Peter Loizos

Today’s post is dedicated to the distinguished anthropologist Mr Peter Loizos who passed away in 2012. The photos presented here were taken by Peter himself during his visits to Cyprus in the 1960s and early seventies. They feature in his book ‘Grace in Exile’ which is available at Moufflon Books in Nicosia or online through Amazon. The photos fall into two sets. The first set of photos were taken in the years between 1968 and 1973 in his father’s village of Argaki near Morphou. At the time, the villagers that Peter met were mostly content and living fruitful and prosperous lives. The second set of photos were taken in 1975, a year after the Turkish invasion that forced all the Greek inhabitants of Argaki to flee their beloved village and bid goodbye to their Turkish Cypriot friends and neighbours. These Greek refugees told Peter that they had just lived through one of the hardest winters of their lives. “We left our village thinking we’d be gone for only a few days,” they told him. “We didn’t think we would be gone for this long.” Peter Loizos was born in South London on the 17th May in 1937. His mother Ruby Ahern was Irish and his father Prokopis Papaloizo was Greek Cypriot from the village of Argaki. Unfortunately, his parent’s divorced when he was just one and half years old and Peter was raised by his mother who as a single mother struggled to make ends meet. At one time she was a cook and a housekeeper and managed two hotels in Scotland. In 1940, during the London Blitz, Peter and his mother moved to Cornwall where she became a clerk and later ran a tobacconist / newsagency in Torquay. Every time his mother found a new job – they would move house. By the time Peter turned ten, he had attended ten different schools. Peter only saw his father (Prokopis) twice as a child. Once when he was aged ten during a brief visit to the Brixton Library and a second time when he was sixteen at a court hearing regarding child support. Prokopis gave no financial support to his wife and son except briefly after a court order in 1953. Peter did not socialise in his father’s Cypriot world. He was Greek by name, but spoke no Greek. He did however choose to study classical Greek at Dulwich College in 1967 after his first visit to Cyprus. Peter’s father was born Prokopis Papaloizou in 1906 in the mixed village of Argaki in Cyprus. He was the son of the village priest and later became a primary school teacher. He was one of the first Cypriots to join the Cyprus Communist Party when he was in his early twenties. Prokopis made a hasty escape from the island in 1930 after getting in trouble with the Greek Orthodox Church. He went to England where he lived a rather vagabond life, mostly unemployed and with a gambling addiction to greyhound racing. He never returned to Cyprus. After Peter’s mother died of cancer in 1966, he decided to track down his father. The meeting with his father was brief but fruitful. Peter was inspired to travel to Cyprus by boat to discover his cultural heritage and to meet his father’s family and his own undiscovered relatives. Not knowing a word of Greek, Peter arrived at the Limassol quayside in the summer of 1966. He was met by a brigade of male relatives who promptly whisked off to the village of Argaki, (his ancestral home) with much pomp and celebration. Peter’s father had alerted the relatives in Cyprus by letter that his only son was coming to meet them. Peter recalls his experience in an interview conducted back in 2009. “I think it was September, so it’s hot and dry, and I look out from the boat as we approach Limassol harbour and it looks like a desert. Everything’s parched and bleached. When we land, I am greeted by a young policeman who happens to be my cousin. After jumping the queue, I am greeted by more cousins in the carpark. I can’t believe it. They’ve come all this way, I mean a three-hour drive, in the heat to collect me off a boat. Which for a man who’d had no brothers and sisters and hardly any cousins – this was pretty amazing. Emotionally overwhelming. Remember, I had just lost my mother and now I was about to be adopted by my new Cypriot family.” Despite his lonely childhood and upbringing, Peter Loizos now found himself surrounded and embraced by his new extended family in Argaki. “It was amazing,” he states. “I mean the food itself was amazing; delicious, generous and unfamiliar. Lots of strong drink served with it. Lots of toasting. You don’t drink at will in Cyprus; you drink in rounds and toasts. So, if I raise my glass, everybody raises their glass. Or if they raise their glass, I must raise my glass. There are also lots of speeches. Speeches of welcome. They know my father, or at least they know who my father was before he left the village 35 years ago. But they don’t know me.” After his six-week adventure in Cyprus, Peter returns to England to study modern Greek and he enrols as a graduate student at the The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). There he meets professor Raymond William Firth, a world-renowned ethnologist who convinces him to conduct his PhD research in his father’s village and to focus on how property and dowries affect marriage. So in 1968, Peter returned to Cyprus and lived rent-free in Argaki. The Research Council even provided him with a car to drive which would later raise the suspicion of the EOKA people. “In Cyprus it was a great advantage to have a car,” he later said. “But it also meant I was suspected, in certain lunatic political circles, of being a British spy, because how could a PhD student afford to have a car?” Peter spent almost two years conducting research in Argaki. He conducted over 200 interviews, collected thirty genealogies and did a survey that involved all 314 households in the village. “I was exhausted,” he wrote. “I was working ten hours a day, six days a week and I felt the locals were getting fed up with me and my questions and I was getting fed up with the task.” Peter only interviewed the Greek inhabitants of Argaki. He explains in an interview that following the 1967 military coup in Athens he realise that he was under the watchful eye of the militants of EOKA who were anxious to accuse him of being a British spy or a Turk-lover. “The EOKA people sent me messages saying, ‘We don’t want you to talk to so and so or write anything about the Greek Military Government.’ I was nervous. I kept looking over my shoulder. I decided it was safer not to involve the Turkish Cypriot minority in my research for fear I would put their lives (and my own) at risk.” Due to the unstable political situation in Cyprus at the time Peter shifted his focus from the village customs (relating to dowry, property and marriage) to the political agendas that were at play during his stay. “A huge influence of my fieldwork was the military dictatorship coming to power in Greece in 1963 which cast a long dark shadow over everything in Cyprus. I was working in a very tense terrain and always under observation. You know those bastards; those crazies were everywhere. The tentacles of EOKA reached right down into the village coffee shops and people were eavesdropping on the conversations being had. There were people spying on other people and checking what newspapers people were reading, and making lists and passing the lists to Greek military intelligence. It was tense.” Peter returned to England in 1973. He was unaware that the following year the political situation in Cyprus will escalate with deadly and life changing consequences. The people he met and interviewed in Argaki were now refugees. When Peter returned to Cyprus in 1975, he tracked down and found many of the refugees from Argaki. Most had struggled to accept their displaced status. Peter’s experience with these people will have a lasting effect on him and his research forever. Peter submitted his thesis to the University of London in 1972. It was titled ‘Social Organisation and Political Change in a Cypriot Village’. He then joined the department of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics where he lectured for thirty years. Peter Loizos married three times. He died on the 2nd March in 2012. He was 75 years old. His widow Gill Shepherd, survives him with three children. I am currently skim-reading Peter’s thesis of around 146,000 words. In my next post I will share some of the most important ethnographical findings and information that he was able to extract from the elderly people he interviewed in Argaki during the late 1960s. As much as I find his political observations and fieldwork interesting, I will only focus on what the village was like pre-1960. WHERE ARE THEY NOW? If you recognise someone in these photos, please add your comments below the photo and provide information about them. If anyone knew Peter Loizos personally, please get in touch with me: conemmanuelle@talesofcyprus.com