After we fled south ‘they treated us like kilindjiri’

A family’s vivid memories of the first phase of invasion

The jets, the bombing, the perilous passage to safety with nothing more than what they were wearing, the pain of being separated from loved ones and torn from their homes and then a new kind of ordeal – being treated like a kilindjiro or ‘filth’ “just because we came over with nothing”.

The Cyprus Mail listened as a family’s women relived the events of the first phase of the Turkish invasion, on July 20, 1974.

At the time...