This research is a needs analysis to develop a marriage education program to be held in the TRNC. The aim of the research is to compare the views of married and divorced individuals about marriage education and to determine their needs for marriage education. For this purpose, it has been determined in which subjects they see themselves as sufficient or inadequate, in which subjects they are willing to participate in the training and in which subjects they are unwilling. In this (...) study, embedded design, one of the mixed research methods in which qualitative and quantitative methods are used together, was used. The dominant dimension of this study is the qualitative research method, and the supporting dimension is the quantitative research method. In the qualitative aspect of the research, the sample group was studied with 16 married and divorced participants living in the TRNC. In the quantitative dimension, a total of 385 married or divorced participants were consulted using the sample calculation of unknown universe. The findings are as follows; In both quantitative and qualitative dimensions, the majority of the participants think that if marriage education is given, they can have a healthier and happier marriage. Married and divorced individuals, effective communication, ways of conflict resolution, respect for differences in understanding in raising children, the causes and consequences of cheating, the importance and functions of the family, expectations from marriage and spouse, the processes experienced by new couples, attitudes and behaviors that may adversely affect marriage, power balance and marital status. They stated that they wanted to receive training on adjustment, relations with families in marriage, marriage and business life, anger control, coping with violence and prevention, spending habits and its effects on marriage, effects of financial difficulties on marriage, sexual life and problems in marriage. A training program will be developed for these determined subjects and will be applied to 20 participants in a semi-experimental model through the TRNC Ministry of National Education. The marriage psycho-education program to be prepared will be developed on the basis of a cognitive behavioral approach. (shrink)

This article is a study of three major metaphors organizing nationalistic discourse about Cyprus in two online forums for Turkish university students. The analysis suggests that discussants symbolically warranted their constructions of the future of Cyprus and Turkish Cypriots with metaphors of blood and heroism that emphasized their personal and collective memory of sacrifice. Sports metaphors were used predominantly to convey a sense of the strategic importance of Cyprus. In addition, discussants employed gender and sexual metaphors to (...) structure the tension between nationalist feelings associated with motherland Turkey as a pure, virgin female, and the geopolitical demands of the nation-state, portrayed as a father faced with uneasy choices. (shrink)

This article examines the bodily donations made by Greeks, Turks and Cypriots to the victims of two devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Greece (1999), as well as to a Greek and a Turkish Cypriot boy, both suffering from leukemia (2000). Considering the age old discourse of amity and enmity shared by the citizens of the three nation states, I ask what made them see these hardly rare events as exceptionally important, and rush to offer each other their blood (...) and body organs. Politicians and journalists of the time presented these corporeal responses as "civil society's demand for brotherly rapprochement," thus underscoring the anthropological insight that contemporary identity politics is increasingly "medicalized". Taking into consideration both the medical regimes of truth that made these donations possible, and the painful political experiences lived and remembered by Greeks, Turks and Cypriots to this day, I argue that the conciliation these donors performed revealed the suspense of their faith in the reconciliatory future rather than their acceptance of restorative notions such as brotherhood and rapprochement. Stated otherwise, these donors, being familiar with the euphemistic and the conditional hence pending nature of such political conciliations, dared the Derridian impossible: without endangering the principle of sharing, they opened their bodies to alterity, to their foe's bodies, and hence entertained the possibility of non-predetermined, thus unexpected even incongruous events of memory. . (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on the Cyprus problem, a thorny and multi-dimensional problem, and especially on the historic events in the years 1950-74 that led the island to the current stalemate and the status quo with two separate communities. Although the decision by the Turkish Cypriot side to open the borders in 2003 and the negotiations between the two sides for a settlement, the Cyprus problem remains unresolved. We will also deal with the Annan Plan which has been (...) characterised by some observers as a unique opportunity for a settlement and attempt to explain the reasons why the Greek Cypriot side rejected it massively. (shrink)

