominently. This commemoration therefore revisits and re-evaluates Cypriot history, challenging nationalistic narratives of the past to provide a positive view of a shared future. After 1974, the left began to organise an event series called ‘Ten-day Event for Rapprochement’ to commemorate the time of peaceful co-existence, promoting goodwill against the Turkish Cypriots in support of the idea of reunification of Cyprus (Papadakis, 2003: 261). In contrast to the controversial commemoration of General Grivas’s death, the left, AKEL and the United Democratic Youth Organisation (EDON) organise an annual commemoration of Archbishop Makarios, honouring also the Resistance Fighters for Democratic Associations who fought against the EOKA B in the 1974 coup. This event, which takes place on 19 January, is intended to counter the commemoration of the death of Grivas organised by the right. All in all, the commemorations organised by AKEL provide a different historical narrative of Cyprus’s recent history, challenging the nationalist, right-wing narrative. The left-wing narrative puts the blame for the Cyprus conflict on the two motherlands, Greece and Turkey. Still, most of these Greek Cypriot commemorative events are clearly offensive to the Turkish Cypriot community (Papadakis, 2003).

Turkish Cypriot commemoration practices

The Turkish Cypriots’ commemoration events are also highly nationalistic, although it is clear that the Turkish Cypriot community is not as cohesive as is often presented; here too, as in the south, there is a left–right dividing line. Many commemorative events are connected with and coincide with similar events in Turkey. The Turkish Cypriot right devotes one week in July to celebrating thanksgiving to Turkey and on 20 July marks the celebration of peace and freedom (Yakinthou, 2009). In the south, this date is a significant day of mourning. Three different historical events are commemorated on 1 August: the ‘Birth of the TMT’, ‘Foundation of Our Security Forces’ and the ‘Conquest of Cyprus’ (Papadakis, 2003: 264). At these commemorations official politicians from the political right are present, there is much right-wing rhetoric and flag-waving and the controversial symbol of the Grey Wolf, which stands for Pan-Turkism, is used, as the events are organised by the government, the security forces and the TMT fighters’ associations (Papadakis, 2003: 264). Thus, the competing nationalisms are performed in parallel, in a sense reinforcing each other. Another day of celebration in the north is Republic Day on 15 November, when events are organised by the right-wing parties, the Northern Cyprus government and the TMT fighters’ organisation to commemorate the declaration of the independence of that territory and the creation of the TRNC in 1983. Throughout the north of Cyprus, celebrations of this day frequently involve air displays and military parades, with a gun salute fired (Yakinthou, 2009). They are often attended by the leader of Northern Cyprus, foreign diplomats and journalists, and are a clear illustration of how official public events commemorating a national struggle may be instrumentalised to reinforce the mnemonic formation of nationalism. The 15 November date is meanwhile marked by protests in the south (Yakinthou, 2009).

As the left-wing parties in the north have not exercised political power at government level, they have had little influence on the commemorative calendar and its annual anniversaries. While left-wing politicians take part reluctantly in some commemorative events, they do not tend to organise them. Turkish Cypriots leaning to the left often find that these events raise tensions between the two communities, creating animosity towards Greek Cypriots and limiting the possibilities of finding a durable and just peace.

On 21 December both the Turkish Cypriot left and right commemorate the Bloody Christmas of 1963, an event that ignited interethnic fighting, and those who died during the violence of 1963–1974. The Turkish Cypriot slogan ‘We Won’t Forget’ is used during this commemoration. This event urges the Turkish Cypriots not to forget the sacrifices of their martyrs, the brutality of the Greek Cypriot enemy and the purported constant threat from this enemy. It is jointly organised by the TMT fighters’ associations, the right-wing parties and the TRNC government, with some participation from leftists. Without exception, these days are characterised by nationalism and militarism, with political elites opting to attend, demonstrating solidarity with their community and cause (Papadakis, 2003: 264).

We cannot, however, assume that public commemorations are accepted by all in a society and that no contestation or challenge is presented to the nationalist narratives and commemorative events. It should not be assumed that the state’s intentions come to be endorsed by the public at large. In fact, during some of the commemoration events celebrated in the north many Turkish Cypriots use the day off work to cross to the south to go shopping, for instance, thus demonstrating that these politically instrumentalised commemoration events do not necessarily resonate widely.²⁴ Similarly, in the south, many of the official commemorative events attract limited attention and are widely ignored, although not necessarily actively opposed.²⁵

The SANE analysis: memory and the quality of peace

Where hegemonic mnemonic formations of nationalism disguise contestation, agonistic narration, competing voices and alternative pasts, they may prove to be an obstacle to a just and durable peace. Cyprus provides a clear example of this. The bifurcated peace or peace(s) that we observe on the island is in part a production of struggles around what to remember and what to forget, as the two dominant communities continue to stake their claims for power based on ethno-nationalist and divisive politics. On the surface, the quality of the Cypriot peace(s) may seem sufficient in terms of manifesting as an absence of violent conflict; the ceasefire is still in place despite occasional challenges to it. The Turkish Cypriot peace and the Greek Cypriot peace may co-exist on the island, but there is no shared peace and there is no agreed vision for the future of the island and its communities. The peace(s) we can observe has emerged from competing imaginaries of the past, whereas the mnemonic formations of nationalism continue to dominate the peace in the present. As manifested through sites, agents, narratives and events, these mnemonic formations tend to serve as a tool of state propaganda. They combine nationalistic, religious and political memory in a mix that can be regarded as antagonistic memory.

