Main concern is reunification of the island – government spokesman

The main goal is a solution to the national problem that provides for an independent and sovereign state, Government spokesman Constantinos Letymbiotis said on Sunday.

Speaking at the memorial service of the Eoka 1955-59 fighters, Letymbiotis said the government is “working for the end of the occupation, the reunification of our country through the achievement of a peaceful solution to the Cyprus problem”.

This solution should be based on the relevant UN resolutions and Security Council resolutions and be in line with the principles and values of the European Union, he added.

This is what the “legacy” honoured on Sunday dictates according to the government spokesman.

“We have a historical debt to our great ancestors, but we also have perhaps a greater debt to our children,” he said.

Noting how the country has been suffering the consequences of the Turkish invasion for the past 49 years, Letymbiotis said the struggle of Eoka fighters to liberate the island from the British rule should become an example for us in the present day.

“It is our duty, therefore, to make this historical memory an experience, the need for history to meet the historicity of need, the imperative for unity to be transmuted into redemption,” he said.

People write their history not only to narrate its past, Letymbiotis said, but to declare what they want to be in the future.

Chloraka community, he said, can “rightly feel proud” of its immense contribution to the ethnic liberation struggle of our people against the British colonialists. It was here, he said, that the beginning was made and “the flame of freedom was quickly spread throughout the island”.

A little further down, in Alyki salt lake, the fighters Kostas Leonidas, Nicholas Mavronikola and Michalakis Papantoniou received the leader Georgios Grivas Digenis on 10 November 1954, who arrived secretly in the ship Siren to take him to the house of Nicholas Azina, he noted.

The memorial service of the Eoka fighters and Georgios Azinas was held at the Panayia Chrysohematousis in Chloraka, Paphos. After the end of the memorial service, a wreath laying ceremony followed.