Returning to the turbulent history of Cyprus

‘I want to break the wall between us and the Greek Cypriots’ says local author of second novel

In Meeting Sister, Turkish Cypriot novelist Metin Murat returns to the characters first met in his debut book, 2022’s The Cresent Moon Fox. But this time round the focus is on Sandy, the son of the first book’s main protagonist Zeki, and Zeki’s best friend Aydin. Additionally, Murat brings to life Defne, Zeki’s illegitimate daughter, offspring of his one-night stand with Fatma, a young woman from Bamyakoy, the fictional Turkish Cypriot village where much of the first novel is set.

While The Crescent Moon Fox focused on what was unfolding in Cyprus before independence and in the initial years of the Republic’s existence, Meeting Sister takes a much more contemporary angle. The novel opens around 2008, the beginning of the international financial upheaval which forces a near bankrupt Sandy, half Turkish Cypriot and half British, to start working for Aydin who runs a network of seedy but extremely lucrative businesses all over the UK. Sandy learns about the existence of Defne and starts searching for her. When he finally locates Defne, she brings far more than new family links. Sandy finds himself questioning everything that he had taken for granted up until then. Their encounter changes the course of his whole life.

The fates of Defne, Sandy and Aydin become increasingly intertwined – at first in London and then in Cyprus, where all eventually return to live. And just as in the ancient dramas, no matter the decisions they attempt to make or how they strive to change the cards life dealt them, there is nothing they can do to prevent the island’s turbulent history interfering with the lives they have returned home to try to build.

When Murat’s first novel was released through Greek Cypriot publishing house Armida, he said a primary reason for having become a writer was the realisation “how little there was written about Turkish Cypriots anywhere and how one-sided it was”. This was what motivated him. “I write because I want to break the wall between us and Greek Cypriots. I want to remove this wall that stops them from seeing us as humans. I wanted to break down that wall through literature.” Lest that gave the wrong impression, he quickly pointed out that he had written his book also “for his own people… to celebrate them.” His aim was to ensure that “people who didn’t know anything about us see us and understand us better.”

Three years later, the 59-year-old is not as optimistic as he was then. Had his first book achieved those lofty goals? Laughing, he shakes his head, acknowledging he was perhaps naively “idealistic” at the time. Every first-time writer “has the right to be an idealist,” he says, but admits he failed to break the wall.

His second book deals more with a world that he fears is disappearing. It is “about nostalgia” as Turkish Cypriots who knew the island pre-1974 are somwhat similar to the last Mohicans, their “culture finished… a minority in our own country.”

British-born and France-based, Murat in his non-writing life is a successful businessman, and like Meeting Sister’s protagonist Sandy is half Turkish Cypriot. His father Murat Akiner was one of the few Turkish Cypriot diplomats in the newly independent Republic of Cyprus’ foreign ministry. Born in Platanissos, at the edge of the the Karpas penisula, Murat senior died in 1965 in a car crash in Turkey that also killed Murat’s grandmother, step-grandfather and a cousin. The only survivor was his seven-month-pregnant, half-Welsh, half-Bengali mother Shirin Akiner, who gave birth to Metin two months after the accident.

Being so tragically displaced from his own country without an opportunity to live here until much later in life inevitably had a lasting effect on Murat’s writing. He resists any suggestion that his books are autobiographical but admits to exploring themes that influenced his own existence.

Just like Murat’s father, in his novels Zeki, Sandy’s father, dies just before his son is born in 1963 in Famagusta port, shot by a Greek Cypriot nationalist. Bamyakoy, the village where Zeki and Aydin come from, is not Balalan (Platanissos) but a reader familiar with the latter would recognise some of the features. The same applies to many other details, anecdotes and descriptions included in the two novels. Murat insists most are his own creations but others carry the seeds of stories he heard in childhood and/or stem from what he came across while doing his background research.

Despite dealing with the violent years of intercommunal troubles of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Murat’s first novel offered some hope for the island’s future. His latest is much more pessimistic, not least because, although the action takes place in the 21st century, some of the same hatred still prevails.

Two scenes stand out in this respect – first when Sandy and Defne cross by car to the south on October 25 to find themselves caught up in the midst of Elam protests, and secondly when they are attacked in the north by a group of Grey Wolves nationalists.

Does this mean that for him and his readers that despite so many years passing, somehow nothing has changed?

“My role as a writer is to challenge people and get them to think about things,” says Murat. “I am here to articulate Turkish Cypriot voices, and yes, my feeling is that there is no hope on this island any more. We are dying just like my village Balalan is dying. There were 700 Turkish Cypriots living there in the 1950s. Now there are 15. People are dying, houses are empty, young people are not coming…”

Meeting Sister by Metin Murat is published by Işık Kitabevi. Available in paperback, available to download and read as an e-book from Amazon and other major bookstores. Readers in Cyprus can also pick up a copy from Moufflon Bookshop in addition to Işık Kitabevi and Best Seller in the north