On August 15, 1974, Pavlos Solomi, 42, and his son, Solomis Pavlou Solomi, 17, were arrested by Turks at their home in the Cypriot village of Komi Kepir during the second phase of Turkey’s military invasion of Cyprus.
Panagiota Pavlou Solomi spent the remainder of her life trying to find her missing husband and son. Finally, 43 years after their abduction, in 2017, their remains were found in Galatia Lake by the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP), which exhumed what was left of them. A funeral was held for the murdered father and son in March 2018, but not in their beloved village of Komi Kepir. That village is still illegally occupied by Turkey. The family buried the corpses in the free region of the Republic of Cyprus, where they currently reside.
In 2008, the French news magazine L’Express reported on the plight of Mrs. Solomi:
“The old woman sent her desperate letter to Nelson Mandela, to Margaret Thatcher, to the European Parliament, to the Queen of England. The greats of this world left her unanswered….
“The life of this 79-year-old Greek Cypriot, draped in black, fits on a typewritten sheet: ‘My name is Panayiota Pavlou Solomi… My husband, Pavlos Solomis, 42, and my son, Solomis Pavlou, 17, disappeared in 1974. On August 15, that year, the Turkish army came in, started shooting. We were brought in for questioning. […] My husband and my son never came back. They weren’t soldiers. Just civilians. […] I have the right, as a human being, mother and wife, to know what happened to them. Please help me find them.'”
Mrs. Solomi passed away on December 10. Petros Ashiotis, a family friend of Solomis, told Gatestone:
“We would visit their house when I was young. The family had an olive refinery and prior to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, were well off. But when the Turkish military invaded, they, like every Greek Cypriot in the occupied area, lost everything. Nine civilians from my village Yialousa, including a district judge, were also arrested during the invasion and went missing. Their corpses were also found later in Galatia.”
Ashiotis added that Mrs. Solomi went every Saturday to the Ledra Palace Hotel, which was the only “accessible” path to the occupied northern region of Cyprus until 2013. There, she stood silently with photos of her husband Pavlos and her son, and other women seeking justice for their missing relatives. She became a symbol of the struggle to find the forcibly “disappeared” Cypriots.
Read more: Gatestone Institute
