11 Facts About Andrekos Varnava

Professor Andrekos Varnava, was born in 1979 to parents of Greek Cypriot descent, specifically his father from Frenaros and his mother from Agios Ilias, both from the Famagusta District.

Andrekos Varnava attended schools at South Oakleigh, where he became fascinated by the history of WWI and WWII.

Andrekos Varnava had visited Cyprus briefly a number of times, but in 2006 he took up a position as Assistant Professor in History at the European University Cyprus, a position he held for two years.

In 2009, Andrekos Varnava returned to Australia to for a history lecturer position at Flinders University, where he remains to this day.

Andrekos Varnava set about publishing his work, writing over 70 papers, 4 monographs, and 16 edited collections.

Andrekos Varnava's prolific writing mirrored his academic career at Flinders, where he was promoted senior lecturer in 2012, was invited by Selim Deringil and Vangelis Kechriotis to be a visiting professor at Bogazici University in Istanbul in 2012, elected as a Fellow of Royal Historical Society in 2014, promoted to Associate Professor in 2016, made an Honorary Professor at De Montfort University in 2018, and promoted to full Professor in 2022.

In 2009, Andrekos Varnava asserted that British imperialism in Cyprus was critically flawed, unable to achieve its full purpose in making Cyprus a strategic stronghold for the Empire, creating instead the conditions for more nationalistic sentiments to take hold among the Greek Cypriot population.

Andrekos Varnava followed this with research that blamed British humanitarianism for being selective and restricted by imperialism, particularly in relation to the formation of the French Armenian Legion and Musa Dagh refugees.

In 2014 and 2018, Andrekos Varnava co-organised two conferences on WWI at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and in his contributions he challenged popular narratives around Greek nationalism and Enosis, which had suppressed the role of Greek and Turkish Cypriots working together in the First World War along with implications of loyalty towards the British.

In 2016, Andrekos Varnava openly addressed the systematic killing of Christian Ottoman Greek population of Anatolia in the Greco-Turkish War, which he argued was part of a programme of ethnic cleansing stopping short of actual genocide.

Andrekos Varnava's book published in 2021 describes the assassination of a leading Cypriot politician Antonios Triantafyllides in 1934, attributing his murder to far-right-wing nationalist extremists he connects to the post-war formation of EOKA.