Though the above messages are limited to informing relatives and friends that they are well, in earlier decades they could also include more factual news. At least the ones I remember up until 1994, when I left Cyprus, would sometimes mention weddings, engagements, studies abroad, anything that could fit in a few seconds. Their brevity and telegraphic nature was also mirrored in the messages sent through the Red Cross. Written in special letterhead paper, their length was limited to 25 words.

‘Messages to the Enclaved’ were the main sonic reminder of the spectral existence of the enclaved people in our everyday lives. They constituted an acoustic shift from the recorded voices of relatives (in 1974 or in special programmes in later years), to the detached journalistic voice, usually of a woman. Read in a sonically telegraphic way mirroring their writing, with pauses and silences, they exhumed a kind of distance, almost in the style of the Brechtian notion of alienation (Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht 1995, pp. 39–41, 179–205). In other words, the detached tone of the voice, the silent pauses, the third person, and the mundanity of repetition created a distantiating effect for listeners like myself, who were not the intended addressees. I do not wish to suggest that the messages should have been read in an emotional way, as a more dramatic reading would have trivialized and melodramatized their content and peoples’ situations. An important strategy of intermediatory transmission, it was also a performative kind of a prolonged and unresolved mourning.⁶ The woman’s detached voice enveloped in silence was a sonic contrast to the tense, emotionally loaded yet silent images of the mothers, wives, and children of the missing, immortalized in photographs with images of their beloved in their hands.

I want to argue here that these monologic acoustic statements of ‘wellness’ carried what Veena Das calls ‘poisonous knowledge’. According to Das, ‘the violence of the past enters into the present not only as traumatic memory but also as poisonous knowledge’, which does not directly point to past violence but rather to how it has shaped the present (Das, 2000, pp. 221–222). Das’ notion talks about the way the knowledge of violence remains embedded in ‘words’ that act ‘as threads’ in everyday life. In the case of these telegraphic acoustic messages, I would argue that poisonous knowledge is not only traced in the words themselves and the oxymoron of the phrase ‘they are well’ in a situation of political staleness vis-à-vis the island’s separation. Most importantly, it is traced in the silences between them, in what remained unspoken. It is also embedded in the acoustics of the journalist’s neutral and detached voice, its detachment strongly accentuated by the elongated pauses between sentences and between messages.

Even if they did not talk about the war and were not addressed to most listeners, the messages acoustically encompassed the poisonous knowledge of displacement, occupation, and of continued separation in ways that words directly relating to this traumatic past had failed to do so. And by this I mean the slogan ‘Never Forget’ (Δεν ξεχνώ) that saturated our lives, featuring on primary school notebooks and school walls to television stills, and stamps. In places of continued political stagnation memory triggers like ‘Never Forget’ became transparent and unnoticeable, particularly when they were not followed by a critical engagement with the multifaceted events of the past, but also since in situations of continued political staleness and conflict many are those who simply want to forget.

Telling is the cover image of this article, which I took in 2023 at the old town of Nicosia, right on the Green Line. On an abandoned Greek-Cypriot military watch-point in central Nicosia right next to the hotel where I was staying, the map of Cyprus divided in two with a bleeding Green Line (showing in red the Turkish-controlled areas) automatically brings to mind the visual rendition of the slogan ‘Never Forget’, designed by Greek writer and graphic designer Nikos Demou in August 1974 after the second Turkish invasion. However, if one looks closely, she will observe that the word ‘Never’ is missing. Standing alone, the word ‘Forget’ dominates, reverting the original message. Painted by graffiti artist Christos Kakkoulis (known as CRS), the omitted word wishes to highlight that Greek-Cypriot society has forgotten, but also the way this slogan had lost its dynamic. When I took the picture in 2023, I failed to notice the missing word (‘Never’). Nor did I see it when I used it in numerous presentations as part of my conference paper. Each time I overcompensated this critical omission until it was pointed out to me by my friend and colleague Eftyhia Georgakopoulou, commenting on the suitability of the image to the point I was making. This overcompensation of the missing word shows well that the slogan’s overuse by the state that did little to keep memory alive and work through the complicated history of conflict, made it transparent and impotent. Another example that shows how ‘Never Forget’ became an empty shell of agonistic memory is evident in its several transformations during the years. In the early 1990s it was changed into ‘Never forget but fight on’ (‘Δεν Ξεχνώ αλλά Αγωνίζομαι’), and more recently into ‘Know, never forget, demand’ (‘Γνωρίζω, δεν ξεχνώ, διεκδικώ’, see Ministry of Education 2024) in an effort to mobilize people, mainly the youth (see also Demetriou, 2018, pp. 55–77). The latter was the title and educational objective of a 2024 bulletin issued to state high schools by the Ministry of Education in light of the 50-year anniversary from the Turkish invasion. Outlining as its main aims ‘memories of refugeehood, nostos, struggles for freedom’ (μνήμες προσφυγιάς, νόστος, αγώνες ελευθερίας) placed within the broader struggles of Hellenism throughout the centuries, the bulletin left out events prior to the Turkish invasion such as the bicommunal troubles in the 1960s s or the 1974 coup d’etat.⁷ It is telling of the way memory has been held hostage by a nationalist discourse, thus losing its agonistic dynamic that can only emerge through a more dialectical understanding of the complexities of conflict and history itself.

