Kato Deryneia: a personal matter

Opinion 1974Cyprus problemFamagustaturkish invasion Kato Deryneia: a personal matter Ammochostos 1536x1024 Relevant News If we’re talking CBMs, let’s talk properly 4 August 2026 Kato Deryneia: a personal matter 4 August 2026 Overnight pharmacies on Tuesday, August 4 4 August 2026 Marios Demetriou 4 August 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber I was there, and I wasn’t. I mean at last Saturday’s anti-occupation gathering, held on 1 August in the open-air space at the Famagusta Municipality Cultural Centre in Deryneia. Yes, I joined the short march too, down to the nearby Deryneia barricade. The road linking Deryneia and Famagusta cuts straight through occupied Kato Deryneia before dead-ending outside the fenced-off city. As everyone knows, a wall of high barbed wire runs along both sides of that road, sealing off access and any real contact with the place. It’s a military zone, run by occupying Turkey. The only contact left to us with our own community is visual. We can see our houses, ruined, empty, wrecked, behind the wire. We just can’t go in. We can’t even get close. And that’s exactly where my head was: back in my childhood, my teenage years, in and among those houses, down the lanes and across the empty lots of Kato Deryneia. So on Saturday I carried the banner, passing it between me and the other Kato Deryneia natives: Michalis, Andreas, Varnavas, Panayiotis. This is a shared initiative, a public one. But for me, as for them, it’s also something else entirely: personal. Panayiotis is the youngest of us. He told me he was five years old in 1974. And so, walking among the small crowd on the march, I found myself back at my own five years old. I remembered Argos, our scruffy tan-and-blond dog, who every evening, the moment my father came home from work, would tear to the garden gate and greet him with delighted barking. Argos’s death gave me my first tears. My first taste of loss, of grief. After the event, the drive back to Nicosia in the dark was hard, and it always is. Less than a kilometre from my house in Kato Deryneia, and I have to cover nearly seventy to get back to my… home in Nicosia. Who could possibly grasp that? Who could put it into words? Not the “clever” drones circling above the gathering, that’s for certain. And not the Attila jets that sent them up. I unlocked my front door in Nicosia and, for a second, thought I heard Argos’s happy barking. But it wasn’t Argos. It was just my mind playing tricks. Makes you wonder: everything I’ve lived since Kato Deryneia, since the displacement, is that just my mind playing tricks too? A strange dream, still running, that will only end when I wake up a kilometre further on, on the road to Famagusta. Subscribe to our Newsletter Latest News If we’re talking CBMs, let’s talk properly Overnight pharmacies on Tuesday, August 4 New “Raptors for LIFE” project to protect Cyprus’s three key birds of prey Wildfires ease in Greece as people return to gutted homes Cyprus Institute builds island’s first tree-level carbon inventory Large fire in Limnatis, Limassol district contained Status of US-Iran talks uncertain as ship struck in Hormuz Follow en.philenews on Google News and be the first to know all the news about Cyprus and the world.