Do you remember where you were?

Where were you when 9/11 happened and how did you find out about the attacks? We spoke to Cypriots who recalled and reflected on how they felt on that fateful day

 

Cypriot journalist Maria Myles was due to land in New York on the morning of September 11, 2001, to cover the events at the UN Generaly Assembly – but instead her flight was diverted to Boston.

“My flight was scheduled to land at JFK airport (in New York) around the time that the attacks took place,” Myles told the Sunday Mail.

“About half an hour before the attacks we were told that we would be landing but ten minutes after that announcement we were told that there had been some ‘activity’ in New York and we would land in Boston instead,” she said.

The attack which claimed the lives of 2,997 people happened on a Tuesday, at 8:46am in New York (3:46pm in Cyprus).

Officials boarded Maria’s plane once it landed in Boston and told the passengers not to worry but made no mention of the attacks.

She describes an eerie entry into the US at Boston airport – a near empty space populated solely by police and airport officials.

“I asked a police lady ‘what is going on, is there anything happening?’ and she turns around, upset, and says ‘have you not heard? The World Trade Center is no more,’” Myles recalled.

A couple of hours later she saw on a TV at a hotel in Boston the true scale of the destruction.

And looking back on it, 20 years later – what’s that like?

“Each time I think of it there’s a sense of how close I came to escaping death, I’m not saying I came as close to death as other people did but…,” she trailed off, wondering.

And was she scared of flying after that?

“Well immediately after the attacks there were stringent security measures everywhere, absolutely everywhere, I was cautious.”

But she seemed destined to cover the UN General Assembly in New York and did so two months later, in November.

Vicki Andreou was born in New York and told us that she remembers the World Trade Center being built – later even working a temp job in the WTC complex one summer in the 1980s.

“My first thought when I heard that a plane had hit one of the towers was ‘oh God, 50-60,000 people worked in that complex,” she told us.

“From my time in New York I just knew how busy that area was – at rush hour if you dropped something on the floor, forget about it, it was gone,” she said.

And while mobile phones were available in 2001, their use was not as ubiquitous as they are now – so how did Andreou find out of the attacks?

As it turns out, she was probably more plugged in than most other people – working at a PR firm in Nicosia which had a major airline account.

She was emailing her sister at the time who informed her that a plane had just struck one of the towers.

“Back in those days you didn’t have YouTube or social media for news on the computer but someone from a few floors upstairs called me and said that it was on TV – I didn’t even know there was a TV in the offices – and so we’re all standing around this little TV watching it,” Andreou said.

A while later she went back down to get on with work but received a call from her eight-year-old son: ‘Mum, something terrible has happened.’

“Then someone came down and told me that one of the buildings has just collapsed and a plane has crashed into the Pentagon,” she said, adding “when they said that the building had collapsed that was just unreal.”

And how did she explain the situation to her young son?

“I said that this is very unusual, that some very, very bad people did something but that it will never happen again,” she explained.

The senseless loss of life is still raw for Andreou, particularly in the city of immigrants in which she grew up.

The city’s diverse background and history is partly illustrated by the fact that the only building not part of the original World Trade Center complex to be destroyed in the immediate aftermath was the St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.

It is being rebuilt as a shrine and was set to have opened on September 11.

And as people across the world tried to make sense of the unimaginable there were young children with even less understanding.

Andrew Panayiotou was just six years old when the attacks happened, out on a family trip.

“It’s a bit of a blur but I remember we rushed back home and saw some scenes on TV but none of it really made sense,” he said.

“I had no context to it really, was this something that happened regularly? And destruction like that is hard to quantify at that age I think,” he explained.

Panayiotou told us that he thinks that he may remember the haunting scenes of ‘the falling man’, but he can’t be sure.

“It actually wasn’t until the next day at school that it really sunk in, because until then it was just within my household, but seeing my teacher and other kids talking about the same event helped me understand the scale of it, its significance,” Panayiotou told the Sunday Mail.

“I remember the teacher bringing in a small TV and showing us the news, until then we had never watched TV in class before I don’t think and certainly not the news – that’s when it was sort of put into perspective of ‘this is something extraordinary’,” he said.