Archive · Reportage & Documentary
Cyprus, 1997–2007
From 1997 to 2007, Argyris Dinopoulos repeatedly documented, on the ground, the situation in the northern, occupied part of Cyprus. On the 1997 mission, it was — in his own words — "as if time had stopped"; by the later ones, in 2002 and 2007, that picture had changed. Three documentaries make up the dossier: the fate of the Orthodox monuments, the exploitation of Greek-Cypriot properties, and the historical portrait of Archbishop Makarios.
In 1997 Argyris Dinopoulos succeeded in obtaining permission for a journalistic assignment, for Antenna, in occupied Cyprus.
The rest of his account
Twenty-three years after the Turkish invasion, the traces of Hellenism were still «alive» in the occupied northern part of the island.
In truth it was as if time had stopped.
Entering the closed church of Agios Mamas at occupied Morphou, for the first time since 1974, everything was as priests and worshippers had left it when they fled that dramatic summer of the invasion.
The same at Rizokarpaso, where in 1997 the primary school of the «enclaved Greeks» was still running, and at the monastery of Apostolos Andreas at the northernmost tip of the island.
The Orthodox churches were in poor condition, many of them turned even into stables.
Striking, finally, was the natural beauty of northern, occupied Cyprus — precisely because in 1997 its so-called tourist exploitation had not yet begun.
You had the sense of being in the Greece of the 1950s and 1960s in summer.
Altogether different was the picture Argyris Dinopoulos found on his next two assignments to occupied Cyprus, in 2002 (again for Antenna) and above all in 2007 (for ERT).
Unchecked tourist development, together with the violent seizure of Greek properties and the regime's destructive environmental policy, had degraded the natural and urban ecosystem, turning northern Cyprus into a low-grade tourist zone.
These matters, along with the question of Greek properties in occupied Cyprus, are presented in the 2007 documentary entitled «Attila Plays Golf».
After that first assignment to occupied Cyprus in 1997, Argyris Dinopoulos made two further documentaries bearing directly on the island's history.
One was on the history and the personality of Archbishop Makarios, with rare documents and testimonies, for the anniversary (also in 1997) of twenty years since his death.
The second, entitled «ELDYK 1974», presented the shattering testimony of the soldiers of ELDYK who in 1974 fought the Turks during their invasion of the island.
By 1998, when Argyris Dinopoulos made that documentary (Antenna), the ELDYK men were already between forty and fifty years old, and they gave testimony from the soul — and of facts about 1974 unknown until then.
What set Argyris Dinopoulos's journalistic work on Cyprus going, however, were the experiences of another dramatic month, August 1996, when as Antenna's reporter he covered the killings by the occupation forces of the young Greek Cypriots Tasos Isaak and Solomos Solomou.
