5 June 2025

On the occasion of the RoC’s censorship of (to the stones) we lent you our breath, and you whispered it back to the earth. The Greek Cypriot nationalist establishment, ever since it gained the monopoly of power, has always tried to control and discipline public discourse. Citing an undefined “national interest” and the “state of necessity”, it tries to define what can and can’t be said or done. As proven many times, “the national interest” is any politician’s career, built on the corpse of the Cyprus problem, it’s the business with golden passports and developers which go unhindered due to the lack of checks and balances in the status quo, it’s the exploitation of the pain of the victims of war, the neglection of Turkish Cypriots, who are supposed to be partners in the Republic of Cyprus, which the Greek Cypriot nationalist elite treats as its backyard. Arts and words have the capability to unmask the hypocrisy and power mechanisms. They offer the people tools of resistance against the dominant narrative. However, this is not done automatically. Individuals are behind every act and word, consciously using them to highlight marginalised and oppressed truths. It takes courage and political consciousness to take on the establishment, as every time a truth is being told, it goes after the ones who voice it. Arts can be the voice of power or they can be the voice of resistance. We stand with the latter. Examples of censorship against any expression that goes beyond the Hellenic Christian nationalist narrative vary. Here’s a few: There’s also a list of examples that highlights the hypocrisy of these same groups:  Partition is before our eyes and is about to bite our necks, while the nationalist elite still plays with words and calls for books to be censored. Even if partition becomes formally established, the people of Cyprus will continue enjoying this island together, away from anachronistic moral panics. History has shown that censorship efforts always fail.