Andrea Demetriou’s poems are the voice for those who will not forget

 

A poet, a photographer, a singer who might otherwise have written about existential issues, beauty, eros or music, “is irrevocably marked by the tragic memories of the Turkish invasion; she writes in order to cure the trauma of childhood,” notes Vassilis Vassilikos, author of the novel Z. “But she also wants to cry out to the world: ‘This is what happened to us — we left only with our summer T-shirts’…”
That August night when soldiers came and woke Andrea’s family up at 1.30am the morning, they were yelling: “You must leave at once, the Turks are coming.” Everybody was in a panic; everyone wanted to get onto her family’s big truck, as not many people had cars then. And while everyone else was concerned about saving their lives, Andrea was worried about her animals.
“I begged my father to make room for them,” Andrea remembers.
Galakti, her baby lamb, was later saved by a Turkish-Cypriot friend, who received bottles of whisky from her father every year in thanks. She took Kloklo, her chook, in her arms that night, but Eta, her pig, was too big to carry — and like so much else they left behind, disappeared into the folds of history.
Andrea was not yet a poet, but the seed had been planted. Her pen would grow from that wound.
“It hasn’t shaped my poetry; it is my poetry,” she corrects.
Born in Morfou, “where no one can be born anymore,” she stresses with sadness, her early childhood was paradise — until it wasn’t…
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