The Hellenic Parliament Foundation for Parliamentarism and Democracy and the House of Representatives of the Republic of Cyprus co-organise the exhibition “Cyprus, 1974. Memory is the only homeland of humanity” and present it simultaneously in Athens and Nicosia. A major trilingual publication (Greek-English-Turkish) accompanies the exhibition.

In her Foreword to the project, the President of the House of Representatives, Anita Demetriou is very revealing:

“Half a century after 1974, the painful history of our country cannot be forgotten. It is documented. It is witnessed by thousands of refugees, prisoners, captives, families of the fallen, murdered civilians, missing persons, by thousands of people who lived through the horrors of war and by all of us who live under the ongoing illegal Turkish occupation in a divided homeland.

Fifty years on, the trauma of the crime against Cyprus, the coup and the Turkish invasion still remains open and the past suffocates the present and every July it is displaced. We reflect on the devastation and destruction, but also on the determination with which the state and especially the tireless and disobedient Cypriot people, who wore black in death, vigorously took back their lives from the beginning and rebuilt the country, the south-easternmost tip of Europe.

This path to devastation and from devastation back to the impressive transformation of life in the long-suffering Cyprus is documented in the exhibition organised by the House of Representatives and the Hellenic Foundation for Parliamentarism and Democracy in Nicosia and Athens. The common goal is to preserve the militancy and collective memory as a vector of historical consciousness of the Cypriot people, who have never ceased to fight for their right, freedom, peace and the reunification of their homeland. They have never ceased to demand conditions of security, prosperity and progress in their country. He never stopped building a better tomorrow for all, Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots, Maronites, Armenians and Latins, proving, in the most adverse conditions, the words of the first Greek Nobel Prize-winning poet George Seferis, that “Cyprus is a place where the miracle still works”.