The military operations of 1974 in Cyprus led to the formation of two autonomous areas houding Turkish Cypriots in the north and the Greek Cypriots in the south. The island is divided by the "Green Line", patrolled by U.N. peace keeping forces.Movement is blocked and communication severed. There are multiple and conflicting Cypriot identities and feelings of nationalism ranging from pride in being Cypriots, to feelings of connection to Hellenic heritage, and cultural along with political and (...) economic ties to Greece. A Turkish Cypriot identity linked to a distinct religious and linguistic background co-exists with Turkish settlers living in the independent north yet tied to Turkey. This article examines the division from a communication perspective taking into account language, religion, the visual landscape and the media landscape on each side ofthe "Green Line" along with interlocking media landscapes with Greece or Turkey in order to explore influences shaping collective identity and nationalism. (shrink)

While research has focused on the role of racism in (re)producing ethnic/racial inequalities in education, there is very little research that investigates how variability in minority students’ responses to racism can be explained. By using an ecological approach to integrate existing research on actors’ responses to racism, this study finds that researchers have generally neglected factors and processes situated at the micro- and meso-levels of analysis. Qualitative interview data with Turkish–Cypriot children enrolled in schools in the predominantly Greek-speaking part (...) of the Republic of Cyprus are used to investigate their strategies in response to racism and the factors that explain the observed variability in their responses. The findings suggest the importance of and interactions between factors situated at different levels of analysis, including the level of organizations and social groups and face-to-face interactions in explaining variability in young people’s responses to racism. (shrink)

This qualitative study analysed the agency of eight non-abusing mothers in the Turkish Cypriot Community after disclosure that their child had been sexually abused by someone outside the family. The aim was to discover how, after disclosure, such mothers act to protect their children in the contexts of their family and community. The data were gathered via semi-structured in-depth interviews and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. In the nuclear family context, maternal agency emerged in the form of motherhood skills, (...) including emotionally supporting the abused child, double-checking the child’s safety or limiting the child’s mobility, and controlling the actions of adult sons. In the community context, maternal agency was manifested in efforts to prevent men in the extended family or the abuser’s family from concealing the abuse and to obtain informal support from others such as birth or extended family members. The women were usually successful in hiding their reactions or making decisions in their children’s best interest despite frequently having to cope with the reality of living in a restrictive and patriarchal culture. The results emphasise the need for working with the general public and professionals to change the culture of silence and to improve the social support network for sexually abused children and non-abusing family members, especially mothers. (shrink)

This paper applies a Ricœurian ethics in a two-fold personal/societal critique, choosing as a case study the representation of an “other” in a newspaper article. The personal critique uses a historical narrative as a window. Through it, we see hysterical stories about national enemies—in this case the Greek Cypriots—imposing themselves upon the developing consciousness of a growing child. I describe my awakening—through Ricœur’s idea of the creativity of language—from the spell of these dominant normative national narratives to the possibility (...) of re-reading them creatively. Ricœur’s blueprint for engagement with such narrative structures holds out the promise of reading them in an ethical manner, and this is achievable through his linguistic hospitality. From there, this study, analyzing the ethical predicaments of mainstream journalism from the perspective of critical media studies, problematizes the issue of otherness in the news. The example taken up, a current Turkish newspaper article covering a Turkish Cypriot Parliamentarian’s remarks in session regarding the experiences of 1974 Cyprus, reveals how this otherization is actually constructed under the name of the journalistic profession. This essay then borrows a Ricœurian ethical perspective with a view to making news language more hospitable, repositioning both news organizations and news items alike within Ricœur’s ethical paradigm of leading a good life with and for others within just institutions. This conceptualization of the news item itself as a just institution is a change that journalists could make in order to bring the news more in line with a Ricœurian sense of ethics and away from the current dominant practices in mainstream journalism. (shrink)

