For two years, the UN has been exhuming mass graves across Cyprus, reviving harrowing memories of the bloodshed in which 2,000 Greek and Turkish Cypriots disappeared without trace. Angelique Chrisafis explains how finding her uncle's remains after 34 years has helped her family - but also raised painful new questions about the fate of those still missing...
Angelique Chrisafis at the site of the mass grave in Cyprus where the body of her uncle was found in September 2006
Laid out carefully on a white sheet, limb by limb, rib by rib, knuckle by knuckle, was the yellowed skeleton of Uncle Yiannos. For 34 years he had been one of the disappeared, the missing people whose haunting black-and-white photos family members had carried round their necks at silent demonstrations. Now the UN had dug up his bones from a mass grave. Laid out beside him were a few relics preserved by the dry Cyprus soil: two buttons, pieces of his shoes and socks, a belt buckle and his small pocket-knife for cutting fruit. My cousin, Andis, picked up his skull and cradled it, tracing his fingers around the bullet holes. "One shot to the back of the head, one bullet into the temple which exited the cheek," he surmised.
Yiannos and two other members of our family disappeared in the ethnic killing in Cyprus in 1974 - the year Turkish troops invaded following an Athens-backed coup to forcibly unite the island with Greece. They were civilians, farmers, ordinary villagers like the hundreds of innocent Greek and Turkish Cypriots who, from the start of violence between communities in the 1960s, were arbitrarily rounded-up, pulled off buses, ambushed, raped and killed in the name of two nationalisms that had come from far away.
Three generations of our men disappeared after they were rounded up into the village coffee shop: Yiannos, my great-uncle, was 61, Pavlos, my uncle, was 42 and Solon, my cousin, was 17. Since then, their birthdays have been marked off on calendars, houses have been kept ready and Solon's bike has waited by the door in case they came home. Relatives signed desperate letters to Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, even to the Queen Mother asking for help to find them. Without the remains there is a torturous limbo, an inescapable hope that somewhere they are still alive. Bones, bodies, any trace at all, are mythic things for the families of the disappeared. You yearn for them and dread them. The chance of a proper funeral means closure. But with it comes the nagging questions and imagined last moments. Did he know his killers? Did he die quickly? Did he suffer? Was he made to dig his own grave?
The UN's Committee on Missing Persons has in recent months been steadily exhuming mass graves on both sides of the line that still divides the Greek Cypriot south, now an EU member, from the Turkish Cypriot north. Villagers, witnesses, and sometimes probably the killers themselves, have given anonymous tip-offs on the location of the hidden pits where bodies were dumped. The skeletal remains of the disappeared have been dug up on beaches, in gardens, in wells, quarries and fields, even under a busy traffic intersection on the Greek Cypriot side of the capital, Nicosia. Each hints at its own shocking story of murder. Officially, there are around 2,000 people missing from Cyprus's years of conflict. Since summer 2006, 379 bodies have been dug up and 83 have been identified and returned to their families.
Several of the experts leading the digs have worked in Bosnia. But a key difference is that in Bosnia when mass graves were opened, evidence was collected for an international war crimes tribunal. In Cyprus, the process is limited to handing back the bones. The committee does not try to find out how the person died, what happened or who did it. There is no justice or truth process, as yet. In fact, the committee's decades-old mandate is so narrow that the UN would perhaps not agree to it now. The bones are simply given to families and the graves are closed up again in silence. We are left aching to piece together the truth of what happened. But we have to be our own detectives, trying to map out the story from fragments of memories and the scant details from the bones. One humanitarian official warned me gently: "Bones don't speak much. They have very limited things to say, little information, they are not bodies in a crime scene. The only secret files are in the heads of the people who did it."
Yiannos Vlachou was the eldest son in a Greek Cypriot family of five children. He lived all his life in Komi Kebir, a mixed village of Greek and Turkish Cypriots, in the north of the country. He farmed olives, carob, wheat, melons and all kinds of fruit. Among the other short, dark Cypriots, he was blue-eyed and unfeasibly tall, standing head and shoulders above everyone else. He was practical joker, dispensing pranks and wisecracks in the local cafe, never without a cigarette, his moustache yellowed from the smoke. He would swim in the sea fully clothed with a cigarette in his mouth and a packet of 20 more stuffed in his hat. He married and had one daughter, Giorgoulla, his pride and joy. He once commandeered the school bus, driving to collect her and her class when a storm broke while they were off on a nature walk.
