The Politics of Cypriot Greek in Postcolonial Cyprus: Textual

Seduction in the Mediterranean

Abstract
As renewed talks for the reunification of Cyprus encounter familiar barriers, this essay
urges the reader to consider the importance of language use in the Greek Cypriot
community. Drawing on Jacques Derridas work on speech and writing, it examines the
political significance of Demotic Greek and the Cypriot Greek spoken every day, arguing
that the conflicts of Greek Cypriot identity since decolonization are played out by the
tension between the two forms of Greek. Demotic use invokes an essential Greek
identity that excludes the Oriental, particularly Turkish, other. However, its use remains
primarily written even though it summons the classical philosophy and Greek Orthodoxy
that celebrate speech, not writing, as the mode of self--expression. Paradoxically, the use
of written Demotic presents a Hellenized version of Cyprus at the same time that it
undermines one of the foundational principles of Hellenic culture. Cypriot Greek persists
in speech, resisting the textual seduction and invasion by Demotic. It can, with its explicit,
supranational diversity, be understood as a celebration of Cypriot difference that
demonstrates the multi--faceted construction of identity on the island. Indeed, Cypriot
Greek deconstructs the hierarchical opposition between Occidental and Oriental. In its
difference from Demotic, Cypriot Greek invokes the polyculturalism of Cyprus, an
instance of the diversity too often ignored and repressed in diverse locations across the
Mediterranean and the Middle East with tragic consequences.
Keywords
Cyprus, Derrida, Deconstruction, Greek, Identity, Nationalism.
Introduction
Southern Europe and the Middle East have understandably been the subject of much
recent attention in postcolonial studies, but this essay focuses on national identity in
Cyprus, a topic that has started to attract academic exploration.1 To build on this, against
the backdrop of reinvigorated bi--communal talks for a solution to the division of the
island, this article examines the relationship between Greek Cypriot identity and its two
versions of Greek, Cypriot Greek and the standard modern Greek, Demotic, in the light
of philosopher Jacques Derridas theory of deconstruction. As a result, the reader is
urged to consider the complexities of Greek Cypriot identity, with an exclusive,
homogeneous Greek identity in conflict with an inclusive Cypriot identity open to the

Greek Cypriot, Turkish Cypriot, Latin, Armenian, Eastern European, and Asian
communities that constitute the contemporary demography of Cyprus.
Greek Cypriot identity has traditionally defined itself within the narratives of
Greco--Turkish antagonisms, as grouped with the forces of Hellenism against the
Turkish other. However, the war of 1974 radically changed the political environment in
Cyprus: a coup sponsored by the Greek junta prompted a Turkish invasion that divided
the island as Britain, the third guarantor of Cypriot sovereignty and the ex--colonial
power, looked on silently. As a result, new lived realities on the island have prompted
many Greek Cypriots to define themselves as Cypriots independent of both Greece and
Turkey, a stance that, whether fuelled by ideology or pragmatism, seeks the reunification
of the island. Michael A. Attalides identified sources of Cypriot consciousness that predate 1974 but conceded that these were never cohesively formulated or articulated (5769). Yiannis Papadakis points out that only after 1974 were symbols of Cypriotness
introduced alongside symbols of Greekness, resulting in a symbolic official double-talk indicative of the ambiguity of Greek Cypriot identity (1998: 153). However, both
Attalides and Papadakis elide the importance of Cypriot Greek.2 Andreas N.
Papapavlous examination of bidialectalism ended with the proposal that Greek Cypriots
prefer Demotic because of a desire to align themselves with Greece prompted by the
ambiguities of ethnic identity in Cyprus, as well as the educational policies [] that
inculcate Greek national values and probably discourage the development of Cypriot
consciousness (25). To take Papapavlous insight further, I will argue that the intractable
conflicts of postcolonial Greek Cypriot identity can be traced through bidialectal
language use. Moreover, I will also contend that Cypriot Greek performs, and has always
performed, a spoken Cypriot identity that, as Ian Chambers says of Mediterranean
history in its entirety, is multiple and mutable (9).

