Cyprus is the country of heroes, not of homosexuals' : sexuality, gender and nationhood in Cyprus (original) (raw)

My doctorate studies were supported by grants from the Graduate School of King's College London and from the Cyprus State Scholarship Foundation, for which I am grateful. First and foremost, many sincere and humble thanks to all the people who kindly agreed to be interviewed and generously shared with me their thoughts, ideas, life experiences, fears and expectations. My deepest thanks and gratitude is owed to all those individuals whose names cannot be revealed for various reasons. These are the anonymous, yet individually unique, Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot men and women, who opened their hearts and personal achieves to me. Their longsilenced voices and negated pain reminded me of the importance of socially engaged academic research, at a crucial moment in the development of this project. I am indebted to Alecos Modinos for being an inspirer and living proof that no struggle for justice goes to vain, regardless of its cost. I am also grateful to Achilleas Demetriades for allowing me to use his rich, legal archive and to the employees at the Press Information Office in Cyprus for making me laugh, even while I was buried under piles of newspapers! Many thanks also to the activists Despina Michaelidou, Yoryis Regginos, Hüseyin Çavusoğlu, Stavros Giannakopoulos and Themis Katsagiannis for sharing with me their stories and for providing me with advice and assistance whenever I needed it. This project would not have been possible without the superb networking abilities of Petros Papadopoulos, a dear friend, who greatly assisted me with participant recruitment. My primary supervisor, Professor Jan Palmowski, deserves special thanks for being a tireless, attentive and companionate mentor, whose rich ideas and insightful suggestions kept me on the right track up to the completion of this project. Robert Wintemute, my secondary supervisor, also deserves special mention, since he offered me invaluable support, both intellectual and moral, on several occasions. My thanks go to my former teacher at