Dr Saydam Akpinar (Sheikh Abu Salman Abdul Azal)

BismillahirRahmanirRahim

MY STORY

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUFI AND AN ALL-ROUNDER

BEGINNING

Praise be to and I take refuge in Allah the Lord of mankind, the King of mankind, the God of mankind and Allah’s blessings and greetings of peace be on all His prophets and messengers among whom are our masters Abraham the Friend of God, Moses the Speaker with God, Jesus Christ the Word of and a Spirit from God born of Virgin Mary and Muhammad the Beloved of and the Last and Final Messenger from God with whom all Divine Guidance culminates in perfection.

I thank Allah for kindly bringing me His servant into existence and blessing me with exceptional health and handsomeness, intelligence and learning, true faith and a disposition to piety and spirituality. I ask His pardon for all my failures and wrongs as well as those of all believers in Him and in fact for all mankind at all times. Amen. 

What follows shall insha Allah (God willing) will be an account of and a commentary on my life so far so as to narrate to my dear readers my experience of God and all things Divine in the context of the events and experiences forming my life story. I shall necessarily be brief and economical with truth as far as my wrongs and defects as well as of those in my life are concerned simply because Allah forbids us to announce our sins as well as exposing others similarly. “Sense of shame is part of faith” said our master and the pride of prophets Muhammad (Allah’s blessings and greetings of peace be on him- from now on this blessing and greeting format is always implied any time the Prophet is mentioned or hinted at by any means). No mortal is totally free from defects and immune to committing wrongs and Islam forbids all exposures in the interests of preserving honour and dignity of persons except when a legal case is involved and exposure is needed to serve justice.

In the course of this humble autobiography I hope to convey to my readers what it feels like seeking God as a Sufi and what could be its possible wonderful fruits. Allah forgive, help and comprehensively bless both the writer and the reader.

1

MY LAND AND TIME OF BIRTH AND MY ANCESTRY AND SIBLINGS

I was born in Limassol, Cyprus on 19^th December 1939 (4 Dhilqada 1357 AH) from Mazlume (b. 1917) daughter of Cemaliye (pronounced Jemaliyeh) daughter of Hayriye, a slant-and- blue eyed blond Circassian beauty and Besim, a musician.- I only remember my this great grandmother Hayriye (died  1948) as a bedridden old lady living with her second husband Mahmud after the death of my great grandfather Besim. My father was Ahmed (b.1911) born of Rushdiye daughter of Havva (Eve) and Huseyin Gulle.  Rushdiye’s husband and therefore father of Ahmed was Mehmed (Muhammed)  Emin  (b. c. 1885?) , a blond police corporal of again Circassian origin. Circassians are a Caucasian people who are mostly Muslims and renowned for their handsomeness and military skills. Mind you, when I count my ancestral races of descent  you must realize that all Ottoman Muslims were thought of as Turks by the Europeans and to an important extent they were: As Turks arrived into what is Turkey now and settled and spread about as conquerors, they freely intermarried with all races already living there so much so that they lost their Asiatic features and acquired mainly Arian features physically indistinguishable from Persians and Greeks and the like. Many Christian races which came under Turkish rule converted to Islam and eventually melted in the Ottoman melting pot. This applies to a great conquering races of old. Among Muslims the first world conquerors were our brothers in faith Arabs; Everybody knows that a more or less real Arab are the nomads living in the depths of Arabian peninsula while the so-called Arabs of Syria for example are just a cosmopolitan mix of onetime Greeks, Latins, Franks, Caucasians and conquering Arabs. So both race and racism are mainly archaic concepts and today ‘race’ or national identity means more language and culture than genes from a given ancient race.  

