By ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ (GREEK) TÜRKÇE (TURKISH)
At first it was the flag. A flag 425 metres wide and 250 metres high so that it could be seen from miles away on the other side. Even at night, when it actually becomes even more visible thanks to the thousands of lights that illuminate it, so that the accompanying slogan can be read clearly: “Ne mutlu turkum diyene” (How happy is the one who says I am a Turk). It has been decades since it was installed. If you focus your gaze on it, you feel anger, depression, defeat (I’m not sure if this applies to everyone). But the truth is that we avoid doing it. Either because we don’t want to confront those feelings, or because we have become so used to its presence that we look at it without seeing it.
Until we saw it as the backdrop to a huge mosque with six minarets, each 32 meters high. It is, they say, the largest mosque in the Eastern Mediterranean, with a capacity of 6,000, and home to an Islamic theological school. The area of Mia Milia where it has been built is no longer the same, just as many places are not as we remember them. The traces disappear and are now replaced by symbols that defiantly declare that “it’s all over now, there is no going back”. How can you keep hope alive? How can you make it all disappear? Only visually, perhaps. Like the intervention of the Turkish Cypriot artist who removed the flag in a photograph and replaced the slogan with the phrase “We all need therapy”. Or the suggestion by a group of artists that the flag be replaced by a reproduction of Alexander Milov’s sculpture ‘Love’. A sculpture of two children trying to reach out to each other, but who cannot as they are trapped in the bodies of two adults seated hunched over back to back.
Occasionally, as is the case now during the pre-election period, candidates say they will do anything to restart talks. While this promise appears once again to becoming a core element of the electoral contest, in practice – and paradoxically, though nonetheless true, few believe it is easyto start talks that will move castles and mosques. Turkey has methodically brought things to where they are, exploiting our own pathologies of course.
And while some of us may look at the photo of the huge mosque and the flag on the Pentadaktylos mountains in the background and feel that the hourglass is empty, our President is busy playing petty politics by favouring and harming the prospects of candidates with a single phrase. This is no longer just pathogenic.