In the village, family was everything and Yiannos was a family man. His nieces and nephews would follow him around the fields. Then his two young grandchildren did the same. "It was five steps to his one stride. When you saw him coming through the village with his grandson, everyone said it was like a giant with a baby," says Androulla, his niece. He saw himself as a great protector, bemusing Androulla and her cousin Anita in the 1960s when they came back to the village from their immigrant life in New York and attempted to have a beach holiday in a nearby hotel. Yiannos arrived by taxi to collect them, suggesting it wouldn't look right if two young women holidayed on their own. Instead he escorted them to the beach himself - by donkey. The few photographs of him were taken by friends and relatives from the diaspora to London and America who arrived in summer with their cameras. He can be seen pointing out landmarks, picnicking or chatting outside the farmers' cooperative. Like others in the village, he spoke Greek and Turkish, and had mixed friends. "I know it sounds like I'm just saying this now, but he was loved - everyone, Greek or Turkish Cypriot sought his company. He was our favourite uncle," Androulla says.
In August 1974, when Turkish troops landed on the north coast, villagers began fleeing south. Yiannos, like other farmers, had fields and animals to tend. "I called the cafe and I said to him, 'If shooting starts, leave,'" Androulla says. "He replied: 'Why should I leave? I haven't done anything to anybody. Why would anyone bother me?'" When the shooting did start, he helped pack his sister and his ageing mother into the back of a neighbour's van and saw them off. Relatives tried to get a message to him via the Red Cross telling him to leave but he shrugged it off. "These were family men, innocent men, they had never done anything to anyone. They stayed because they thought they were safe," his grandson Andis says. Turkish Cypriot neighbours had assured them they would be safe. Anyone in the area who had anything to feel guilty about had long since moved off when the Turkish troops approached.
A few days later, the Greek Cypriot men in the village were rounded up in the cafe; the women and children were held in the school. Fourteen men from the village, including Yiannos, his nephew Pavlos and Pavlos's teenage son, were never seen again.
From south of the ceasefire line that divided the island and shut our family off from their village, decades of campaigning, hoping and dreading began. "The dead die once, the disappeared die every day," said the Argentinian writer Ernesto Sabato.
In February this year, Yiannos's daughter got a telephone call from the missing persons committee saying they wanted to come and talk to her. She knew what it meant. The following week, family members were driven to see the bones at the UN's makeshift laboratory in the eerie no-man's land of old Nicosia airport, frozen in time at the moment of the invasion, and of Yiannos's death.
We now know that he was found in a mass grave with 12 people in it, six from Komi Kepir and six from neighbouring Eftakomi, my grandfather's village. Yiannos was lying seventh in the line with one arm above his head. Three of the others had their hands tied. All had bullet wounds and bullets were found dotted separately around the grave - we don't know if they came out of the bodies as they decomposed. The men, aged from their 40s to their 60s, were farmers as well as the coffee-shop owner from Komi Kebir. Some had land, as Yiannos did, others didn't. There didn't seem to be a link between people chosen to die. The grave was on the edge of fields beyond our village, a quiet spot in view of a tiny old Byzantine church. It wasn't far from the fields Yiannos had tilled himself. It was near a big bush - a quirk I later learned was a common pattern, the killers often chose a marker, such as a wall or a tree.
It took three days for the UN to dig the grave and recover the bones, then they covered it up and moved on. None of the locals approached to watch. The grave was 12 metres long by two metres wide and less than one-metre deep. Its uniform shape meant it was dug by a bulldozer, by someone with farm machinery. That and the perfect numbers would suggest that it was systematic: 12 men picked out and driven off to be killed, the grave prepared. Clockwork "ethnic cleansing" before the term was coined.
As a journalist back from Paris for the funeral, I could ask a few questions of officials. But my cousin in the army had the better brain for wounds and logistics. We sat at a kitchen table considering theories. It must have taken at least 10 people to hold the 12 villagers, transport them, dig the grave and kill them. The men had bullets to the head. But some also had bullet wounds to their torsos. They could have been lined up, sprayed with a round of gunfire, then shot in the head as they lay on the ground. But the bones will never tell us about other wounds, bleeding, or beatings. "I just want the truth," he said.
