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The exhibition we are inaugurating tonight awakens memories.
The exhibition "Asia Minor: splendour - catastrophe - uprooting - creation" organised last year by the Benaki Museum and the Centre for Asia Minor Studies was, I know, a great success in Athens, attracting thousands of visitors. It is therefore a great honour and pleasure to inaugurate tonight the exhibition "Asia Minor - Cyprus" with its special focus on the Asia Minor people who rebuilt their lives in our land.
In an admirable way, the glory and splendour of Asia Minor, but also the war and the uprooting of the Greek populations are revealed before us tonight. An important addition to the exhibition here in Nicosia are the stories and memories of those who found refuge in our land. They arrived under difficult circumstances as at the time Cyprus was under British colonial rule and the number of refugees who were eventually able to settle here was limited, around 2,000 people. With their pride, their proud soul and their pro-progressive spirit, qualities that no conqueror could ever take away from them, the Asia Minor people would manage not only to revive themselves from the ashes, but also to contribute to the progress of Cypriot society, which embraced them warmly, as the reports of the time testify.
Several of them would even work as teachers and contribute to the consolidation of Greek education at a time when Cyprus was a British colony.
Today, the descendants of all these people are an integral, living part of Cypriot society. They deserve to be congratulated on how they have kept the memory alive, despite the adversities, by founding, among other things, their own very active Association - this is already the third event in a few months for Asia Minor - and I want to congratulate you for your actions and activities in Cyprus that help to maintain the bond with the roots as an element of a distinct history and identity.
Let me also warmly congratulate the Leventis Foundation, the Leventis Gallery, the Benaki Museum and the Centre for Asia Minor Studies for taking us on a trip down memory lane with this exhibition, 101 years after the Asia Minor disaster, while sending us a strong message: the duty to keep the memory alive for generations to come.
A debt that we in Cyprus feel is heavy. Besides, this exhibition will also awaken our own memories, as 2024 will mark the 50th anniversary of the brutal Turkish invasion in the summer of 1974, which forced more than 200,000 of our fellow human beings to leave their homes and slowly rebuild their lives and raise families in the refugee camp. They worked, toiled, created and deserved to see their children grow up as strangers in their own land, but with the desire to return always stronger. And one message I want to send to our fellow citizens is that I will do everything possible so that we can reunite our land.
But the opening of the exhibition unfortunately coincides with a tragic development in our neighbourhood. We see what is happening very few miles from here. It is precisely because we know from refugee experience what suffering and misery means that, within the framework of our possibilities, having excellent relations with all the neighbouring states, we are trying to help in particular to provide humanitarian aid to all those who need it.
It is a collective and individual effort and the duty of all of us that these new generations do not lose the ties and the heritage of the place they were forced to leave.
The memory that is not lost graft the future. It becomes strength. In difficult times, each of us finds the courage to continue, looking optimistically to the future, but always keeping the testimony of yesterday as a precious legacy. This is the story and the message of the exhibition we are inaugurating tonight.
(PM/MS/EAθ/GS)
Contents of this article including associated images are belongs PIO
Views & opinions expressed are those of the author and/or PIO
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