Going back to the ‘messages to the enclaved’, it is important to note that listening to them was by no means a homogeneous experience. On the one hand, there were those who eagerly waited for them in the north (the addressees), tuning in to find out news of beloved family members and friends. On the other, there were listeners like myself, of different ages and generations, who unwittingly turned into eavesdroppers on an everyday basis, in a broadcast that blurred the boundaries between private and public, family and political, the everyday and political traumas. Listeners in the south found ourselves overhearing too little and at the same time too much. I use the word ‘hear’ to contrast it with the process of listening, which presupposes attentiveness. I argue that these messages were heard but not listened to, and were later repressed. It is no coincidence that they were not registered in the memory of many of the people I spoke to, even though they were played at a time of high ratings. People from older generations vividly remembered the recorded messages aired in 1974, not recalling the written messages of the later years. Others, from younger generations, recalled the quality of the journalist’s voice, the silences, and the opening line that ‘he/she was well’ – ‘whatever that means’, as architect Sevina Floridou noted in our interview in 2024. For me, this sonic and verbal ostinato⁸ was the most depressing moment of each day. Reminding us of our impotence with regard to the unresolved political situation, the messages constituted a performative kind of mourning that remained unresolved, returning listeners to the originary trauma of separation and displacement, encapsulated in the simple phrase ‘they are well’. Freezing time, they became – performatively and discursively – a sonic reminder of a mourning gone awry. Unresolved as it was, it turned into melancholia, as Freud (1953) reminds us.

‘Peace Garden’ at Astra Radio

The first programme that tried to connect people in the north and the south was ‘Peace Garden’ at the Greek-Cypriot radio station Astra Radio, affiliated with the Cypriot communist party AKEL– Progressive Party of Working People. Broadcast on Tuesday evenings at 9pm from 1999 to 2003, it addressed Cypriots from both sides, encouraging them to call and share their thoughts, experiences, and memories. ‘Peace Garden’ became possible through the establishment of a UN-led telephone line in 1997, aiming at facilitating communication between the two communities when the checkpoint in the buffer zone was closed. The closure of the buffer zone marked an abrupt halting of numerous bicommunal events that took place in the context of the growing bicommunal movement. Initiated by diplomats, embassies, international organizations, as well as grass root organizations and groups on both sides in the late 1980s, efforts became intensified in the 1990s (see Loizos, 2009; Hade, 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2000, 2001).⁹ Rapprochement was also supported by leftwing parties and platforms on both sides. Bicommunal activities included: conflict resolution workshops, presentations, concerts, study groups, bicommunal gatherings, and exhibitions in the buffer zone; youth camps abroad; festivals; workshops and meetings abroad and at the buffer zone; youth encounters for peace (YEP); bicommunal events at Pyla, a mixed village situated at the buffer zone; the publication of HADE, the first bicommunal magazine in Nicosia; and the establishment of the first bicommunal website www.peace-cyprus.org by four Cypriots from both communities (i.e. Turgut Durduran, Adonis Florides, Eser Keskiner and Panayiotis Zaphiris). These events and encounters gave rise to initiatives and platforms such as the Citizens Movement for Democracy and Federation, the bicommunal choir, and the platform Bicommunal Citizens Initiative for Peace in Cyprus. When Rauf Denktas blocked their continuation, the UN established a telephone line, an important confidence building measure.

