Intercultural Communication Portfolio

Intercultural Encounter: Growing Up Across the Divide

Introduction

I grew up in a country that is split in half. Since the Turkish military intervention of 1974, a UN buffer zone, the Green Line, has cut Cyprus into two, with Greek Cypriots in the south and Turkish Cypriots in the north (Papadakis, 2005). Over 160,000 Greek Cypriots lost their homes and became refugees in their own country (Loizos, 2008). My family was one of them. My grandfather was a shoemaker. When the invasion came, he took his work van and filled it with as many people as he could from their village and drove them south to safety. They slept in tents for weeks before the government gave them somewhere to stay. My grandmother still lives in that same apartment today, over fifty years later.

This is not just history I read about in school. It is the story I was raised on. The memories of 1974 were not mine to live through, but they were passed down to me through my father's stories, my grandmother's quiet sadness, and the things no one in my family ever really got over. In this section, I reflect on how those inherited memories shaped who I am, and how my time at the English School and in the army pulled me in completely different directions.

Inherited Memory: My Father's Narrative

Halbwachs (1992) wrote about collective memory: the idea that we do not just remember things individually, but through the stories and frameworks that our families and communities give us. That is exactly how the events of 1974 live on for my generation. None of us were there, but we all carry it; through family conversations, national commemorations, and certain silences too.

What I only really noticed looking back is that my primary school history lessons barely touched 1974 at all. The curriculum focused on ancient and medieval history, on periods safely distant from the present, but the event that shaped the Cyprus we live in today was almost entirely absent. Perhaps it was too raw or too politically sensitive. Either way, the silence said something. It meant that the story of 1974 came almost entirely from my family, not from any textbook. Halbwachs would say that is because shared memories hold communities together, giving people a sense of who they are. But when the institutions that are supposed to teach history leave the most important chapter out, the family becomes the only classroom.

What my father told me about life before the invasion always surprised me. He did not talk about enemies. He talked about a Cyprus where Greek and Turkish Cypriots lived side by side: sharing the same streets, sitting in the same cafes, shopping at the same markets. He said it was after 1963 that things started to change. People were being killed on both sides, and the trust between communities was slowly breaking down. By 1974, the division became permanent.

But the thing that always stayed with me is that he never made it simple. He never told me to hate anyone. He always said there are two sides to every story, that the conflict is not black and white, and that wars are almost always fought for the sake of politicians, not ordinary people. My father managed to pass down the memory of what happened to our family without passing down bitterness. That, I think, was its own kind of intercultural communication.

Hirsch (2012) calls this relationship postmemory: the connection that the children and grandchildren of trauma survivors have with events they never experienced directly but that feel deeply real, because the stories are so powerful that they become almost like your own memories. That is my relationship with 1974. I was not there, but I feel it. I feel it when I hear my father talk, when I see the old photographs, and especially when I visit my grandmother in the apartment the government gave her all those years ago. Hirsch says postmemory is different from actual memory because of generational distance, but it is different from history too, because the personal connection runs so deep.

One story captures this. After the crossing points opened in 2003, my father went back to the north with my grandfather to see their old family home. The Turkish Cypriot woman living there welcomed them in, and gave them photographs she had kept safe since 1974: our family's photographs, pictures of people she had never met, preserved for nearly thirty years because she understood that the house had a life before hers. For me, hearing that story was postmemory in action: I was not there, but the image of my father holding those photographs, returned across the divide after three decades, feels as vivid as if I had witnessed it myself. My father, though, could never find a small radio he had managed to save during the invasion, a tiny personal thing, lost somewhere between two lives in the same house. One thing returned, another gone forever. That is what displacement does: it scatters the pieces of a life, and you never quite get them all back.

On that same trip, my father got talking with a Turkish Cypriot man in a park. They chatted for a while, and the man asked how long my father had lived there before the invasion. When my father told him, the man went quiet for a moment. Then he said that he himself had been living there since 1974. “So who can call this place home in the end?” he asked. I think about that question a lot. My father grew up there. That man raised his family there. They both had a claim, and they both carried the weight of displacement; one from leaving, the other from arriving into someone else's absence.

The English School: Contact Across the Divide

If my family gave me one way of understanding the divide, the English School gave me another; one that sometimes turned everything on its head. Founded in 1900, it is the only secondary school in Cyprus where Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot students go to school together (The English School, 2024). After 1974, Turkish Cypriot students stopped coming, but when the crossing points opened in 2003, they slowly started to return.

Going to this school put me in a position that almost none of my friends outside it could understand. Every day, I was sitting in class, eating lunch, and joking around with Turkish Cypriots, the very people that my family's story placed, however gently, on the other side. Allport (1954) proposed the contact hypothesis, which says that prejudice between groups tends to decrease when they spend time together, as long as certain conditions are in place: equal status, shared goals, cooperation, and institutional support. The English School had all four. We shared classrooms, worked on projects together, played on the same sports teams, and the school actively encouraged intercommunal understanding.

