LAST Sunday afternoon, a friend of the Iacovides family called them unexpectedly from London where they had just arrived from Larnaca on Cyprus Airways. He told them to go and pick up a copy of the Sunday Mail.
“Why?” asked Jason, a 59-year-old shipping maintenance manager.
“Just go and buy it and we’ll talk later,” his friend said.
When Jason brought the paper home and flipped through it with his 51-year-old wife Eleni, the two were left speechless. Staring right at them were long-lost photos of themselves and their son, Panos, from over 30 years earlier.
There was Panos blowing out the candles of his second birthday cake, Eleni and Jason embarking on a month-long trip through Europe, and even a 21-year-old Eleni at their Famagusta home, pregnant with their daughter and second child, Eleftheria. All of this appeared under the headline: Whose Pictures Are These?
They were featured in last week’s Sunday Mail when former Famagusta resident, Anthony, pledged to return a set of mystery slides to their rightful owners. He had stumbled across them weeks before when visiting his home in the north. A neighboring Turkish Cypriot family returned some of Anthony’s own family’s missing slides, among which the Iacovides lot had been misplaced.
As early as Monday morning, Panos Iacovides – seen in the photos as the lovable two-year old dressed in red and leaning coyly against a Jaguar – called the Sunday Mail to claim them. He is now in his thirties, married, and with a baby boy of his own.
“We were all very emotional, and so excited to get the photos back,” he said.
On Thursday night, the Sunday Mail, along with Anthony and his wife, met the Iacovides family at their Limassol home to return a tin box filled with over 100 slides dating from 1972-1973. The result was a slide show full of surprises for the family, and an elaborate Cypriot dinner between new friends.
Anthony and the Iacovides couple quickly discovered that they had much in common with one another, and that their paths had crossed many times before back in Famagusta. Jason remembered Anthony riding his bike around the neighborhood, Eleni and Anthony had been at the same school, and as a child, Eleni lived across the street from Anthony’s grandmother. The “mystery” faces now had names and context in the social fabric of old Famagusta.
But even before loading up the projector, all four members of the Iacovides family rummaged impatiently through the stack of slides, holding them up to the light in disbelief. Panos reached for one in which his two-year-old self sits on his grandfather’s lap.
“We were hoping we would see some pictures of him, because he died a year ago,” he said about his grandfather. “We had always wanted to see pictures of him when he was young.”
Another slide showed Panos next to a fountain in the Famagusta yard. Eleni cried that the same fountain was still in the house, and went to grab photographs she had recently taken of her old house, now used by Turkish Cypriots.
She had gone to see her home two months earlier, and wanted more than anything else to find some old photographs. “She went to the family living there and said ‘please do you have any photos, nothing else, just photos?’” said Eleftheria about her mother. “They told her ‘no, we just moved into the house in 1983,’ and she came home so disappointed. Instead, we couldn’t believe it but the photos found us.”
“Mana mou” was exclaimed repeatedly, as the family saw the slides projected on their wall from situations they had since forgotten.
“We are not crying now because we did all of our crying when we first saw the newspaper,” Eleni said, but evidence of tears surfaced nonetheless on her big brown eyes.
Eleftheria and Panos laughed playfully at the bell-bottoms and sideburns sported by their father, who in turn, reminded them that he had always been very stylish.
In one picture, Eleni, pregnant with Eleftheria, stands next to Panos on their Famagusta balcony.
Five days after the birth of Eleni’s second child, Turkish forces invaded Cyprus and the 22-year-old mother fled her home with newborn Eleftheria, and four-year-old Panos. She went to a meeting place in Limassol where Jason, who was in the army at the time, had instructed her to wait for him. Jason was wounded in the war, and to this day has shrapnel embedded in his left arm. At the time, his condition allowed him to leave the army, and soon enough the family-of-four was reunited.
“We went to London for two years, but we decided to come home when Panos was mixing English with Greek,” said Jason. “We knew we would have to decide: if we stay, we stay until both kids have finished school, otherwise we go back now. We wanted to come back.”
They came back and spent a year in Nicosia, before settling in Limassol for the long haul. After almost 30 years away, when Cypriots from both sides of the divide were finally able to cross the Green Line, Jason did not go with his wife to see the Famagusta house. With memories of the war still close to his heart, he did not wish to enter occupied Cyprus. Even Eleni, now a boutique manager, admitted to feeling a bit uncomfortable when she saw Turkish Cypriots living in her home, and the changes they had made to it.
But if opening the checkpoints did anything to make up for what they lost so many years ago, it’s that it has allowed them to reclaim an important piece of the family history. If Anthony had not been able to go and visit his old Famagusta home, who knows how long the rusty tin box with the Iacovides’ slides would have waited in a Turkish Cypriot family basement.
“We are so grateful to Anthony for bringing us this pleasure,” Panos said. “I don’t even remember these years, but I still get goose bumps seeing these baby pictures of myself, and especially the ones with my grandfather.”
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