Marios Dimitriou recalled the dark memories of the 1974 invasion, as well as his subsequent capture by the Turkish army when he was just 14 years old, Marios Dimitriou recalled while appearing as a guest on the Alpha Summer show.
Mr. Dimitriou found himself one step away from death and one step away from being transported to Adana, but luck was on his side, and he escaped both fates.
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On August 17, 1974, Marios Dimitriou, then 14 years old, set out from Liopetri to go to his home in the Stavros area of Famagusta to pick up some clothes.
“That morning, there was an announcement on RIK that the Famagusta Police were to report to the city’s Technical School. When we heard this news, we were in Liopetri; I was with my mother and my siblings, and my father was at CYTA with the army—he was a CYTA employee. So I told my mother that I would go get some clothes from home, because we had left in such a hurry on the Feast of the Assumption and didn’t have anything.”
Together with the man who was hosting them in Liopetri, Lambros Katsonis, his son, and one other person, Antonis Liatsos, they found an old gasoline-powered Land Rover.
“We didn’t have any gasoline, so we filled it with diesel. We set off toward Deryneia and from there to Famagusta. In Pano Deryneia, we came across police and soldiers who appeared to be on our side. They were looking through binoculars toward Famagusta. No one stopped us, so we continued on. Further down toward Kato Deryneia, where the roadblock is now, there were other soldiers wearing National Guard uniforms. When one of them turned around, we saw the crescent moon on his helmet. We stopped, tried to put the car in reverse to drive away, and they fired at the car’s engine. We stayed there; they made us get out and took us to a nearby field close to the orchards of Pertsiena.”
The Turks would select and take a few of those they had captured every so often, drag them 50 meters away, execute them, come back, and repeat the process.
“We heard the bursts of gunfire; they’d pick out some of those who had stopped, take them a little farther away. Then back again—more selection, more gunfire. This happened about five times, and we never saw them again.”
Among those stopped by the Turks along the way were buses carrying women and children.
“They gathered us all there, made us sit down, and after a few hours told us to separate—women and children on one side, men on the other. I tried to sneak over to the women and children. ‘Where are you going?’ a Turkish Cypriot soldier asked me. ‘But I’m 14 years old,’ I told him. “You’re a soldier,” he told me. I was small and skinny, wearing flip-flops and shorts. In the end, he grabbed me and tossed me over to the men’s side. A few hours later, buses arrived and took the women and children. More buses arrived shortly after, and they loaded us onto them and took us to the Karaolos camp, which is toward Bogazi. We stayed there one night, and the next day they loaded us onto buses again and took us to the Pavlidis garage in Nicosia. It was a courtyard surrounded by buildings; one of them was a sports field. I was in a small room with 25 other people. We weren’t allowed to go out; they’d let us out only briefly in the morning or at noon to give us a piece of bread and three olives. There was also a faucet where we could wash up quickly.”
A few days later, at Pavlidis’s garage, the Turks loaded them back onto trucks and buses.
“During our transfers, our hands were always tied behind our backs, and we were blindfolded; it took years for the marks to fade from my wrists. There were also stops along the way. People would get in, beat us from above, then the journey would continue, and the same thing would happen again.”
At some point, their truck reached Five Miles, and they were able to see a bit through the cloth that had been used to blindfold them.
“That day, cars were being loaded onto the landing craft. Two or three, however, didn’t make it because they were already full and couldn’t fit any more. One of the trucks that didn’t make it was ours. That’s how I avoided being sent to Adana. And this was before the Red Cross found us; we had been missing until then. They brought us back to Nicosia, to the Serai prison.”
Marios Dimitriou and the others who were with him were released on September 24. Previously, they had been taken to the KEO warehouses as a stopover and then to the Ledra Palace, where they were released.
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