THIS is the week Greek Cypriots celebrate the end of the academic year, with schoolyard fetes where parents attend song and dance performances by their progeny. Then they feast, at long tables on thyme flavoured lamb roasted in vast clay ovens mounted on the backs of lorries.
With exams over in May, June is a month of planning holidays at the seashore or in the mountains, a relaxed and carefree time.
But not for the handful of children whose parents cannot be present at the fetes because they are "enclaved" in the Karpass peninsula in the north of the island. While their younger children prepare for the day when they can cross the "green line" under UN supervision to spend the summer in the Turkish occupied north, with the end of each school year the time of permanent separation from their older children approaches boys over 16 and girls over 18 are barred from returning. For the "enclaved", June is the cruellest month.
And with every June there are fewer boys and girls left stranded in the south. Greek Cypriots clinging to their homes and land in the north are growing older. The "enclaved" Karpass community, 13,000 strong after the Turkish occupation in 1974, has shrunk to 487 members, their average age 67 years. As fewer children are born, the young are excluded and the old die, the number of the "enclaved" diminishes by about 10 a year. And it is not only the Greek Cypriots who are being ethnically cleansed": their history and culture are also being expunged by a combination of neglect and political design.
Turkish Cypriot journalist Serhat Incircli, who recently toured the Karpass, wrote in the daily Kibris that he found empty villages, abandoned factories and farms, churches and monasteries on the verge of collapse or converted into stables' and barns. Even the 70,000 Turkish mainlanders who have settled on the island since 1974 seem to shun the Karpass.
Today there are only half a dozen Greek Orthodox churches and one monastery still functioning in the Turkish occupied north. A nonagenarian priest officiates at christenings and funerals. One of these churches is contained within the Monastery of Ayios Andreas (Saint Andrew) at the tip of the Karpass peninsula. Only members of the local community with police passes are permitted to attend services on feast days at the monastery, once a place of pilgrimage for Orthodox from the entire region.
Elsewhere in the north hundreds of churches, monasteries and church properties have been desecrated and damaged and used as cinemas, art galleries, barns and warehouses. In April a 12th century church located at the picturesque hill village of Trimithi was advertised by a British Turkish Cypriot real estate agency in the English language paper Cyprus Today: "Leasehold church. Fully restored and used as a picture gallery/craft centre. Lovely position. £32,500." Also in April the looted doors of a historic Cyprus church in the Famagusta district were found at the Kanazawa College of Art in Japan.
The "cultural cleansing involving classical Greek and Byzantine sites taking place in northern Cyprus contrasts sharply with the endeavours of the authorities in the Republic to maintain Turkish mosques in the south. While most mosques in towns and villages have been locked since the island was divided in 1974, they have been kept in good repair and services are conducted at two.
And the Tekke, or shrine which houses the tomb of an aunt of the Prophet Muhammad, located on the shore of the salt lake near Larnaca, is always open to visitors and believers alike. Services take place at the Tekke on Muslim feast days, but the authorities in north Cyprus do not permit Turkish Cypriots to attend. The cruelty of separation and division is not confined to the month of June.