This is the context in which ‘Peace Garden’ was created in 1999. During its first year, it was run and presented by Turkish-Cypriot poet Neşe Yaşın. An active figure of the bicommunal movement, Yaşın had moved to the south in 1997. Her move is telling of the strong grass-root bicommunal network that was being consolidated on the ground at the time. In an essay to the bicommunal magazine HADE, she had described this move as the ‘longest 50 meters in the world’, as it entailed flights from Nicosia to Istanbul, Istanbul to Athens, Athens to Larnaca, and then a car ride from Larnaca to Nicosia, just to find herself 50-meters across the checkpoint in her home city (Yaşın, 1998, p. 62). Pondering on the absurdity of choice and noting the many rejections to her requests to cross over for a short visit, she positioned her move as an act of civil disobedience. She also saw it as an important act in terms of the reconciliation process, as she would give speeches ‘at schools, villages, and cultural centres’. Situating her outside the topography of her own ethnic community, a decision that sited her with the enemy so-to speak, Yaşın’s move was an embodied reiteration of her claim on both parts, previously expressed in her 1977 poem My own country has been divided in two (Η δική μου η πατρίδα έχει μοιραστεί στα δυο / Yurdunu sevmeliymiş insan). Set into music by Greek Cypriot composer Marios Tokas, the song has become identified with the impossibility faced by Cypriots and the desire for unification:

They say that people have to love their country,
that’s what my father often tells me.
My own country has been divided in two,
which of the two parts should I love?¹⁰

My thoughts on ‘Peace Garden’ draw on my own memories, since I had the opportunity to listen to the programme in March 2000 when visiting the island for a long period. It was the first time in my life I was able to hear Turkish Cypriots – their voices, their memories, their positions. I also draw on interviews conducted with Neşe Yaşın in October 2023 and with Takis Hadjigeorgiou in early May 2024 in Nicosia.

‘Peace Garden’ was the first bicommunal initiative to address a larger public across the two parts, as it was broadcast on mainstream radio and could be accessed by all social strata. It constituted the first time since 1974 that Greek and Turkish Cypriots could directly talk and listen to one another. It is not clear who had the idea for a bicommunal radio programme. In our interview, Yaşın remembered this as an idea of the then director of the radio station Takis Hadjigeorgiou. On the other hand, Hadjigeorgiou recalled that the journalist Anna Andreou had come up with the idea.¹¹ For both, the programme’s driving force came out of the need to bring the two communities together, enhancing the bicommunal work that had taken place in previous years. During the first year, Yaşın ran ‘Peace Garden’ alone in English. Calling it a radio programme for bad English speakers, she urged listeners from both sides to call in. After the first year, she was joined by Andreou, and the language changed from English into Greek and Turkish. The two women would speak both languages with the help of the other through note-keeping and translating on the spot. ‘Peace Garden’ came to an end after the opening of the checkpoints. According to Hadjigeorgiou, at that time there was a need for a more holistic bicommunal approach vis-à-vis ASTRA’s radio programmes that went beyond the limitations of a specific programme and context.

Apart from listeners’ calling in, ‘Peace Garden’ included guests as well as briefings and discussion about bicommunal events taking place. Indicative are themed specials for the first year which can be found in the first bicommunal website www.peace-cyprus.org: ‘Lost Memories’, ‘Interviews with Members of Youth Projects’, ‘Villagers Reunion Meeting’, and ‘History Conference’, just to name a few (Peace-Cyprus, 1997). Yaşın recalled people sharing happy memories of living together before the troubles and the war, talking about friends and neighbours with whom they lost touch after the war. Hadjigeorgiou too remembered calls to have been rather emotional. He noted how at first the calls were not so many. It took a while for people to learn that it was possible to call on the other side. Despite several difficulties, calls gradually increased, more so by the Turkish Cypriot community. As he noted, tuning in to a Greek Cypriot radio station, Greek Cypriots understood themselves more as listeners.

