“This door, from the house of my late parents, Fanou and Giorgos Poleos, never shut anyone out,” Michalis told me. “It was always open to people, just as my mother Fanou’s heart was open: a hospitable woman, full of love for people and for our land.”

He added that he “looks at this door every day and is transported back to his childhood, to the happy times in Kato Deryneia, to the family home, to our roots”. Then he went on:

“It’s as if the people, the voices, the images and the memories of a life left behind on the other side, under occupation, come alive again before my eyes. My dream is that one day I’ll take this door and return it to where it truly belongs. It pains me that it sits so far from its rightful place, in the house that held it in its embrace for years.

“At the same time, I feel deeply grateful to have a piece of our family’s history close by, something I can share with my sisters, Ellada, Marina and Maria, and with my children. Sometimes I think about restoring it, looking after it and giving it pride of place in my home. But something inside me holds me back. Perhaps because if I give it a permanent place here, I’m afraid it would be like accepting that it will never go back to where it truly belongs. And I don’t want to stop waiting.

“I don’t want to let go of the hope of return. Until that day, this door will remain far more to me than a family heirloom. It will be the symbol of my love, my memory and my waiting. A door that never truly closed. A door waiting patiently, as we are, to open again. This time, in a free Kato Deryneia.”

“The person,” she goes on, “cannot shield themselves from an inner reality that becomes unbearable. They live with an intense fear of the self disintegrating or shattering into pieces, as if carrying the very ‘end of the world’ inside them. Delusion, or even destructiveness, can also be seen as ways of defending against a psychic reality that has become intolerable.”

I should stress here that Efstathiou is the founder and former director of ‘Ariadne’, a Nicosia hostel for the rehabilitation of people with mental health difficulties who come from Athalassa psychiatric hospital. In her note for the column she adds:

“Eighteen years of my working life were bound up with creating and running the ‘Ariadne’ hostel. When I set it up in 2001, my vision was a space halfway between the psychiatric hospital and the community, protected and stable, that could contain these people’s fears, anxiety and psychic disorganisation without cutting them off from life. The experience of those years taught me how healing a stable framework can be. Containment, stability and continuity can gradually act as an auxiliary ‘ego’, until the person is able to restore some of their ties with themselves and with others. That is why I always thought it important for ‘Ariadne’ to be within the city.

“People with psychosis need to walk the same streets as we do, to shop, to work when they can, to connect, to belong. Social reintegration cannot simply mean leaving the hospital.

I still remember a torn canvas from an exhibition of the residents’ art therapy work. To me it symbolised exactly this: a psyche may have suffered deep fractures, and yet the capacity for relationships, creativity and life can still be there.

The state has a duty to create specialised community facilities, intermediate spaces, supported living and real opportunities for rehabilitation. Otherwise, deinstitutionalisation will simply shift exclusion from the psychiatric hospital to the fringes of society.

A person with psychosis is not their diagnosis. How a society manages to hold them within the community ultimately shows how far it can bear the different, the fragile and the unfamiliar without casting it out.”

Kyriakos was 76, Stathis 81 and Savvas 78. All three had emigrated to London in the 1960s, when they were around thirty. All three had been small children in the pastoral, backward Cyprus of colonial rule, and they often told me how hard those early years had been. Savvas in particular, who if I remember rightly came from the occupied village of Prastio in the Mesaoria, once described how brutal his father had been. He was hard on the boy and, of course, on his mother, all to get through the gruelling daily farm work that men, women and children shared back then.

It was a time of utter wretchedness. Families were held together by a kind of tough love, built on discipline and on obedience: the young to the old, women to men. The men felt the weight of colonial oppression bearing down on them, and in turn passed it on to their wives and children.

