Nicos Anastasiou: Connecting to the Past for Peace

February 29, 2012 by Gail
Filed under VidStyle

Nicos Anastasiou shares stories of citizen peace-building and how ordinary people were separated due to the conflict in Cyprus and how they are reconvening again. How the younger generation is learning to turn the pain of the past from a wall that separates them to a bridge that brings them together.

ABOUT Tedx

TEDx was created in the spirit of TED’s mission, ‘ideas worth spreading’. The programme is designed to give communities, organisations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level.

ABOUT Nicos Anastasiou

“In 1974, war tore Nicos Anastaisou from his classmates. He shares his personal story of how reconnecting with those friends inspired the Cyprus Friendship Programme, a movement to reunite Turkish and Greek Cypriots and bring about a new generation of dialogue.

He is an Economics teacher by profession, involved in bi-communal citizen peace building work in Cyprus on a voluntary basis for the last 20 years. His work included bringing together people in the buffer zone from the two communities who, before the 1974 war, lived in mixed villages.

Nicos has contributed to the creation of numerous bi-communal groups like educators, deaf people, dancers, musicians, and theatre enthusiasts and has worked extensively with young people in efforts to create genuine friendships despite the generalised negative stereotypes that one community has of the other.

He is currently one of the two Principal Co-ordinators of the Cyprus Friendship Programme, an all volunteer project that ‘pairs’ together teens from the two communities in Cyprus and through them bringing together their families and friends.

After decades of conflict in the island of Cyprus, the two largest communities, the Turkish Cypriot and the Greek Cypriot, have been separated geographically as well as psychologically.”

The VIDEO