By Dr. Augustine (Dinos) August *:
Exactly 21 years ago, they traveled to the neighborhood of Angels, embracing the blue and white and the national anthem of Dionysios Solomos on their lips. Two Leventes, fearless, standing and unarmed, put up with the hordes of Attila, with their only supply being the desire for freedom of their small special homeland. They will be forever accompanied by the glory they deservedly won in the field of honor, in moments of real resistance, as free people wielded the barbed wire of shame.
Tassos Isaac was the first to cross the Acherousia on the journey to heaven, after the heinous and unprecedented brutality of his assassination on August 11, 1996. He was followed three days later by Solomos Solomou, who was cold-bloodedly killed during a militant protest against the cowardly murder of Tassos, shortly after his funeral at the Paralimni cemetery. He had sworn on his cousin's freshly excavated memorial to lower the Turkish flag from its mast, which he waved under guard from the iron-clad armies of the eastern enemy, without anyone ever daring approaching it, for 22 consecutive years.
He received the bullets from Denktash's fake gun, shortly before reaching the top of the occupation mast. Bloodied young man, with the last cigarette on his lips, he continued to hold the pole in his arms, until he fell covered in blood on Cypriot soil.
He cooled down by kissing forever the bloody soil of the earth that gave birth to him. And his heroic sacrifice was to be the last act of substantial resistance against the conqueror.
Our two heroic martyrs with their sacrifice managed to convey to every corner of the earth the message that no matter how many years pass, the accomplishments of the invasion and the ongoing occupation will not quench the thirst for freedom. Their blood that the wire mesh painted, however, despite the initial expectations it created, was unfortunately not able to change the course of events! Pure emotions, sacrifices and romances have no place in today's anarchic reality.
Especially when the conquered seem to not realize the real dimensions of the occupation, delimiting the struggle of resistance within indefinite compromise parameters and not in anti-occupation frameworks!
Both then and now, Nicosia and Athens, instead of waging a struggle to expose Turkey and its occasionally corrupt institutions to the occupied territories, have preferred and still prefer oblivion and silence. Nicosia and Athens, instead of taking the message of their sacrifice and turning it into a demanding struggle, chose the path of an unheard of and beyond all human logic compromise. Some even mourned in a pitiful way in their memory. Some in the first meeting of the National Contract called Solomos "crazy"!
Thus we came to the point that our two Hero Martyrs are remembered almost exclusively by the members of the Cyprus Motorcyclists Association who, together with a few more "out of season" citizens, repeat the events of honor and memory every August, marching across the Cypriot territory to reach the roadblock of Deryneia and end up in Paralimni. A journey that then symbolically started from Berlin (the only divided European city that was united), passed through various countries, arrived in Greece after several days to end through Piraeus to Limassol and after an adventurous way to the roadblock of shame in Deryneia with the known tragic results.
Postscript: The leader of a major political party in Cyprus, at the first meeting of the National Council immediately after the assassinations of Isaac and Solomos, called Solomos "crazy" (we will deal with a cloak * he said literally)! Vassos Lyssaridis confessed it to me a few months after the bloody events of Deryneia, when he was in Larissa invited by the Cypriot Association of the Prefecture of Larissa, to speak at an event celebrating the anniversary of E.O.K.A. 1955-59.
* crazy (from apollos)
Dr. Augustine (Dinos) August
Assistant professor at TEI Of Larissa
From Monagri, Limassol
a.avgoustis@hotmail.com
Source: mignatiou.com