Savvas’s father saw school as a waste of time that would rob him of an extra pair of hands. So instead of going to primary school, Savvas spent his days mucking out the pen where the family kept its few animals and taking them to graze. He couldn’t stand that life. At 14 he slipped away from home and village, set on reaching Varosha. He wandered through places he had never seen, slept in fields under the open sky, and lived, still just a boy, in a grocer’s shop with potato sacks for a bed. The rough and tumble of the marketplace toughened him early. But he managed to find work as a building labourer, rent a room and live life on his own terms, as far as his circumstances allowed.

“So many years have gone by, but telling you all this now, it feels like I’m back in my village and in Varosha,” old Savvas told me with a sigh…

I should say that she is a strong woman who held senior public posts for many years and still works while caring for her husband. “I feel terribly bitter and disappointed,” she told me, “because I love him very much. He’s the man I married, and we’ve been together for 50 years… and the last two or three years, since he was diagnosed with dementia, have been very hard for me. I still haven’t accepted it.”

I paused over the question of anonymity and asked why she was so set on it. “I don’t like people feeling sorry for my husband, or for me,” she said, and went on: “Lately, because of his illness, I work from home most of the time so I don’t leave him on his own. It may have started a little earlier, but I didn’t notice at first, because I was so busy with work.

“For example, he started forgetting his name day and thought it was mine. He started forgetting visits from close friends. Even though they came round very often, he’d ask them why they’d disappeared and stopped coming to see us… Twice a week he spends a few hours at a day care unit. He goes by taxi. He can no longer drive his own car, because he gets disorientated.

“His condition hurts me deeply, because my husband was a successful professional, a man of wide political, social and intellectual interests who was devoted to his work. He carried on working even after he retired, but he can’t do that now… and I know his work made him happy. I told him I hope God gives me strength and patience, and that as long as I live and breathe, I’ll be by his side…”

At 50, Alice is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She begins, gradually, to lose her sense of direction and her memory. She gets lost in her own city, in her own neighbourhood. In the end, she can’t even recognise her own children. The book and the film show, unflinchingly, the devastating effect the disease has on her family: her husband and her three children, as they face the changes in her and the need to care for her, now that she can no longer care for herself.

The film’s message is this: the patient remains themselves. They don’t lose their identity, their worth, their uniqueness as a human being, even when they no longer recognise anyone else. I spoke about the importance of solidarity, love and care from patients’ relatives and friends with neurologist and psychiatrist Dr Kyriakos Veresies, one of the founders, thirty years ago, of the Alzheimer’s Support Association. “A person’s worth,” he told me, “is determined neither by their age, nor by their physical or mental condition. An Alzheimer’s patient loses their bearings in space, time and among people, because all the relevant information their brain once held has faded away. They might, for instance, believe their daughter is their mother.

“In these cases, one or even two people are needed to care for the patient, day and night. That happens through the self-sacrifice of children and other relatives, because there’s very little help from the state.”

That last remark brought to mind a public intervention I heard at an event in Nicosia, from the son of a 92-year-old patient: “It is unthinkable that Cyprus, a member state of the European Union, does not have a single state structure for people with dementia. And it is unacceptable that the state leaves this problem to volunteers and to local authorities, and refuses to take up its own responsibilities.”

Former Movement of Ecologists – Citizens’ Cooperation leader Charalambos Theopemptou opened up about the adventures of his youth and student years, the years that planted the roots of his environmental conscience and everything he went on to do as an activist, while accepting the 2026 Democracy Award. The Centre for Socio-Political Thought “Politeia” presented him with the award on September 15, at an event held at the Press House in Nicosia.

But it was former MP Alexandra Attalidou who spoke first, opening her speech with this: “I’m going to let you in on something a lot of you probably don’t know. Charalambos is a whizz with an iron, so he’s never going to go hungry! And I’m not just being funny. When he went to London to study, he worked in a clothing factory to get through his studies. He studied while working, with stubbornness, independence and dignity.

And maybe that’s exactly why he never turned into one of those distant, untouchable politicians. He stayed the kind of man who can talk to you about an EU directive one minute, then be knee-deep in a rubbish dump, a felled tree or a beach under threat the next.”

