Turkish Cypriot academic and former Akel MEP Niyazi Kizilyurek paid an unusually candid tribute on Monday to the late publisher and restaurateur Vasos Ftochopoulos who died last week at the age of 76.

Writing under the title ‘I will not say go to hell for you’, Kizilyurek described Ftochopoulos as “a personality unique in its kind”, whose rhetoric he characterised as a form of “anarcho-nationalism”.

He recalled that Ftochopoulos dismissed the Republic as “a farce” and branded Greek Cypriots who backed a federal solution as “Turks who speak Greek”.

Ftochopoulos had likewise accused the majority of Greek Cypriots of having abandoned the cause of Enosis, as “Neo-Cypriot parasites.”

Kizilyurek described his first encounter with Ftochopoulos in 1988, visiting the restaurant Aegeon against the advice of friends and finding a banner which read the infamous slogan ‘the only good Turk is a dead Turk’ hanging inside.

The restaurant, set within a courtyard inside the walls of old Nicosia, drew crowds on summer evenings, with Kizilyurek himself admitting “he made excellent souvlaki.”

He noted the irony that Greek Cypriots who supported federation, precisely the people Ftochopoulos derided as “parasites,” were nonetheless “his best customers,” suggesting they may have felt “a twinge of guilt for not being true patriots like him.”

Kizilyurek also commented that Ftochopoulos, as a refugee from Yialousa in Karpasia, “believed he had every right to harbour hatred toward Turks.”

He wrote that he told Ftochopoulos the slogan echoed the Nazi era phrase ‘the only good Jew is a dead Jew’ and that he should be ashamed of himself.

The banner was later taken down, Kizilyurek recalled, adding that he was not the only person to have objected to it.

The animosity between the two persisted for decades, for after Kizilyurek published his book Oliki Kyprosin 1990, Ftochopoulos began publicly attacking him and later dismissed the documentary Our Wall, which Kizilyurek made with Panikos Chrysanthou in 1993, as “Turkish propaganda.” 

Despite the animosity between them, Kizilyurek recalled that Ftochopoulos had written “go to hell” on the death of former president and Akel leader Demetris Christofias, a gesture he said he would not repeat in return.

“I, despite all this, will not tell you to go to hell,” he wrote, closing his tribute with “may you rest in peace, and condolences to your family and those who love you.”