You may think there is nobody alive to recall the assassination of Antonios Triantafyllides. Well you would be wrong. Antonis Pitrakkou, a grand old man and my wife's uncle by marriage, remembers it well. Uncle Antonis is a great storyteller. One day I was telling him about my research on the assassination of Triantafyllides. At length he stopped me and asked: ‘Although I’m from Rizokarpasso, you know I was born in Aglanja?’ I said: ‘yes I know’. He then leaned forward and recounted:

We were both astonished and it is amazing that a migrant to Adelaide, Australia, in 1948, and now 94, could recall, yet, as he said: ‘how could I forget’. The fear and shock in the Greek Cypriot community were palpable. And the comment ‘our best one’, shows that uncle Antonis's father, an ordinary worker, considered Triantafyllides the best politician going around.

The way the past is remembered and forgotten are integral to forming state-controlled national histories and identities. The degree of state control depends on the character of the state and the level of nation-building that elites perceive is necessary. The control is greatest in postcolonial societies that maintain the rage against the colonial authority and in divided societies – Cyprus is both. I have previously shown how one of the largest enlistments in the British forces during the Great War, the Cypriot Mule Corps, was silenced from Cypriot historical consciousness and historiography.