Funeral eulogy by Nikos Ioannou Member of the Secretariat of the C.C. of AKEL for comrade Christoforos Konstantinos Tzionis

 

Funeral eulogy by Nikos Ioannou Member of the Secretariat of the C.C. of AKEL for comrade Christoforos Konstantinos Tzionis

24 February 2022

Today we bid farewell to Christoforos Konstantinou, our dear comrade “Tzionis” as we all called him.

We bid farewell to a worthy representative of the “old guard” of the Party and the People’s Movement of the Left. A real pioneer. A true son of the working class. A tireless, persistent and militant people’s fighter. Always at the forefront of every call issued by the Party. Always there, ready to stand forward, ready to defy danger, in the years when the iron was red hot as we say. Together with the companion of his life, comrade Kalodoti, they fought, resisted, struggled and asserted – without ever lowering the flag, without ever yielding.

Tzionis went to school for five and a half years, not even six. His family’s only property was the small house they lived in. “We didn’t have a plot, not even to bury us,” he said. Tzionis went to school in a pair of shabby trousers, like most children back then. But he could see that some other children went to school with a shiny school bag and cashmere trousers. But he couldn’t explain then why it was cashmere for the few and holey pants for the many. He was still a child.

Nor did he understand why his uncle, Tefkros Anthias, Secretary of the Party group of sixteen communists in the village, used to send him to notify such and such a person for some meeting. Nor did he understand why he was made to sit on the porch and if anyone passed by outside to knock on their door.

Years passed and Tzionis matured. His conscience was fermented by his uncle and father who proudly declared himself a communist. His conscience rebelled because of life itself, the reality he was experiencing. So he joined the ranks of the People’s Movement, the Progressive Youth Organisation (AON) and the Construction Workers Trade Union. He played a leading role in the founding and development of the Local Cultural Club/Association in Kondéa. Years later he would describe that period by describing the political, cultural and social activity that the Associations developed as “the cornerstone of the Party’s activity”.

It is true that AKEL’s influence was founded on the work of this generation of comrades, the generation of Tzionis. The generation that built with its own two hands theatres, stadiums, roads, pavements, houses for the homeless, associations for the poor to find a way out, answers and a refuge.

Tzionis hadn’t graduated from elementary school. But he was able, because of the ferment of political work and social action, to identify the needs of progress. “Your daughters will join the Association, they will play in the theatre,” he announced to his father who found it hard to accept this for his four daughters. He proudly recounted years later that women in the village of Kondea had been acting on stage since 1936.

Tzionis did not study in the expensive schools and big universities. But he stood in the front line of the struggles of the construction workers for the 44-hour working week, for social insurance and the big strikes of 1948. He fought with his comrades for what many today take for granted.

Tzionis never dreamed of contesting for positions of power and sought rewards. Whenever the Party entrusted him with a task, he responded with the consciousness that he was fulfilling a debt to the Party, its ideology and ideals. That is to say, he felt that he himself owed a debt to the cause of the working class, not that the working class owed a debt to him, however much he fought for its interests. And it is for this that he did not reckon danger.

The move to the Acropolis neighborhood in Nicosia opened up a new field for the Party activity of Tzionis and his comrades. New surroundings, new challenges to build the Party. “We had just about completed thirty people who lived in Acropolis to make up our Local Association”, he recounted years later. The Misiaoulis-Kavazoglou Local Association was built with the voluntary work of several comrades. Tzionis was the first to work for its construction, and despite all the other tasks he had in the Movement, he was always a pioneer in the work of the Association as well.

The years when he moved to the Acropolis neighborhood were the years when every day that dawned for the militants and members of AKEL was very dangerous. Grivas was preparing to launch a brutal attack on communists as he himself wrote and the British colonialists were tightening the noose around the Party. Tzioni’s house was the base, but also the shelter. It was from his house that the youth went out to write slogans and paste posters and pamphlets during the years of underground Party struggle.

He says in one of his last interviews for the Party’s archives:

“I had an incident one night that I still remember to this day that made my hair stand on end. In March 1956, we had been notified that the Party has some material that had to be distributed, so be ready to go and fetch it. Twelve o’clock at midnight would be fine, especially if you’re struggling underground in illegality, but if you’re underground, I can tell you to come at five o’clock, or else you’re not fit to fulfill this duty. It was raining at 12 o’clock at night, I put on my cloak and took my bicycle. The material was hidden in place where they were no houses, it was a plain. I was riding my bicycle slowly. I arrived to where the Bank of Cyprus is now. It was a cave, it was 12 o’clock, I didn’t find the leaflets, I went back home, it was 3 o’clock, I got up wondering ‘what’s going on, did they find and arrest the comrades’? 5 o’clock I came back again, they brought the party material back that hour. I picked up the leaflets, did the distribution as usual and went home, I got in touch with comrade Shippis and he told me that the polygraph had broken down and they had no way of notifying me. Then I hear on the radio that in the caves of Agia Paraskevi in Akropolis neighborhood, where I was going to all night, the English had found a dead couple and in the next cave 24 hunting weapons. We barely managed to save our lives, I still remember this detail”.

Our Turkish Cypriot comrade Dervis Ali Kavazoglou and dozens of other hunted Turkish Cypriots took refuge in his house. Something that many may not know is that Tzionis and his comrades made sure to alert EOKA fighters hiding in their neighbourhood if they saw any British soldiers wandering in the area.

The house of Tzionis and Kalodoti became an open embrace for the daughters of comrade Kostas Misiaoulis who, after his assassination, were left alone with their mother, the late comrade Adriana. Tzionis took them under his protection and Kalodoti embraced them with great love. And we are sure that this was not out of debt, out of some duty, but out of comradeship, out of a profound humanness.

At every dangerous turn in the history of the Party and the country, Tzionis was at the front line of the struggle. Without ever hiding. Without flinching. In the great struggle waged for the legalisation of AKEL in 1959. In whatever task he undertook as a full-time party cadre in the Party Countryside Bureau, in the AKEL Nicosia District Organisation and in the Central Committee.

At a time when fascism was ostentatiously sharpening its knives threatening AKEL and the whole of Cyprus, Tzionis was again at the forefront. Ready to defend the Party, democracy, the constitutional order. Together with other comrades, often at the risk of their own lives, they made sure to pass on information, to reveal the sinister EOKA B plans, to fight to prevent the betrayal and the selling out of Cyprus.

An entire life in the Party, in the Movement.

A whole life devoted to the aims and ideals of the working class, in the service of the people.

An entire life with Tzionis at the forefront.

A life that was targeted and hounded by our enemies. From the gun barrels pointed at him by the fascist “X” organisation in his village, to the secret meetings, to the notes stuffed deep in his pocket.

A life against fascism, a life keeping hope alive to tear down the barbed wire of division.

A life, smoke of a train on a long journey, as the poet wrote.

We bid you farewell Comrade Tzionis.

You leave behind a life full of history and the memory of a man who never stopped fighting, nothing stopped him from fighting.

Rest assured that new comrades will hold high the banner of the Party you honored with your devotion.

New hearts will fill the streets in the struggles to come.

New comrades will work for the same cause.

New generations will take the path that you and your comrades opened up back then.

Rest in peace, comrade Tzionis.

May your memory live on forever!