Rina Katselli

Rina Katselli was born in Kyrenia in 1938 and finished the town’s Greek gymnasium. As a schoolgirl she joined the EOKA struggle of 1955–1959 against British colonial rule, and the British authorities imprisoned her for about a month. In 1958 she began directing and acting in amateur theatre in Kyrenia, and in 1959 she wrote her first play. She married Stelios Katsellis around the time of independence (sources give 1959 or 1960); his family owned Kyrenia’s Dome Hotel.

Her life in Kyrenia ended in July 1974, when Turkish forces occupied the town and almost all its Greek-Cypriot inhabitants were displaced. She moved first to Limassol and later settled in Nicosia. In 1981 she was elected to the House of Representatives for the Democratic Party (DIKO) and represented the displaced people of Kyrenia until 1996. She was the first Greek-Cypriot woman in parliament; a Turkish-Cypriot woman, Ayla Halit Kazım, had sat there earlier, in 1963. For forty years she was secretary of the Kyrenia Folklore Association, and she founded the publishing house Χρυσοπολίτισσα (Chrysopolitissa) in 1973. She died on 28 May 2021, aged 83.

Katselli’s early plays, written from 1959 onwards, were collected in 1970 in seven mimeographed volumes; Ο ανάξιος (The Unworthy) was staged in 1962. After 1974, displacement became her central theme. Πρόσφυγας στον τόπο μου (A Refugee in My Own Land), first published in 1975 under the pen name «Γυναίκα της Κερύνιας» (Woman of Kyrenia), is a diary-narrative of the second half of 1974. In plain, direct language it records the coup, the invasion and the first Christmas as refugees, and it quietly echoes lines by Seferis and Elytis. For her, as she wrote there, Kyrenia was not only a geographical space.

Her novels Στα βουνά της Τραμουντάνας (In the Mountains of Tramountana) and Γαλάζια φάλαινα (Blue Whale, 1978) both received Cypriot State Prizes. Blue Whale follows a displaced Greek Cypriot, a simple man facing the injustices of the modern world and the fear of nuclear weapons; a stage version was produced by the Cyprus Theatre Organisation (THOC) in 1980. THOC also staged Η τρελή γιαγιά (Crazy Grandma), and one of her plays was performed in Italian at Rome’s Silvio D’Amico National Academy of Dramatic Art. She also wrote local history and folklore, such as Κερύνεια εκ στόματος γερόντων (Kyrenia from the Mouths of Elders), and a two-volume life of the Kyrenia lawyer and scholar Savas Christis. Her books have been translated into English, French, Spanish and Russian.

Katselli won the Cypriot State Literature Prize four times, and in 2010 the Republic of Cyprus gave her its Award for Excellence in Letters, Arts and Sciences. Extracts from Πρόσφυγας στον τόπο μου appear in Κείμενα Κυπριακής Λογοτεχνίας (Texts of Cypriot Literature), the school anthology of the Cyprus Ministry of Education. The University of Cyprus Library keeps the Archive of Rina Katselli and the Kyrenia Folklore Association in its digital repository Λήκυθος. Try this: read her diary entry of 30 December 1974 with a dictionary and find one sentence about what was lost and one about what remains. Then use this page’s B2 passage to introduce two places in your own life: Γεννήθηκα στην Κερύνεια, αλλά ζω στη Λευκωσία (I was born in Kyrenia, but I live in Nicosia). Replace the towns with your own.

• The first edition of her refugee diary was signed only «Γυναίκα της Κερύνιας» (Woman of Kyrenia).
• Her diary uses Cypriot verb forms such as κάθουμαι and εύχουμαι, where standard Greek has κάθομαι and εύχομαι.
• In 1974–75 she learned egg-tempera icon painting from the nuns of the Monastery of Agios Minas.
• In 2015 she became honorary president of the Kyrenia Folklore Association.