Histories for Life and Histories for Death: Conflict and Recursion in Cyprus, 2024

Abstract: Fifty years have passed since two critical and closely linked events transformed the modern Greek world: the attempted coup and ensuing war in Cyprus that brought its enduring division, and the restoration of democracy after the fall of the dictatorship in Greece. This paper takes as a point of departure the analytic and ethical challenges of reflecting on the meaning of these events from a distance of fifty years, focusing especially on the division of Cyprus and its complex afterlives. I will think with a number of Cypriot scholars and artists who wrestle with the division's radical instability as an event: forensic scientists, historians, poets, photographers, and filmmakers who show how the past is present and changing all the time, and how the effect of war—division—has become the cause of other things.