Bloody Christmas (1963)
Bloody Christmas (Turkish: Kanlı Noel) refers to the resumption of intercommunal violence between the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots during the Cyprus crisis of 1963–64, on the night of 20–21 December 1963 and the subsequent period of island-wide violence[1] amounting to civil war.
The first major crisis came in December 1961 when the Turks refused to vote for the budget as a reprisal for the Greek failure to fulfil certain obligations affecting Turkish interests in other spheres.
[8] After two relatively peaceful years, in November 1963 tensions skyrocketed when President and Archbishop Makarios III proposed 13 constitutional changes for his consideration which were met with fury by Turkish Cypriots.
Nothing at this stage impinged upon the wider interests of Turkey under the Treaty of Guarantee but the Turkish Government saw the attempt to change the basic articles as a dangerous precedent and rejected the proposals.
Both sides had been stockpiling arms since the Zürich agreement that led to Cyprus' independence and a clash was expected sooner or later.
These Turkish Cypriots were being driven by taxi driver Zeki Halil and were around Hermes Street en route to Taht-el Kale.
[13] Harry Scott Gibbons, editor of the London Daily Express newspaper, describes the brutality in Ayvasıl village as follows: "Gunshots were heard; locked doors were broken with rifle butts; people were dragged into the streets.
Turkish Cypriot snipers fired from minarets and the roof of the Saray Hotel on Sarayönü Square.
[21] Based on later interviews, the reporter Harry Scott Gibbons described the murder of 21 Turkish Cypriot patients from the Nicosia General Hospital on Christmas Eve.
A joint call for calm was issued on 24 December by the governments of Turkey, Greece and the United Kingdom.
[27] A conference held in London in January among the protagonists of the events, failed because of the maximalist positions of the leadership of Greek and Turkish Cypriots.
[20] A mass grave was exhumed there on 12 January 1964 in the presence of foreign reporters, British Army officers and officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
[29] A number of the victims in the mass grave showed signs of torture, and observers noted that they appeared to have been shot with their hands and feet tied.
[20] An investigating committee led by independent British investigators then linked the incident to an ostensible disappearance of Turkish Cypriot patients in the Nicosia General Hospital, but it was not determined until decades later that many of the bodies had been murdered elsewhere, stored in the hospital for a while and then buried in Ayios Vasilios.
[31] The exhumed bodies were interred by the Turkish Cypriot authorities to the yard of the Mevlevi Tekke in Nicosia.
The bodies were exhumed in the 2010s by the Missing Persons Committee, the eight villagers of Ayios Vasilios identified and buried individually.
[34] The events of the Bloody Christmas abruptly brought about the end of the power-sharing arrangement in the government of Cyprus, leaving the police and civil service to become de facto Greek Cypriot organisations.
[40] The anniversary is commemorated by Turkish Cypriots as the 'week of remembrance' and the 'martyrs' struggle of 1963–1974', and follows the TRNC's Independence Day, which is on 15 November and is marked by protests in the south.
It is often the case that the few public gestures made by Turkish and Greek Cypriot officials that signal possible reunification are often contradicted by these elements which have the effect of reinforcing the conflict mentality.
This approach is exemplified in the first meeting of the now solely Greek Cypriot House of Representatives after the conflict, on 9 March 1964.
[46] Niyazi Kızılyürek highlights the "borderline racist" language of these propaganda works and states that a fabricated narrative became the common perception amongst the entirety of the Greek Cypriot elite of the time.
[44] Anthropologist Olga Demetriou has described the Greek Cypriot official discourse regarding the events of Bloody Christmas as one that "in a sense, parallels denialist strategies that, for example and albeit in cruder form, draw on the battle of Van in 1915 to present Armenians as aggressors against Turks and deny the genocide.