My father for his part was a dark- complexioned person like his mother who died (1911) not long after he was born, of obstetric complications. What is more, her husband Mehmed Emin (b. c1886)  who was a police corporal, got into his head the idea that he would like to become a religious scholar and therefore six months into his marriage to my grandmother Rushdiye (b. 1895) he, along with a similarly motivated friend went to Damascus to study to that effect. Soon however the news came that he died there of a certain fever.  On our side of the Mediterranean, Rushdiye had also died within fifteen days of childbirth, leaving the tiny Ahmed (b. 1911) to the care of her grandmother Havva. She arranged for a string of wet nurses to suckle Ahmed to whose name she added Rushdi, the masculine form of the name of her deceased daughter Rushdiye.  Havva’s only surviving child Mehmed was 15 at the time and a ship hand. He took on himself to play father to Ahmed Rushdi whom he continued to call only Ahmedjik, i.e. the Little Ahmad.  This great uncle of mine was nicknamed ‘Bully’, for he was a small but very agile man much addicted to small brawls here and there. Thus his full name became Mehmed Bully.  More about him later.

My father studied at the local primary and then secondary school and then trained and worked as a barber, a pastries maker and a carpenter in that order until his death in 1964, of heart failure aged a mere 53. At his most successful he had two shops, one a townwide famous pastries shop which served breakfasts from 5 am to 9am mostly to crowds passing by on their way to their jobs and and another carpentry and furniture making shop for the rest of the day. As a result our early childhood was blessed with modest prosperity and our tables and dress was the envy of  neighbours and acquaintances. I remember my father as a very handsome man of middle height,  very well dressed and groomed man who was so well-spoken and upper-class looking that those who did not know him thought he was a lawyer or something. His voice was greatly sweet and played the lute and sang superbly. He died prematurely in 1964 of circulatory complications, aged 53. He was very musical, played the lute and sang very nicely with a beautiful voice. His musical talents passed to two of my younger siblings, namely my sister Tolgay who now lives in Izmir and is the wife of a Army colonel turned a professor of French after heroic academic effort, and my brother Oktay who lives in London who is a magician with everything to do with music but unfortunately wheelchair- bound for many years now due to a spinal degenerative illness caused by a parasitical infection. Please pray for him.

My mother who survived my father long time died in 1995 aged 78. She was a superb men’s and women’s dressmaker and manufactured everything we put on from underwear to great coats and all the bridal gowns of my sisters until we set up our own respective families. She had extraordinary high intelligence and like my similarly intelligent father she could impress total strangers as somebody with very high education. An elderly dentist friend of mine who was also an imam at our local mosque swore to me that my mother as a young girl was the most beautiful woman among all the women of Limassol, Turk and Greek alike.

When my parents contested something you had a spectacle of two brilliant wits exchanging resounding canon fire like two great men-o-wars, i.e. sailing battle ships. The only difference was that it was in good humour and the exchange of fire was frequently interrupted by laughter as each scored a point the other could not answer. Ours was a very intellectual family with an equal measure of religiosity on the tolerant and enlightened side. My mother was additionally psychic with appreciable telepathic talents.

 For her part my maternal grandmother was a bookworm poring over many tomes bought for her by her husband Mustafa Hasan (Hasanoz), books on religion and history on a regular basis which eventually run into a hundred volumes or so.  She regularly read to us from her books after dinner in the long winter nights before going to bed. They were about the Muslim heroes headed of course by the Prophet and we particularly enjoyed her reading out to us about the exploits of chivalric old heroes who wrestled with giants and dragons to rescue innocent victims. Of course the chief fighter hero was always the invincible Ali the cousin and son-in-law o the Prophet and a hero both for Sunni and Shia alike. He rescued innocent Muslim captives from giants and dragons each time winning the praise and prayers of the Prophet and naturally our further admiration of course. Alongside Ali we were fascinated with Abu Bakr and Umar, the two closest companions and advisers of the Prophet- peace and blessings of God be on them all.

