TODAY a new era is beginning for Harita Mantoles. No longer will she go to bed at night wondering what has happened to her husband, her father, her uncle, her cousin or her two brothers-in-law. Today she knows. Today she can rest her head knowing she has finally laid them to rest.
“After 34 years it feels like a salvation. All these years I didn’t know 100 per cent if he was dead or alive. I didn’t know what had happened to him, where he was. I wasn’t able to take his remains in my arms and kiss them as I did the other day,” Harita said.
The 61-year-old, who lives in the Ayios Athanasiou Limassol refugee estate, was referring to the burial of her husband’s remains yesterday.
Andreas Mantoles, 25, Neophytos Damaskinos, 75, Savvas Chakkas, 65, Panayiotis Chakkas, 25, Phoivos Kyprianou, 23, and Theodoros Achilleos, 36, were found buried alongside six others in a mass grave in the Kyrenia district three years ago. All 12 were buried where they’d died after they were shot dead by Turkish troops in front of their wives and children on July 21, 1974.
Harita, who was one of the wives, remembers it like yesterday.
“I could get over his death, but I can’t get over how he died. I keep seeing him lying there shot, with our son, blood pouring down the side of his face, clutching the back of his father’s neck and twisting his own from head side to side, his eyes wide open in fear. He was only one and couldn’t speak but he kept saying bam bam Baba (dad), bam bam Baba,” she said.
The 61-year-old believes the only reason she and the other women and children present on that fateful day, as well as another one of her brothers-in-law, are alive is because of a Turkish soldier who helped them escape.
“I pray for him every night. I hope that he is well and that God has looked after him because it is he who saved us,” she said.
As Harita goes back in time to recall the event that left her a widow and made her two children fatherless, her eyes begin to fill with tears.
Raised and married in Elia-Karava village in the Kyrenia district, Harita was one of 48 who were rounded up by Turkish troops on July 21 after they were found hiding in an underground stable.
They were marched to a clearing in the middle of an orchard several kilometres away, where a Turkish officer gave the order for their execution. The last words she remembers her husband telling her were: “If they shoot at us, lie down on the ground and pretend you’re dead.”
Everything happened very quickly after the first shot was fired. The men went down and the women and children screamed. In the commotion the Turkish soldier helped them escape. Three days later they were found by the United Nations and given protection.
Homeless, fatherless and widowed, Harita had to struggle to build a life for her and her two babies. This meant working 18 hours a day and holding down three jobs to ensure they were clothed, fed and educated. At the same time she found time to put pressure on one government after another to help her find her husband; pressure which finally paid off in 2005 when the Turkish Cypriot side uncovered the mass grave where her spouse was buried.
The sheer extent of her loss and her ability to speak so eloquently and movingly in public meant that over the years Harita has become almost a sort of mascot of the Committee of the Relatives of the Missing, the organisation at the forefront of demanding answers to what actually happened to their loved ones.
The possibility for that did not come until after a July 1997 agreement between Glafcos Clerides and Rauf Denktash in which both sides agreed to exchange information regarding burial sites and cooperate in returning the remains of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot missing.
The 61-year-old answers telephone calls throughout the interview. One minute she can be heard thanking callers and the next she reaches for a tissue to wipe away her tears.
“It is people’s love and support that has given me the strength to go on. Sometimes I’ll get a phone call and not know who it is and they’ll just tell me ‘I’m here for you, whatever you need’. That fills my heart with such lightness. I think the fact that I talk about it so often has helped me all this year. I allow myself to feel the pain. I know people who were there that day that cannot talk about it. They keep it buried inside them and it manifests in ill health. I can talk about it and want to when asked about it. I get upset, but I think it helps,” she said.
Today Harita lives in a simple, yet lovingly cared for home. Photographs of her six loved ones are pinned up on the wall and her home smells of freshly baked bread.
“They’re for their memorial service on Sunday,” she said, pointing at six photographs of her relatives on the dining table.
Her front garden is carefully tended with lots of flower pots giving the place a touch of colour. Two large olive trees and a lemon tree add more warmth to the place, as does the large fig tree in the back garden.
Despite Harita’s obvious sadness, the love, care and consideration she puts into her home is unmistakable. This was the place she raised her children and taught them the values her own father, Neophytos, taught her.
“He was a man who brought up all 11 of us when my mother died, who never raised his voice to us, never lost his temper and taught us to love our neighbour. He was a good man and when I remember him my heart burns,” she said, her eyes welling up with tears again.
Her four grandchildren are the source of her greatest joy: Andreas, Mina, Despina and Nicholas.
It is for them that she said she will now try to remove the black clothes she has been wearing for over three decades.
“I promised them that when I’d find their grandfather I’d take off the black. It won’t be easy, but I will try, for them,” she said.
Although Harita has had much happiness and even laughter in her life, each experience has been tinged with sadness.
“Every school graduation, university graduation, wedding, birthday, grandchild’s birth, I’ve wanted my husband there. My children have wanted their father,” she said.
Although her daughter and son were only two and one when their father died, they had felt Andreas’ absence intensely while growing up.
In fact her son had taken the news that his father’s skull had not been found with his remains very badly, Harita said.
“He came home and was moaning like a wounded animal,” she said. “I knew when the DNA tests confirmed his remains that there was a possibility not all his remains would be there and I warned him that we should wait to see what had been found before going to see them, but he insisted. When he was told that his father had no skull he was inconsolable,” she said.
Although the retired nursery school cleaner and cook said was aware her husband’s soul had left his body on the day he was shot, it wasn’t easy to take in the fact that his skull was missing.
“It’s human and we have feelings. It’s a huge relief to me that I’m burying my husband, as it is to my children, but part of them had always clung to the hope that he’d be found alive. This is why to find him without his skull was so hard,” she said.
Harita said an experience her husband’s aunt had had with her own husband during World War II had possibly fuelled her offspring’s hope.
“She received notice her husband had died and then after the war ended he knocked on her door. They had been in the middle of preparing for his memorial service,” she said.
Because of this Harita has faithfully held a memorial service for her husband every year since he has gone missing. She also burns a candle in his memory, and for the memory of all 1,619 missing since 1974, in her home.
“It does no bad to hold a memorial service whether you’re alive or the dead,” she added.
Just because her own relatives’ remains have been found does not mean Harita plans to stop her lifetime struggle for answers.
“I have found my loved ones. I have found peace and relief. There are hundreds more mothers out there who do not know what happened to their children and who go to their graves not knowing. Do you know that is like? Not to know? I will keep on struggling so that all the missing are found and I will not rest until a viable solution is found and I return to my home in Elia. Only then will I stop,” she said.
Harita said she has nothing against Turks and knows that both sides’ inflicted a lot of ugliness and hurt on the other.
“But we mustn’t forget the past or wipe out our history. The missing issue is still unfinished and we have to keep up our struggle,” she said.