This study is about two political church crises that the Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church, which regained its freedom with the conquest of the island of Cyprus by the Ottoman Empire, experienced during the British rule. The British administration in Cyprus is divided into two periods. The first is the period that lasted until 1914 within the scope of the two-point agreement with the Ottoman Empire in 1878, and when the island was actually accepted as Ottoman territory; the second is the (...) period from the British unilateral annexation of the island in 1914 to the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960. The first of the church crises during the British administration took place in 1900-1910, between the Bishop of Kitium Kyrillos Papadopoulos and the Bishop of Kyrenia Kyrillos Basileiou. The second one took place in 1933-1947, because of the Metropolitan of Paphos Leontios Leontiou's declaration that the metropolitans who were in exile outside of the island due to the 1931 revolts declared that elections could not be held without their return to the island. Since the Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church is an autocephalous church, it did not want to interfere with other churches in its internal affairs, but the intervention was inevitable due to the stalemate choice of diocese. The Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church, which has had an influence in politics until today, was able to overcome the church crises it had experienced at the beginning of the 20th century only with the influence and help of politics. The first Greek flag in Cyprus was used as a supporter gathering effort during the first church crisis. He was taken to Trooditissa Monastery by Kyrillos (Kyrillos Papadopoulos). However, the island of Cyprus has no ties with Greece, neither in previous periods nor now. It is the church that tries and claims to create a bond between the Greeks living on the island of Cyprus and Greece. The church crises mentioned in the process played an important role in the election of Makarios III, the first president of the Republic of Cyprus, as archbishop. During this period, among the archbishop candidates, there had been accusations of not defending Enosis passionately against the rival island and being too close to the British administration. Makarios III fiercely defended Enosis and was, at the same time, always in conflict with the British administration. This process brought him first the archbishopric, and then the Presidency of the Republic of Cyprus. The Turkish hostility, which came to the fore in the aforementioned period in Cyprus, was considered the first condition of being an archbishop. After the British annexed the island unilaterally, the archbishops of the Greek Orthodox Church, who were almost sure that the British would leave the island to them, made church propaganda out of hostility to the British administration and then to the Turks. In the study, the attitude of the Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church, which is an autocephalous church, in intra-church disputes and its adherence to church rules are also discussed. These two crises, in which the effect of the idea of enosis on the choice of diocese will be seen more clearly, are very important in terms of understanding the present day of the church. (shrink)

Fifty years ago, on 12 September, 1963, the association agreement between the European Economic Community (EEC) and Turkey was signed in Ankara. However, in contrast to many other countries who applied later on, Turkey has not yet become a member of the EU. Nevertheless, Turkey’s candidacy to join the EU is still one of the most considerable and controversial topics within the European political arena. Within the accession negotiations, apart from human rights and the Kurdish and the Cypriot issues, one (...) of the greatest challenges to Turkey’s successful candidacy is the issue of respect for and protection of minorities. It might indeed represent an unsolvable problem, which will ultimately block Turkey joining the EU. Neither the EU nor Turkey has really come to terms or dealt with what the EU sees as an “unsatisfactory” protection of minorities in Turkey. What lies at the root of this disagreement is what the term “minority” actually means. Due to Turkey’s own nation state concept as being a united and undivided country and to the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne signed in 1923, which defined Turkey as a nation, the country only recognises non-Muslim minorities. Moreover, contrary to the wording of the minority protection clauses in the Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey restricts its recognition of non-Muslim minorities only to the Greek, Armenian and Jewish religious populations. Although being a non-Muslim group as well, the Assyrians are excluded from the Turkish concept of minorities and, therefore, also from minority protection. In contrast to that, the EU’s concept of minority includes ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities, which means that according to the EU’s concept of minorities, also ethnic minorities like the Kurds, linguistic minorities like the Laz and religious minorities like the Alevis are included in the term “minority” and, therefore, these minorities should benefit from specific minority protection rights. To find a common basis for discussing the unsatisfactory issue of minority rights in Turkey, the concept of “ethnic groups” is introduced by the author as the most promising approach to deal with this unreconciled conceptual difference. According to this concept, ethnic groups could form a sub-identity of Turkishness and help build a legal basis to the treatment of minority groups founded on human rights, which would be compatible with both Turkish and EU Law. (shrink)

The Middle Ages have their great love stories. We owe one of them to Peter I Lusignan, King of Cyprus. Married to Eleanor of Aragon, who bore him a son and a successor, he had a mistress pregnant with his child. The queen decided to eliminate this rival by inducing a premature delivery. The incident was recorded by Leontios Makhairas, a Cypriot chronicler, who described the cruelty of Eleanor and mourned the fate of the baby. But it is not his (...) account which keeps this tragedy alive in Cyprus even today. There is a folk song about beautiful Arodaphnousa, who suffered because of the bad queen. The song is deprived of historical context, but it is a historical source nevertheless. Its remote counterpart is the Catalan story of Eleanor, who was expelled from Cyprus and lived in Aragon for a long time. This story creates an image of a benign, calm lady who was venerated after death by her subjects. The clash between these images makes one think about the black and white PR created in every epoch. But this is not the point of this story. The point is the fate of an innocent child, both the flower and the victim of love. This is a rare motif in medieval literature; children are seldom present on the pages of its manuscripts. The emotion connected with this story deserves the reader’s attention. (shrink)