The nationalist interpretations of the two national struggles provided the points of departure for this analysis of the mnemonic formations of nationalism produced by the two respective state actors and demonstrate the absence of counter-narratives. As sites, the museums of national struggle function in a way that inscribes a sense of stability around received information on what happened in the past and the meanings of that information. In that sense, the museums become a means of inscribing time upon space, while stabilising the associated narrative. Through material inscriptions of the past at these museums the two dominant nationalist narratives find expression. At each site they remain uncontested and pass unchallenged. The representation of the two independence struggles in the museums has the potential to arouse affective reactions and strong emotions, even after several decades.

Neither the sites emplacing the hegemonic nationalist narrative nor the conventional memory agents and nationalist commemorative events emphasise the suffering of all victims on both sides of the buffer zone, or the shared experiences of fighters on the two sides, nor do the exhibitions at the museums convey for visitors an anti-war message or a peace message. The memories on display at the museums, and the narratives into which they are woven, support a toxic nationalism that tends to apply moral terms to specific roles and characters, in the form of heroes and enemies. Thus, it is fair to say that the mnemonic formations of nationalism in place in Cyprus are obstacles to reconciliation. They are divisive, self-absorbing and exclusive. They function as obstacles to peace-building and raise concerns as to the quality of the peace. The sites, agents, narratives and events that are the cornerstone of the mnemonic formations of the two competing nationalisms perpetuate a divided, ethnic peace(s) at the expense of a potential to construct a shared, just peace. The analysis supports Aliefendioğlu and Behçetoğulları’s (2019: 1474) argument that ‘the negative collective remembering fed by nationalism(s) of two communities maintains the unresolved situation of not being reconciled and intensifies the in-betweenness and uncertainty on the island’.

Despite the dominance of the mnemonic formations of nationalism, there are sites, agents, narratives and events that reference a different past and attempt to remember a past that is otherwise often actively forgotten. Indeed, memory work by left-wing political parties, academics, civil society, trade unions and women’s organisations have tried to construct counter-memories by focusing on the shared past and the loss of still missing persons. These counter-memories are nevertheless often depicted as self-contained, despite circumstances that suggest intricate interconnections with each other and with the mnemonic formations of nationalism.

When we investigate the Greek Cypriot collective memory and unpack the narratives and commemorations of the past, we can actually observe three interwoven yet different narratives promoted by different memory entrepreneurs. One set of narrated memories may be seen to romanticise the past by highlighting the peaceful co-existence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots said to have prevailed previously. Memory work along these lines may, nevertheless, contribute to bringing to the fore positive community relations, which in turn may be supportive of peace-building activities to construct a shared peace. This understanding of the past is in part supported, promoted and performed by the bi-communal movement of Cyprus. A second set of memory work connects with nostalgia. It captures Greek Cypriot memories of their lives in the north and their desire to return to their former homes. Such nostalgia, as the visits to the other side have revealed, may create disappointments, contributing to upholding exclusionary practices that perpetuate processes of othering the Turkish Cypriots. When nostalgia can be turned into a constructive force for peace, co-existence and cohesion, it may contribute to peace-building. A third Greek Cypriot narrative, also absent from the mnemonic formations of nationalism, captures the more recent past of the referendum on the Annan Plan, Cyprus’s membership of the European Union, and the acceptance of the separation and of building a Cypriot state on half of the island (Bryant, 2012). This parallel and contemporary narrative connects with a peace that only reflects the absence of conflict and with the existing status quo where the buffer zone functions as an international border. These memories are clearly entangled within the Greek Cypriot community, but tend not to be entangled in the same way in the Turkish Cypriot remembrance of the past.

Moving on to examining the Turkish Cypriot practices of remembrance and forgetting, we can discern three narratives that destabilise the mnemonic formation of nationalism. The first is a narrative that recalls a horrific past, highlighting insecurity, vulnerability and the marginalisation of the Turkish Cypriots in previous decades. This is the pillar of the mnemonic formation of nationalism as supporting taksim (partition) and the sovereignty of the TRNC. Similarly to the Greek Cypriot narrative of nostalgia, a second, less dominant Turkish Cypriot narrative highlights the Turkish Cypriots’ aspiration to return to their lost homes in the south. This narrative may have been gaining strength with the increased influx of people from Turkey, so-called settlers, with political developments in Turkey and with Turkey’s growing influence in the TRNC. This has made some Turkish Cypriots recall the past in terms of nostalgic recollections of co-existence, of Cypriotness and a former collective Cypriot identity, as well as of a shared island rather than agonism and division (Bryant, 2012). A third Turkish Cypriot narrative is similar to its contemporary Greek Cypriot equivalent and accepts the partition, conveying a sense of pride in the TRNC. These mirroring narratives uphold the current negative peace on the island, a peace that is divided and has ethnicity as its basis. In this sense, nostalgia may facilitate the envisioning of a future peace built on shared experiences as refugees, shared experiences of oppression, as well as of individuals’ experiences of personal autonomy, dignity and mutual respect.

