Dwelling of Dust and Mercy

In 2005 I was invited to Cyprus to lead a Cypriot-Greek-Turkish dialogue group, which met in Nicosia. I had heard about the abandoned Turkish villages in Greek Cyprus that were left after the civil war there in 1974, which included ethnic cleansing on both sides. On the Greek side, the uninhabited Turkish villages remained as is. The cemeteries were still being maintained with the thought that the situation is still reversible. I decided to photograph these villages at the end of the seminar. I was amazed to find that they do not appear on the map. I went in search of them in the summer heat. They reminded me of photographs from my student days at Hadassah College in Jerusalem, when I took photographs in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jericho. The book was photographed in 2005 and edited in 2006. I added texts that I found on the website of the Zochrot organization dedicated to exposing and disseminating historical information about the abandoned Palestinian villages. I found a story written by Levi Eshkol, who was at the time the Minister of Finance, about the moment in the early 1950s, when he came up with the idea of settling Jewish immigrants in abandoned Palestinian settlements. The book, which presents the photographs from Cyprus, is also available as a film with narration. The project was presented in the exhibition Disengagement (curator: Nili Goren, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2006), which was organized following the evacuation of the settlements in the Gaza Strip and Samaria.