A story of pain and horror was told by Mrs. Despina in yesterday’s episode of “Famagusta”. How she found her dead husband buried after years.
He returned with a new episode on Sunday night (21/04) at MEGA the line “Famagusta”captivating viewers again with its developments, but also with the shocking testimonies shown, which are based on true stories.
In yesterday’s episode, the testimony of Mrs. Despina (played by Cypriot actress Andri Agathangelou), of a woman who was pregnant when her husband was forced to go to war as soon as the Turkish invasion became known, shocked and moved the viewers.
“On July 19, my husband, Theodoulos, had a birthday. He was turning 25 years old and we celebrated, despite the fear and uncertainty that the coup had sown in the previous days” said Mrs. Despina at first, describing afterwards the moment he saw the paratroopers falling from the bathroom window.
“I thought I saw big mushrooms falling from the sky. They were paratroopers. That moment, was the end of my carefree life. Because in the 50 years that followed, nothing would ever be the same“ he stated bitterly in the documentary that Michael is shooting in the “Famagusta” series.
As he described: “For a moment I thought I lost my sense of reality. I wanted to scream, but my voice wouldn’t come out. First time I saw something like this. I ran into the room and saw Theodoulos sitting on the bed listening to the radio. It was the familiar message calling the reservists. I rushed at him to stop him from going to war, we fought for a while, he pushed me, I fell back and hit. I was holding my belly screaming, not so much from pain, but from fear and anxiety that something might happen to our baby. Theodoulos panicked. He told me he had to go and swore he would come back“.
Mrs. Despina continued her testimony in “Famagusta”, stating: “I have been looking for him for many weeks, without any information about his fate. Until, in the second phase of the invasion, someone told me they saw him on a ship with prisoners being sent to Turkey. TheHowever, when the last captives returned to Cyprus, Theodoulos was not among them. I cried for hours, until I felt sick and was taken to the hospital. It was late, I had miscarried. Our baby, our son, would never grow up.”
He then revealed: “In 1999, my friend Amalia told me that the man she saw on the ship looked a lot like my husband. But he told me that Theodoulos, for many years, was buried in a cemetery outside Nicosia. She was told by someone who wished to remain anonymous. He had no proof, but he was sure, until he showed her the spot where Theodoulos had been buried”.
“I started knocking on doors to let me exhume, but it was impossible” she said and described how she decided to do the exhumation herself.
“Since they wouldn’t give us permission, we went one night to the cemetery. We were trembling with fear. There was a full moon, it was a strange night, and every noise made our hearts jump like crazy. But we were determined. We dug right where the information said the secret burial had taken place. When we found a shoe, we stopped digging with the shovels so as not to break the remains. We started digging with our hands. Until I found him. Wrapped in a half-eaten army blanket. He was wearing the locket I gave him when he left for the war“.
