ECHOES OF THE DEAD: ANTAGONISTIC MEMORY REGIMES IN DIVIDED CYPRUS
Études balkaniques (Sofia) 2026, N 3, pp. 505-541
DOI: https://doi.org/10.62761/645.EB.LXII3.01
Julie Alev DİLMAC, ORCID 
Galatasaray University, Turkey
E-mail: jadilmac@hotmail.com
Ozker KOCADAL, ORCID
Cyprus International University, Northern Cyprus
E-mail: okocadal@ciu.edu.tr
Abstract: This article examines the antagonistic memory regimes structuring public life in divided Cyprus, focusing on how death and martyrdom sustain competing ethnonational narratives and hinder togetherness. Drawing on memory politics and necrogeography, it analyzes commemorative devices on both sides of the Green Line, including monuments, museums, ceremonies, martyr cemeteries, and toponymy. Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot regimes rely on selective narratives of violence that sacralize their own dead while marginalizing the suffering of the other. These parallel mnemonic configurations not only reflect division but actively reproduce it by embedding a rhetoric of death in everyday space and institutional practice. Through the continual reactivation of martyrs and dead persons as morally charged figures, past violence is rendered contemporaneous, producing suspended mourning and durable haunting. The absence of shared memory thus results from active mnemonic labor that hierarchizes victimhood and obstructs recognition of shared loss.
Keywords: Cyprus, memory, necrogeography, conflict, death