`Phoenix` lands on Mars, to send the world pictures from the red planet, as we sit at the Mavilis Square, among the noise of Athens…

It’s a sunny day, bright and hot and it is lunchtime… We choose from the menu of the restaurant: Stuffed tomatoes with yogurt, tavas with different vegetables, a Greek salad…

The landing of `Phoenix` on Mars is a milestone for humanity: back on the 20th of July 1969, I remember how Apollo 11 had landed on the moon… We were in Ankara, at the main square Kizilay, watching from the black-and-white TV with only one channel, in a restaurant, the first steps of Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon… Edwin Aldrin was with him and the two astronauts would spend a day on the surface of the moon… I was barely 10, turning 11 at that time and still the moon for me was the place where the cartoon character `Noddy` lived! Everyone around me was excited about this landing as 500 million people watched it live on television! I was in Ankara, visiting my brother together with my mother and in the following years, we would actually see the moon stones brought over to the earth, being exhibited in Nicosia, in the library where my mother worked…

Now, `Phoenix` landing on Mars, would be another turning point for humanity… But we are not talking about the moon or the Mars at Mavilis – I am with Yolanda and George Liasis, eating lunch and talking about Cyprus - what else!... The `Cyprus` that we carry everywhere – even if there is landing on the moon or the Mars, we continue to talk about Cyprus, about what happened, about what will happen, about what might or might not happen…

Yolanda is a beautiful woman – blondish with a lovely smile… She is wearing black, having lost her husband recently… I wanted so much to meet her but her brother George had told me that we should not speak about Palekythro (Balikesir) when we meet. I had agreed and here we are eating stuffed tomatoes with yogurt – but words eventually would find their way back to Palekythro, to flow between George and me and he would also translate to Yolanda, what we are talking about…

Yolanda smiles at me but I know what she has been through – she had been shot, back in 1974, in Palekythro by two young Turkish Cypriots, together with the other women and children… Yolanda had, in her arms, her two year old baby who would die in her arms… Heavily wounded and paralyzed, she would lose her mother and her three sisters and her grandmother in this massacre of Palekythro… She would have to go through very complicated surgery for six months, to be able to walk again… A bullet scar on the forehead of George also shows that he had been shot in the head and they had thought that he had died and left him there… The bullet had not exploded inside his head but remained stuck between the skin of his forehead and his skull, to be taken out later… But the scar remains on his forehead – the scar in his heart must be deeper than this, having gone such a terrible experience as a child…

On Sigma television, a few weeks ago, Elita had asked me:

`What was the reason behind the massacre in Palekythro?`

We knew that behind the massacre of Maratha-Sandallaris-Aloa (Murataga-Atlilar-Sandallar) were the rapes of the women and children of three villages. A bunch of Greek Cypriot killers, mainly from Pigi Peristerona, had tried to cover up their crimes…

Palekythro is a different story: Among the three Turkish Cypriots who had done this, one of them is from Palekythro whose family, together with around 200 or more other Turkish Cypriots, had fled from the village to become refugees in the surrounding villages… Was he taking the `revenge` of being a refugee for so many years? There was another story that they had gone there to steal the milking machine – quite new for the area – of the grandfather Suppuris. That they had asked for money as well and he had given them money… Were they trying to cover this up? And yet there was one other story from the area that the eye of the fiancée of one of these three, had been taken out by some Greek Cypriots and he was so angry and so upset that he did this. Whatever the `pretext`, this was a massacre of women and children, George and Yolanda Liasis among them who were `lucky enough` not to die but to remain to suffer from this horrible experience…

When you see yourself `superior` for whatever reason and the others `inferior` and when you have a gun to emphasize your `superiority`, it is easy with this mentality to find 100 pretexts for doing this… It is when you see yourself as a human being that you cannot do such horrible crimes… And there are enough `hidden` stories in Cyprus, to tell us how people helped each other in villages and towns, to try to save each other’s lives. In Neachorgo Kythrea (Minarelikoy), a Turkish Cypriot would put up Turkish flags and gather the Greek Cypriot villagers in his house, to prevent the planes from bombing them but later he would be found tortured and killed… He had managed to save lives there but could not save his own… Or the story from Celya when a young man called Nicos happens to go and a Turkish Cypriot hides him in his house for four days, so his parents can come and pick him up. Or the Turkish Cypriot women saved from being raped in Dali by a Greek they knew and the men collected to be executed to be saved by another Greek doctor… We need to bring out these stories as well to convince ourselves that there is still hope on this island for living a decent human life…

When shall we be able to leave all of this behind, to be able to enjoy the landing on the planet Mars and thinking that this is more important than our expired conflict?

When shall we be able to smile at the sunflowers blossoming in our gardens and look at the stars every night, dreaming of the next landing on other planets?

When shall we be able to enjoy life as it is, having overcome all the traumas of the war?...