The Changelings

About 3,000 years after King Solomon, in his boundless wisdom, settled the case of two mothers claiming the same child, District Judge Mehmed Zekia Bey of Nicosia, Cyprus was faced with a similar problem.

Complaints in the Morning. More than four years ago Panayiota Theofanous, a pretty soft-voiced Nicosia housemaid, caught the fancy of John Gow, a Scots R.A.F. pilot. Airman Gow was killed six months before Panayiota gave birth to a boy in the Nicosia Government Hospital. The rosy baby weighed 7 Ibs. 9 oz., and had eyes as blue as any Scotsman's.

On that same day, in the same hospital, one Mrs. Theodosia Shatis, the wife of a Cyprus shepherd, also gave birth to a boy. He weighed only 6 Ibs. 1 oz. and he seemed to resemble his dark parents.

The British nurse in charge at the hospital showed each mother her son, then took the babies back to their separate ward for the night. Next morning, both mothers were loud in their complaints that the babies had been switched. The nurse promised to look into the case, but did nothing.

After three days, Mother Shatis appeared satisfied with the fair, blue-eyed child she had been given as her own. She took Blue Eyes back with her to the mud-brick village where she lived with her husband. Panayiota stayed behind with the dark boy who, she was convinced, was not hers.

Luck for the Shepherd. When Shepherd Charal Shatis looked into the strange blue eyes of the son his wife had brought home, he felt some misgivings. But Shatis began to prosper, and he came to believe that Blue Eyes brought him luck.

Time and again Panayiota traveled to the Shatis home, begging for the return of Blue Eyes in exchange for the dark boy. But Mrs. Shatis insisted Blue Eyes was hers--she wanted no part of the dark little tyke who looked like all the other children on Cyprus.

After three years, Panayiota finally found a lawyer who would listen to her. Last November, in Nicosia's green-walled district court, Panayiota faced Zekia Bey, the judge. Nervously she displayed photographs of her dead Scot lover: Blue Eyes clearly looked like him. Then swarthy Mrs. Shatis stepped to the bar. She cried hysterically that Blue Eyes was hers.

At length Judge Zekia Bey decided that the babies had indeed been switched. He ordered the changelings returned to their rightful mothers.

Last week, Panayiota was preparing to take her bonnie, blue-eyed lad to Scotland to live with John Gow's parents. In her village on Cyprus, mother Shatis had resigned herself to her loss. She had even grown to love the other child, she said, and father Shatis hoped that the dark boy, too, would bring him luck.

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