For Derrida, speech is never complete, full, or stable. Derrida proposes that the
self--sufficiency of speech that phonocentric Western metaphysics, from Plato to
Ferdinand de Saussure, has assumed could only be guaranteed by an external point of
reference where unequivocal truth resides, a Logos. This Logos has always been linked
exclusively to speech and can be understood, by way of example, in the sense of Gods
infinite understanding (1997: 11). In the absence of such divine guarantees, Derrida
argues that meaning results from the trace of difference, since we understand a term by
reference to its differentiating other, not any extra--linguistic origin that stabilizes speech.
Meaning, then, depends on the trace of, for example, Turk in Greek, a trace that marks
the relationship with the other (1997: 47). An effect of this trace is to unfix, or
deconstruct, hierarchical binary oppositions; it implies a possible duality or identification
between terms thought of as opposites, where one term usually has cultural pre-eminence over the other, so that the trace of the denigrated other is always already
concealed within the selfsame. Indeed, this critique deconstructs the opposition between
speech and its necessary supplement, writing, an opposition that Western metaphysics
has always sought to reinforce.
This essay appropriates Derridas critique of Western metaphysics in order to
trace the shifting commitments of Greek Cypriot identity. On the one hand lies Demotic,
increasingly used to present the Greekness of the Cypriot through the de-Ottomization
and Westernization of his/her language. Simultaneously, its official, pedagogical,
especially written use traduces the Occidental phonocentric history to which it appeals in
order to prove the Greek identity of the Cypriot. On the other hand lies Cypriot Greek,
which persists phonocentrically as the spoken language of a polycultural Cypriot identity
that resists the textual invasion of Demotic. In other words, Demotic is considered the
expression of an essential Greek identity, but its predominantly textual use undermines
the very notion of speech as the expression of inner self. Cypriot Greek, meanwhile,

deconstructs the opposition between Greek and Turk as it orally performs a Cypriot
identity that is fluid and multi--faceted.

I
Cyprus can be understood as both Oriental and Occidental. In an analysis of the diverse
ideological uses of the goddess Aphrodite in Cyprus, Papadakis describes geopolitical
perspectives of the island as uncomfortably situated between Greece and Turkey, Asia
and Europe, Christianity and Islam, neither of one nor the other (2006: 247).
Conflations of East and West are certainly evidenced by descriptions of its geographical
location, which range from Europes outer limit as the Eastern Mediterranean, to Asias
buffer zone as the Near East, but they are also reproduced internally. Barren and winding,
the line that divides the two largest communities stands as a crooked reminder of the
violent desires of disambiguation that have plagued the island. South of that line, Greek
nationalism in Cyprus has always explained Cypriot society as European. Only the
communist party AKEL, the single party in Cyprus with a history of support from both
Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, was sceptical of Cypruss recent accession to the
European Union. Not only did accession constitute an important economic decision, it
also signified the validation of Cyprus as a European society. Obscured, but not
completely hidden, by the fiscal considerations of European Union membership is the
hope that a place within such a hegemonic structure will protect against Turkish
occupation of the entire island. European consciousness holds the same fear of the Turk
that dominates Greek Cypriot society, a fear that not only attempts to erase from
memory the Eastern influence on European society but also addresses Turkeys
deplorable human rights record and the continued occupation of the north of Cyprus
from behind a veil of prejudice. If Europe, from the Renaissance onwards, has refused to
recognize the Oriental influences that helped mediate the Greco--Latin cultures that

constitute its classical foundations (Chambers: 150), the grievance in Cyprus against the
Turkish state demonstrates a European paradigm. On these terms Greek nationalists in
particular, self--narrated as in fraternity with the wider Hellenic struggle against the Turk,
can consider themselves a paragon of European existence. However, political events
since the onset of British colonialism in 1878 and throughout the last century have
proved the dispensability of Cyprus to the Occident: the United Kingdom and the
United States of America, in rapprochement with Turkey, have bartered the island in
exchange for geopolitical sway in the Middle East.
Consequent claims to Occidental Greek identity in Cyprus are, then, negated by
the Mediterraneans Oriental undertow when Cyprus confronts the West. As Vassos
Argyrou urges us to consider, Cyprus will always be on the edge of Europe: Irrespective
of how Greek Cypriots are, they will always be excluded from the Occidental core
(39). Allied to this exclusion, the past failures of the Greek Cypriots to coherently
construct an alternative cultural identification to Greek, one that could encompass the
polycultural demography of the island, reproduces the very ideology that constitutes
them as backward Middle Easterners (58). To facilitate the self-defeating ideology
Argyrou identifies, a place within Occidental discourse requires the strategic exclusion of
the Oriental Turkish Cypriot other within, the existence of a progressive and rational
Occident dependent upon the rhetoric of a backward and irrational Orient. Against this
strategy, however, operates the trace of Turkish Cypriot otherness that always marks
Greek Cypriot identity, a problematic antithesis of other and selfsame illustrated by Maria
Avraamidous short story Paralogismos.
Set in the town of Kyrenia after the events of 1974, Paralogismos depicts the
unthinkable, or paralogic, love affair between a Greek Cypriot woman, Evtikhia, and an
unnamed Turkish, or perhaps Turkish Cypriot, soldier. At first, the narrative explores the
liberating potential of the relationship, which, as Mary N. Layoun states, offers a

