This Sunday, 19 July, the church of Agios Andreas in the Oroklini refugee settlement will hold the annual memorial service for Themis Dimitriadis, a familiar, much-loved face from my childhood in occupied Kato Deryneia, who was killed fighting during the Turkish invasion of 1974. He was a little older than me, born in 1956, and was finally laid to rest ten years ago, in 2016.
But he wasn’t 60. He was 18. Just as he was that terrible July, when he found himself with his comrades of the 181st Field Artillery Squadron in a valley between Syngchari and Bellapais, near Kyrenia, fighting what the then Commissioner for the Presidency, Fotis Fotiou, called in his eulogy an “epic, uneven” battle against the Turkish forces closing in around them.
“The men of the Squadron,” he said, “put up fierce resistance in an uneven battle that dragged on for around three hours. The attackers held every advantage, having boxed the Squadron in on all sides in a horseshoe formation. A number of the 181st’s men gave no sign of life. Among them, Themis Dimitriadis, his name added to the long roll call of the missing.”
Part of Themis’s remains were finally recovered decades later, in a mass grave near the site of that battle, as part of the exhumation programme run by the Committee on Missing Persons. And so the 18-year-old corporal was moved off the list of the missing, and onto the list of the fallen.
“With a grief that cuts to the soul,” said Fotis Fotiou, “we bid our final farewell today to Themis Dimitriadis, who fell as a hero, son of Charilaos and Paraskevi, his beloved parents, who left this life with open wounds in their souls for their missing child.”
I go back now to something I once wrote, a column about that last summer of childhood and adolescence before the invasion took it from us. In it, I’d described the thing about Themis I admired most: how he ran. “He’d leave us all standing, at some ridiculous speed,” I wrote, “while we were still only halfway there, he’d already vanished up ahead like the wind. They tell us he’s missing. Nobody knows if he’s among the dead, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he’d outrun even death itself, and got away.”
It took 42 years to settle the matter. Themis did not outrun death. He didn’t get away. In what turned out to be his final race, he chose to stay, and he did not run.
