It was EOKA's first April the beginning!
With this verse from young children we recount and honour, with pride and gratitude, the most brilliant page of our country's modern history, the anti-colonial uprising of EOKA for self-determination-unification with Greece.
At a time when the world is overshadowed by the drama of Ukraine and we express solidarity with a people that is now under attack and invasion, like Cyprus in 1974, we will celebrate the epic of Cypriot Hellenism that successfully claimed the ideal of freedom, with the EOKA Struggle 1955-59.
"With the help of God, with faith in our honest struggle, with the support of all Hellenism...", these were the words of the first Proclamation of the anti-colonial struggle of the Cypriots. With Archbishop Makarios III as their spiritual and political leader and with Digenes as their leader, the Cypriots, after having been patient and for 77 years had peacefully claimed liberation, counting on the liberalism of Britain, but were disappointed, since it was necessary, they took up arms on April 1, 1955. In continuation of the 1931 uprising, realizing the popular demand of the Unitarian Referendum of 1950.
With God's help... The Cypriot fighters were convinced of the rightness and sanctity of the freedom struggle and used the same schemes, the same words that came out of our national heritage. The oath of the Society of Friends and the Holy Company, the words of Kolokotronis who, together with his legendary deeds, assured with faith that "God signed the freedom of Greece and does not take back his signature...".
From that day on, with the youth in the front line, as witnessed by the courageous steps towards the gallows of the student-poet Evagoras Pallikaridis and the 23-year-old Michalakis Karoli, but also the "Battle of Severio", the Cypriot people as a whole did not hesitate to stand up for universal human ideals before the dizzyingly superior size and power of the British Empire.
Moments of patriotic self-denial and heroism that transcend human limits were then experienced throughout Cyprus. The desire for freedom and national vindication won the hearts and minds of the people. A heady air of freedom blew from the guerrilla dens of Pitsilia, to the barn of Liopetriou, the narrow streets of the cities and the hideouts of Dikomou.
We once asked ourselves today: how was it possible then for people to proceed to certain death and the gallows with the same naturalness that someone today simply crosses a road to go to work? What gave high school boys the strength to envy their classmates who were driven to martyrdom for their country and eagerly await their turn? There is no complicated explanation. They were simple and ordinary people, kneaded in our communal tradition and our Orthodox faith, people with love of country and national education. They were people who had rooted in them the sense of "we" of which General Makriyannis spoke. They were people who believed and were committed to a cause above the trivial, the narrow individual and everyday. They were people who believed and felt that life without freedom was not worth living.
They were the young people who made Nobel laureate Albert Camus, one of the world's greatest writers, write "The Greek Child", a laudatory text calling for the imminent hanging of Karolay to be cancelled.
They were the young people who made Nobel laureate Albert Camus, one of the world's greatest writers, write "The Greek Child", a laudatory text calling for the imminent hanging of Karolay to be cancelled. But a decisive role had also been played, since the previous decades, by Greek education, which was first disseminated and generalised in the first half of the 20th century and which implanted and shaped a modern national and social consciousness. The legendary EOKA uprising was preceded by an "educational revolution", with modern Greek education in Cyprus.
Greek Cypriots fought and sacrificed for freedom. We honour today special figures such as the great hero Grigoris Afxentiou, who became a holocaust for freedom by not hesitating to repeat Leonidas' "Molon Lave", such as Kyriakos Matsis, the gifted thinker who with patriotic self-denial fended off Harding's highly tempting attempt at bribery by proudly declaring: "We fight not for money, but for freedom". Like Marcos Drakos, Iakovos Patatsos, Fotis Pittas, Andreas Zakos, Christos Samaras and so many others... The 'rough and tumble', of which our national poet Vassilis Michaelides spoke: "When a cavagine is cut, around it are thrown rough shoes". From the "parapulia" of 9 July 1821 came EOKA!
The struggle of Cypriot Hellenism achieved what seemed impossible. It led to a retreat and an end to the British occupation and colonialism. It is another matter if the policies thereafter could not complete the demand for self-determination-unification. But it did bring freedom to Cyprus and, for the first time, an independent state. This same state of the Cypriots that we are called upon to defend today with works of peace and creation against the aggression and buoyancy of the expansionist and authoritarian Turkey.
This same freedom we still claim today for our occupied territories. The same ideals and human rights and freedoms for all Cypriots, through a real solution to the Cyprus problem that will end the occupation and the captivity of Cyprus by Turkey.
Honor and glory to the struggle of 1955-59!
Honor and glory to our heroes who gave their lives for freedom!
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