The untold story of Cyprus through one soldier’s life

From Fasli to Monte Cassino, new novel reflects village life on the island in the first half of the 20th centuryThree hundred years ago a group of nomadic Yoruk tribesmen from the Taurus mountains was ordered to move to Cyprus by the Sultan. Eighty six Yoruks landed in the west of the island, near Polis, and were given a piece of land close to Androlikou. The land had its own waterpool thanks to an undrground spring. When a severe drought struck the surrounding area in later times, the Yoruks were the only ones with water, triggering a bitter conflict between them and their neighbours in the course of which a young Yoruk shepherd named Hasan was brutally killed. After a priod of negotiations, the Governor of Paphos determined that the Yoruks must relocate. So they did, establishing a new village close by which they called Fasli, and it was in this settlement that another Hasan came into the world centuries later. Born during the historic Great Depression, no one could have imagined that this Hasan, second son of Niyazi from Fasli and Serife from Androlikou, would grow up to become a British soldier fighting at Monte Cassino, one of the great battles of WWII; even less that he would live on to be celebrated as the main protagonist of a novel written by the well known Turkish Cypriot journalist, his son Basaran Duzgun. Entitled Orphaned Horses Land, Duzgun’s novel covers a span of about 40 years from 1924 to 1964 and is set in Cyprus as well as the countries Hasan served in during a military career that took him to Egypt, Palestine and Italy. It is the author’s first book to be translated into English, part of what is intended to be a trilogy covering recent Cypriot history. The second book, called Pink-Painted Room, has been published in Turkish and describes life on the island in the 1960s. The third, Where the God Died also in Turkish, is awaiting publication and focuses on the events of 1974. Duzgun has high hopes that both will also be published in English and is keen to see all three books in a Greek translation too. “I would really like Greek Cypriots to read my books as well because what I write covers not only the history of Turkish Cypriots but their story too. I write about the lives of poor people on this island – not the leaders,” Duzgun, 62, also the editor-in-chief at Havadis, one of the north’s leading newspapers, declares. Words of the people “As a journalist you meet people all the time and they tell you many stories. You go to a village and first you talk about the subject that you came to cover and then they start remembering the old times – what happened to them in the war or how they fell in love. And what they tell you is what they saw with their own eyes, not some edited version of the history in the school books.” Duzgun says he had collected a lot of such stories and always thought he would one day make them into a novel. “And then the pandemic happened and the world changed. The way we used to work changed. Everything went online. Real journalism died. So since I always wanted to write books I started writing. This is how I became a writer and frankly speaking nowadays even though I still work in the newspaper I feel more like a writer than a journalist.” Author of the trilogy Basaran Duzgun While many of events in the Orphaned Horses Land follow the story of Duzgun’s father, the journalist insists he never sought to write a story that was about his own family. This, he explains, is why the same characters don’t feature in the latter two novels. “True, they include some of the stories that my father told me. Some of them, especially those in Where the God Died, are so horrible that he always told me to publish them only after his death. But I never wanted to make my family the main focus of my novels. There are many people who contributed to my writing. And yes, what I write is a fiction but many of the stories described in it are not.” Cyprus life in the early 20th century The Orphaned Horses Land is a page-turner and will enchant all who love the island and want to learn more about the way its inhabitants lived before the tragic events that led to its division as well as subsequent developments. It provides a broad and vivid depiction of Cypriot life in the first half of the 20th century as it was lived in the villages as well as in urban centres such as Nicosia. Starting with the birth of Hasan into a poor shepherd family in the village of Fasli in the Akamas, the novel takes us by the hand and leads us through his childhood adventures. At the age of five, little Hasan loses his father. His uncle places him in the care of Pembe, Nicosia’s Tanti hamam bath attendant, famous for her role in arranging marriages between poor Turkish Cypriot girls and the Palestinian men who between the 1920s and mid-30s would come to the island in the search of “cheap wives”. Since Pembe has no great desire to keep Hasan, she sells him to a wealthy Turkish Cypriot family living on the main street of old Nicosia, where he becomes a servant. “At that time, it was a very common situation,” Duzgun.notes. “After the book was published, many people came up to tell me how something similar had happened to their grandparents or their parents. These children were slaves in a way. They ‘belonged’ to the families who bought them.” Hasan, is bright and learns to read and write on his own but instead of being rewarded for his efforts he gets punished since “slaves should not be able to read ane write”. Luckily, with the help of some friends, he gets out of the “indentured” servant arrangement and manages to enter an apprentinceship with a Greek Cypriot blacksmith in Aglandjia, at that time still a village on the outskirts of Nicosia. Greek and Turkish Cypriot miners striking together in Lefka Here, finally treated much better, he learns Greek and is accepted by the blacksmith’s family almost as one of their own until he falls in love with one of his benefactor’s daughters. This in a country where marriage between Muslim and Christian is impossible and he is forced to leave his job and the family at the onset of WWII. The island’s British rulers are looking for soldiers so a forelorn Hasan fakes his age and enlists. Fighting for the British As Duzgun recounts it, joining the British army equated with Hasan’s third exposure to a form of slavery. “People were so poor they could not do anything. So they had to sell their daughters to Arabs and later on they sold their sons to the British army… These boys were going in knowing that either they will earn some money or they will die. And the British were smart – they would pay only one-third of the wages directly to the soldiers. The remaining two-thirds would be going to their families in Cyprus and since the families were getting the money they were encouraging their sons to enlist. “Some 30,000 boys went and when they returned home people laughed at them becasue they didn’t regard them as having been real soldiers since some hadn’t fought on the front line. They were muleteers serving in the logistics corps. People didn’t realise the importance of logistsics and how without these guys and their mules the soldiers could only last up to three days.” The latest novel While writing his books, Duzgun made time to conduct extensive research. For Orphaned Horses Land he made sure to visit all the Cypriot villages where the action is set. He also travelled abroad, going for example to Monte Casino Monastery in Italy, the scene of one of the longest and bloodiest engagements of WWII, which claimed an estimated 55,000 casualties, including some of his father’s closest comarades, both Greek and Turkish Cypriot muleteers. Hasan, thanks to his blacksmith apprencticeship in Aglandjia, was familiar with how to take care of and work with horses as well as the mules. So much so that after returning from the war he helped organise some of the first horse races at the Athalasaa Agricultural Station where he was a British government employee. Throughout the narrative, he is an acute observer of the hardship and grind of postwar village life, witnessing the workers’ strikes in the Lefke copper mines where the Greek and Turkish Cypriot miners joined forces to fight for better working conditions, as well as the beginning of the EOKA independence struggles. Finally, married with children, he experiences the flare up of the divisive conflict between the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities in the newly independent Republic of Cyprus in 1963. As horses appear and reappear throughout Duzgun’s tale and help frame much of the unfolding narrative, it is reasonable to ask if the title of Orphaned Horses Land has an additional meaning? “It is a metaphor,” Duzgun explains. “They symbolise us – Cypriots. The horses in my book are orphaned but also we Cypriots are orphaned. Both Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots have been abandoned by our motherlands. We are all orphans.” Orphaned Horses Land by Basran Duzgun, published by Olympia Publishers, London is available at Moufflon Bookshop in English and at Isik Kitabevi, north Nicosia, in both English and Turkish