Who was the person who told the UN where to dig? Who after all this time finally led the authorities to the hidden grave? There was a story going round that some time after the 1974 killings, a 10-year-old boy had been out in fields with his father and had come across some strange raised earth. His father had come to look and had returned with a tractor to try and dig there to see what it was. He dug below the surface but not deep enough. The boy, now in his 40s, had possibly now come forward to point out the spot. Some were sceptical about this tale. Whoever gives information can do so anonymously and without recrimination. Some wondered if the killers themselves had pointed it out.
The missing persons committee has its offices in the abandoned Ledra Palace hotel, which sits suspended in time in the buffer-zone dividing Nicosia between north and south. "People are getting older and they want to speak before they die," Christophe Girod, the UN member of the committee said. "When people see that graves are dug, that you can speak and nothing happens to you, it prompts more to come forward. When we exhume, neighbours often say, 'You're digging here but you should also dig over there.' We've found several sites that way." He felt some people giving information could be perpetrators, but they never said so. "Everybody is a witness. Everybody was behind the tree. Nobody was behind the gun."
Through the checkpoint and into the north, I met Sevgül Uludag, the Turkish Cypriot peace activist and journalist. In the last few years, her powerful investigations on missing people, rape and murder on both sides have prompted such an emotional outpouring that she now runs an independent hotline for tips on locating mass graves, passing everything on to the committee. The stories she has collected of parents pulled from cars, buses ambushed, women and children butchered, paint a picture of the nationalist frenzy and cold-blooded killing on both sides. Yiannos's story can almost be pieced together by fragments of other people's: the round-ups in coffee shops, the bulldozers being commandeered for burials, farmers who refused to bury bodies seeing their machinery taken away. Some sagas were almost homeric: the Turkish Cypriot from the south who had eaten from the rare fig tree in his garden before being taken to his death. Years later that same variety of rare fig was found growing from a cave on a beach, pinpointing his grave.
"It hasn't been easy," she says. "There was harassment, I got death threats from those responsible. Some mayors did not want digging in their village, because the past would come out. A son of one of the killers threatened me. There isn't an atmosphere where people feel ready to talk, because most of the killers are still alive. People are afraid. This is a long process. It was a dirty war and we have to deal with it. We all have blood on our hands, we have to accept we committed crimes on both sides. There should now be a process, a truth commission, on which the two communities must agree."
After years of stalemate, political progess is at last being made, and with it intellectuals are starting to debate what to do with the past that is being dug up with the bones. Greek Cypriot politicians long exploited families' grief for political gain, while in the north Turkish Cypriot families were told not to look for their missing, that the subject was taboo.
For four years now the border has been partially open. So the day before the funeral, I hired a car to drive north to the village and find the spot where Yiannos died. I wanted to leave some flowers. The grave was dug up in September 2006, the bones analysed and finally given back to us in March 2008. So by now the wheat in the fields had grown high and the silent grave, closed and grown over, was difficult to find. I left some flowers under a bush, almost certain it was the wrong bush but also wondering if anyone else - maybe Pavlos or Solon - might be in other graves nearby still waiting to be found. I picked wheat in the field and flowers by the road to take back.
Yiannos, the giant of the village, was buried in a child's coffin - all that was needed for the bones. The funeral service, where speakers remembered some of his best jokes, was filmed for the TV evening news. He was buried next to his wife, who died six years after he disappeared. Afterwards, relatives drank coffee in the garden. My cousin Christina said it was "like the turning of a page", although we are still waiting for others to come forward to help find her father and her brother, Pavlos and Solon - indeed all the others - so the chapter can be closed.
One thing the families of the missing talk about on both sides is the exhaustion of the fight. Christina's mother is now almost blind but she refuses to give up. One Turkish Cypriot man whose father's bones were found says he can now sleep properly for the first time.
"We're lucky to have found him, because others haven't," says Yiannos's daughter Giorgoulla. "I have cried a lot, but I have carried this all these years and now finally it's the end".
Like his many fans, we owe him an enormous debt of gratitude. Like them, all of us at the BBC feel a tremendous sense of loss 
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