substantial textual recasting of the Turkish or Turkish Cypriot presence in Cyprus (97).
Turkish soldiers raped Cypriot women (both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot) during
the war, crimes that compelled both the Cypriot Orthodox Church and the government
to sanction abortion due to the number of resultant pregnancies. Contrary to the
predominant cultural representations, Paralogismos presents a Turkish soldier and a
Greek Cypriot woman who enjoy a consensual, romantic relationship. However, with a
pre--war vision of her village that invokes the Garden of Eden, Evtikhias recollections
foretell the ultimate ambivalence of Avraamidous short story: Once the village was one
gigantic garden that stretched to the plain below and within it strolled monks dressed in
white. As a demonic counterpoint to this idyllic image, the face of the soldier appears to
Evtikhia in the same moment utterly unexpectedly (24). No distinction exists in the text
between Turk and Turkish Cypriot, and the possibilities of the romantic transgression are
emphatically delimited when the pregnant Evtikhia violently kills the soldier, a
homogenous, unidentified Turkish other. The bloody conclusion of Paralogismos
reinforces the divisions it initially challenges, but, in the form of the unborn child who
can be seen to represent the heterogeneity of Cypriot identity, the potential disruption to
Greek Cypriot nationalism remains.
Current debates continue to contest Greek Cypriot identity. For example, the
way in which schools teach twentieth--century Cypriot history has become an ideological
battleground, in particular the period from the end of British colonial rule and the
subsequent bi--communal unrest until the war of 1974. Spyrou claims that nationalist
discourse in Greek Cypriot primary schools employs a monologic reading of identity
that limits the discursive exploration of alternatives (2000: 64). Nevertheless, claims are
made from both ends of the political spectrum that private and party opinions invade the
classroom. This usually entails a demand from the right that the traditional, pro--Greek,
anti--Turkish slant be continued, while those on the left demand a restructured approach

that presents the island as the victim of nationalisms imported from Greece and Turkey.3
Thus the issue returns to how Greek Cypriot identity can be understood; it is either
Greek, and therefore defined as European and in opposition to Turkey, or it is non-aligned and unhappily caught between Greco--Turkish ethnonationalisms. In practice,
then, any attempt to forge a pro--Cypriot identity is undermined by a constant
Westernizing, de--Ottomizing resistance. The fresh round of peace talks that began in
September 2008 and were accelerated in January 2010 between Cypriot President
Dimitris Christofias and Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat had to balance the
desire for reunification against the ethnonationalistic drives that exist on both sides of
the Green Line dividing Cyprus. In leadership elections held north of that line on April
18 2010, Talat lost out to right-wing conservative Dervis Erolu, who, with growing
support from a rapidly altering, increasingly pro--Turkish demographic, stands opposed
to reunification. At a crucial moment for the peace process the threat of
ethnonationalism returned.
Language use south of the Green Line exemplifies this impasse. The most
fundamental aspect of the eradication of the Turkish Cypriot other from within the
selfsame has been the emphasis on the use of Demotic since the mid--1970s, a
marginalization of Cypriot Greek and its Turkish and Arabic influences. Examples of
these influences include the frequently--used loan words mashallah, a compliment in the
name of Allah, and inshallah, used similarly as a term of hope. Alongside these are
innumerable everyday instances of alternate or loan words. For example, the Cypriot
Greek word for cup, fentzhani, becomes flintzani in Demotic, while the word for
coffee pot, tzisveh, becomes briki. Such quotidian Cypriot Greek words and phrases
are disavowed, a rejection of Middle Eastern idiosyncrasies that denote the otherness of
the Greek Cypriot, a process that extracts elements perceived to be exterior to the
Hellenic Cypriot core. De--Ottomization proves itself, then, to be a reaction to both the

