Maria Baha
Turkey, Greece, Cyprus
Part I
I grew up in my grandparents’ kitchen in Queens, New York — packed with succulents, baklava, and stories. My grandfather, or Papú,loved to sit me down at the kitchen table, next to the window with the birdfeeder, chirping cardinals peppering the rare chance to hear one of his tales, my legs dangling as I sat at the edge of my seat, hanging onto every detail. My grandmother, a soft-spoken, kind and delightfully stubborn woman, would quietly listen and occasionally correct a small detail my Papú got wrong or left out. They were always stories centered on his childhood — of war, dead bodies lining the street, beatings by British military officers. Somehow, they were always told with a smile — distant memories he survived, stories he passed along to me. While my brother and cousins spent hours in the scorching heat playing kickball, I’d sit in the cool kitchen with my grandfather, a glass of water in hand, quietly listening. As a child, I knew that these were my stories, too.
My Papú set the first scene. He was born in Athens in 1930, spending the first few years of his life on a lemon-, apricot- and jasmine-tree lined street, tucked away in a humble apartment on the outskirts of a city soon to be ravaged by Nazis. His mother, Yiasemé, and her sister, Lemonía, were named after these unassuming trees, which witnessed and miraculously survived the Germans, then the civil war, and finally a U.S.-sponsored military dictatorship. Several of my Papú’s family members decided to flee the increasingly dangerous reality of occupation. They set their sights on Chios: a small island that was supposed to be safer, just off the coast of Turkey, where extended family lived. My Papú was brought along. His mother, Yiasemé, stayed behind. His father, having abandoned them both when he returned to Egypt, was already long gone.
In Chios, different risks were assigned to different faiths: for Jewish people, their discovery would lead to the concentration camps of Europe, which meant it would lead to death — for law- and occupation-abiding Christians, the risk was starvation. Muslims had already left Chios in the prior decades, most making their way to mainland Turkey through a forced population exchange.
Many modern-day nation-states were based on eugenic concepts of ethnic (read: religious) purity, Turkey and Greece among them. Greece was declared a country for Christians. Turkey, a country for Muslims. Both engaged in a population exchange in 1923, a process of ethnic cleansing that ignored linguistic and cultural similarities, to say nothing of the deep ties many individuals held to land and place. As Christians in Turkey, my family was forced to flee.
During the German occupation of Chios, all harvests yielded from the crops were handed over to the Nazis, which meant there were endless days spent walking through the mountains in search of food. Several rotten oranges would feed the entire family: slivers of decay passed around, bitter peels devoured. One day, a red cross ship meant to deliver much-needed aid was bombed in the harbor. Starved bodies lined the roadway leading to the main village.
It was here in Chios that my grandfather and grandmother first met: two children just trying to survive. They did their very best to hide their budding romance from their strict families, secretly writing love letters to one another over the long years apart. Those months in Chios set the stage for what would become a lifetime together.
In March of 1942, my Papú, his uncle Giorgos, his aunt Lemonía and his grandmother began their second upheaval, boarding a small dinghy at night towards the western coast of Turkey — just three nautical miles away. They prayed the German military ships patrolling the waters would not catch them. The old boat was packed to the brim with people, and small holes punctured throughout meant that several people had to constantly bail water to avoid sinking. Once they arrived on the neutral shores of Turkey, my family awaited their fate along with countless other refugees. Through an informal and, at times, intentionally secretive arrangement between the Greek government in exile, the Turkish government, and the British government, refugees coming from the Aegean islands were transported to British colonies throughout the Middle East. While in Turkey, refugees were temporarily housed in an abandoned theater in the resort town of Çeşme, waiting for British officials to call their name and the colony where they would be relocating. One month later, my family boarded a ship to Cyprus, where they would go on to live for many years.
But there are several details — several people — missing from this story. Over the years, with each storytelling session with my grandfather, things became a little clearer.
