When I was little I had my bed in my grandmother’s room, a bed with a thick eiderdown under which I could hide to feel safe. On Sunday mornings I could smell the sweet dumplings prepared by Anni, our help, when I woke up. The wood burner gave off cozy warmth, so I propped up my pillow and got my book of fairy tales out; it looked torn from frequent use. It was a DIN A4 book which we had assembled ourselves; you could buy the text book and glue in the pictures which were offered as a gift with Knorr oats boxes; it was just shortly after the war; later I also had other such books, history books from the Early and Middle ages, with pictures of heroes and knights. But my favourite when I first started reading, was my book of fairy tales. The paintings in the books of fairy tales or fantasy stories were well done by professional painters and I could study them for ages, drawings were often in art nouveau style. The Gebrüder Grimm tales or the tales by Andersen, were based on stories told for centuries in the homes but never written down, passed on by mouth only. The stories were educational, had a moral value,  often weird and gruesome and they gave me the goose pimples and made me disappear under my bed cover making up my own continuation of the stories involving my little me, but then at the happy ending, and there usually was a happy ending, I was extremely happy and satisfied. It was my world where no adults had admittance to. I was the princess or the prince fighting with the dragon or any enemy depending on my mood and this feeling gave me some self-assurance. There was a period I got deeply involved with Prince Valiant and it were not so much the stories here but the drawings in art nouveau style which made the figures appear so romantic and beautiful, that attracted me and millions of other young people with me.

All children with a normal childhood grew up like this; the many artists I interviewed here in North Cyprus, all remembered with a smile of regret the wonderful evenings in their homes when stories were told, the more gruesome the better, when there was no electricity and the family crowded around the kerosene lamp and oven at night; there were giants and dwarfs, queens and kings, saints on donkey’s back punishing the mean and vicious and recompensing the good and brave ones. The mountains and plains were filled with ghosts and legends, sometimes based on real events in the past, stories woven around a legendary person.

Later when I grew up, I went traveling and exploring with the seafarers, the many adventures with Sindbad first, then later Columbus, Vasco da Gama and James Cook, I loved them. Then came the film industry: I do remember the first movies I was allowed to see, The Thief of Bagdad with Sabu, the films with all the genies, what a wonderful time.

Today? The modern books of fairy tales have been reduced to very simplified paintings and drawings, also in films the protagonists have become automaton creatures, a complete different world, the Japanese film industry has had a lot of impact on the development, nothing romantic about them, it’s muscles and iron fists, the girls with wasp waist and eyes huge as plates.

We need fairy tales - today it’s fantasy stories - for growing up, to widen our fantasy, to learn the vast fields of good, bad and ugly, fairness and unfairness, in order to take sides at an early age, to be prepared for life with all its experiences and contradictions to be expected, to learn via the sample of fairy tales. We no longer have the Hansel and Gretel, and the princess with the frog, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but fantasy figures such as the Spiderman and the like. Admitted there is the danger that a child takes the wrong side of the medal and selects to be the bad guy, but that would also happen without the fairy or fantasy stories. 

The world has become very businesslike, matter-of-fact like, a no-nonsense society, so it takes no wonder that fantasy books like Harry Potter are making such a wild success - I know of elderly people in their seventies who proudly declare that they have all Harry Potter films; or stories like Lord of the Rings with a series of films, giving us the possibility of entering a world of fantasy which is no longer available to us; or all these modern vampire films that excite the young world.

We need heroes, to waken the hero which is in all of us; all the girls even today dream of Prince Charming that comes along galloping on a white horse rescuing them from a lonely and boring life. In our dreams we hope that in difficult situations there might be somebody to come along for rescue, a saint on a donkey, or a genie with a magic wand to fulfill a wish….because HOPE in our daily life is most important and often the only anchor we have, and that is why we still believe in the magic of fairy tales.