During our interview, Yaşın gave special emphasis on her casual and non-journalistic style, on the spontaneity and improvisatory manner with which she conducted the programme during its first year of operation. Openness was central to her approach, she said: it was not prepared or pre-scripted but driven by the various conversations taking place on the spot. She also underlined her choice to address people with their first names, something that had raised eyebrows by some. She strongly defended her style. In ‘Peace Garden’, she told me, she was inviting listeners to her home, where she was just Neshe, noting how her voice but also the first names reflected this personal approach and cordiality. Her approach blurred the boundaries of the political and the personal, highlighting the need for the personal to be inscribed in public space:

I had a programme in this very masculine public space. I had the idea […] of making the personal political, […] a feminine public space where the personal is also there and the personal is also political. […] I was myself. […] the way my voice…was as if you were a guest in my house I didn’t have the journalist… I was myself.

Yaşın’s idea of a feminine public space implicitly refers to the traditional banishment of women from public spaces, forced to inhabit in the realm of the domestic and private, where they nevertheless thrived, had social visibility, and were able to express themselves more freely. Through ‘Peace Garden’, Yaşın wished to bring the qualities of the openness of feminine domesticity into public space, creating a safe space for more personal stories and encounters, where emotions and experiences could be publicly heard. A space where people could talk and listen to one another, sharing a wide range of emotions and experiences including fear and anger.

Telling is an incident she shared, when a Greek-Cypriot soldier called to say that ‘Cyprus is Greek and Constantinopolis is Greek’, hanging up right after. She responded that she could understand someone young who has these ideas. She held a similar attitude with regard to an arsonist who attacked Astra radio station. In a special radio programme, organized by the station’s director to discuss this incident, Yaşın did not condemn the arsonist. Instead, she noted that she was very sorry for his pain and his loss. According to Hadjigeorgiou, this was one of many attempts to undermine the station’s operation. As he told me, front-windows of shops and local businesses were smashed on a daily basis, late at night. These were shops whose owners had financially supported the station. Tied on a stone, was the station’s brochure calling for financial support: ‘Support Astra’. To deal with this tense atmosphere and ensure the station’s financial support without targeting its supporters, Hadjigeorgiou created the Astra Friends scheme, thus allowing the station to remain financially afloat.

In our interview Yaşın recalled how her more spontaneous approach changed in the second year to a more journalistic one, when she was joined by Anna Andreou. Instead of being driven by the conversations that unfolded as they went along, questions were now preplanned. Listening was replaced by a more active type of dialogue that would not shy away from putting interlocutors in a corner if needed. Yaşın contrasts here the feminine public space she wished to create, grounded in an unconditional listening, with the more formal journalist approach, which she understands as more masculine, fixed, potentially confrontational, and less open to the input of interlocutors.

The kind of listening that emerges from Yaşın’s recollections is not so much focused on the notion of truth as such, but on sharing with and listening attentively to each other’s (hi)stories and traumas perpetuated by years of separation, conflict, political and ideological polarization as well as educational biases on both sides (for the latter, see Papadakis, 2008; Kizilyürek, 2002). Through her bicommunal meetings with youth from both sides, Yaşın was well acquainted with the educational biases with which history was taught. In our interview she recalled a bicommunal event called silent history walk during which Greek and Turkish Cypriot youth were asked to write descriptions next to specific years: 1974 was named as the Turkish barbaric invasion by Greek Cypriots and as Peace Operation by Turkish Cypriots; 1963 was described by the former as peaceful coexistence with Turkish Cypriots, and as Bloody Christmas or Kanli Noel by the latter.

In this context, listening emerges as a key concept of a process of reconciliation. It does not presuppose a consensus or only recollections of happy memories and affinity. On the contrary, it is a difficult process that acknowledges different, opposite, and polarized experiences, positions, and (hi)stories based on pain, loss, and the violence of the past. In other words, the road to reconciliation is conditioned by the way we listen to these difficult moments, to the complexities of conflict: by the space and openness of a collective discussion we allow to be. According to Lucia Farinati and Claudia Firth (2017), the political space created by listening has the potential to change and transform existing conditions: it is the space from which we start together side by side, a space created through the gradual exchange of experiences, thoughts, actions, and practices of listening. Listening together, listening with each other, creates this potential of transformation but also of emerging mutualities, networks of support, and the intersection of struggles be they ethnic, class, feminist, or other.