There were the Jewish people my great uncle, Giorgios, had helped escape to Turkey. They were hidden in a small closet tucked away in the corner of my extended family’s home in Chios — where the rifles were normally stored. Giorgios worked with a friend from Athens to arrange boats to take them away in the middle of night, although “conspirators” who were discovered to have helped Jews were shot point blank by the Germans. These people were my uncle’s friends. He wanted them to live. He would go back and forth regularly, secretly bringing groups of people to safer shores before returning to Chios alone. Eventually, the co-conspirator friend was caught. That’s why one day, Giorgos decided to take his sister, his mom and his beloved nephew — my Papú — across the water with him.
There was the boat filled with refugees which my family was supposed to board. Their names were read out by the British to get on: today was their day to leave Turkey and head by sea to one of the many British colonies in the Middle East. My uncle decided my family should wait for the next one, much to the displeasure of my great grandmother and great aunt. They were tired of living in an abandoned theater and ready for a new life. Giorgios, however, was convinced something was not quite right with the wind that day. They later learned the boat sank off the coast of southern Turkey. Everybody drowned, so the story goes.
There was my family’s arrival in Cyprus, their new home. They were quarantined in a monastery for ten days before they were settled in various cities and villages across the island. This was before the Cyprus conflict, before the island was divided in two, before the forced population exchange of Christians and Muslims, before the UN came and stayed.
Then there was the incarceration of Giorgios in Egypt by the British. From Cyprus, he was sent to an “Egyptian concentration camp” run by the British for delinquent refugees: midwives who performed abortions, adulterers, communists. He died long before I was born. I have been told he was a wonderful man and was endlessly generous. My grandfather adored him. I have a clear image in my mind: kind eyes, dark hair. Given that my Papú’s father abandoned him, Giorgios played an especially important role in my grandfather’s life — mentor, protector, role model. Just a few months before my grandfather died, he confirmed my suspicions — Giorgios was a communist.
The resistance movement in Greece was led by communists; they helped Jewish people escape the Nazis, as my uncle did, and took up arms to fight back against the unlivable conditions for those left behind. In the Greek Civil War following World War II, it was the communists versus the British loyalists fighting for the future of their country. The outcome of this war, in favor of the British, was not an especially surprising one. Meanwhile, the British continued fighting to maintain control of their increasingly hostile colonies further east in the Mediterranean — including Palestine and Cyprus, a small yet strategic island just across the water.
I had always wondered what happened to my great uncle. As an adult, I began to dig. I asked other relatives. I consulted historians and academic journals. Repeated efforts to better understand what happened to refugees like my family during this period left me confounded. There remains little historical documentation on Christian refugees coming to Cyprus from Turkey during this period, and almost no public memory of my family’s particular migratory and political experience.
In the Spring of 2023, my grandfather moved from the comforts of his home to a shared room in a rehabilitation center in Queens. I would visit him regularly, bringing him his favorite treats and very specific cravings — among them basturma (Armenian cured beef, loaded with cumin, salt and paprika) and a particular brand of toasted pumpkin seeds I could only find at one family-run grocery store in Astoria. Like his stories, he often left the basturma unfinished.
Occasionally, I would enter my Papú’s room and find him staring at the ceiling, smiling. He was approaching his own end. I asked what he was smiling about.
“I am remembering my childhood,” he said, wide eyed and still.
“What memories?” I wanted to know. He paused for a moment.
“You already know all of my stories.”
Part II
Following my grandfather’s death, I went looking for Giorgios. I was heartbroken and very full of the distinct weight of grief. I spent a semester at the University of Cyprus as a visiting researcher, digging through the archives. I found my grandfather, great grandmother and great aunt, but no Giorgios. His name — let alone any record of his imprisonment — were nowhere to be found in the endless folders. He was never registered as a refugee.
Wearing baby blue medical gloves, I spent months carefully combing through page after yellow page of archival material, inhaling dust and cobwebs, moved by the occasional sign of life: a crossed off sentence, a misplaced handwritten note, a coffee stain. The British were meticulous with their record keeping and yet, uncovering what happened to refugees like my uncle after they arrived in British-controlled Cyprus proved to be difficult.
