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- Ελληνικά
This year marks 50 years since the Turkish invasion and the loss of a large part of our homeland and of our people. 50 years of destruction of our monuments, 50 years of refugees, 50 years away from our towns and villages, the churches and cemeteries where our ancestors are buried, 50 years away from the schools where generations of Cypriots learned letters and sciences and managed to thrive.
Your conference today is dedicated to these schools. Through your work you will highlight the contribution of these schools in shaping modern Cypriot society and help us all to learn something about them. And for this I congratulate you and thank you warmly.
For you, the invasion and the war is a historical event that changed the course of our country, a course of development and formation of the Republic of Cyprus as a modern independent state. For those of us who were children in 1974, even if we were not all refugees, the invasion marked our lives with unprecedented experiences and emotions. I remember those years very vividly even though I was in the first grades of primary school. I remember that we had to learn new unfamiliar words - such as refugee and refugee, prisoner, missing person, camp. I remember our school windows being covered with tape to keep glass from flying in case of bombing, and us and our teachers doing preparedness drills. I remember observing from the balcony of one of my childhood friend's apartment the big red cross they painted on the roof of the school so that the enemy planes would know not to strike there. For years the sound of a plane flying over Nicosia caused me intense fear and anxiety.
The school was the centre of our world and the refuge of our young classmates who lost their home and their school. There during the school day they could forget what happened and just be students and not refugees. Thanks to the school we learned about the places that were lost and about our history.
Thanks to the efforts of the Ministry of Education and our teachers, through the lessons and the motto "I DON'T KNOW", the memory of our occupied territories remains alive to this day. Now our children in turn are learning, not forgetting and claiming, a free homeland and a return to their villages and towns, a return to their homes and the schools of their parents and grandparents.
We at the Ministry of Culture have an equally important role to play in preserving the memory of our occupied homeland and we are fulfilling it through our many actions. We study and record the monuments and findings from the occupied territories and protect them with all the means at our disposal. We closely monitor the auctions and sales of antiquities and identify and repatriate objects stolen from the churches, museums and archaeological sites of our occupied territories. We cooperate with our occupied municipalities and communities in their invaluable efforts to keep alive the intangible cultural heritage of their land and pass it on to future generations.
We support both the Bicommunal Technical Committee for Cultural Heritage, which works systematically for the restoration and conservation of monuments all over the island, and the Bicommunal Committee for Culture.
The goal of all of us is the reunification of our land and the peaceful solution of the Cyprus problem. A solution that will respect the dignity of all the inhabitants of our island and that will give all of us, free and independent, the right to live in conditions of security, stability and harmonious coexistence, like every European citizen. Through culture we can find common ground and avenues of cooperation with the Turkish Cypriots and work towards a solution. Culture and love for our land can become the bridge that will unite us. We must therefore invest in our culture and the people who serve it.
My dear children,
I am sure that you have gained much knowledge from the research on our occupied schools and we look forward with great interest to the presentation of your work.
You are the future of our country.
You are the future of our country. Take every opportunity offered to you to learn about our occupied lands, traditions, and culture of our homeland. In this way you will love her even more and fight for her freedom and reunification, and in this way you will live in a better tomorrow. I wish the conference every success.
(EK)
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