On resistance through commemoration.
When I was five years old, my parents and I travelled to Cyprus to visit our family, as we did every summer. On the second-to-last day of our trip, a plane enroute from Larnaca to Athens depressurized and, ultimately, crashed into a mountainside near Grammatiko, Greece, killing all 121 people onboard. My parents and I were due to fly back to London the following day.
“With the same airline? No,” my adoptive father’s koumbáros said. “No way.”
My mother waved a hand. With such a disaster fresh on their record, she said, that airline would be running the safest flight in the skies.
As it happened, my mother was right, and I was fortunate enough to have no cause to think of the Helios Airways Flight 522 crash again for many years.
"With our 1974 conflict still hanging over us, it seems we have less room, in Cyprus, to recall our other shared losses than perhaps we would otherwise."
Then, in 2021, my partner and I decided to move to Cyprus. A tricky feat post-Brexit, though it has proved (somewhat) easier for me as I have two parents with Cypriot passports. Max spent ten months of 2023 flying back and forth from England, wanting to be with me as much as possible without overstaying his allowance as a non-EU citizen. He was on a plane every three-to-four weeks.
This was nightmarish, and not only because it meant Max and I spending so much time apart. Even before what my adoptive father’s koumbáros called our ‘close call’ in 2005, I was terrified of flying. I have had to force myself onto every flight I have ever taken, half-convinced that it would not reach its planned destination. If I hadn’t grown up overseas from my extended family, I doubt I would ever have flown anywhere.
"I have had to force myself onto every flight I have ever taken, half-convinced that it would not reach its planned destination."
A strange thing, then, that I should have ended up with a partner so fascinated by aviation. It was Max who, two years ago, reminded me of the Helios Airways Flight 522 disaster, having read about it in one of his online forums.
I thought of the incident each time Max boarded a flight that year, tracking it every inch of the way. I pictured the trusting, casual goodbyes of those bound for the doomed Helios Airways flight in 2005, as well as the devastation caused to the loved ones they left behind. And, slowly, an image of those people formed in my imagination.
"For all the tragedy it encompasses, Ghost Flight is not a story about death. It is a story about life, and the love and potential that we must embrace in our short time on this earth."
For all the tragedy it encompasses, Ghost Flight is not a story about death. It is a story about life, and the love and potential that we must embrace in our short time on this earth. It is also a story about Cyprus, and the many facets of a place that can collide in an instance of such national calamity.
With our 1974 conflict still hanging over us, it seems we have less room, in Cyprus, to recall our other shared losses than perhaps we would otherwise. The 14th of August 2025 will mark twenty years since Helios Airways Flight 522 depressurized, garnering the name of ‘ghost flight’. While the people that I have written onto it are fictional, 121 others were not, and their friends and families continue to mourn them.
Speaking at the 2024 memorial service of the crash in Paralimni, MEP Michalis Hadjipantela proclaimed, “Commemoration is resistance to defeat the ugliness of death”.
And so, this story begins.
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