Cyprus problem and the Osmanli history the island shares with Greece. Demotic thus
becomes a medium that establishes fraternity between the Greek and the Greek Cypriot
through a textual exorcism of Oriental, primarily Turkish Cypriot, spectres.
In 1976 Demotic was recognised as the language of Cyprus. As Andreas
Georghiou Karagiorges documents, Act 309 was passed into Greek law with the
provision that Demotic, the spoken language of Greece, be recognised for the first time
as the official language of the state and the language of instruction in schools at all levels.
Up until this point Katharevousa, a more complex version of Greek, had been used.
Karagiorges states that Greek and Greek Cypriot education suffered from the lack of an
easily understandable language of instruction (147, 148). Cyprus whole--heartedly
adopted the provision, and also took on the Greek national anthem as that of the
Republic of Cyprus. However, whereas in Greece the language of the state was unified
with everyday speech, an unrealistic ideal with Katharevousa, in Cyprus the spoken
language, Cypriot Greek, would have to change of the peoples own accord in order to
match that of the state.

II
Demotic invokes a Greek identity rooted in phonocentrism by problematizing
phonocentrism. Since 1976 the linguistic object in Cyprus has been defined chiefly by the
written word on the page, and this written word of Demotic articulates state pedagogy,
literature, the media, and the alienated other on the computer screen. Moreover, in
accordance with the Greek nationalist drive to Hellenize Cyprus entirely, this use of
Demotic must also alter the speech of the Greek Cypriot. In other words, it must usurp
and disprove the phonocentric tradition that understands speech as the symbol of inner
experience, and writing as nothing more than the representation of speech. However,
this philosophical tradition cannot be separated from the ancient Greek lineage to which

Cypriot Hellenism appeals, a lineage that, as Derrida explains, considers writing as merely
the signifier of the first signifier, representation of the self--present voice.
Phonocentrism, then, sees speech, not writing, as the immediate, natural, and direct
signification of [] meaning (1997: 30). Here Aristotelian and Platonic elevations of
speech are crossed with Christian apotheoses of the Word as the cultural vectors that
constitute contemporary Greek identity converge. The divine reason connects truth,
rationality, and language, as in the New Testament: In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John. 1.1). Paradoxically, Demotic
denotes the classical ontology and Orthodoxy of Greek identity at the same time that its
establishment in Cyprus disrupts the foundational notions of these aspects of Greek
identity. On the one hand, it calls on the Greekness of the Greek Cypriot but, on the
other, its predominantly written existence undermines Greekness as a spoken
expression of inner self.
As a result of these conflicts the invasion of speech by writing can be clearly seen
in Cyprus. Taktakallas, a district of old Nicosia, offers an illustrative example. Previously
known as Tahtakallas to Greek Cypriots and Tahtakalle to Turkish Cypriots, it was a
mixed community and, from the 1950s onwards, home to the Olympiakos coffee shop,
an epicentre of extreme Greek nationalist activity heavily implicated in the
ethnonationalistic violence that ravaged the area and led to the division of the capital in
1963. Still written into the constitution of the Olympiakos football club is the provision
that the teams green and black colours, which honour the fallen heroes of Hellenism,
will change to blue in the event of union with Greece. Today the area goes by the name
of Taktakallas, with the emphasis on a hard, more Demotic k rather than the softer,
Arabesque h of previous appellations. Subtle, phonetic differences such as this give
Cypriot Greek overall a distinctly different sound to Demotic. Textual prescription of
pronunciation, however, does not always succeed, even with the most likely

sympathisers: sit on the terraces at an Olympiakos match and fans, in particular those of
a certain vintage, offer encouragement to their Tahtakallites.
Demotics textual existence subverts the Saussurean definition of writing as a
replication of already constituted units of signification, in the formation of which it has
played no part (Derrida 1997: 31). Written down in order to defy the everyday, spoken
persistence of Cypriot Greek, Demotic does not form new units of signification but
imports written units of signification alternative, and supposedly superior, to the
language a young child learns at home, a language addressed as a dialect in need of
purification. In this sense the use of Demotic in Cyprus can be understood as
graphocentric. More than that, it is also grammatocentric because its apparent need
tempts us, by way of comparison, to see the syntax and diction of Cypriot Greek as
deficient. A performance of refinement, use of Demotic has come to denote modern
urban progression differentiated from the denigrated village associated with Cypriot
Greek. Indeed, the sound of Cypriot Greek often draws scorn and ridicule that
distinguishes between the correctness of the progressed city--dwellers and the uncivilized
practices of villagers. Papadakis rightly contends that Greek Cypriots often see Cypriot
Greek as dirty, and to speak cleanly one must adopt Demotic (2005: 12). To take this
further, when a Greek Cypriot adopts the written Demotic as his or her mode of speech,
he or she accepts a frame of assumptions that constructs Demotic as superior to Cypriot
Greek. Or, to put it another way, when a Cypriot speaks Demotic he or she articulates a
Hellenized conception of Cypriot identity rather than the polycultural identity that
Cypriot Greek signifies.
By extension, then, Greek identity in Cyprus can be described as both
graphocentric and grammatocentric. Demotic does not represent speech in Cyprus, does
not, without agency, represent spoken signifiers. Instead, it reproduces the speech of the
Greek other, reproduces the signifier of the Greek others first signifier. This

