“Never again”, is what Costas and Petros Souppouris wish for, as they prepare to bury five members of their family. The two brothers are survivors of a massacre during the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, in the village of Palekythro.
The Souppouris brothers were speaking to CNA only a few days before the funeral on Sunday of five out of six members of their family, who were murdered during the hostilities and said that one must look to the future for the sake of the generations to come.
The remains of the five were recently located in a mass grave in the island’s northern Turkish occupied areas, exhumed and identified through the DNA method, as part of an ongoing process to alleviate the suffering of relatives of missing persons in Cyprus.
“We hope that what we have been through does not happen again, so that our children do not experience anything like that”, Costas said, having narrated the tragic story of the killings by young Turkish Cypriots of five members of his family on August 17th, 1974.
“We hope that what happened then and past mistakes made by some persons from both sides on the island teach us a lesson. It is the only thing we hope for”, Petros added.
The remains of Andreas Souppouris (father, 48 years old), Areti Souppouris (mother, 39 years old), Dimitris Souppouris (brother, 6 years old), Julia Souppouris (sister, 2 years old), and Thekla Souppouris (aunt, 47 years old), have recently been located in a mass grave along with the remains of 12 other people, murdered during the same incident in Palekythro and identified through the DNA method.
“It has been a long time, but the most important thing is that the remains of our loved ones have been found”, Petros said, speaking to CNA. Petros was wounded during the massacre in Palekythro, but has survived.
Petros feels that it is very important that a funeral will take place. “At least now we know what happened”, said Costas, who managed to escape the murderers just minutes before the killing.
“We knew that our loved ones had been murdered. They were not missing. But, thanks to the people from the Committee on Missing Persons, journalists Sevgul Uludaj and Andreas Paraschos who conducted an investigation, we know about their fate,” he added.
Recalling to his mind the tragic moments of August 1974, Petros who was 10 years old at the time, said: “two days after the second phase of the Turkish invasion, 3-4 young Turkish Cypriots came to Andreas Souppouris’ house, which was used as a shelter by 23 persons.”
“One by one, they took us out of the house, my father, my mother, the Liasis family. My brother managed to escape and he went to our grandmother’s house. My brother Giannis, whose remains have not yet been found, and I left the house last. They kept shooting. One of them ordered us out of the house and the rest were shooting at us. I was wounded. After a couple of hours, the Turkish army arrived and offered us medical care. During the next days I met up with my brother Costas and my aunts. After a few days they took us to the school at Voni village and a month later we came to the southern government controlled part of the country,” Petros said.
As he recollected his memory, Costas, who was 8 years old in 1974, described how he escaped the massacre: “while the Turkish Cypriots led their victims to the court yard to kill them, I began to run, out of fear or instinctively, to the side of the house, jumped the wall and headed through the fields to the centre of the village. I reached the small church of the village, where I found my aunts. I explained to them what had happened, and they tried to calm me down. All this happened in the morning. After the massacre, around noon, the Turkish army came to the village, took the wounded people to one place, and gathered the rest of us at a local house, where I met my brother”.
Petros said that he had never asked to learn the names of those who killed six members of his family.
“The point is what will happen in the future. Of course the criminals still remain criminals, but the most important thing is what we, as Cypriots, choose to do; either to continue a vendetta and the killings or to learn about what happened and try to understand why those things happened. I have opted for the second choice”, he pointed out.
Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkey invaded and occupied its northern third. Hundreds of Greek Cypriots have been missing since 1974, many of whom were last seen alive in the hands of the Turkish military. Nearly 500 Turkish Cypriots are also listed as missing since the intercommunal fighting in the early 1960s and during 1974.