While many records were destroyed, a few meeting notes and documents left behind did indicate there was an informal and “top secret” process for isolating, surveilling, deporting and/or imprisoning refugees considered problematic passing through Cyprus during WWII. This included communists.
I found a passionate petition from villagers, begging British colonial administrators to allow a refugee to stay, citing his congenial behavior despite his communistic tendencies. I found the meeting notes of British officials, discussing what to do with the refugees trained as midwives who were performing abortions, or the refugees demanding better living conditions in the camps. I found a letter from worried parents in Istanbul, looking for their daughter who married a Cypriot man “prone to violence.” Between these harrowing handwritten stories and my intense dust allergy, I often found myself wiping my eyes, glancing up to ensure fellow archivists in the room would not bear witness to my tears. I was out of place: not a traditional academic, often the only woman, always the youngest.
After months of research, I still found no mention of my uncle. Short of diplomatic intervention, I will likely have to wait it out, or hope a young historian of the future picks up where I leave off. It is not especially surprising that the Cyprus State Archives has few materials related to communism available past the year 1933. According to state archivists and popular legend, these records were dumped, burned, or otherwise destroyed by the British in an effort to cover up atrocities committed by the colonial administrations of the time. The fact that the Communist Party of Cyprus (CPC) was outlawed in 1931 certainly did not help. Still, it is well documented that the British found the growing popularity of communism in Cyprus to be incredibly threatening, as much as they tried to dismiss the power communists wielded.
The colonial administration’s fears of communism were connected to their fears of losing their valuable colony. A central tenet of the CPC was freedom from British colonial rule. The British viewed Cyprus as a geographically strategic, permanently anchored warship — too valuable of a resource to let go of without a fight. With Palestine and Egypt in turmoil, Cyprus was their next best bet.
Cypriot-led riots broke out in 1931 in response to harsh economic measures imposed by the British, and a period of autocratic rule that lasted almost 30 years followed — newspaper publications were severely restricted and gatherings of more than five people were outlawed. Political activity was, essentially, prohibited. A paternalistic attitude towards Cypriots was used to justify this harsh political reality. Members of the British colonial administration did not believe Cypriots were capable of political freedom — a colonial mindset and framework used to justify the continued subjugation of Cypriots and the suppression of their political agency.
Giorgos arrived in Cyprus just one year after the communist party’s public reemergence. In 1941, members of the underground CPC formed the Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL) and in 1943, when the first municipal elections were allowed to be held, AKEL members became mayors of two major districts in Cyprus: Famagusta and Limassol. With the outbreak of WWII, fears of an axis invasion existed alongside fears of an increasingly popular communist party on the island.
This fear of communism extended beyond Cypriots to refugees passing through the island, as well. My great uncle was among the refugees impacted by such fears.
It is possible Giorgios ended up at Moses Wells Camp in Egypt, run by the UN’s predecessor called the Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration (MERRA). It is possible he ended up at an intentionally undocumented camp, lost to the hidden or destroyed records, or to the memories of colonial administrators of the time. Maybe the grandchildren of those British officials have these stories stored somewhere in the folds of their mind, like mine are. Maybe one day our stories combined can flesh out a fuller picture of what happened.
Part III
In 2010, my Papú visited me in Cyprus — his first time back in over 50 years. I had received a research grant and was living on the island.
It was on this trip that I learned how much my Papú and I had in common. We would spend night after night, after a long day’s adventure, watching Al Jazeera and discussing regional politics, our hands wildly flinging in a similar fashion as we commented on the state of the world. My Papú would go out with my friends and me, helping us make our way through heaping plates of lemon potatoes, grilled chicken seasoned with mint and coriander, fresh cucumber salad, thick olive oil drizzled on top. We washed down every meal with raki, an anise-based liquor, occasionally mixed with rose water. By the end of his visit, my Papú had effortlessly won the adoration of all my friends, a difficult feat for an 80-year-old man among a sea of defiant young people. While I was impressed with my Papú’s energy, open-mindedness, and progressive political leanings, I later learned my Papú was also impressed — he was amazed that I had managed to thrive, professionally and socially, in a country I had never lived in before over such a short period of time. I learned this not from my grandfather, but from his best friend — his first cousin Theo. Apparently, my grandfather would speak of me like I was one of his best friends — a part of his crew, or parea. My Papú and I became good friends on this trip — no longer just granddaughter and grandfather: like “two peas in a pod,” according to Theo.