 My father had again Circassian blood in him, as already noted.  I must haste to add that all this because the Ottoman Empire was a world empire like the Roman before it and was therefore a melting pot of innumerable races caught into its wheels and nets through conquest,  emigration for a better life, conversion, slave trade and the like until its population became a convergence of all human genes and types under the sun. Blonds rubbed shoulders with blacks and slant-eyed with the straight-eyed. It was an entirely  meritocratic  society with hardly any so-called nobility vs commonality  segregation or barrier; yesterday’s slave could become today’s prime minister entirely on merit and soon perhaps also the son-in-law of the sultan himself. All in all, it was the most Islamic of Muslim empires and has also been rightly called by some as the third Roman Empire with ample justification, for it had jurisdiction in and around the Mediterranean, from Hungary to Crimea and Caucasia in Europe to North and North East Africa all the way down to Somalia and Sudan and in Western Asia from Iraq to Arabia proper and Oman and Yemen. Kings of France and the queen of England occasionally solicited Ottoman help and got it. At one point its navy was given a base in Nice to watch over France against the ambitions of Spain recently on the rise thanks to its vast conquests in and rich spoils from the virgin lands of the Americas beyond the Atlantic. All this not for boasting of Turkishness: Unfortunately the quite regular and legitimate success of Turks as great empire builders won them many jealous and vindictive enemies both East and West, especially the latter. European nations blissfully ignoring their own record of both local and global brutalities have been resenting Turkish successes in penetrating their supposedly aristocratic Europe and for several centuries dominating quite a large area of it. Of course this resentment has also a lot to do with Christian-Muslim spiritual rivalry the two faiths being the most populated communities in the world since the 12^th century at the latest. On top of this Islam enjoyed a cultural ane economic superiority over Christendom for a thousand years which began to decline only by the 17^th century at the earliest, say the reverse at Vienna when Turks just failed by a whisker to take it (1689). But if conquest is a crime all races have been guilty of it: witness the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish, Portuguese, French and English... and the near extinction and otherwise abject subjection of the American natives. Predatory instincts and acts are universal among men and played a very great role in history of all races and nations without exception. At this age of alleged or supposed enlightenment we should at long last recognise the equality and equal fallibility of all men and all races and learn to humanize and equalize all together as the unique species homo sapiens. Greed and aggression ares caused both by excess power and excess need or excess ambition or excess greed. All races are equally fallible in these.     

My Albanian ancestor on the father side was a muslim Slav, a Bosniak or Balkan ‘Turk’, a certain Hurshid Pasha who was an Ottoman governor in Albania in mid 19^th century.  He was granted, at his retirement  from  government service, a fief in my home town Limassol, on which land was built the two storey dried mud-brick, white plastered house- typical Mediterranean-  I was to be born in after a century, among dozens of other houses .It was thus the first all-Turkish quarter of Limassol and came to be known as the ‘Arnavut mahallesi’, Arnavut meaning Albanian.

My mother’s Turkish ancestor was a certain Uzun Pasha (the Ottoman title ‘pasha’ more or less corresponds to the British ‘sir’ or ‘lord’ although not hereditary like it but won by merit alone) was settled in the Karaman province in central Anatolia which now makes most of modern Turkey. I also have reason to believe that we as family are descended from Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, the chief and favourite companion of Muhammad the Messenger of God for which favour I cannot thank God enough. Please understand that I mean no boast because an infinite number of people are out there with far more things to boast about; what I mean is obeying Allah’s Command Who,  addressing His Messenger said “As for thy Lord’s blessing on you, proclaim it!” (the Qur’an/Koran, 93: 11). So I am proclaiming mine and thanking.

This is the order of birth of my siblings, girl (g.) and boy (b.):

Umran, g. 1934, Suzan, g. 1935, Ertan, b. 1937 after whom is me and then Taylan,g. 1941, Erdal, b. 1944, Tolgay, g. 1946, Oktay, b. 1948, Berkay, b. 1952 and Feray, g. 1954, altogether ten with 5 girls and 5 boys of which overall seven are blonds and three including me are tans. A very mixed bag of kitten in fact showing how varied is racial mix in most places and cases.

As for our fate: Umran now (2009) is an old lady retired long ago from Ankara University where she was the head of foreign languages department. She has been married to a Turkish army officer (now a retired colonel) since soon after her graduation at 23, and they live in Ankara. They have two daughters and one son and a few grandchildren. All other siblings of mine except one married and produced many children. 

Next is my sister Suzan. She is a retired science teacher, a divorcee with two sons, both university teachers, one domiciled in the USA and now a professor of civil engineering.

