Greece Outside In: Cyprus divided: 40 years on, a family recalls how the island was torn apart

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Cyprus divided: 40 years on, a family recalls how the island was torn apart

The award-winning Observer correspondent who covered the 1974 Turkish invasion returns to the rocky battleground with one Greek Cypriot guardsman he met in the conflictTime stands still in Cyprus's UN buffer zone in pictures

On the outskirts of a mountain village in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus, Lakis Zavallis, 72 in September, is scrambling about a rocky roadside hillside looking for an imitation-leather grip he had first used when he was a law student in London in the early 60s.

Some 40 years ago he was a lieutenant commanding a diminishing platoon of weary Greek Cypriot National Guardsmen when he hid the bag under the overhang of a rock. They had just been ordered to make what he thought might be a temporary withdrawal from a forward position and he wanted to lighten his load. In it was the English paperback edition of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and a sweater, for even during the island's scorching summers the Kyrenia range gets chilly at night when you're dodging mortar bombs by living in a hole in the ground.