During my Papú’s visit, I took off from work and told him I would take him anywhere on the island he wanted to go. His first choice was the monastery where he had been quarantined —all he remembered was that it was west of Kyrenia, the port city in the north of the island.
Much had changed. We were no longer in a British Colony, and the island was now divided, filled with settlers to live in the abandoned homes of those forced to flee. After my Papú left, Cyprus endured a tumultuous period. Following WWII and a Cypriot-led anti-colonial struggle that lasted decades, a conditional form of freedom was won but short-lived. The British colonial exit strategy was divide and conquer; seeds of division that had been planted during colonial times, along with the proxy interests of Greece and Turkey, led to an all-out war in Cyprus in 1974. This ultimately led to a population exchange of Christians and Muslims, not dissimilar to the ethnic cleansing that came along with the formation of modern-day Turkey and Greece.
My Papú laughed as he told me about the time he lived in Drouseia, Cyprus and built a mechanical scarecrow to keep birds from eating crops, but which accidentally scared the horse of a British military officer who was thrown to the ground. Or the time his homemade kite was mistaken for a paratrooper, causing an uproar and getting him a second beating from a British officer. He remembered how kind his neighbors were, anonymously dropping off extra harvest from their gardens onto their doorstop. He remembered the summer he spent teaching a neighbor how to swim.
I drove our rental car on the left side of the road, down a narrow dirt road west of Kyrenia, and I asked random strangers we passed if they knew of a monastery. The people I asked looked new to the island and did not know of any monasteries, so I began to search out Cypriot faces. I spotted a group of old men at a cafe sipping coffee and playing tavla – a popular table game.
“Do you know where the monastery is?” I asked them in Turkish.
“I do,” a man responded in Greek. “And I will show you. But first, have coffee with me.”
We did as we were told, happily. Afterwards, Taner invited us into his burgundy pickup truck to find the monastery. I questioned my strict grandfather’s comfort with jumping into a stranger’s car, but he was already halfway in — too late to go back.
Rebetiko, blues music created by those who fled Turkey many years ago, was playing on the radio. Taner laughed and chatted with my grandfather. He brought us to one monastery after the other, but we could not find the one on the water my grandfather first came to. His first home in this country.
Eventually, we passed a Turkish military base and Taner smiled. It must be here. He spoke with the mustached, uniformed men guarding the site, and after some discussion, they miraculously let us pass. We hopped out the truck, and my grandfather slowly circled the monastery, taking in the crumbling walls, the beige stone faded by salt and wind. The monastery was surrounded by overgrown brush, and the view — the shades of teal in the sea, the southern Turkish coast in the far-off distance — was breathtaking.
We headed home soon after, thanking Taner profusely and sharing with him a rebetiko CD I happened to have in my rental car: a parting gift.
We took the main road back to Nicosia. My grandfather sat in silence, having just willingly eaten a massive bowl of lamb stewed with apricot and cinnamon, a known allergy he happily chose to ignore that day at the expense of his inflamed, swollen tongue (to the delight of his stomach). A young child’s smile became plastered on his face as we drove through the mountains, through the uniformed men at the buffer zone, and back to the capital. The smile stayed.
Maria Baha is a sex educator, independent researcher, DEI consultant, and a proud CUNY alum. She serves on her neighborhood Community Board in Brooklyn, New York and was most recently a visiting researcher at the University of Cyprus, where she conducted archival research on the history of British colonialism in the Middle East. A former Fulbright recipient (Cyprus, 2010) and migration specialist, her writing has appeared in Cadences, A Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus and the Greek-language academic book, Sexualities: Views, Research and Experiences in the Cyprus and Greek Context.
Saffron City Press 
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