10

reproduction attempts to extinguish the trace of the Oriental other marked in the
selfsame by Cypriot Greek. Post--reproduction, writing permeates speech and constitutes
the Greek Cypriots sense of national identity: the Demotic on the page, when spoken, is
understood as the representation of an inner reality, the Cypriots Greek soul. Once
more, in order to spontaneously express a natural inner self, Demotic penetrates speech
so as to establish that inner self as Greek. Simultaneously, this artificial establishment
undermines the very notion of speech as an expression of a fixed, innate, and obvious
inner self. Or, to put it simply, the use of Demotic highlights the cultural construction of
an identity it sets out to prove as inherent, straightforward, and effortless. This violent
intrusion into the inner system of speech, this complication of the organic bond between
signified and phonic signifier, this sign of the body that is the mark of writings original
sin, necessitates the admission and essentialization of Greeces passion in Cypriot spirit,
breath, and speech. We speak as we write when representation and the represented mix,
resulting in, as Derrida sardonically argues, a dangerous promiscuity and nefarious
complicity between the reflection and the reflected which lets itself be seduced
narcissistically. Derridas tone mocks the phonocentric fears of writings influence, but
the result of this tendency is to obscure any point of origin. Succinctly put, there is no
cause, beginning, or foundation, only difference, because what can look at itself is not
one (1997: 36). For the Greek Cypriot, this split is always already an alienation, as the
use of Demotic does not double the phon of the selfsame but of a Greek other to
which the selfsame attempts to assimilate. The very possibility of such assimilation
scorns the foundational point of the assimilation, which is that the phon expresses a
true, unalterable Greek self.
Demotic signifies Greek historical glories that entice the Greek Cypriot, and this
textual seduction produces a centrifugal tendency in the national identifications made in
Cyprus. The very Greekness of the Cypriot depends upon the narrative of Mycenaean

11

ancestors who settled in Cyprus during the Bronze Age and Hellenized the island, an
arrival generally understood as Cyprus Occidental turn. A mnemotechnic agency, the
seductive Demotic attempts to remind Cypriots of their Greek souls at the same time
that it usurps the Cypriot Greek language understood to link Cyprus to the Ancient
Greek home of the Mycenaean. Standing before such Gordian Knots, Greek Cypriots
administer Alexanders logic. For example, when faced with the ideological limitations of
modern Greece, Greek Cypriots cut through the tangled bonds of Demotic with a sharp
return to the primacy of the phon, to the Cypriot Greek popularly considered as far
closer to Ancient Greek than Demotic. Greeks of today are commonly regarded by
Greek Cypriots as contaminated with negative Oriental idiosyncrasies, a legacy of the
Ottoman Empire. Stereotyped as idle and disorganised, dishonest and disrespectful, the
modern Greek stands in contrast to the industrious and progressive, that is, more
Occidental, Greek Cypriot. Such unhidden insolence contrasts the outward civility the
Cypriot learnt to perform under British rule. Confronted by Greek vulgarity, Greek
Cypriots turn to their speech for justification of their older Hellenic identity, as it brings
them closer, in a linear, temporal sense, to the cradle of Western civilisation. Argyrou
urges us to consider this paradox in Greek nationalism as the everyday belief that there
are two ways of being Greek, and that the Cypriot way is superior (56). In contradiction,
then, the Greek Cypriot others the Greek in order to be Greek.
The ideological contradiction in the Greek Cypriots use of Demotic can be put
in Derridean terms. Cypriot Greek persists in speech despite the drive to decontaminate
it, so the possibility of a polycultural Cypriot identity continues phonocentrically.
Conversely, Derridas treatment of writing as an equal that invades speech contradicts the
phonocentric tradition from which Greek ancestry, via the predominantly pedagogical
use of Demotic, demands lineage. Descendants of the Mycenaeans, and therefore
children of a Hellenic world that gave birth to Western civilization, Greek Cypriots