And in that environment, I realised something that changed me. The Turkish Cypriot students I sat next to were not some abstract “other.” They were stressed about the same exams, laughed at the same things, and many of them had family stories that mirrored mine, only in reverse. Their grandparents had been forced to move too, from south to north. There was something quietly powerful about recognising that: not competing over who suffered more, but just acknowledging that both sides lost something.

National Service: The Pull of a Simpler Story

After finishing at the English School, I did my national service. Military service is mandatory in Cyprus for all men, and I chose to go through special forces training. Part of it was the physical and mental challenge. But if I am honest, there was something else too. Something I am not proud of, but I think it matters to say. A part of me, a younger and more naive part, went in with anger. With thoughts of revenge. Of taking our villages back. Of doing something for all the families that lost their homes. My family included.

During training, the chants, the drills, the history lessons, it all fed into that feeling. It made the conflict feel simple in a way that was almost comforting: we were the good side, they were the enemy, and one day we would set things right. Greek Cypriots were always the victims, the heroes. Turkish Cypriots were the aggressors. There was no room for grey areas, no space for the kind of nuance my father had always insisted on.

Billig (1995) calls this banal nationalism: the everyday, almost invisible ways that national identity is reinforced through routine practices, symbols, and language. In the army, it was not invisible at all. It was loud, physical, and deliberate. The chants we repeated, the way the enemy was always “them,” the one-sided history we absorbed; all of it worked to solidify a version of identity that left no room for doubt. Looking back, I can see how powerful that kind of environment is, especially for young men already carrying inherited anger and a deep sense of injustice.

But I do not look back on that time with regret. The army exists for a reason. As long as the island remains divided and occupied, Cyprus needs a defence force, and the discipline, resilience, and sense of duty I gained are things I still carry with me. What changed was not that I rejected what the army gave me, but that I eventually placed it alongside other experiences that complicated the picture. My father's nuance, my friendships at the English School, my own reading and education; all of these helped me see that the story I was told in the army was real, but it was not the whole story.

Reflection

The English School and the army pulled me in completely different directions. One taught me that the people on the other side were just people. The other taught me they were the enemy. Both felt real at the time, and I think the tension between them is more valuable than either one on its own.

My generation grew up with less hate, more contact, and a wider understanding of how complicated this really is. The English School showed me that living together is not just possible; it is natural, when people are given the chance. And my family showed me that you can remember something devastating without letting it make you bitter. Those two things together have shaped who I am: someone who refuses to see the world in simple terms, and who believes, maybe stubbornly, that reconciliation in Cyprus will require not just a political process but a genuine shift in how the two communities understand each other and themselves.

Analysis of a Cultural Representation: Akamas (2006)

Introduction

The stories we tell about ourselves, in films, books, and the news, do not just reflect who we are. They shape it. Hall (1997) makes this point clearly: representation is not a mirror but a practice that actively produces meaning, building the categories we use to understand culture, identity, and difference. Cinema is especially powerful in this regard, because a single film can challenge a whole community's understanding of itself. In this section, I analyse Akamas (2006), a Cypriot film directed by Panicos Chrysanthou, focusing on how specific moments in the film disrupt the dominant Greek Cypriot narrative of the conflict, and what the intense reaction to it reveals about the politics of cultural representation.

The Film

Akamas is set in the Akamas peninsula in north-west Cyprus and follows its characters from the 1950s through to the Turkish military intervention of 1974, a period covering British colonial rule, independence, and rising intercommunal tensions. At the centre of the story are Rhodou, a Greek Cypriot woman, and Omer, a Turkish Cypriot man. They grow up in the same village and fall in love. But in 1960s Cyprus, a relationship between a Christian woman and a Muslim man is not something either community is willing to accept. Their families reject them, their neighbours turn against them, and they are left trying to build a life in a society that is falling apart along the exact lines they are trying to cross (Chrysanthou, 2006).

The Church Scene: Shattering the Victim Narrative

The scene that caused the most controversy shows a Greek Cypriot man being executed inside a church by other Greek Cypriots connected to EOKA, the nationalist paramilitary group. For many Greek Cypriots, this was unbearable to watch. The dominant narrative of the conflict positions the Greek Cypriot community as the victim: displaced, occupied, wronged. Showing Greek Cypriots committing violence, and doing so inside a church, the most sacred space in Greek Cypriot culture, felt like a betrayal (Papadakis, 2005).

