The recently elected mayor of Kyrenia has spent most of his life battling, against various causes. THEO PANAYIDES meets him
Glafkos Kariolou – the newly-elected Mayor of Kyrenia, among other things – is conspicuously kind. He speaks slowly and gently, like a man telling a story. He looks, with his glasses and trim silver beard, like a kindly uncle. When we take his photo he politely asks me to come and sit beside him, as if he’s planning to keep the photo as a cherished souvenir of our meeting (I politely decline, of course). You’d never suspect, looking at him, that the man’s a fighter, and in fact has been battling assorted antagonists all his life.
His first battle – though this one is complicated, and I’m sure he’d deny it strenuously if it were put to him – was with his own father. Andreas Kariolou was and remains a hero in Kyrenia, being the diver who discovered the ‘Kyrenia ship’ (one of the world’s best-preserved ancient shipwrecks) in 1965. Glafkos was 13 in that year – he turns 60 this year – and later took part in the lengthy salvage expedition, having just graduated from his father’s diving school. Father and son shared a deep, abiding love of the sea, which in Glafkos’ case tended to upstage more academic pursuits. “I was not a very good student at school, because of the sea,” he admits. “I was never very happy to sit down and study. I was always playing about with boats, sailing boats, diving, spear-fishing…”
That’s unlikely to have gone down well with Andreas, a stern Victorian type who ran (no pun intended) a tight ship. “He was a very correct and just father,” says Glafkos carefully. “He was very austere and strict, which it took me many years to appreciate”. It was only as an adult, after coming back from the UK, that Glafkos really became friends with his dad. As a child, his rules must’ve rankled. “My mother was not allowed to enter my bedroom,” he recalls; from a very early age, “I had to be making my own bed, cleaning my room, cleaning the windows… imagine that my knife, my fork and my plate had my name underneath – and if these were found not washed-up properly, I was punished. I was never allowed to have any material goods, presents – not even to use one of his boats – unless I worked for it.”
Hard to say what effect such an upbringing had (and of course one must be wary of playing amateur psychologist), but it surely fostered self-reliance, a boy who could take care of himself – and perhaps also bred a rebellious streak as evinced later, in 1974 for instance. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Glafkos’ childhood was mostly uneventful – and in many respects idyllic, despite the strict rules. “I feel very sorry for our children nowadays,” he muses, “that they don’t have this stage that we used to have in the old times, the stage of [being] a child. The freedom that we used to have in Kyrenia! The whole town of Kyrenia was for us a huge playground”. As long as young Glafkos followed the family routine – home at 12 for lunch, then again before dark – he was free to roam.
Always, the sea was important. Years later, as the man responsible for aquatic tourism at the Cyprus Tourism Organisation (CTO), he made the news by publicly decrying the state of Cyprus beaches, accusing Cypriots of being slobs and litterbugs (it’s “a cultural problem,” he sighs). He made his first sailboat as a seven-year-old, “and it cost me quite a lot of punishment, because I secretly stole my bed-sheets and used them for sails. That was not a very pleasant experience afterwards!” He laughs – but his love of sailing was real, and led him to a degree in Naval Architecture and Boatyard Management at Southampton University.
That’s where he was in the summer of 1974, getting ready for his final year. His course didn’t allow for long holidays (summer was for work experience), but Andreas had to lift one of his boats – a 70-foot diving vessel – out of the water for repairs, so Glafkos got special permission to come to Cyprus and help his father. They were testing the 70-footer on July 15, trying to exit Kyrenia harbour, when soldiers fired warning shots from the Castle and told them to go home and stay there: a military coup had been launched. Glafkos went home, seething. “All this created a very negative feeling against the coup people, both in myself and my father,” he says now, deceptively calmly. “And I started reacting.”
It’s not clear if Glafkos rebelled for political reasons or because the soldiers had shot at him (either one would probably have sufficed), but now his fighting spirit was up. With a couple of friends, he snuck to the Castle and tried to cut off the water supply, using a hacksaw to sever the main water-pipe – but they were spotted, and fled for their lives. His next port of call was an army camp on the outskirts of Kyrenia, where he tried to persuade the sentry to abandon his post and join them. “Unfortunately it didn’t work, and I was shot at again! Then of course, vindictively, I went round the camp and cut all the telephone lines.”
His antics having made him persona non grata, the coupists sent the police to arrest him, forcing Glafkos to flee to the mountains above Kyrenia – where he remained, sleeping rough, till July 20, when he was woken by the sound of Turkish planes flying overhead and watched, from his mountain perch, as a Cypriot torpedo boat fired at the planes, the planes returned fire, and the boat quickly sank. He went down into town, knowing the Turkish invasion had begun – but the Greek coup officers insisted it was just a NATO exercise, “which made it more obvious to everybody that all this was pre-planned. Give a pretext to Turkey, they invade, they divide the island, half of it goes to Turkey, the other half goes to Greece – finish. That could have been the settling of the Cyprus problem, for the superpowers.”
Glafkos lashes out as he tells his story, the decades doing nothing to dim his pugnacious nature (he reminds me of the old Hollywood saying: “I forgive, but I don’t forget. And I don’t forgive”) – not just at the Turks, but also the others who took part in betraying Kyrenia. One Greek officer, refusing his request for weapons and equipment, told him instead to stop the Turkish tanks by throwing blankets in their tracks – and Glafkos adds the man’s name, having gone out of his way to discover it. Then there’s the British officer in charge of the UN forces at the Dome Hotel, where Glafkos and other Kyrenians were brought by the UN for their own protection – at least till Turkish forces entered the hotel “with the consent of the British, and the British officer submitted people from the hotel to the Turkish army. I was one of them.”