Ertan, recently died of a heart condition aged 71 was a retired Agricultural engineer living with his wife in Magusa in Cyprus. They have two sons- one a pharmacist in Cyprus and the other an electronics engineer in Germany-  and a daughter, again a pharmacist. Both pharmacists own their respective pharmacist shops.  In total they produced six grandchildren for Ertan- may God bless his soul. Like me he was very religious and unlike me a very muscular sportsman. I was also quite a sportsman in my youth but more or the running and jumping side than the wrestling and weightlifting.   

Myself a chemical engineer, have initially been a science teacher and lecturer, then  a petroleum refinery engineer and technologist and lastly an industrial manager in Cyprus and once in England since 1980 a teacher and lecturer again, then a financial consultant, then a Ph D in and a trained practitioner of homeopathic and herbal medicine and a lifelong Sufi seeker and amateur imam.

Declared and appointed  a professor of Sufism by our illustrious master maulana Sheikh Muhammad Nazim al Haqqani head of the world Naqsibandi Order (may Allah bless everything about him)  with the instructions for the creation of a “Prophet’s Academy”  to teach Islam the Sufi way. At the moment of writing this (may 2009) I have been carrying out this function since December 1999- for more than ten years. 

My teacher/sheikh  is the most illustrious Naqshibandi Sufi master Sheikh Muhammad Nazim al Haqqani of Cyprus (b. 1922) whose disciples number in tens of thousands over seven continents.

I have had the good fortune to be associated with him since half a century now. Presently I am living in London with my old wife and three children and am running the Prophet’s Academy- Institute of Advanced Practical Sufism since 1999 as already said. 

MORE ABOUT CYPRUS

Cyprus is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea around which it is believed civilization as we know it now flourished. From the Iberian peninsula (today’s Spain and Portugal) in the west bordering the Atlantic to Persia as the immediate neighbour of Syria on the east of the Mediterranean and from the south of Gaul (mainly today’s France) to Anatolian peninsula in the north and lastly North Africa to the south of it makes up what has been called the Mediterranean Basin or the Mediterranean World where since at least six thousand years civilization flourished as nowhere else. Here we have Sumeria and Babylonia, Egypt and the Hittitesof Anatolia  and Greece, Rome an Carthage which, in their respected turns, rivalled each other in power and splendour.

What led the Mediterranean Basin to lead the world in the flourishing of civilization was its overall excellent climate which reduced the need of men to spend time against the brutalities of seasons, excess or sparse vegetation and instead give them plenty to eat from staple crops like corn, olive, carobs, dates and an incredible range of fresh fruits and vegetables as well as easily domesticated or hunted animals. Although draughts were not rare, often rivers fed by waters from far wetter climates both in the north and the south more than compensated for the caprices of rainfall; the Nile dependably flooded the lands around it from Ethiopia all the way to its delta on the Mediterranean, providing millions to have both industry and leisure, leisure which has been the womb for all creations of civilisation from engineering to art. Central Africa could not do the same as livelihood there depended on more hunting than agriculture while plant foods were too abundant and variegated to make men to bother much about agriculture and the climate too hot to bother with big architecture. Against this central African ease which checked serious inventions the peoples around the great rivers of the Mediterranean world had to deal with the changing flow rates and patterns of the great rivers the Nile, the Euphrates and the Tigris on which dams and around which artificial diversionary channels had to be built, each after careful measurements and sophisticated calculations. The area simply let itself to reliable agriculture, animal husbandry, engineering, architecture and art and also, thanks to its almost round-the-year clear skies, to astronomy, mathematics and science as well as religion. Monotheism was born here after all.

Cyprus, despite its small size and mainly arid climate did not lost much to others in its contributions to civilisation. It benefited from being an Egyptian colony earlier, then a Phoenician and then a Greek, all very advanced civilizations, the last determining its racial and cultural claims. Additionally like and even better than Greece proper it benefited from a very fair climate with almost daily sunshine, not negligible rainfall and accordingly an ample possibility of a healthy outdoor life with plenty of leisure to think, debate and create- those factors which made classical Greece great albeit after a long studentship of mainly Egypt.