The late Sir George Hill in the first volume of his monumental History of Cyprus remarks that the Cypriot syllabary is found in use until the third century B.C. This, it may be noted, is the traditional opinion which for some sixty years has stood the test of time. I read therefore with interest on p. 330 of the same volume, among the addenda, that ‘pottery with incised inscriptions, discovered in 1939 in an excavation four miles from Nicosia, shows that (...) the syllabary continued to be used as late as the first century B.C.’ Sir George Hill in effect is here accepting the claim of Mrs. E. H. Dohan and Professor R. G. Kent, which he has hitherto ignored, that the syllabary survived until 50 B.C. Now this is an important claim, partly because it would add from two to three centuries to the life-span of a script already in possession of a long and reputable lineage; more particularly because, if true, it will convict the ancient Cypriot, admittedly a conservative individual, of a degree of conservatism with which I find it hard to credit even him. That there should still have been men in the hinterland of the island under the governorship of Cicero so little affected by the impact of the whole Hellenistic age that they were prepared to write Greek in a manner so uncouth and preserve, incidentally, certain elements of their old Arcadian tongue, is to my thinking highly improbable. A fresh examination of the evidence on which Mrs. Dohan and Professor Kent based their claim is clearly called for. (shrink)

In his recent book, the well-known Cypriote scholar K. Hadjioannou comes back to a disputed verse of Nonnus, Dionysiaca 13.432. For a long time the usual text has mentioned two obscure Cypriote heroes, Litros and Lapethos: Κνπριδας δ φλαγγας κσμεε Λτρος γνωρ | εχατης τε Λπηθος. Obviously the second is the legendary eponym of the town of Lapethus . But what are we to say of the first one, Litros? Hitherto the name is unknown, either for a figure or for (...) a city. Nevertheless we know something which is not very different, in the ancient name of Λδρα, Λδρα, previous designation of the modern city of Nicosia, which was for a few centuries the capital of a small kingdom in central Cyprus. Thus, independently, Pierre Chuvin in his study of the geography of Nonnus and the present writer in a detailed discussion of the name of Ledra, etc., both put forward the hypothesis that ‘Λτρος’ is nothing but a light distortion of Λδρος, which could simply be the eponymous hero of the city . As P. Chuvin observes: ‘Les deux formes sont pratiquement homophones: Lapéthos et Lèdros auraient été fabriqués de la même façon’. We thus think that the easy correction here is not misplaced. But now K. Hadjioannou objects that the poet did not allude to the town of Ledra and that the singular κσμεε cannot support two subjects. On the first point I would answer that the poet is not obliged to afford symmetrical allusions, on the second that the verb is here correctly in agreement with the nearest subject . And what does our Cypriote colleague propose? Another kind of correction by which the first hero completely disappears in favour of a new epithet of Lapethos, the text being; κσμεε λνγρς, γνωρ/εχατης τε Λπηθος. The idea is indeed ingenious, but does not convince: the rather negative adjective λνγρς. (shrink)

The theory of speech acts, formulated by Austin and developed by Searle, is widely applied to analyse and classify various speech acts. In this paper it is assumed that legal texts, especially normative acts i.e. constitutions and statutes, are direct speech acts. Normative acts are linguistic entities and they do not exist outside the language, thus the theory of speech acts may be applied to examine them. They are also considered to be performative utterances according to Austin’s classification. In this (...) paper the intention is to compare Cypriot, Greek and Polish normative acts on the basis of the so-called classical theory of speech acts and typology of performativity exponents. The author will compare various methods of expressing performativity in reference to the meaning conveyed by them. Furthermore, other exponents of performativity occurring in the analysed texts shall also be compared. The results obtained while performing the analysis and comparison may be significant for scholars, lawyers and translators. (shrink)