Roots are the foundation of identity. So what happens when you are ripped away from your roots, suddenly, overnight, and you cannot return? What happens to your sense of who you are and where you belong? How do you feel – how do you cope?

1974 Cyprus was primarily a rural, agricultural community. If you had moved to a regional town it would likely have been very recent. Your village was still where you had family  - mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. Your village home was likely to be the family home passed down through generations – generations who lived off village lands that belonged to your family.

George P. Georghiou called these people the “only true people left on the island”, contrasting them with whoever were the colonialists at any particular time. For generations they scraped and clawed a subsistence living that bonded and anchored them to the soil. Literally and metaphorically rooted to their lands. Over generations they developed deeply embedded traditional values and religious codes of conduct that  persevered through centuries and survived natural and man-made convulsions and upheavals.

For these communities the connection with your house, your village, your lands runs deep - very deep, to your core. This is where your roots make sense, where they construct and define your identity.

The Diarizos Valley

I live at the base of the Diarizos river valley. I have come to know well Its principal highway, one of the main arteries from the coastline to the Troodos mountain range in which lies so much of the island’s soul.  In one sense, close to the coastline to which it is connected. In  another far removed from the sun, sea and sand motifs by which so many visitors know the island.

Its pallid present only whispers the valley’s iridescent past. A neolithic copper mining and trading centre; part of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt; prospered and established new settlements in the Roman age; shared in the wildfire-like spread of Byzantine churches and monasteries ; declined in the face of dark age Arab raids; came under the control of Crusader conquerors and flourished under Venetian rule; witnessed a significant shift in population under the Ottomans as mosques and churches cohabited in mixed villages; and brought into the modern age under British rule with the arrival of ubiquitous water fountains.

For the most part the valley contains no surprises -  monasteries, mosques and churches; mantra’s with their beastly occupants; citrus, olive, almond, carob, fig and many other types of trees. Its arterial highway, with drunken twists and turns, carries cars, tractors, motorbikes and increasingly bicycles that weave through a predominantly rural, agricultural landscape. Hamlets which appear occupied hide their few occupants.

These occupied hamlets, although barely showing any signs of life, are flourishing and thriving when compared to the abandoned villages of the  Diarizos valley.

From its two sources which give the river its name, until its mouth, the Diarizos  covers a distance of 42 kilometres. Diarizos’ villages begin below the Venetian Tzefelos bridge and the Arminou earthfill dam and end near its estuary below Kouklia, site of the ancient capital of Palaipaphos and the antidiluvian sanctuary of Aphrodite. Along its route  you will find quarries, steep slopes, large lonely outcrops of rock and abandoned villages.

Six in total. Hidden tales of human existence frozen in time. whispering echoes of bygone eras and the lives once lived amidst their crumbling walls. Each forsaken settlement carries within it a unique narrative, remnants of communities long deserted. From the Troodos Mountains to the coastal plains, these ghostly remnants serve as poignant reminders of the island's complex past, where shifting demographics, geopolitical strife and natural forces intertwine to shape the fate of its inhabitants. Silent witnesses to a vanished way of life,  stories  of the island's complex  history etched into their crumbling facades. 

Connections Lost - A Wound that Never Heals

Some 75 years ago, turning their backs on their family heritage as subsistence farmers in deeply rural Cyprus, my parents became economic migrants. Little more than children,  they left their families to travel thousands of miles to start up a new life. The connection with their past, their ‘home’, their roots, however, survived. Their life tramline was  just taking a detour while at all times remaining connected to its source, its foundations. You can return anytime.

But for those communities who, in the 1974 bicommunal troubles, forsook their village wholesale and completely, the life tramline is broken. Unable to return,  the connection is lost, maybe never to return. Like a framed photo that holds all your memories and reference points that are the bedrock of your identity, which give you purpose and meaning, smashed, in a moment, obliterated.

Something inside you dies, and it is not small.

It is not just livelihood and property – these can be replaced. It is your connection with your roots, your links with what has made you who you are  and how you went about your life and how you engaged with your community. Now you have to start your story all over again without these reference points, unsure how or what to base it on as the foundations of what make you have been lost. The foundations which give you meaning and reassurance, grounded in the familiar, the past, your roots, collapse like skycrapers on a fault line.

Carrying the shadow of another place, homesickness is not missing a home - it is the memory of a life left behind and which may never be recovered.

Birth is not the only beginning.

This is what befell the inhabitants of  five of the abandoned villages of the Diarizos Valley.

This is their story told in their own words and in the words of what was left behind…