At about 500 BC Cyprus was definitely Greek in culture and part in race.  However it never enjoyed independence but changed hands among regional powers until the Romans came to keep it well into the Medieval times, as did Rome’s successor Byzantium. In the New Age, i.e, as from the 15^th century CE we find it a possession of the Italian maritime empires, the last being Venice. They imposed Catholicism on the island’s Greek Orthodox Christians as well as the feudal system back in Europe where lords held all lands and natives lived as their serfs. 

In 1571 the age’s superpower the Turkish Ottoman Empire managed to wrestle it from the Venetians and as was their Islamic habit they freed the Greek serfs, re-established their Orthodox church with a Greek archbishop at its head, whom the sultan had crowned and gave the staff and firman and the  authority to rule over all Christians of the island. Turks granted and allocated great stretches of land to the Greek Cypriot church and divided the rest between the natives the ex-serfs and the Muslim immigrants brought over from Turkey, all as freeholders. Cyprus was a painfully depopulated land before the Turkish conquest, thanks to the bad government by its Latin Catholic lords. As usual, Muslim conquerors were behaving sublimely kindly to their newly conquered subjects- a kindness never reciprocated by Christians when  it was their turn to win wars about three centuries later. It is so interesting to observe that while true Christianity  seems to be based on lambish submission to any established authority and saintly kindness, ‘Christian’ powers always behaved incredibly brutally both towards each other and towards non-Christians, especially towards Jews who found a far better home in the House of Islam for centuries- that supposedly warlike Islam).

Accordingly (as ‘true’ Christians) and due to racial and religious hatred on their part Cypriot Greeks thanked the Turks little for their liberation and empowerment through the donation of a church and freehold lands of their own; almost as soon as Greeks broke from the Ottoman Empire after a nationalistic revolt in early 19^th century (helped by Russia, Britain and France) and succeeded in the creation of an independent Greece, their Cypriot brethren laid own their claim to Cyprus. Initially they seemed to stand not much chance but the Ottoman Empire was in decline which fact made it to look for any help from any quarter to keep itself alive. Accordingly, in 1878, the Turks allowed the English to rent the island from them against a promise to protect Turkey from the long-standing Russian ambitions against them.  It was a first step towards its absorption into the then sprawling British Empire.

Once British rule as from 1878 more than half replaced the Turkish, the island’s Greeks felt the time was ripe to assert their claims to Cyprus. Even Britain was not sympathetic let alone the Turks to this but Greeks felt that they could at least play for time now. Luck was with them. The first block in their way, namely the Turkish ownership came to an abrupt de facto end in 1914 when Turkey, in the hands of some silly modernist-adventurist leaders, took sides with Germany at the opening of the First World War which prompted Britain to declare Cyprus theirs as a war gain. Mind you, that was legitimate because in a wat situation each party becomes entitled to disposses the others of any assets which falls into or happen to be already in their hands. Now the Greeks had to bid their time for Britain also to become vulnerable. This occurred at the end of the Second World War when the idea of national independence as against imperialism became the byword in international politics. First India broke away in 1947 from the British Empire and Cyprus achieved something similar in 1960, with the only difference that India was partitioned on religious lines but Cyprus was kept as a semi-federal state on the same basis but with no separation of the Muslim and Christian communities. This so-called solution was imposed on the Greeks by Britain and Turkey putting their weight behind it against which duo neither far smaller Greece and the tiny Greek Cypriot community had an answer. But these same Greeks, true to their obstinate spirit and thanks to their superb capacity for conspiracy and diplomacy were determined to have the whole thing for themselves and annex the island to Greece whatever the Turkish fears and objections. Thanks to the chronically inept Turkish diplomacy they soon eroded the agreements which had created a bi-communal Republic of Cyprus and after some conspiratorial violence ejected the island’s Turkish community from the government they were sharing with them and attacking almost all Turkish-held pockets of land sent the smaller populations of the smaller ones running for their lives into safer areas, naturally leaving behind many dead while doing so. Turks were also harassed on the roads and many were taken down from their transports and summarily executed never to be seen again- all in true brutal Balkan tradition last seen in Yugoslavia in 1990s. The rest of the Greek-threatened Turks had to abandon their ancestral homes and and flee to squeeze into more firmly held Turkish areas as refugees. The result was the creation of many Turkish ghettos throughout Cyprus. An attempt on the part of the victorious Greeks at summary union with Greece took place in 1974 whereupon Turkey- long preparing  for such an eventuality sent its armed forces to abort the Greek attempt which it did within days.The island ended up divided like India was before but with the difference that the division remained only de facto and has been giving headaches to both communities and their respective motherlands, namely Greece and Turkey since and now also to the European Union which granted membership to the Greek Cypriot-held government of Cyprus, again thanks to the chronic imbecility of the Turkish diplomacy.