This is what Hall (1997) calls the politics of representation: the fight over who gets to decide how a community is shown and remembered. The Greek Cypriot story of the conflict is built around victimhood and injustice. In many ways, that story is true. But it is not the whole truth. Akamas threatened the collective narrative by introducing complexity, by showing that Greek Cypriots were not only victims but also, at times, participants in the violence. The choice of the church as a setting is significant: it is not just any location but a symbol of communal identity and moral authority. By placing political violence inside it, Chrysanthou was not merely adding a footnote to the national story; he was challenging the moral framework on which that story is built.

The backlash proved the point. The Cypriot government pulled its funding, officially because Chrysanthou had refused to move the scene to a coffee shop. Greek nationalist groups called him a traitor and accused him of making Turkish propaganda. The film was effectively banned from being shown in Cyprus. And yet it became the first Cypriot film selected for the Venice Film Festival (Cineuropa, 2006). The gap between how Akamas was received at home and abroad reveals something important: dominant narratives are not just stories; they are structures of power, and challenging them carries real consequences.

Rhodou and Omer: Love Across the Divide

The love story at the centre of Akamas does something equally disruptive. By making Omer a fully realised character, someone with hopes, fears, and the same capacity for love as Rhodou, the film refuses the reduction of Turkish Cypriots to an abstract “other.” Said (1978) argued that othering works by constructing a simplified, inferior image of another group to reinforce one's own identity. In the dominant Greek Cypriot narrative, Turkish Cypriots occupy that position: the aggressors, the occupiers. Akamas undoes this by placing a Turkish Cypriot man at the emotional centre of the story and making the audience care about him as a person, not a category.

Their relationship is what Bhabha (1994) would call a third space: a place between two established cultural positions where new identities and meanings can begin to take shape. By choosing each other, Rhodou and Omer refuse the labels their communities have given them and try to build something that does not fit into the existing categories of Greek Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot. The film follows their connection developing naturally, before the political divisions around them intrude and ultimately destroy it, asking the audience to see the human relationship first and the communal categories second, reversing the usual order.

But the film is honest about how that ends. Rhodou and Omer are rejected by both families and both communities. They cannot sustain their relationship in a society that is tearing itself apart along the very lines they are trying to cross. Bryant (2004) notes that mixed marriages in Cyprus during this period were not just frowned upon but genuinely dangerous. The film refuses easy optimism: when the political and structural forces around you are strong enough, even the deepest personal connection might not be enough to overcome them. Contact is not always safe, and Akamas does not pretend it is.

The Film as a Site of Contestation

When accused of being a traitor, Chrysanthou responded: “It belongs to Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, it belongs to peace and humanity” (Cineuropa, 2006). He was not making a film for one side. He was trying to make something that both communities could see themselves in, even if what they saw was uncomfortable.

Hall (1989) wrote that cinema is not a “second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists” but a form of representation that can “constitute us as new kinds of subjects and thereby enable us to discover who we are.” That is what Akamas tried to do: to offer Cypriots a new way of looking at their own history, one that acknowledged suffering on both sides and refused to let anyone rest in the comfort of a simple story.

As a Greek Cypriot who grew up with the inherited memory of 1974, who attended the only school where both communities learn together, and who then served in an army that taught me to see the other side as the enemy, watching Akamas felt like seeing all of those tensions laid out on screen. The church scene in particular was difficult. I understood why people were angry, because I have felt that same instinct to protect the narrative I was raised on. But I also recognised that the anger was itself proof of what Hall describes: representation does not just depict reality, it shapes what we are willing to accept as reality. The people who wanted to ban Akamas were not just objecting to a scene. They were defending a version of collective identity that depends on certain things not being said.

In many ways, the army gave me a version of that same impulse. The one-sided history we absorbed during training was not just education; it was its own form of representation, carefully constructed to maintain a clear boundary between victims and aggressors. Akamas held up a mirror to that construction and showed its cracks. Having been through both the English School and the army, I could feel both the threat and the necessity of what Chrysanthou was doing: the threat, because questioning the dominant narrative feels like questioning the suffering of your own family; the necessity, because without that questioning, reconciliation remains impossible.

The film does not resolve these tensions, and I think that is the point. It asks its audience to sit with the discomfort of a more honest history rather than retreating into the familiar story. That willingness to hold contradictions rather than flatten them is what connects Akamas to the wider themes of this portfolio.

Conclusion

Akamas matters because it does what the best cultural representations do: it takes something familiar and makes you see it differently. By telling a love story across the communal divide and by showing that Greek Cypriots were capable of violence as well as suffering, the film asks its audience to question the narratives they have been raised on. For me, it echoes something my father always said: that the conflict is not black and white. Akamas is not anti-Greek Cypriot. It is anti-simplicity. And that is exactly the kind of representation needed if reconciliation in Cyprus is ever going to move beyond politics and become something genuinely felt.