Basaran Duzgun’s novel tells the story of Cyprus from 1924 to 1964
Turkish Cypriot journalist and editor-in-chief of the Havadis newspaper Basaran Duzgun has written the novel “Orphaned Horses Land” about life in Cyprus between 1924 and 1964. It is the author’s first book to be translated into English. Its protagonist, Hasan, comes from a poor shepherd family in the village of Fasli and serves in the British Army in Egypt, Palestine and Italy during World War II.
As Cyprus Mail reports, the novel’s plot is partly based on stories told by the writer’s father. At the same time, Duzgun said he did not want to make his own family the central subject of his books. According to him, the prose is fictional, although many of the stories described have a real basis.
Hasan’s story
In the novel, Hasan loses his father at the age of five and later becomes a servant in a wealthy Turkish Cypriot family in old Nicosia. He teaches himself to read and write, leaves that household and becomes an apprentice to a Greek Cypriot blacksmith in Aglantzia, which was then a village on the outskirts of Nicosia.
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After the outbreak of World War II, the protagonist falsifies his age and joins the British Army. Duzgun said that around 30,000 young men went into service, with some working as muleteers in logistics units. Hasan fights near Monte Cassino in Italy; among the approximately 55,000 casualties in that battle were his closest comrades — Greek and Turkish Cypriot muleteers.
A trilogy about the island’s history
After the war, Hasan returns to Cyprus and helps organise some of the first horse races at the Athalassa agricultural station, where he worked in the British government service. The novel also covers the strikes at the Lefke copper mines, where Greek and Turkish Cypriot miners demonstrated together, the beginning of EOKA’s struggle for independence, and intercommunal confrontation in 1963.
“Orphaned Horses Land” is the first part of a planned trilogy about Cyprus’s modern history. Duzgun’s second novel, “Pink-Painted Room”, has already been published in Turkish and is devoted to the 1960s. The third book, “Where the God Died”, is still awaiting publication and focuses on the events of 1974. The author hopes that both subsequent novels will also be published in English and that the entire trilogy will be translated into Greek.