Both the Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot mnemonic formations of nationalism comprise memories that are narrated, emplaced at sites and performed at events commemorating the past. In both cases, there are various memory agents that in different ways make efforts mainly to stabilise, but at times to destabilise, the dominant mnemonic formations. The mnemonic formations of nationalism clearly do not overlap in Cyprus and, as this analysis has demonstrated, memory work is bifurcated and lacks a genuine entangledness of memory entrepreneurs, memory work and remembering. The counter-mnemonic activities challenging nationalist recollections of the past may unsettle the otherwise settled mnemonic formation of nationalism. However, at this point in time these do not seem sufficiently interconnected or dynamic to contribute to reconciliation and peace-building and thus to a quality peace.

Conclusions

As explored in the Introduction, history and memory are more concerned with the future than the past, and history is constantly reinvented to legitimise claims to power in the present. It is in this context that we can read the competing disentangled singular mnemonic formations of nationalism and their representations. The bifurcation of the memoryscape in Cyprus demonstrates a kind of homogeneity within each of the commemorating communities and privileges tangible manifestations of memory, such as the museums. At the same time, however, individual acts of remembering or seeking out the past help to explore what lies underneath the seeming homogeneity within the two communities.

The Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot nationalisms have shaped sites of memory, the narratives presented and the artefacts on display, and they have shaped the work of the agents of memory. The representations at the museums of national struggle reflect and enhance nationalist ideologies; both display violent and traumatic events. The museographic representations used in their spaces, as examined in this chapter, aim through various practices to incite visitors’ potentially nationalist emotions, not least through their focus on traumatic memory and the aesthetisation of death. Such sentiments rest not only on nostalgia for the past – its fictionalisation – they also rely on a perpetrator/victim dichotomy and the victimisation of one side against the other. The exhibitions function principally on an emotional level to incite nationalist sentiments, which at the same time produces polarisation and alienation.

The SANE analysis of the mnemonic formations of nationalism thus makes visible the difficulty of an entity that is as historically heterogeneous as Cyprus to serve as a proper singular subject of collective identity and shared political memory. Whereas the hegemonic narratives, performed commemorations and memory agents underpinning the mnemonic formations aim to represent the correct singular history of the island, they more accurately represent the history of two nations and two respective state entities. Both mnemonic formations show the tragic and often denied aspect of state-making, that is, the massacres, atrocities and ethnic cleansing that were part of the two national struggles for independence. Hence, there are competing understandings of what counts as the struggle for independence. The mapping of the memory agents of Cyprus reveals how such mnemonic agency is present across scale and is fluid and frictional as well as trans-scalar, stretching from the individual to local communities, national and transnational politics and diaspora communities. Some of the everyday, mundane memory work takes place under the radar and goes unquestioned, for example through school visits to the museums of national struggle. Other memory work is more high profile, such as when the respective authorities encourage visiting dignitaries and foreign correspondents to visit their museums of national struggle. What is made visible is that memory politics on both sides of the island is hegemonic, lacks acknowledgement of the other and is stuck in the state framework – a reflection of how memory-making is closely connected to state-making.

In an effort to gender the history of Greek and Turkish Cypriots and provide alternative histories to respond to the officially engrained masculinised versions of nationalism, researchers have collected and curated women’s memories of the past. Although these individual memories are not necessarily divorced from collective remembrance, and are often a mixture of official and informal histories, at times they also make visible a different past. It emerges as a past in which women as neighbours shared the everyday in a casual, carefree way, and it provides a more nuanced version of a past that is shaped by a variety of intersectional identities. Thus, gendering the past helps advance the plurality of memory, and the memories of the everyday may also contribute to the entangledness of memories.

In summary, the partition of the island has led to the memory of the ‘other’ becoming disentangled from ‘our’ memory, and this has been turned into a political strategy. The bifurcation of memory does not reflect a plurality of memory in the sense of entangled memories. Rather, the Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot memories are portrayed through a tunnel vision of the past, where the influence of, and entanglements with, the other’s collective memories are marginalised. Memory in Cyprus is dominant and hegemonic, and state-centric political memories evidently enhance separateness, revealing a lack of acknowledgement, plurality and inclusivity. Such selective, politically motivated cultures of remembering the war are an impediment to meaningful dialogue across a divided Cyprus. Today, memory-making does not contribute in any meaningful way to peace-making in Cyprus. This is mainly due to the fact that memory production is divisive and memories are compartmentalised between the two communities rather than entangled.