Theopemptou himself backed this up a few minutes later, bringing up his student days ironing in London. But before that, he described his first memories of Pentadaktylos, in the years before the Turkish invasion, and then his studies in England: two experiences that, on the surface, had nothing to do with each other, but that, as it turned out, had everything to do with shaping the way he thinks politically.

He spoke at length about the stretch from Agios Ilarionas at the top of the mountain down to Lapithos, untouched, he said, by any human interference, a wonderful stronghold of wildlife back then, home to nothing but foxes, snakes, wild donkeys and eagles wheeling above the great cliffs. Then he added: “After the war in 1974, I went to London because I wanted a good time and to see as many rock bands as I possibly could. I was ironing dresses in a factory, and not long after, I ended up at a college in what was, back then, a pretty rough part of town, Hackney.

I kept working whenever I could, delivering dresses all over England, and so, after the beauty of Pentadaktylos, I fell in love all over again, this time with the forests and lakes of England and Wales. At college, I had a lecturer who had a huge impact on my life, especially when it came to activism, because she was the first activist I’d ever actually met.

She was in the Women’s Liberation Movement, organising marches in London for women’s rights. Put all those experiences together, and that’s what made me fall in love with nature and fight for it as hard as I possibly could.”

Dr Veresies, who chairs the Department of Social Sciences and Behaviour at PHILIPS University in Nicosia, started by telling me: “We need to separate three things we constantly muddle together: the historical event, the psychological trauma, and hostility towards the Other.

“Cyprus,” he added, “carries deep trauma on both sides. There were deaths, missing people, displacement, violence, lost property, the destruction of family and community ties.

“Those experiences don’t just disappear because the decades pass. But remembering a traumatic event doesn’t mean we have to hand down the hostility that got tangled up with it too. Memory itself isn’t the problem.

“A society has the right, and I’d say the duty, to remember injustices and crimes. But what matters isn’t only what we remember, it’s how we tell the story. One version of events can cast our own community purely as the victim, and the other purely as the perpetrator.

“A different version can hold onto the historical facts and who was responsible, while still recognising human complexity. That doesn’t mean treating everything as equal. It doesn’t mean forgetting who did what. It means trying to separate historical truth from inherited hostility.”

I asked Dr Veresies to sum up his position, and he told me: “It comes down to a research question, rather than a final answer. What I want,” he added, “is to look at whether we can build a form of historical memory that tells the truth about the past, honours the victims, and keeps the historical record intact, without turning the other community into a permanent psychological enemy.

“In one line: memory without inherited hatred. That doesn’t mean we should forget. Quite the opposite. We need to remember better, with historical accuracy, not selective memory. Remember the dead and the missing, the people who lost their homes, the violence and the injustice. But we have to be very careful that the memory of the crime doesn’t turn into a legacy of hatred. Because the moment it does, the past stops being the past. It becomes a command for the future.”

So Hitler is back in the headlines. And once again, I found myself reaching for that extraordinary book, “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness,” by the German social psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980). In this forensic psychobiographical study, Fromm draws on Albert Speer (1905-1981), the architect and Nazi politician who stood closer to Hitler than any other figure in the regime, to make a striking point: Hitler’s real passion was architecture, not painting, a craft he had precious little talent for in any case. His paintings were a lifeless, dead extension of his own soul, and yet they now sell for eye-watering sums to anonymous, wealthy collectors, for reasons I suspect only a psychoanalyst could properly explain. As Fromm puts it: “Hitler’s fundamental lack of education drove him to systematically avoid inviting academics and other educated people into his office or his home, because a conversation with genuinely cultured minds would have threatened the entire edifice of his shallow knowledge. The one exception to this was Hitler’s relationship with architects, simply because he loved architecture, which seems to have been the only genuine interest in his life, outside himself, that wasn’t narcissistic and wasn’t an expression of destructiveness.”

