A protest, women, the 1990s...
In their hands, a placard in Turkish and Greek...
It reads “Barış” and “Ειρήνη”…
Two languages, not translating one another - completing one another.
A white dove...
Takes flight...
My first years in the profession...
That was the day I met her, Sevgül Uludağ...
A journalist, an activist...
That day I understood dedication to the profession and the shared struggle for a common homeland, together...
***
The year is 2001.
I am at Yenidüzen…
A peal of laughter erupts from the newsroom, loud enough like a protest itself…
“What are you doing here?”
“Gathering agency news, doing some editing, sometimes translating, screaming; don’t you like it, dear…?”
Another burst of laughter; she cannot stay still.
Now, it’s just the two of us.
“Are you happy?” I ask.
“It’s so boring…”
I’m a young editor, new to this newspaper…
Standing before me is a complete madcap…
“What do you want to do?”
Her eyes light up. “I’ll come back tomorrow and tell you,” she says, and storms off, in another explosion of laughter…
“I want to speak with the families of the missing… I want to prepare a series…”
Her first series is called: “Oysters with the Missing Pearls.”
The pearl; the missing child, the missing spouse, the missing sibling… The oyster, the loved ones who have carried that loss within for years, living with its pain…
As that first series unfolds, calls begin to come in; new names of missing persons, tips about burial sites, relatives, cries, pleading voices, echoes...
A new reckoning with the truth...
From then on Sevgül follows only the trail of the missing in the newspaper...
She is everywhere...
From Limassol to Galateia, from Lapithos to Morphou… From Paphos to Palaikythro… From Kofinou to Assia …
Her stories are never only about the missing…
Years later, she reunites people who once faced one another in war but chose to protect one another, to shelter one another, to embrace one another instead…
Through Sevgül, we come to know the stories of lost children, of spouses forced to postpone their dreams, of mothers and fathers who would never smile the same way again, of hearts that remained forever broken...
Her phone becomes a ‘hotline’; her work is published both in the north and in the south....
The calls come in from both the north and the south...
One reveals a burial site, another, sobbing, confesses to a murder, another offers only threats...
Sevgül brings to light the human story behind every loss.
Relentlessly she keeps the burial sites in the public eye, she insists they be excavated, and from the soil itself Cyprus’s pain emerges....
Every inch of this island bears the shame of war...
With every family of missing she shoulders another measure of grief... Neither threats, nor intimidation deter her...
Through her, we share the pain of Hüseyin Rüstem Akansoy and Petros Suppuris, who lost their entire families... We come to know officer Ezel who saved the lives of four families... We weep once more for Nedi Zanettu… We lose ourselves in the eyes of Mother Ayşe, who lost three sons—including twins—in the same attack… Maria from Kythrea, who lost her mother and father, and two siblings… Sevilay from Trikomo, Katerina from Larnaca… Leyla from Mari… Hristos from Dali… A well... The base of an almond tree... The roots of a fig tree by the sea... A hospital courtyard, a military barracks... So many dreams, so much longing... So many missing, so many murders... So many human lives...
At the end of every series, Sevgül leaves us with the same wish...
“Now, we must remain vigilant against every provocation and every conflict, so that blood will never again be shed on this land... We must not allow events to drag us back there... We must stop extreme nationalism before it grows and takes root...”
***
The year is 2019.
Together with my friend Dionisis Dionysiou, as editors of the two newspapers that publish her work, we announce Sevgül Uludağ’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Sevgül Uludağ has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize not only for her invaluable work on the issue of the missing, but also for the pioneering role she has played in fostering mutual understanding between the two communities, by using her journalistic talent in the service of the democratic resolution of social problems. This nomination, also honours nearly half a century of her active struggle for peace in Cyprus.’
So many awards. From every corner of the world...
***
A June afternoon, 2026...
General Hospital, South Nicosia...
Room 25...
Monday...
My friend Yiorgos Frangos, President of the Cyprus Journalists’ Union, is by my side...
We are walking. Tense, heartbroken, swallowing our fears...
An oxygen mask covers her face...
“Sevgül...”
Please...
Tears fill my eyes...
My throat is in knots...
She opens her eyes, with her own hand she removes the mask and says to me the most beautiful words I could ever hear in my life... “You are one and only...”
That kind of look; indescribable, sorrowful, yet smiling...
A nurse brings soup.
“Would you like me to feed you?...”
In that moment, she is like a baby...
“Come on, one more spoonful if you love us so much...”
“One spoonful, in our homeland...”
“Come on, Sevgül...”
***
We had said our goodbyes.
How difficult it was to say, “Farewell”…
Felt like death itself…
"Help the people,” you had said, as we left…
And now…
Hundreds of families of the missing are weeping for you, Sevgül…
Once again, laments rise in Turkish and in Greek poured out in grief for the heroine of stories still left untold…
You, who for years dug for ‘life’ in this land where blood has seeped into the soil... You laboured without rest, trying to transform the hatred in people's hearts into love.
What extraordinary devotion that was...
What an extraordinary heart...
There’s is no embrace wide enough to preserve time, Sevgül...
You were an unwavering champion of rapprochement… Always at the forefront of the women’s struggle…
This island has lost the finest journalist of the past fifty years. A pen devoted entirely to Cyprus…
We have lost a friend: extraordinary, unyielding, wise, relentlessly inquisitive, and deeply in love with peace…
The wounded and grieving people of this homeland resemble one another so very much… Its victims resemble one another… Just as its perpetrators and killers resemble one another…
In Sevgül’s investigative journalism, in the very act of journalism, there was never anger, never vengeance, there was always hope.
Now a tree has fallen to the ground…
every branch carries this homeland…
Now…
A white dove…
Takes flight…
Now a homeland bids farewell to one of its heroes…
In every language…
Now Sevgül, you belong to all of us
You are all of our loss.
Source: NOW, A WHITE DOVE
