President Nikos Christodoulides was among the attendees of Wednesday morning’s memorial service to those who died during the 1974 coup d’état at Nicosia’s Saints Constantinos and Eleni church, with Archbishop Georgios and House President Annita Demetriou also in attendance.

The service’s memorial speech was delivered by former Edek MP Kostis Efstathiou, who said tribute was being paid to “those who remained forever young, the proud guardians of the borders of freedom and democracy”.

He said that those who died during the coup were “the first of the twin calamities and the Turkish invasion which followed”, before describing the coup itself as an “unforgivable and criminal act which was tantamount to treason”.

The coup, he said, “gave Turkey the pretext it was seeking to intervene in Cyprus”, and that “the crime was not only directed against the constitutional order, but also against democracy, legality, and the Cypriot people”.

“The worst thing is that it turned Greek against Greek, arming and ordering one to turn against his brother, his fellow villager, and his friend,” he said.

He then added that those who died in the coup “should be honoured with deeds and not just words”, and that “the monuments bearing their names are a constant reminder of the debt owed to historical memory”.

Moving onto the matter of the Cyprus problem as it currently stands, he said that “Turkey seeks the Turkification of Cyprus”, and that “honouring the dead of the coup and the invasion requires resistance to these plans”.

“We must prioritise the fight for liberation and shore up our defence – democratically, nationally, politically, spiritually, culturally, and, of course, in terms of our armed defence,” he said,

On this front, he said that “there can be no sustainable solution which is unjust, illiberal, and undemocratic”, and that “the Cypriot people must not give up their guaranteed rights”.

“It is not the renunciation of the right to freedom which constitutes realism, but its assertion. The goal should be a free and democratic Cyprus for all Cypriots, without dividing lines, in conditions of equality and egalitarianism,” he said.