Christina Wieland’s work is worth turning to as well. A Greek Cypriot psychoanalytic psychotherapist based in England, she wrote about the phenomenon of “inner fascism,” observing that “the absence of an inner world, the inner emptiness in Hitler, has been noted by many writers, including Ian Kershaw, who calls him a ‘non-person,’ Sebastian Haffner, who sees him as an ’empty man,’ and the psychoanalyst Walter Langer, who describes Hitler’s inner world as a void that he filled with Germany itself, since he felt love for no one and had neither friends nor family.”

It’s that same void, Dr Wieland argues, that lies behind the urge some now see stirring again: “The desire to destroy the entire world and rebuild it from nothing is unquestionably part of the fascist ambition.”

Dozens of speakers from Cyprus and abroad, academics and others, took part in the conference. And, of course, the start of the new school year, with pupils heading back to their desks yesterday after the summer break, made this a good moment to open up a conversation about school playgrounds across Limassol and the whole of the free areas (the government-controlled south): public spaces that sit locked up every single afternoon, as Vaskez put it.

What we’re left with, she added, is a kind of temporary wasteland: the school emptied out every afternoon and every holiday, especially over summer, at neighbourhood level. That’s a problem on two fronts. Technically, it feeds straight into the urban heat island effect. Socially, it deepens isolation within the neighbourhood itself.

She was clear that her talk, titled “Institutionalising Care: Can School Playgrounds ‘Cool’ the City and Strengthen Ties Between Citizens?”, forms part of an ongoing PhD research project. The project, focused chiefly on Limassol, looks at turning school playgrounds into “urban cool commons”: shared infrastructure for climate adaptation, social care and participatory governance, built for Mediterranean cities grappling with the twin crises of urban heat and social fragmentation.

As she put it, her research argues that the fenced-off, tarmacked school playground isn’t just a design failure. It’s a governance paradox. A public space is turned functionally private, through the very logic of control and protection meant to safeguard it, logic that ends up weakening the exact civic bonds it was supposed to protect.

Drawing on urban commons theory, the ethics of care, and frameworks of social innovation, Vaskez argues in her work that opening up school playgrounds, both physically and institutionally, amounts to an act of climate and social repair.

She closes with this: an institutional shift on the horizon, the transfer of school infrastructure management to municipalities in 2029, offers both an empirical opportunity and a theoretical challenge. Can care actually be institutionalised? Or does institutionalising it always end up hollowing it out?

Two men were left on the pavement. One was a homeless immigrant, and somehow he dragged himself back up despite the beating he’d taken. The other will never watch the sun come up over this city again. Not that morning. Not any morning. He lay there soaked in his own blood, put there by the boots and fists of the men who killed him, his expensive suit torn to rags, his leather wallet untouched in the inside pocket of his jacket. This wasn’t a robbery. It wasn’t, in any real sense, about anything at all, nothing except the sheer savagery of the men who took his life.

The report itself read like just another random crime, one more unlucky moment, skimmed by readers of the websites and papers that ran it and forgotten within minutes, filed away in that automatic reflex we’ve all developed for switching off, as though it were fiction, a forgettable film plot, some dull page torn out of a crime novel. But the man was married. He had two young daughters. That night, the last night, he’d left his house outside the city and driven in with his wife and girls for a family dinner at his brother’s. After the meal, he and his brother went for a drink, and while they stood waiting for a taxi home, they walked straight into a gang beating a stranger senseless in the middle of the street. He didn’t know the man on the ground. It had nothing to do with him. And still he ran at them. Still he shouted at them to stop. That was enough. They let the other man drop, bleeding, and turned on him instead, and beat him to death right there in the street.

He wasn’t playing the hero. This wasn’t some grand act of self-sacrifice. Call it a pointless death if you like. Point out, if you must, that his one act of decency saved a stranger’s life and cost him his own. He’s under the ground now regardless. Why did he wade into a fight that wasn’t his? If you could put the question to him, he’d probably tell you the truth: that in that moment, he did the only thing he could do. He stood up for someone who needed standing up for. And that was reason enough to make it his fight after all.