No Greeks on the moon, no turks on Mars
The reconciliatory politics of Cypriot shadow theatre
I suppose, in retrospect, I should have known that Mehmet Ertu? was a puppeteer. That he had manufactured and sold eau de cologne during the lean years of internecine bloodshed in Cyprus, or that he was the Turkish Cypriots’ greatest authority on the postal history of the island, had once produced LPs and sold antiques should have come as no shock either. As it was, I had chanced upon one of Cyprus’ last living shadow puppeteers in his theatre in the B?yuk Han because I was looking for a book on Turkish grammar, which was on sale on a rack outside. A wiry, ageless man with the air of a conjuror, Ertu?, I know now, could have told me that he had invented the flying trapeze, or taught pigs to dance, and I would have believed him too.
He grew up in the village of Arsos, where his father owned a grocery. Next to the grocery was the village coffee shop. The villagers gathered there in the evenings to listen to itinerant storytellers in lieu of television or movies. These storytellers performed shadow plays whose roots probably have their source in the crude peasant dramas and fertility rites of ancient Anatolia. Karag?z, the cunning idiot who always triumphed over his more astute but less crafty fellow villagers, including Hacivat, his refined associate, who could declaim Persian poetry as deftly as he could identify an obscure flower, emerged as the unlikely hero of the village stage.
Karag?z’s origins are as disputed by scholars as those of ancient Greek tragedy. I had read that Arab traders had brought him from Java to the Mameluke sultans in Egypt, and from there he had made his way, outwitting Arabs, Jews and Greeks alike, to Istanbul, where he flourished in the Ottoman courts of the 16th century. Whatever the truth, by the 17th century the humpbacked jester with a club for an arm was a household name, and his antics, equal parts oral poetry, folk tradition, mimicry, or taklit, and sheer buffoonery, formed a genre of their own.
“In the old days there were puppeteers going all around Cyprus,” Ertu? said, waving to a little girl who had just seen his Saturday show, Karag?z Sells Ideas. “When I was a little boy, my father’s grocery was in front of the coffee shop where the puppeteers performed at night. The people used to repeat the jokes and stories the next day in my father’s shop. So I listened to what they repeated. I was a natural mimic… I tried to imitate Molla Hasan, a famous Cypriot puppeteer. After that, I listened to Ankara radio. I read all the books on Karag?z.”
“Unfortunately, I had no teacher. I watched some other puppeteers later here in Nicosia. I tried to catch everything. In my second year teaching – I taught Turkish literature in Famagusta – the headmaster asked me to put on a show. I had no puppets, so I made it live – I used students instead of puppets. After that I created my own puppets and started playing festivals, radio and TV. Four years ago they gave me this place. This is the main theatre in the North.”
The old puppets, of which Ertu? has a substantial collection, some of which are over 200 years old, were made from camel or goat skin. He pointed to a reproduction among many hanging on the walls. “This is Karag?z without a head scarf. For most of the Karag?z puppets, the arm consists of two pieces. This one has three.”
“Why?”
“In order to better beat Hacivat!”
He drew my attention to another. “This lady is topless. Do you see? One hundred years old and even at that time they had topless women. In a Muslim community!”
There are 30 (some say 29) classical Karag?z plays, the puppeteer told me, one for each night of Ramadan. These plays were performed in a mixture of archaic Turkish, Persian and Arabic.
Puppeteers like Ertu? have expanded and modernised the themes as well as the language.
Into this category would fall plays like: Karag?z on the Internet, Karag?z Solves the Cyprus Problem, Karag?z the Wimp, Karag?z the Environmentalist and Karag?z in Annanistan, all written by Ertu?. In Karag?z Solves the Cyprus Problem, the hero sends the Greeks to Mars and the Turks to the Moon, leaving the island for the donkeys, which he claims was President Makarios’ own idea.
As in Karag?z Sells Ideas, where an Arab asks for salaam (‘peace’ in Arabic) and Karag?z tries to sell him a salami, which turns out to be nothing more than a brisk cudgelling, Turkish shadow theatre relies as heavily on stock characters as it does on puns. But even to the stereotypical characters, such as the dandy, opium addict and village drunk, Ertu? has added some of his own. The Three Stooges, for one.
“I also imitate the man who used to call the people to the cinema. That’s new. About 40 years-old.”
Predictably enough, with the advent of moving pictures, the coffee shops stopped attracting crowds and the art of the puppeteer faded. “But the first films were in black-and-white,” the puppeteer recalled, “and without sound. Karag?z was live, in colour and with voices. When Paphiosos, a Greek puppeteer from Limassol, stopped his shows, the people wanted him back. He accepted and all the cinemas closed! For a while.”
In 1967, when Mehmet Effendi, a Turkish-Cypriot puppeteer from Lefka, died, the tradition was carried on in the north by Ertu? alone. As far as I know, he is the last. “Whenever I give a talk, I always say I need someone to teach. Some youngsters come immediately. They say, ‘Uncle, I love this work. Can you teach me?’ But they expect to learn in a day.”
We moved to the stage, a curtained box about a meter and half wide and two meters high with a translucent screen. The puppeteer turned on the light and set Hacivat down, a colourful acetate figure manipulated by a wooden stick.
“Where are you Karag?z?” a distraught Hacivat asks.
Karag?z appears and growls, “I’m in my shoes.”
Hacivat gets a nasty beating.
“Why did he hit him?” I asked.
“A misunderstanding.”
On the way out, I noticed a series of pamphlets on the counter, short tales written by the puppeteer. Each cost 1YTL and was used instead of a ticket. At the end of a performance, theatre-goers were offered a piece of candy in return, and sometimes an old coin.
