Yesterday’s piece, and the reminder of that famous David Halberstam line — that journalism had given him a wonderful life, everything he wanted, and that he was glad to have been a reporter — brought to mind Cyprus’s first female journalist, Maroula Violari-Iakovidou. She belongs to the same generation as Halberstam, born in 1937. “Journalism gave me a beautiful journey, a thrilling journey,” she told me in an interview I conducted a few months ago, ahead of a tribute event organised by the Union of Cyprus Journalists to mark her 70 years in the profession. “If I were born again, I would do it all over again.”
Mrs Violari-Iakovidou begun working in journalism in the summer of 1955, before she had even turned 18 — one day after graduating with distinction from the Pancyprian Gymnasium.
That iron-willed generation of journalists — most of them born in the 1930s, who started their professional journey covering the EOKA struggle of 1955–59 — was honoured by the Cyprus Parliament in 2011. Among them: Fanos Konstantinidis, Andreas Hatzipapas, Giorgos Leonidas, and Alex Efthyvoulou (born 1927). “You were the first to live through the agonies and the longings of our then-newborn Republic,” said the then-Speaker of Parliament, Marios Garoyian. “You were there during the critical decade of the 1960s, you were there when the Turkish invasion came, there at every effort to resolve the Cyprus problem, and there when we entered the European Union.”
“The people honoured today by Parliament,” said Antonis Makrides, then-president of the Union of Journalists, “can rightly be called the most authentic narrators of the events and developments that stamped the history of Cyprus in the second half of the twentieth century. They lived through the defining moments of this country and, pen in hand, became the recorded witnesses of those events.” He added: “However many universities you attend, however many books you read, what you take away will always fall short — in weight and in worth — of the experience of a journalist already seasoned by fire. Experience is worth more than all the professors in the world put together.”
That experience, of course, came at a price. What Antonis Makrides described encompassed countless days and sleepless nights of dread, anxiety, and psychosomatic exhaustion — and that was just as observers of a society paralysed by partisan passion, factional fanaticism, intercommunal hatred, the terror of death, and the uprooting of entire communities. Because those old colleagues of ours were not merely “eyewitnesses” and “authentic narrators” of heroic deeds. They were the ones who absorbed the full toxicity of a turbulent age.