So the Turks didn’t take him by force?
“No. The Turkish forces entered the hotel [and] stayed at Reception. They presented a list” – around 25 people, the ostensible reason being to check their identities – “and the British UN forces allowed the Turks to kidnap us in front of them, with the consent of the British officer.”
What were his feelings as the Turkish soldiers led him away?
“Vague,” he says, with a shrug. “Nothing. Fear. We never knew, from that moment on, if we were going to be alive or dead the next moment.”
The next three months were a nightmare, starting with a week at Serai Prison in Nicosia – though in fact that wasn’t so bad, the Turkish Cypriot wardens treating their prisoners humanely (even now, Glafkos draws a firm distinction between Turks and Turkish Cypriots: “A ‘Turk’ is a Turk from the mainland. A Turkish Cypriot is – like me.”). All that changed when the Turkish army arrived: “When they discovered the Turkish Cypriot policemen were treating us properly, in a civilised manner, they beat them up in front of us – and then they beat us up.”
The Kyrenians were loaded into buses, then boats, and shipped t
o Turkey – first to Mersin, where they ran a gauntlet of baying crowds hurling stones, then to Adana where they spent weeks in prison, punched and kicked on a daily basis. Glafkos thinks he must’ve broken a rib when a soldier jabbed him with the muzzle of his rifle (it’s hard to know, since no doctor ever came to see them). At first, he recalls with a tinge of shame, younger prisoners like him deliberately used older people – those “unable to protect themselves” – as shields, cowering behind them so they wouldn’t get beaten; after a few days, however, they became so accustomed to the daily violence that they actually switched places, shielding the elders to keep them safe. Was anyone killed? Not that I know of, he replies – at least, he adds with a grim smile, not physically. “Psychologically, many people were killed”.
The ordeal ended in October, with the release of prisoners – and Glafkos Kariolou might’ve been forgiven for living out the rest of his life in quiet docility, trying in vain to heal the trauma, but in fact he soon found another set of villains to rail against: from the Turks to the CTO, which he joined in 1976 and where he remained for 35 years (he resigned last year, to take up his post as Mayor). Not in the same league, one might think – but in fact his voice, which remained calm while describing the horrors of a Turkish prison, rises in anger as he outlines the corruption and incompetence of those who (as he sees it) made a mess of Cyprus tourism.
“What stops the proper handling of tourism in Cyprus is nine people!” he declares angrily. “These nine people are called the Board of Directors of the Cyprus Tourism Organisation. The CTO has an excellent selection of experts and technocrats. Scientists in their fields, they know what they are doing. But they are absolutely and totally stopped by these nine political contributors!”
The Board are political appointees, nominated by the parties. Many of them (says Glafkos) are in the pockets of developers and tourism companies. Many of them use their post to promote “stupid idiotic seminars” taught by their friends, or just fly Business Class and stay in expensive hotels. Almost all of them (he says) don’t care about the job. “These nine people, in July, will go home and another nine people will replace them. They pay nothing. And each of my cases” – he took the CTO to court 12 times for not promoting him, and won every time – “cost the taxpayer 200,000 euros.” So this is why he hates political parties, I note wryly. “I don’t ‘hate’ them,” he replies. “They are our destruction!”
Here’s the most important thing about Glafkos Kariolou’s recent electoral triumph: apart from the Greens, he wasn’t supported by a single political party – yet cruised to victory, with 52 per cent of the vote. “I am an anti-partisan,” he says with feeling. “I do not support political parties, in the way they have developed in Cyprus. What we are suffering in Cyprus is a carcinogenic cell of society, and this cell is called ‘political party’. The attitudes, the behaviour of the political parties are absolutely disgraceful! … They have intervened in the legislature, they have intervened in semi-governmental organisations. They have destroyed everything – and they are supporting mediocrity!”
How could this man have made it in Cyprus politics? The answer is Kyrenia – the lovely coastal town of his carefree childhood, the lost jewel of Cyprus, the symbol of a long-ago past. In voting for Glafkos, Kyrenians may have been voting for the days of Andreas Kariolou, that austere father figure who’d surely have decried the decadent nonsense of party politics – and maybe, on a more practical level, they were voting for a fighter, a man who’s been scrapping all his life and can be relied upon to stand up for their rights.
“This is not a symbolic post,” insists Glafkos – but it is, of course. He has no actual town to administer, no houses, no roads. The Municipality has a staff of three (including himself), plus eight councillors and a few volunteers. Almost all its income comes from the central government. Yet he’s full of ideas, using Facebook and Twitter to bring Kyrenians together – “reconnect the old neighbourhoods” – and bristling as he talks about his flock. “Nobody looked after the Kyrenians,” he says hotly; there was never any counselling for prisoners like himself. “Our own people don’t appreciate us!” Worst of all is the IPC, the Immovable Property Commission set up by Turkey where more and more refugees are applying to sell their land – forced to do so by financial problems, he insists, and asks (no, demands!) that the government give these people financial support, so they won’t have to sell.
We’ve been talking for an hour and a half – and his secretary mentions discreetly that visitors are waiting outside. I see him with those visitors later, fellow middle-aged Kyrenians whom he enfolds in a bear-hug, fellow refugees with the same fading memories. “I’m a very passionate Kyrenian,” says Glafkos Kariolou – adding, however, that all Kyrenians are passionate. “We have to be passionate. We have been made to be like this, by events.”
“We want what belongs to us. Full stop. Nothing more. If we die, our land will go to our children and to our grandchildren”. Turkey will pay, he says grimly, weighting his words for maximum emphasis: “Turkey. Will pay. Sooner. Or later. They have no escape, my friend. Absolutely no escape”. Clearly, the battle goes on.
