"A tireless worker for peace in Cyprus
By Marcel Grandy
(1926-2006)
Swiss Peacemaker in Cyprus
FOR 30 years Marcel Grandy lived and worked in Cyprus in an unofficial but extraordinarily far-reaching capacity. Working for reconciliation between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities, before and after the island’s earliest division, he extended the hand of friendship to Greeks and Turks at village level as well as in the highest echelons of government. For several weeks in 1974, and like many in Cyprus, he and his wife Theri had to leave their home near the Green Line in Nicosia when bullets were fired across the bottom of their garden.
In the tense years after Independence in 1960, Grandy had almost constant access to Archbishop Makarios, spiritual leader and head of state, and significantly also to the leader of the Turkish Cypriots, Rauf Denktash. Both were personal friends of the Grandys, who were also valued friends of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church. "
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