The dynamic of listening does not only rest in acknowledging the other and their experiences, but also in the ability and responsibility of a response. Therein lies the ethical and political moment of listening: in the ways we respond to such difficult (hi)stories that turn all of us into witnesses of painful events we can never eye-witness, which can often contradict or call into question national archives of history and archives of violence (see Oliver, 2001). By acknowledging the complexities of conflict, responsive listening harbours the reparative potential of people and societies that have been plagued by violence. Without the possibility of a response, the entire process becomes stunted, drowning in stagnation or melancholia (Freud, 1953), often in both. This takes me back to the messages to the enclaved, left hanging and unanswered on the airwaves with no possibility of a response by those who listened in the north due to the impenetrability of the Green Line and communication constraints, or from us, eavesdroppers in the south. Their poisonous knowledge was acoustically conveyed not just in the embedded yet silenced violence of the past, but also in the stagnation of the political process and most importantly in our very own impotence and inability as listeners and citizens to respond or act in any meaningful and reciprocal way.

In the case of ‘Peace Garden’, its acoustics became a bicommunal space where Cypriots could reclaim their place and voice in the social and public space after decades of separation and silence. Listening, in this sense, became a potentially transformative process, and the radio waves a potently transformative space, an acoustic territory that ruptured what Rancière calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’ and LaBelle ‘the distribution of the heard’ that is, the acoustic economy of who could talk and who could listen, heavily relying on silenced (hi)stories. At a time when the Green Line was an impenetrable limit, listening gave rise to a political space where the various memories, positions, political anxieties, and struggles could be heard and acknowledged. It was a space where the notion of citizenship understood here as ‘the practices of becoming claim-making subjects in various sites and scales’ (Isin, 2008, p. 16; Isin and Turner, 2002, p. 2) could be reclaimed and reinvented from below, creating the potential of a dialogical process among Cypriots. After 50 years of frozen conflict, and at a time when the political climate in Cyprus has moved to the far right on both sides with a steady turn towards partition, ‘Peace Garden’ reminds us that the only way forward is a bold bicommunal process, emerging from below, forcing politicians to move away from partition politics. This can only be envisioned through an open, collective, unmediated, and responsive listening: an integral part of reciprocal dialogue among people committed to the process of reconciliation, acknowledging from its very beginning the complexity of conflict, the different losses and traumas bi- and inter-communally, and responding to them in ways that can push the social and political process forward.

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

This article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 101002720 - MUTE).

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Photo credit: Anna Papaeti

This article is part of a long-term project that explores listening as a transformative experience in conflict and post-conflict societies, focusing on the case of Cyprus. It explores the ways in which the traumas and legacy of the 1974 Turkish invasion and the continued occupation of the northern part of the island have been acoustically conveyed in everyday life until the opening of the Ledra checkpoint in Nicosia in April 2003 on the Green Line that divides the island to this day. Here I focus on the acoustic dynamic of sound as the main means that transgressed the impenetrable limit of the Green Line, allowing for voices that had been silenced to be heard in public, thus disturbing the distribution of who can talk and who can be heard. I focus on two radio programmes broadcast by Greek Cypriot radio stations, addressed to Cypriots residing on both sides across the Green Line: ‘Messages to the Enclaved’, broadcast daily on CyBC Radio 1 spring 2003, and the first bicommunal radio programme ‘Peace Garden’ at Astra Radio (1999–2003).

Keywords: Cyprus, listening, conflict, bicommunal, radio, enclaved people, rapprochement, Green Line

Anna Papaeti holds a PhD from King’s College London. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant Soundscapes of Trauma: Music, Sound, and the Ethics of Witnessing (MUTE) at the Institute of Historical Research at the National Hellenic Research Foundation. She writes about the nexus of music, sound, and trauma, as well as the intersection of politics, ethics, and aesthetics. She held two Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowships at the University of Goettingen (FP7, 2011–2014) and at Panteion University, Athens (2017–2019, Horizon 2020) respectively. Her research has also been supported by DAAD, Onassis Foundation, and the Research Centre for the Humanities (RCH), Athens. She co-edited two special issues on music torture and music in detention, as well as the edited volume The 1969 “Greek Case” in the Council of Europe: A Game Changer for Human Rights, edited by Kornetis et al. (Bloomsbury 2024). She is also a practitioner, working in sound and textual forms.

Papaeti, A. (2025) ‘Listening to Conflict: Broadcasts in Divided Cyprus’, Witnessing, 1. doi:10.26238/3057-5605.2025.01.03