As I wrote yesterday, the two books by Nicosia-based author and researcher Stefanos Evangelidis, a lawyer and member of the Society of Greek Writers in Athens, take female criminality in colonial Cyprus as their subject. But Evangelidis is adamant about one thing above all: in those years, “the woman in Cyprus was first and foremost the victim, not the perpetrator.”
As he puts it, the books “explain to the reader what drove certain women to take another human being’s life. Beyond the interest these stories hold (morbid, some might say), they surface a great deal that gives us a vivid picture of life in Cyprus in the first half of the twentieth century.”
On the period before, Evangelidis writes: “For the women of Cyprus, the Ottoman period was a dark age. Search the texts from the early centuries of Turkish rule as hard as you like; you won’t find a single mention of women, as if Cyprus were populated by men alone. Not a word about what they did. Nobody counted them for anything. Women were kept hidden in the depths of the house, out of sight of male eyes… The British arrival in 1878 changed a great deal for Cypriot society, and above all for women’s lives. The bolted doors of the home swung open, and women, after centuries shut away, began to step out of what had been house-prisons. That new freedom brought situations Cypriot society had never seen before. But the road to women’s emancipation was still long and rough going.”
The author’s conclusion is blunt: “The first thing that helped emancipate Cypriot women was education and work. Around 1915, the first voices against the oppression of women were heard, from the earliest feminists, Cyprus’s own women schoolteachers. But in the villages especially, women remained under the thumb of fathers and husbands, hemmed in by customs and attitudes that suffocated their lives. Right up to the 1940s, educating women still wasn’t seen as important; a woman’s destiny was marriage, often forced on her from her early teens, and childbearing. Until then, girls were kept hidden away at home once again, to shield them from the foreign… temptations supposedly threatening their virtue! The mindset of the father or husband as lord and master lived on, even under British law: a pater familias who answered to no one.”
