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THEO PANAYIDES meets a woman whose life as a teacher has made her determined to bring all sides in Cyprus together to really engage

At one point in our conversation, Chara Makriyianni leans forward and gently brushes something off my forehead, some fleck or speck of dust (“There was smoke, and that thing got there,” she mumbles mysteriously). Later, she asks if I’d like a cushion – we’re sitting outside at Chateau Status, the elegant eatery in the Nicosia buffer zone – and re-arranges the surroundings so we can sit more comfortably. Later still, we talk about perceptions and labels, a subject close to her heart. She recalls the first time someone (her supervisor at Cambridge, where she was doing her Ph.D) referred to her as “an activist and supporter of democracy” – a label she doesn’t reject, it just felt weird to hear someone say that.

What label fits her most accurately (or perhaps least inaccurately)? “Now? ‘Mother’!” she says, and laughs. “I’m a mother,” she goes on – which is true, since she has a one-year-old son named Maximos Rigas, but she spreads her arms in a wide enfolding gesture to illustrate that it’s also true in a broader sense. “I tend to act like a mother in various areas,” muses Chara. “I’m too motherly sometimes. It might come off as too pushy sometimes...”

In between all this we talk about the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research, a multi-communal organisation of which she’s been President since 2005. Inevitably – despite making clear that the Association works collectively, by committee – she admits that “sometimes I compare [it] to a baby”, because she was among its founding members and has watched it grow over the past six years. Its biggest current project is perhaps the Home For Co-operation, now being constructed in the buffer zone (it’s due to open in May 2011), which will be an educational centre and – eventually – a school where the various communities can come together for instruction in Greek, English and Turkish. The donors (listed outside the construction site) are mostly Scandinavian, though the Cyprus government also made a contribution. “It took us three years to convince the UN” that the project was viable, admits Chara wryly.

There are various facets of her life contained in that factoid. The first is that Chara is committed to education: she’s a teacher by training and profession – her day-job is at the Pedagogical Institute in Nicosia – and indeed the Association aims not just to foster research on historical issues but also to train teachers, people who’ll be able to disseminate that research and engage in dialogue. The second facet is that Chara is hard-working and possibly quite stubborn, the kind of person who’d take endless meetings, draft proposals and make presentations till her project was approved. “I’m a person who gets easily excited,” she tells me. “And when I set my mind on something, I want it to be materialised.”

It helps that she looks quite striking, a bright-eyed 36-year-old with an oval face crowned by a flowing mane of dark hair. Her cheekbones are high, giving the oval an elegant suggestion of a diamond shape; when they make ‘The Chara Makriyianni Story’ she’ll obviously be played by Annette Bening. Her demeanour, as already mentioned, is gracious, verging on motherly. Again and again, she insists that she’s merely one of many activists working hard at the Association. Yet her CV runs to eight pages – an impressive bustle of peer-reviewed papers, edited collections and various presentations at conferences and seminars – and she’s not shy about listing academic accomplishments in conversation, pointing out for instance that she was “among the few” who got into the Pedagogical Academy back in the 90s, the first stage in a top-tier education that also included a Bachelor’s from Nottingham, an MA from the Institute of Education in London and the aforementioned Ph.D from Cambridge.

There’s a slight contradiction here – between the consensus-seeker and the high achiever, the liberal teacher embracing the philosophy that all points of view are equally valuable and the strong-willed woman striving for success. Chara herself seems aware of this, albeit not in so many words – and implicitly connects it to her childhood. “Being a woman who was brought up in Cyprus,” she begins, a little hesitantly, “I have to tell you that sometimes I come off as very… I don’t know… confident, or too optimistic”. She pauses, as if checking my reaction. “I might, sometimes. But it hasn’t always been the case.”

Chara’s parents are both teachers (her Dad’s now retired). Being a teacher was always her dream. But growing up was hard, because the family came from Famagusta and were uprooted by the invasion, when Chara was about the age her toddler is now. They fled with nothing, and she grew up in Larnaca with the trauma of loss and penury. “I remember those years,” she says. “We had absolutely nothing. I was ashamed to go to school – although I was one of the best students – because I had no shoes to wear and I had to borrow from my cousin, and the teacher would say ‘Why aren’t you wearing black shoes?’.” Pupils had to wear the school uniform of blue and white – but all Chara could afford was a grey ragged thing sewn by her grandmother.

