Reviews in the Press

A Precious Past Reclaimed
by Bejay Browne
3 August, 2014, Cyprus Mail, Nicosia

The tale of a village in the north whose Greek Cypriot residents were torn apart and displaced by the Turkish invasion has been eloquently and lovingly resurrected by two foreigners with only indirect links to the village.

http://cyprus-mail.com/2014/08/03/a-precious-past-reclaimed/

Bringing the Past to Life
by Jessica MacCormick
6 September 2009

Views from Phlamoudhi celebrates the return of artefacts excavated by an international team of archaeologists between 1970 and 1973 in the now occupied village.  Yet unlike most archaeological exhibits, this exhibition not only displays the remnants of long-distant pasts, it also celebrates the lives of those Phlamoudhi villagers who lived alongside and assisted the dig, now living in other places after their displacement in 1974 by the Turkish invasion.  Ian Cohn’s photographs document the village as it was during the dig. ...

http://www.jessicamaccormick.com/Review-Faces-of-Phlamoudhi-Bringing-the-past-to-life

Critical Perspectives

Dr. Robert S. Merrillees, past director of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, an authority on the art and archaeology of the Bronze Age Mediterranean and Near East, and a member of the original Phlamoudhi expedition, writes:

“For the Merrillees family, Helen, Antoinette and Dolla, two seasons of excavations at Phlamoudhi in the depth of summer in an isolated corner of Cyprus were an unforgettable experience. It can never be repeated.  ... the traditional way of life of the local inhabitants, and the tranquillity of the island in the early 1970s are gone forever. I have been back but it is not the same place.

What those halcyon days have left us with is a sense of academic achievement, lasting friendships and a nostalgia for times past, captured for posterity in Ian Cohn’s photographic record that evokes dormant but still vivid memories."

Dr Niki Katsaouni, Cultural Counsellor to the Cyprus High Commission of the UK offered these observations in her introduction to a lecture by Mr. Cohn in London:

“The Faces of Phlamoudhi are not just faces; they are personalities, that do not ever allow you to take them at random or speak generally about them: Lysandros Lysandrou is a shepherd ‘bon viveur’, who has probably one or two good tips in his sleeve to give you about life, and although Chrysostomos Serghiou seems rather reserved, he has unreservedly put on his best paisley print shirt very much in fashion these days at London’s Jermyn Street, Piccadilly, 37 years later!

So why are all these persons -I cannot call them just ‘people’- so archetypical as if they mean to imprint on the viewer their very existence and life and not just their looks? As a writer I can write whole stories about each one of them because each one of them oozes so much substance, you can be made to think up their individual, particular lives, the way they move about things they may say.”

Peter Loizos, emeritus professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and an author of numerous studies on a displaced community in Cyprus, has contributed an afterword to the book in which he writes:

“... I asked my daughter about this, and she is quite clear: ‘If I had to run from the burning house I would take the cat in one hand, and my photo albums in the other.’ ...

This is why the photographs taken by Ian J. Cohn of the Phlamoudhi villagers, in the summer of 1972  will mean so much to the people portrayed in them, because two years later, they, like so many other Greek and Turkish Cypriots, and people elsewhere  found themselves displaced by war, and they have not been able to re-posses their homes.”

ISBN: 978-0-615-28948-9

© 2009 Ian J. Cohn