We are informed that in the context of the events organized to commemorate 50 years of displacement from our homes and lands, the authorities have created “Threads”, a project for each displaced person to record the itinerary followed and all the places one has stayed in throughout our ongoing uprooting. Okay, we’ve pulled the thread of the course we have followed, from the first day until today. Why do this, what is the goal?

What is “Threads”, how did they come up with it, what does it actually serve?

• Is it just a game, a pastime to keep us busy?

• Is it an exercise to draw our attention away from stillness?

• Is it classified as a …smart application to convince us that although they are incapable of doing anything good, they care about the displaced?

• Have they run out of ideas, the boxes of promises are empty, so they had to invent SOMETHING new, anything?

Many questions remain with no answer, hanging in the air for 50 years, same as the fate of the displaced.

What is it that they are asking us with “Threads”? Here is the map of the island, put a pin at the place of your roots, another in the first, the second, the latest stopover of your flight, reach your current residence by joining the pins with … a thread. They miss the fact that every pin pierces the veins, tears the flesh apart, blood springs from our memories. Why open wounds?

And what about the various stops? All stops, from the start of the flight to today. But how could they have missed it? The thread of life for each one of us is held by the mythological fates, Clotho and Lachesis, but tens of thousands of displaced people have been ‘caught’ by Atropos: The “Thread” of life of our mother, father, grandmothers and grandfathers, even of our siblings, has already reached the end, Atropos cut it off and “Thread” became synonymous with “Death”. Pitiless time. The last stop in your “Threads” should materialise with a hole, the vacuum of a grave; with so many gaps, so many myriads of holes, the map of the island would take the form of a huge empty space, that of a deep wound. But you can’t see the wound; you can’t feel it, can you?

Your games and “Threads” are clever, a good pastime for show, empty words and commemorative photos, bringing to you, again, as whenever it suits you, much-tortured souls, the people whose flesh was irreparably scarred by the (Turkish Army 1974) invasion. But, what do you want us to do, to think about? To pierce the map for each one of our beloved ones, who, with bitterness and sorrow, have passed away, and make a hole at the end of his/her “thread”, the hole of their grave? And, after that, what?

And for us? Should we stop at this day, today’s stop or, perhaps, prolong the “pastime”, imagine and draw the possible course of the thread for the next 10, 15 or 50 years or until our own grave?

That is where you lead us, unable to reason beyond the daily routine of your power, unable to realize that the displaced do not find any meaning in the trails you are forcing us to carve out. The only worry and concern of our beloved and others who have passed, the only thing that makes sense for us, today, was / is the point of our ‘departure’; the only “thread” we hold is one of a straight line, which goes from today’s stop all the way back to our roots, to the places we were deprived of 50 years ago. You can’t understand, so show respect, shut up!

Article published in Kathimerini & Politis on 25 July 2024