One must admit however that, excepting their mutual distrust and nationalistic rivalry, Cypriots, both Greek and Turkish are very civilised and easygoing people who can get along exceedingly well when they are not possessed by their respective nationalistic paranoias in the hands of their respective demagogues- of course there is no realistic prospects that the demagogues will ever away go away. Demagogy is too powerful a tool any ‘self-respecting’ politician to afford to abandon. Both the eloquent Greek language and proud and dreaming Greek soul promote great ambitions, produce great rabble-raising demagogues and make Greeks to reach for the moon and often get it no matter the cost in blood and tears. Love or hate them, their talents are undeniable.    

Other than their respective religions, many traditions of Greek and Turkish Cypriots overlap, among which are attachment to family, ready hospitality and honesty, honour and peacefulness in their daily, non-political relations. Trouble begins when the usual bad blood of politics come between them two. So long they are free from inordinate nationalistic selfishness and despite a long history of politically motivated bloodshed between the two communities their individual members can get along exceedingly well once left to civil relations which fact exposes the main cause of  inter-racial or inter-communal strifes and bloodsheds: morbidly politically ambitious members prepared to advance their careers by fomenting racial hatred whenever they can  whatever the cost. Naturally as by far  the minority community Turks are concerned they could never afford or initiate a violence-oriented racist conspiracy against Greeks; hence they cannot be accused of bad faith, at least initially,  while the Greeks have been doing all those ugly things deemed great honour and heroism by themselves (curse racism!). This of course does not mean that Turks could not act similarly in a situation where the roles were reversed- after all human nature is one and the same across all accidental divides. As God’s last and incomparable Book the Koran explains “Man is in loss, except in the case of those who truly believe in True God and therefore are mutually advised by truth and informed by good patience and tolerance” (103: 1- 3). Unfortunately politics is not one of the areas such morality is popular in. Politics stirs up and exploit what is most elfish and vile in man and then attempts to fish in the waters it so troubled.    

At the writing of these lines the Cyprus problem remains as intractable as ever. No doubt the cause is irredentist racist nationalism on the part of the Greeks and the stupid inadequacy of the Turks in politics which inadequacy I dare say has been chronic. Overconfident with their famous military prowess they have been despising political skills and in fact throughout their Ottoman centuries they  delegated their political matters to their Greek, Armenian or other subject European races, initially as converts to Islam but later frank Christians. Many served the empire well but as it declined so did the loyalty of some of these castes of Christian Ottoman diplomats. Frankly though, Turks have themselves to blame for that: rather than training home-grown Muslim diplomats they preferred their Christian (and often also Jewish) citizens equipped with a good knowledge of European languages to mess their hands with the infidel matters of diplomacy. Eventually that helped to pave their way to decline and ruin. They should not confine themselves to military matters alone and leave diplomacy to the talented members of their Christian subject communities or self-seeking renegades from Europe seeking their fortunes in Istanbul. Many Christian soldiers of fortune who failed to make a fortune in their Own lands tried their luck in Turkey and were usually well-received given the fact that Turks despised non-Muslim languages and as a result needed non-Muslim staff to deal with foreign matters. Born Muslims (except as those born into a suitably converted family) unfortunately, stood no chance for becoming diplomats after the 14^th century and increasingly holding no command posts as well. That proved the Ottoman’s Achilles heel.  It may be that Turks had too suddenly become successful through their military abilities to get used to diplomacy and develop skills in it and had to resort to more experienced races to fill their growing vacancies for diplomatic posts for which conversion to Islam of whatever quality had to be considered as adequate in the hurry. Naturally as many bad apples as good must have filtered in.

