The Island of Missing Trees

The Island of Missing Trees unfolds in three different time periods: 1974 in Cyprus, the early 2000s in Cyprus and England, and the late 2010s in England.

In 1974 in Cyprus, Defne and Kostas, who are 17 and 18 years old respectively, regularly meet at a bend in the road near an olive tree. They keep their relationship a secret because Defne is a Turkish Muslim and Kostas is a Greek Christian. Tensions between the two cultures have been rising in Cyprus, occasionally leading to violence. If Defne’s and Kostas’s families or communities found out about their relationship, there’s no telling what might happen. When Defne’s uncle spots Defne out late one night, he asks her what she is doing. She lies to avoid being found out.

To avoid being seen again, Defne and Kostas begin meeting at The Happy Fig, a tavern run by a secretly gay couple, Yiorgos and Yusuf, who also come from different cultural heritages, as Yiorgos is Greek and Yusuf is Turkish. Inside the tavern, the fig tree grows through an opening in the roof. Yiorgos and Yusuf help Defne and Kostas maintain their secret relationship, and Defne and Kostas are grateful for the help and protection.

One night when Kostas and Defne are at The Happy Fig, someone throws a bomb into the tavern’s garden. Five people are killed. Kostas and Defne escape without serious injuries. On the walk home, the teens both say they never want to lose each other. Despite their secrecy, Kostas’s mother, Panagiota, soon finds out about their relationship. She has already lost her oldest son, Michalis, to violence; he was murdered one day while walking down the street, and no one knows who killed him. Panagiota’s youngest son, Kostas’s younger brother, Andreas, has joined the Greek nationalist organization, EOKA-B, and the family doesn’t know where he is.

Worried about what people might do to Kostas if they were to find out he’s seeing a Turkish woman, Panagiota sends him to live with her brother Hristos in England. Kostas leaves a letter for Defne with Yusuf and Yiorgos in which he says that Defne is his “country” and that he has no home without her. Kostas intends to return to Cyprus soon, but the Cypriot National Guard, in conjunction with EOKA-B, stages a coup to overthrow the democratically-elected Archbishop Makarios III. In response, armed Turkish forces invade the island. Violence ensues, and the island is partitioned into two, with Greeks on one side and Turks on the other. Hristos then cancels Kostas’s return trip to Cyprus, saying that he can’t go back to a “war zone.” Meanwhile, Defne slips away and finds Yusuf and Yiorgos, and they give her the letter from Kostas. Before she reads it, she asks them if they can pass a letter from her to Kostas. Yusuf and Yiorgos are surprised that Defne doesn’t know the news already, and they tell her: Kostas is gone. He has left Cyprus for England.

Defne is devastated. In her letter, she had planned to tell Kostas about her pregnancy. She can’t believe Kostas has left and thinks that love is treachery and deceit. Kostas continues writing to Defne from England, but Defne doesn’t respond and eventually tells him not to contact her anymore. She seeks out a gynecologist, Dr. Norman, and plans to have an abortion. Dr. Norman says that he can’t perform the procedure in his clinic because the staff has quit. Defne asks Yusuf and Yiorgos if they can do it at The Happy Fig, and they agree to help. Right before Dr. Norman is going to start, a group of homophobic men arrives outside the tavern, seemingly intent on vandalizing the establishment. Defne hears a commotion outside followed by a gunshot. When she makes her way outside, no one is there. After Yusuf and Yiorgos disappear in the process of helping and protecting her, Defne vows to have her baby no matter what. When the baby is born, she names him Yusuf Yiorgos and gives him up for adoption to a British couple. One year later, though, the baby dies of malaria.

Decades later, in the early 2000s, Kostas crosses paths with Dr. Norman, who tells him that he once kept a note for Kostas in his front coat pocket, written by Defne, but in the decades that have passed, he’s lost it. At this point, Kostas doesn’t know that Defne was pregnant or that she had a child, and he wonders why Defne would have needed to see a gynecologist during the island’s worst violence unless there had been a pregnancy or an abortion. He decides to travel to Cyprus for the first time since he left in 1974, in part to do field research for a project about the relationship between fig trees and their ecosystems, though mostly he wants to find Defne.

Through a former colleague, Kostas gets in touch with Defne. She is now an archaeologist and works for the Committee on Missing Persons (CMP), a group that aims to find the bodies of people who went missing during the violence of 1974. Defne tells Kostas that two of the thousands of missing people she is searching for are Yusuf and Yiorgos. At first, Defne acts distantly toward Kostas, but as the two spend more time together, she opens up to him and tells him that she had been pregnant and did have a baby, but that the baby died when he was a year old. Kostas asks Defne to return with him to England and proposes to her. Though she knows that marrying Kostas will lead her family to push her away even further, Defne says yes, and the two plan to go to England together. The day before they’re set to leave, Defne gets a tip about where the bodies of Yusuf and Yiorgos bodies might be. She travels to a hillside in Nicosia and finds them. They had been beaten, chained together, killed, and then thrown to the bottom of a well.

Defne and Kostas go to England together, where they have a daughter, Ada. In the late 2010s, Defne struggles with depression and begins drinking heavily. Kostas thinks Defne’s depression is the result of painful memories from her past in Cyprus. One day while Kostas is away on a work trip in Australia, Ada finds her mother’s body after Defne has taken pills. Defne falls into a coma and dies shortly after.

In the late 2010s, Ada tries to navigate the impacts of her mother’s death. In school the day before the winter break is going to start, Ada screams uncontrollably in front of her class for close to a minute. She’s mortified by what she’s done and is afraid that it might happen again. At home, Kostas buries the fig tree in his garden to protect it from an impending storm, Storm Hera.

During the vacation, Meryem comes to visit. Ada has never met her and is angry at her for, among other things, not coming to Defne’s funeral. When Ada asks why she’s come to visit now, Meryem says that when Defne married Kostas, she promised her family that she would cut off all contact with Defne and Kostas. Her mother just died 10 days earlier. Freed from her previous promise, Meryem wanted Kostas and Ada in her life. Ada doesn’t fully accept that explanation, but over the course of Meryem’s visit, she finds herself warming up to and becoming closer to her aunt. The two end up cooking together, and Meryem helps Ada with a school assignment for which Ada has to interview a family member about their family history and migration.

After the storm passes, Kostas digs the fig tree out of the ground. The fig tree reveals that she is Defne, who metamorphosed into the tree after her death so that she could stay close to Kostas and Ada and remain “anchored in love.”