12

encounter an aporia in the establishment of their Greek identity: the graphocentricity of

Greek nationalism in Cyprus breaks with the classical, phonocentric tradition of which it
claims to be a part. That is to say, the graphocentric approach excludes the Greek
Cypriot from the very genealogy he or she wishes to prove, so that in the attempt to
claim Greeces relation to classical ontology as Cypriot history, the Greek Cypriot
subverts that philosophical tradition. Put simply, in Cyprus an Oriental Cypriot identity
makes its presence felt in speech, connecting the spoken word and self--present identity
in a classically Occidental way. Alternatively, an Occidental Greek identity subverts the
Occidental philosophical tradition that privileges speech: the written Demotic questions
any natural connection between speech and self--present identity at the same time that its
use attempts to prove a self--present Greek identity in Cyprus. Use of Demotic presents
Greek identity as a natural, obvious, and organic Cypriot trait, but that preference,
particularly in speech, over Cypriot Greek, the idea that a different register denotes a
different person, underscores the very construction of what appears natural, obvious, and
organic.

III
Cypriot Greek contains, despite the drive to decontaminate it, the mark of Cypriot
polyculturalism. Demotic invades Cypriot Greek speech in an attempt to homogenize it,
to cleanse it of the Oriental others influence; it is a text governing my talk (Derrida
1973: 132). Yet this attempt to access a real, stable, original Greek concept is self-defeating. Meaning, as Derrida informs us, results from the trace of difference in
language, not by reference to anything in the world. That is to say that no first--hand
correspondence exists between words and free--standing concepts, so, as we have seen,
Greekness cannot be accessed beyond its construction in language. In social and
political practice, efforts to homogenize language use in Cyprus only serve to stress the

13

dissimilarities between Greek and Turkish Cypriots without the guarantee of a

homogeneous Occidental Greek identity. The Greek Cypriot finds him/herself in
conflict, caught between speech and writing, the Orient and the Occident, words and
concepts. A Greek Cypriot talks like a Cypriot and writes like a Greek. Not only that, a
Greek Cypriot talks like a Cypriot divided from Cypriotness and writes like a Greek
divided from Greekness. It is, however, the heterogeneity of Cypriot Greek speech that
questions the very terms that frame this conflict.
Hybrid, regionally varied, and fluid in its supranational vocabulary, Cypriot Greek
articulates a cross--border identity. Some of its words and phrases are recognised across
Europe, throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and on the Subcontinent. In this
sense, Cypriot Greek is a paradigm case of all languages. The need to focus on it rests on
two factors. First, the current context, where new bi--communal talks aimed at the
reunification of Cyprus continue. These talks follow the relaxation of crossing
regulations along the Green Line by the Turkish Cypriot authorities in 2003, which, as
Spurgeon Thompson stresses, has opened Cyprus to a valuable kind of intercultural
exchange (290). Cypriot Greek has been crucial to this exchange. Many Turkish Cypriots
of a certain age can still use the Cypriot Greek they learnt before the war of 1974, and
the language breaches the walls that historical and political narratives tend to build
between the co--existence of the past and the present separation. My intention is not to
demonize the inevitable use of Demotic, in which exist the marks of otherness that make
up all languages, but to emphasize that the denigration of Cypriot Greek also denigrates a
particular view of Cypriot society. And, of course, in an ironic, chiastic twist, Cypriot
Greeks persistence in speech can be used as an entry point to a nexus of possible
identities distinct from those denoted by the written Demotic. Cypriot Greek survives
despite the imported nationalism of Greece (and, in the north, Turkey) because, for the
attentive listener, it can be separated from the myth of origins that constitutes

