They spent Christmas in Famagusta

Time does not extinguish the details, not even the longing and the desire to return. Dreams do not fade either

It seemed like a dream. I was walking on the road of Alexandros Dimitriou to the church of Agia Aikaterini and I met the Second High School of Famagusta. The Gymnasium square is full of students dressed in gray. Opposite the Papathoma Academy, the private High School, with all the children dressed in green looking like a vast plain. Yes, we had a party. Yes, Christmas had dawned! Yes, the spirit of Christmas overflowed our hearts with love.

From that festive day, a poem about Christmas stood out and resounded everywhere in every corner of the city, on every school holiday: “Christmas dawned. The churches mean, / the bell towers are shaken, and the voices that come out / from the deep, wide mouth of each bell, / look like cherubic psalms, like from a heavenly roof. Thousands of Christmas songs are sung by Angels, and every ray from above, that every star sends, / looks like an angelic look. Religion! Sweet mother, / how beautiful you give a cry to the bell, / and how that cry shakes in our hearts ".

And yet, after those Christmas days and until the next ones after the invasion, the bells stopped ringing! The children stopped singing Christmas carols and carols with their triangles. Not even the orchestra of the Municipality of Famagusta with the conductor Michalakis Michailoudis no longer exists! The main streets of the city, once buzzing with life, big, small, children's voices longing to wander in the market that wore its festive colors in the colors of Christmas, are now frozen. Time seems to have stopped there. Only a closed deserted city! A ghost town! And outside the barbed wire of shame, the rest of the city is inhabited by strangers. Without owning anything from our homes, our properties, our land. And yet we are still in celebration and we hear:

"How many that cross from our bell towers / pouring into the antidote, so many golden rays, / pours deep into our souls, sweet golden hopes! / Both those dawns that the angels descend / through the sky above and come and they mean / Christmas and resurrection, oh! what a mystery they pour./What nightmares they are, how much life they give us! / The cloudless celestials shine like sapphires, / The windows shine like watchful eyes./ Happy and quiet miles mingle around, and out of every door that opens, they come out forms laughing, / bathed, sweet, well-dressed. They hold candles and candles in their hands. In their eyes / the joy that they feel deep in their hearts shines./ Christmas dawned! "Doors are always opening / and now Christians are mixing in our churches".

Yes, Christmas dawned in an empty city, where her world is not there, but she is desperately looking for her children. And hope never left! She was left there alone to fight with time. She was left alone wandering the empty, icy streets, looking for her rightful owners. We will be back there in Democracy, Ermou and Kennedy. On our golden beaches, in our schools and in our churches. We will decorate our city again, we will dress it again in its festive ones and we will welcome Christmas with magnificence and respect. Hope! Forty-four years later, far from our city, Famagusta, we remember.

We must never forget! And hope ignites! The requirement itself, no change! To give the city to its legal residents. Let the bells ring again! To hear again joyful voices and Christmas carols from children's mouths. Let us all celebrate Christmas together in our city. Time does not extinguish the details, not even the longing and the desire to return. Dreams do not fade either. They will always take us back to our house, to sit together at the festive table.

DR VASILIS MAVROU, President of the Famagusta Association UK