MORE ABOUT LIMASSOL

As regards my town Limassol, it is built around the southernmost  bay of the island with a most fertile hinterland by Mediterranean standards as well as boasting of most and earliest developed industrialization and tourist trade. Small proud factories were everywhere and as usual were entirely owned by Greeks. Turks traditionally preferred agriculture, small trades and crafts and salaried government jobs. As industry and commerce outstripped farming in creating wealth, the Greek community overtook the Turkish in prosperity and influence with the English government of Cyprus which was headed by a governor sent from London. However the English rule was fair and enlightened and provided one obeyed it one could look to a comfortable life blessed by across the board justice for all except when some special British interests were at stake. That of course was forgivable since all nations put their interests first when it comes to that.

The Turkish quarter I was born in made at the time about one fifth of its total built area but today it lies deserted and decaying at a leisurely rate, a ghost town quarter in fact. We had to abandon it and emigrate to the north of the Island when the two communities were at the throat of each other and the Turkish army were avenging its long-withheld wrath on Greeks who had been so unwisely for so long dismissing it as an impotent barbarian force. Coming from the North the Turkish army destroyed the Greek defences like a house cards and sent about two hundred thousands of Greeks fleeing to the south in their night gowns- an unnecessary catastrophe caused  both  by the Greek over-confidence in their dares and conspiracies and Turkish delay and prevarications out of their chronic diplomatic inadequacies and the non-realization of the fact that a too late response to Greek machinations could be as bad as a too early one. You see, the 1960 Cyprus agreement between Britain, Turkey and Greece and the daughter Cypriot communities of the latter two, namely,  Turkish and Greek communities of Cyprus had given all three sponsor overseas powers the right to intervene collectively or singly in case one of the Cypriot communities attempted to dispossess  the other which of course meant the far bigger Greek Community overpowering the Turks and annexing Cyprus to Greece. Which means the intervention clause was actually amounted to a tacit recognition of the fact that it was the far weaker Turkish Cypriots who needed protection.  And that proved to be the case when in 1974 a Greek Cypriot junta seized power and declared union with Greece. How much more could Turkey be provoked, who, as a guarantor power for the 1960 Zurich-London agreement between Britain, Turkey and Greece had the right and the obligation to interfere when one party in Cyprus attempted to infringe the agreement?    

Despite that great trauma since, the Greek part sorted out its problems and licked its wounds back to health and is presently (2009) as alive as ever and in constant development as well. We from south Cyprus all have our ancestors’ graves there and our childhood memories extend in its direction like cool and smooth lanes inviting another nostalgic travel.

At the moment of writing Cyprus problems remains unsolved with Greeks suffering from a sense of victimization based on the notion that what was Greek centuries ago should again become Greek until a Greater Greece could be resurrected at the expense of half a dozen of other nationalities around the North Eastern Mediterranean which idea is called Megali Idea (the Grabd Idea) which has been clashing on and off with the grand ideas of other  Balkan irredentist nations like the Bulgarians, Romanians, Serbs and the Macedonians- a collective grandiose madness in fact which has been causing untold aggression, adventurism and barbarism among all the contending parties: note the Yugoslav civil war in the last decade of the last century to understand how mad and barbaric these contending nationalisms have been.  Collectively they caused the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and massive and catastrophic destruction and displacement of millions of innocent civilians. In my humble opinion nationalism has been a disgraceful reversal into racial barbarism only thinly disguised by the modernity of the advanced weapons and the falsely civil diplomacies employed in the pursuit of its vindictive and selfish aims. Its only legacy are the mountains of massacred dead millions buried in mass graves from the shores of the Adriatic to the Aegean Turkey and tiny long-suffering Cyprus. The whole has been a master theatrical tragedy produced and directed by his satanic majesty the Devil.