14

ethnonationalism in Cyprus. Cypriot Greek thus speaks, to those who care to listen, the
negated history of perpetual change and exchange that makes up the Mediterranean and
the Middle East. Indeed, the broad influences so clearly on display in Cypriot Greek
especially in the use of unaltered Turkish, Arabic, French, and Italian words, and the
alternative uses and pronunciations of words also used in Demotic reflect the fluid,
unfixed, heterogeneous Cypriot existence. To summarize, Cypriot Greek performs the
formulation of Cypriot identity, making audible its perpetual movements and encounters.
So, secondly, Cypriot Greek offers us access to the disavowed alterity of the entire
Mediterranean and Middle East, to the differences throughout the region too often held,
with dreadful consequences, to be strictly incompatible.
In Cyprus in particular, Cypriot Greek presents an alternative to the Greco-Turkish antagonisms that have co--opted the islands historical and political narratives.
After the Greek Revolution of 1821, the subsequent creation of the Modern Greek State
led to Greek nationalist ideas in Cyprus that unsettled Ottoman rule. With the onset of
British rule in 1878, Greek nationalism found its voice. By way of reaction, Turkish
nationalism grew in Cyprus after the establishment of the Modern Turkish State in 1923.
Antagonism and conflict replaced co--existence as national identity was removed to
Athens and Ankara. Enosis, the demand for union with Greece that was the major
ideological foundation of Greek nationalism in Cyprus, fuelled the rise against British
rule by EOKA (the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) that led to independence
and the formation of the Republic in 1960. But that same ethnonationalism in Greek and
Turkish communities also encouraged the failure of the Republics initial constitution,
based on the Zurich--London agreements that Archbishop Makarios III, the first
President of Cyprus, famously claimed created a state but not a nation.
A new, unified political community in Cyprus, a realization dependent on a single,
shared national identity, never fully occurred. The de jure loss of the Greek and

15

Turkish prefixes to the consequently repudiated Cypriot term contradicted the

mainstream Greek Cypriot desire to identify with Greece against the Turkish other.
Simultaneously, the Turkish Cypriot minority, once the dominant community on the
island and now forced into legal equality with the Greek Cypriot majority, turned towards
the nationalistic fervour of Atatrks Turkey. Niazi Kizilurek states that the brutal failure
of the Cypriot state can be attributed to the threat perceived by the ruling elites to Greek
and Turkish national identities: Greek Cypriot leaders were determined to Hellenize
Cyprus while Turkish Cypriot leaders refused the Cypriotisation of their community
(37). By 1963 the spectres of British rule, which encouraged ethnonationalism with the
cynical recruitment of Turkish Cypriots in the failed attempt to vanquish EOKA, had
also returned to haunt Cyprus. Displaced nationalisms and un--exorcised colonial policies
combined as inter--communal violence raged. How, precisely, Cyprus should be defined
was the issue that led to every gunshot, every bomb, and every blow.
A different spectre also haunts Cyprus in the form of Cypriot Greek. If the dead,
the refugees, and the missing, are the victims of a violent historical struggle to eliminate
the intricacies of Cypriot society, with Demotic use a textual instance of that drive,
Cypriot Greek exemplifies an alternative history ignored, suppressed, and ridiculed by
Greek nationalists, Turkish nationalists, and apologists for Anglo-American abuses: it is
the language of peaceful co--existence. It is a voice that calls across the Green Line, that
blazing marker of difference that divides the island and stands as the legacy of a desire to
un--Cypriotize Cyprus. Spookily, the Green Line, which cuts a jagged, deserted swathe
from east coast to west, bears an uncanny resemblance to the division once envisaged on
paper by Britain, the so--called paper tiger. Textual practice, it seems, has often impacted
on Cypriot society. However, when Greek Cypriots speak in Cypriot Greek they do not
just use a regional variation of Demotic: they resist a history of textual seduction by the
fixed, homogenized space of modernity and its linear concept of the nation. Ultimately,

16

they use a language that verbalizes the irreducible nature of Cypriotness. As Christofias
and Talats replacement, Erolu, negotiate a possible unification of Cyprus, the Green
Line at which they meet commemorates the catastrophes visited on all Cypriots, events
inseparable from the attempt to hold apart the Oriental and Occidental influences on
Cyprus, a narrative written in Demotic. Deconstructing this binary opposition, Cypriot
Greek invokes the polyculturalism that, in the recent climate of rapprochement on an
increasingly diverse island, can be celebrated as the very condition of Cypriot identity.