Even worse was the psychological burden. Her father was a kind of role model for what she does now, a man from a mixed (Greek/Turkish) village who “was, let’s say, one of the activists of his own time” – and, though he found a job and bounced back, his dignity took years to recover. “I was brought up as a girl who had to be thrifty,” says Chara, and not just thrifty but self-effacing: “Don’t talk too much, because we’re refugees. Keep a low profile, because people don’t like refugees”. The official line is that refugees were welcomed with open arms, she says with a chuckle; the truth is a little more complicated. In many ways, refugees in ’74 were approached like immigrants today – “these people who are different, who are coming with their rags [‘bogalakia,’ she says in Greek], who want to take our jobs, who are starting to build restaurants and doing lots of jobs”. Chara felt the difference keenly: “I used to feel terrible when I had to queue to take milk – because refugees were allowed free milk”. At birthday parties, she always stood out like a sore thumb, always getting the dress code subtly wrong in her refugee duds. “I still get it wrong,” she smiles. “But now I don’t mind.”

Armchair psychologists might trace a direct line between those early years and the person she is now – especially her mix of assertive and low-key. She was always a high-flyer (not just academically; she was Pancyprian swimming champion for three years in the 80s), but took years to develop her voice and rise above those childhood inhibitions. “It was only when I did my Masters,” she admits, “that I understood that you don’t have to act like that. You don’t have to have a low profile, just because you’re a girl or you come from a particular background. You can express your point of view, and it’s as equal as everyone else’s.”

Maybe it also accounts for her philosophy, which is very much about plurality and a multitude of voices. A teacher should be a “facilitator”, the emphasis always on dialogue rather than authority. That’s why going from teaching to Historical Dialogue came naturally, she says – but pauses when I ask about the politics. “We don’t have affiliations to any political parties,” she replies carefully; the Association is only political in the ancient sense of ‘polis’, meaning contribution to Society in general. But doesn’t anything bicommunal automatically become politicised? “OK, then we should use the term that we’re working in a sensitive area,” she concedes. “That, yes.”

It is a sensitive area. When the Association recently held a conference to celebrate its sixth birthday, one local TV channel misunderstood the title – “Six Years On: What Does it Mean to Think Historically?” – and assumed they were talking about the Annan Plan. The mere fact that they have their office in the Ledra Palace (actually a modest prefab on the grounds of the Ledra Palace) and hold most of their events in the buffer zone is enough to put some people off, she admits. But not only are things changing – which they are, slowly – the more important point is that narrow issues of Greek-Turkish politics are almost irrelevant to Chara’s (and the Association’s) greater project.

The aim isn’t to promote rapprochement as such, she explains. “Many people think ‘Let’s get together, eat, drink, have fun, make friends’ – then they go home and continue working in their own spheres, without even considering other perspectives in their daily life.” Instead, what Chara and her colleagues hope to achieve is something deeper, a co-operation based not (just) on goodwill but critical thinking: “We would say Question what you hear, then Examine and Reflect,” she says – the point being for everyone to create their own “well-documented arguments”, allowing for a richer understanding of History. What she hopes for – eventually – is a whole grass-roots transformation where questioning becomes a way of life, not just questioning the claims of hardcore nationalists but also (for instance) the claims of supermarkets that Product X is the best on the market.

Chara Makriyianni, I suspect, is a teacher first and an activist second – because activists subscribe, almost by definition, to a narrow view of the world, whereas her own project is large and expansive. She’s very idealistic, I point out. “I’m very idealistic?” she repeats with a touch of exasperated irony. “Does that mean I’m a dreamer, that I’m out there?” Not at all, I add quickly, but the damage is done; she really doesn’t like being labelled. Maybe it’s down to her childhood again – the fact that she never quite belonged, always felt a bit of an outsider, so she now resists being boxed into this or that label. Or maybe it’s just because labels are inadequate.

Identity is fluid, says Chara – an argument against monolithic Greeks (or Turks) who insist on their national identity, but also against pesky journalists trying to pin a person down. “It’s a process,” she explains. “I’m a mother, I’m a teacher, I’m a woman, I’m a partner. I’m an Association activist. I’m somebody who cries when things go wrong sometimes.”

She’s a person who’ll rescue stray kittens found on the street – but also one who gets “extremely stressed”, her enthusiasm often shading into anxiety. In the mornings she’s a civil servant at the often-frustrating Pedagogical Institute, in the evenings (after Maximos is asleep) she schedules meetings in her activist capacity. Her partner is a social developmental psychologist – “His research inspires me” – specialising in contact hypothesis, the theory that people tend to shed their stereotypes after meeting the Other in the flesh. Her baby “changed my life but also brought new perspectives,” prompting her to think about her own childhood. Her life is like a prism made of many shards of glass, changing tone and brightness according to which shard one chooses to turn to the light – not unlike History itself, where the so-called facts change according to which perspective one chooses to adopt.

“You’re going to go home now,” sighs Chara Makriyianni. “You’re going to gather all this information. You’re going to add the information from the written material I’m going to give you – but what you’ll come up with is going to be your own synthesis, and it’s going to be called a Profile. Does that mean this is who I am? No. It’s just your interpretation, based on what we’ve discussed”. In a fluid world, the well-documented argument is king. “Question, Examine, Reflect.” Hey, I did my best.