FORMER residents of Vasilia village in the occupied north are due back in their hometown today to plant cypress trees in the village cemetery as a symbolic move to mark its repair.
Former neighbours and relatives of the community’s dead will gather at 11am to plant the trees and plan the next steps for the complete restoration of the resting place of their loved ones.
The Association of Vasilia-Vavila Displaced Persons has prepared a topographic layout of the cemetery and plans to gather the necessary information to fill in the missing details on gravestones that have either eroded or been destroyed.
The cemetery at Vasilia is one of the first restored within the framework of the Cypress Tree Project. The grounds were cleaned up, the perimeter restored and the main gate replaced. The decision was taken to leave the restoration of gravestones to the relatives and fellow villagers of the dead in every village.
Cemetery restoration on both sides of the divide in Cyprus comes under the operation of the Bicommunal Development Programme, funded with the co-operation of USAID, UNDP and UNOPS.
According to yesterday’s Phileleftheros, a similar restoration project at the cemetery of Filia will be completed in a month, and relatives and community members will be called to fix up the headstones of loved ones.
The project incorporates Muslim cemeteries in the south and Christian ones in the north.
However, Church officials have so far failed to take a shine to the repairs to Greek Cypriot religious sites in the north.
Last month, two bishops accused UNOPS of “communication tricks” which served Turkey’s propaganda, as well as US interests.
“The overblown promotion of the simple repair of the cemetery wall in Vasilia in occupied Kyrenia by the so-called UNOPS cemetery restoration programme and the flagrant omission of the sacrilege and destruction of the rest of the cemeteries, does not solve the problem of the continuing occupation.
“It reveals the intentions and motives of those who assumed the so-called restoration,” the Bishop of Paphos Chrysostomos announced in a joint statement with his Kyrenia counterpart on September 23.
The bishops said the main concern of the UN, until the end of the occupation, should be the restoration of all holy places, which were turned into mosques, warehouses and nightclubs, to their pre-invasion condition and to oversee their return to their legal owners, as opposed to facilitating Turkey’s image as being accommodating.