Works Cited
Avraamidou, Maria (1979) Paralogismos, O Teleftaios Khorismos, Nicosia: Kypros Printing.
Argyrou, Vassos (1996) Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Attalides, Michael A. (2003) Cyprus: Nationalism and International Politics, Mhnesee:
Bibliopolis.
Bryant, Rebecca (2004) Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus, London:
I.B. Taurus.
Chambers, Iain (2008) Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity,
Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1997) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
---. (1973) Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs, trans. David B.
Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Karagiorges, Andreas Georghiou (1986) Education Development in Cyprus, 1960-1977,
Nicoisa: [n. pub.].
Karseras, Athena (2009) MPs to Hear English School Concerns, The Cyprus Weekly,
January 30 February 5, p.4

17

Kizilurek, Niazi (1998) The Politics of Separation and the Denial of Interdependence,
The Cyprus Review 10(2): 33-39.
Layoun, Mary N. (2001) Wedded to the Land? Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Newton, Brian (1972) Cypriot Greek, The Hague: Mouton.
Papadakis, Yiannis (1998) Greek Cypriot Narratives of History and Collective Identity:
Nationalism as a Contested Process, American Ethnologist 25 (2): 149-165
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/646690> [accessed 25 February 2009].
---. (2005) Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide, London: I.B. Taurus.
---. (2006) Aphrodite Delights, Postcolonial Studies 9 (3): 237-250.
Papadakis, Yiannis, Gisela Welz, and Nicos Peristianis, eds. (2006) Divided Cyprus:
Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Papapavlou, Andreas N. (1998) Attitudes toward the Greek Cypriot Dialect:
Sociocultural Implications, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 134: 1528.
Postcolonial Studies (2006) 9: 225-328.
Shakespeare, William (1997) Othello, ed. by E. A. J. Honigmann, The Arden Shakespeare,
Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson.
Spyrou, Spyros (2000) Education, Ideology and National Self: The Social Practice of
Identity Construction in the Classroom, The Cyprus Review 12 (1): 61-81.
---. (2002) Images of the Other: The Turk in Greek Cypriot Childrens Imaginations,
Race, Ethnicity, and Education 5 (3): 255-272
<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713693077~db=all
~order=page> [accessed 25 February 2009].
Thompson, Spurgeon, Stavros St. Karayanni, and Myria Vassiliadou (2004) Cyprus After
History, Interventions 6: 282-299.

18

Over a decade ago, Yiannis Papadakis focused on the competing histories and identities

in Greek Cypriot society (Papadakis, Yiannis (1998) Greek Cypriot Narratives of History
and Collective Identity: Nationalism as a Contested Process, American Ethnologist 25 (2):
149-165 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/646690> [accessed 25 February 2009]), an
anthropological study of Cyprus that has gathered pace in the new century (see Bryant,
Rebecca (2004) Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus, London: I.B.
Taurus, Papadakis, Yiannis (2005) Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide,
London: I.B. Taurus, and Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict (2006)
Yiannis Papadakis, Gisela Welz, and Nicos Peristianis eds., Indiana: Indiana University
Press). Elsewhere, Spyros Spyrous ethnographic fieldwork has critiqued the role of
education in the construction of national identity in Cyprus (see, in particular, Spyrou,
Spyros (2000) Education, Ideology and National Self: The Social Practice of Identity
construction in the Classroom, The Cyprus Review, 12 (1): 61-81, and (2002) Images of
the Other: The Turk in Greek Cypriot Childrens Imaginations, Race, Ethnicity, and
Education, 5 (3): 255-272
<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713693077~db=all~order=
page> [accessed 25 February 2009]). In 2006 Postcolonial Studies focused on Cyprus in a
special issue edited by Papadakis, bringing to an international academic audience the
tradition of coffee--fuelled intellectual reflection that has long been the everyday
response to Cyprus complex political and cultural issues (Postcolonial Studies (2006) 9: 225328). Two years earlier, an excellent dialogue in Interventions between Spurgeon
Thompson, Stavros St. Karayanni, and Myria Vassiliadou demonstrated the potential for
exchange between current Cypriot socio--political debates and contemporary critical
practices (Thompson, Spurgeon, Stavros St. Karayanni, and Myria Vassiliadou (2004)
Cyprus After History, Interventions 6: 282-299). This article continues the spirit of that

19

discussion in Interventions with an examination that looks to interrogate both Cyprus and
the critical frame through which it looks at Cyprus.
2

For an authoritative introduction to Cypriot Greek, see Newton, Brian (1972) Cypriot

Greek, The Hague: Mouton.

3

See, most recently at the time of writing, Karseras, Athena (2009) MPs to Hear English

School Concerns, The Cyprus Weekly, January 30 February 5, p.4. The English School,
in the capital Nicosia, is perhaps the most prestigious private secondary school on the
island, and parental concerns over the provision of history became a political issue in
early 2009.

20