The shop in the municipal market? I wondered, but did not ask about it. The eccentric in his barrel-shaped room in the medieval hostelry was a multi-layered chapter in a history whose chroniclers seemed to pop up in the most unlikely places. But who would imitate the last puppeteer? I snapped a photo of Mehmet Effendi, the puppeteer from Lefka, whose portrait, hanging next to the stage, stared intensely from the wall, and left.
Christodoulos Paphios, director of The Friends of Shadow Puppet Theatre, is the grandson of one of Cyprus’ most beloved shadow puppeteers, Christodoulos Paphios Sr., and learned his art as a boy by accompanying his grandfather on his tours of the island in the late 50s and early 60s. Having once worked as a tourist guide and then as a hotelier, Paphios, now teaches French, in addition to managing the Shadow Theatre.
He has performed in festivals all over the world, including Slupsk, Poland, and is well-known in France. As recently as a week ago, he represented Cyprus in the 10th World Festival of Puppet Art in Prague, where he received a special jury award for “Energy in a One Man Show.”
I visited the puppeteer in his studio a few days after his latest triumph, though my thoughts were still with his Turkish colleague, Mehmet Ertu?, who, due to his political status, could not attend such festivities.
The respective heights of the two puppeteers mirror the stages on which they play. Ertu? is small, as are his puppets. Paphios, surrounded by his menagerie of large Greek fig
ures, is about six feet tall.
I mentioned in passing that I had talked to Ertu?. A furious soliloquy in rapid Cypriot followed. I dimly perceived the issue of a set of puppets commissioned and some falling out over the price. Then I distinctly heard a figure. Fifty liras. What was the going price for a shadow puppet these days?
Paphios rolled his eyes. “We are good friends,” he said at the end of this speech. “I have invited him so many times to my studio, but he refuses to come. Why?”
Back to business: what is the origin of Karaghiozis (in Turkish, Karag?z, or black eye).
I said, “Ertu? told me that Karag?z is Turkish. Is this true?”
Paphios grimaced.
“No, he was a Greek carpenter. You see, the Pasha of Bursa had Hacivat build him a palace, and Hacivat hired Karaghiozis because he was clever. But Karaghiozis was a wag and he made all the workers laugh. All day long, no work. So the Pasha said to Hacivat, ‘What’s going on here. Where’s my palace?’ Hacivat got scared and said, ‘Well, I hired this fellow, Karaghiozis, and he’s a very funny guy, but he won’t work.’ Hacivat warned Karaghiozis, but it was in his nature to tell jokes, you see, and he didn’t stop and the Pasha hung him. Well, the people protested and protested because they loved Karaghiozis. In the end, the Pasha had to give Karaghiozis a lavish funeral. Even today there is a monument. Two big cypresses. This was 170 years ago.”
It sounded like a nice, Hellenocentric fairytale. Paphios disagreed.
“It’s a reality. There are some documents, but mostly we have the oral tradition.”
The Greekness or Turkishness of Karaghiozis/Karag?z may be a moot point historically speaking, but on an island where the admission of cultural interdependence is still taboo and the national conscience awash in a sea of self-willed amnesia, ill-defined patriotism, bloodshed and dislocation, even a village hunchback can be a thorny issue.
Paphios said, “It doesn’t matter really. Absolutely not. Only one thing. The Turkish Karaghiozis is foul-mouthed. The Greeks cleaned him up.”
Other differences, according to Paphios, include the size of the screen, the Turkish one being tiny, the Greek gigantic, and the themes of the plays. Greek shadow theatre deals with Greek history, Greek mythology, everyday Greek life and Greek political events. And its Turkish counterpart? Religious themes, Paphios said.
A case in point is Alexander the Great, who rises from the grave to slay a monster for the Pasha. But there is an added Hellenic twist. “A symbol,” Paphios said. “Nobody knows it. I will tell you. The serpent is the Ottoman empire.”
At least the two puppeteers have one thing in common. They both perform and write their own plays. Paphios has penned plays that deal with social issues, like violence in schools. In one of his plays Karaghiozis shows up at the 2004 Olympics, in another he brings relief to the children of Iraq.
“We don’t have violence in our performances either,” he added.
“And Karaghiozis’ big fist?” I asked.
“The fist? It’s not for hitting. It’s like that so he can pick rich people’s pockets.”
This was a revelation.
“No hitting?”
“OK. Sometimes, yes. Love taps. Hacivat is his friend.”
The puppeteer said, “I once played in the occupied area. In Yialousa. And I had Turks and Cypriots in the audience.”
This play is called Karaghiozis, President.
“You see, Karaghiozis wants peace. He speaks Turkish. He says to the Turkish Cypriots, ‘I want peace. I don’t want war. Other countries created the problems in Cyprus.’”
I mentioned Ertu?’s interstellar solution, which would have the Turks and Greeks occupying separate planets. The puppeteer frowned.
“It’s different, of course. When we speak of the Cyprus problem we speak seriously. We lived in peace before the Turkish invasion. Now we want peace again.”
Both puppeteers also share the same misgivings about the future of their art. Specifically, they fear that the shadow theatre will fade away under the pervasive influence of the internet and other modern, but less educational, entertainments. Only, Ertu? does not have an apprentice, whereas Paphios has several.
For details of upcoming performances:
Mehmet Ertu?, B?y?k Han/north Nicosia Tel: (009) 0542 850 35 14
Christodoulos A. Paphios, 21 Dorou Alastou, Flat 5, Ayios Pavlos, Nicosia. Tel: 22 774932, 99 560664
