Cyprus, July 2013
“Table for one,” those lonely words. I bided the time in a Wetherspoon’s pub, to my right a partition of frosted glass and then great windows looking out on the north runway of Heathrow. Planes like metal whales coast in from the west, floating down, unhurried.
Everyone here is waiting: waiting for adventure, waiting to return home. I love airports for this; the anticipation it harbours, the moment of embarkation, the point of no return. Perhaps the real trip for me doesn’t begin until touchdown in Athens, still ten days away, but this stay in Cyprus is the first stepping stone, the acclimatisation stage. I plan—I hope—to be able to pick up some Greek, if only enough to buy food and water. It will acclimatise me to the weather too, with thirty-six degree heat in Cyprus and not much below that in Athens, it will undoubtedly take a few days on the beach to get used to it.
Back to Starbucks, food eaten, a little more time passed, the sun lowered, mocha being sipped and a caramel shortbread slice being nibbled. Let us consider travel, in this hub so apt. Modern travel so often happens as a means to a destination. What it means to most is delay; a period of time spent between where you wanted to be once, and where you want to be soon. But travel used to be so much more, the journey as important, if not more so, than the destination itself. When I have travelled in the past, I would consider the entire trip to be travelling. When you reach the “destination”—country, city, region, island—the journey should not end. Every step on your way through this new place is part of the journey and should be treated as such.
Travel does not stop until you have returned home, and even then you journey onwards into the rest of your life. And if the journey is so important, it should be enjoyed, or attempted to be enjoyed. My flight later on into Cyprus may have been one of the worst of my life. With a little illness still hovering around, my ears wreaked havoc as we rose and fell through the sky. But I arrived, falling through a curtain of brightening fluff as the sun crept up out of the horizon.
We drove through rough dry scrubland. Trees grew no more than twelve feet high and were few and far between at that, exposing the parched earth that grew only a few other low bushes. Rough hills grew on either side of us. The houses we passed were white and blocky. Most were modern builds, with a few traditional Mediterranean-villa-style houses. A rusted, abused car sat in a pile of dust. It seemed farmers had given up farming long ago, releasing the land to hardy scrubs of grass and wild olive trees old and wrangled by the harsh heat…
We entered Lefkosia, a wide, sprawling, flat city. No business skyscrapers, no modern blocks, just shopping centres, super markets, convenience stores, apartment blocks and private housing. As we neared Andreas’ neighbourhood, Vasilis (Andreas’ father) said that this area used to be far on the outskirts of Lefkosia, with houses scattered in clumps along the arterial roads, but now the area overflows with houses, very much a part of suburban Lefkosia. The change had come in the last ten or fifteen years as more and more people moved to the city from their villages in hope of employment. With the recent financial crisis in Cyprus, the flow is reversing, with those who are unable to sustain their family on their current income returning to their village to set up a small farm and earn a little extra for their family.
We passed George’s house to drop him off at a property fronted by a jungle of palms and trees and bushes. The roads narrowed as we passed squares of barren land amongst properties with high railings, verandas and double garages. The empty plots, Andreas told me, are the closest they get to parks in Lefkosia. Not enough rain falls during the year to sustain healthy grass, so to maintain a green park would require sprinklers and watering, something that the local council would not splash out for.
We arrived and I was shown in to my room, Andreas’ room that he had vacated, and I was left to sleep for a few hours before heading into the old town of Lefkosia at ten. Twelve thirty and I awoke, stumbling out into the hall as Andreas came up the stairs with ‘We tried to wake you!’
I guess I needed the sleep more than I thought. Now in the hottest part of the day, we rested on the veranda drinking cold water.
The old town of Lefkosia is surrounded by a circular defensive wall, built in the time of Venician rule, and gated by arrow-shaped extrusions every few hundred metres all around the circle. We drove in below on of these now to a parking lot set against the high wall in the dry moat around it. The centre itself is a network of predominantly pedestrian streets and alleyways spreading and connecting at slightly off angles in that way medieval town planning always seemed to manage. Though some buildings now were refurbished or rebuilt as modern blocks, these flashy shop facades were interspersed with plenty of traditional three-story stone-built terraced housing, the bottom levels converted to clothes shops, cafes, taverns, ice cream parlours and religious trinket shops, the upper levels balconied and still serving as private apartment residences.
We wandered through the empty streets. Many shops had already closed for the afternoon heat, waiting for the cool of evening before coming out of their air-conditioned slumber back home to serve the evening customers. The main market street ran a crooked line perpendicular to the defensive wall. Mostly holding taverns and restaurants, the pavement was scattered with chairs, tables and closed umbrellas. Following this wide pedestrian street would take you to the central square of the circular fortified area of Lefkosia, but we soon came across a barrier: the border between Grecian Cyprus and Turkish Cyprus. Here, a small police station stood to the right, an abandoned building to the left, and a border control fence and booth blocking the street.
Forty years ago, there was conflict in Cyprus between the Greeks and Turks living there. The Turks rose up against the previously Greek-Cypriot government and fought for control. They now occupy roughly forty per cent of Cyprus, their territory covering the majority of northern Cyprus. The Greek-Cypriots living beyond the border were forced to move south or become separated from the rest of their community and family
For thirty years thereafter, the border remained closed to Turks and Greeks. In the last ten years, this changed, and the borders opened at a few select points, although the regulation of the border was not fair to both countries and to both communities. For various reasons, Turkish-Cypriots are free to enter the south of Cyprus without a visa, without paying, and sometimes without a passport too. They are then able to get a job in southern Cyprus and receive all the benefits of being Greek-Cypriot in the south: healthcare, housing, jobs, schooling, licences. Contrary to this, for a Greek-Cypriot to travel north, they must show their passport—many are too proud to show their passport to a Turk—and pay an entrance fee. On the other side, it would be almost impossible for them to find employment, and they would also have trouble finding a place to live or a place to send their children to school.
We moved along the border on a street parallel to no-man’s-land. Another alleyway cut through the border. A young Cypriot sat guard in a small open booth in the middle of the barbed wire and wood fence. Through the gap in the border, I could see the decaying alley continue. The houses still showed signs of the war: bullet holes and crumbling plaster as well as some walls half-toppled and the bricks strewn in piles alongside. Windows were smashed, becoming gaping black mouths frozen in shock. Wooden shutters hung limp on rusted hinges, the slats splintered and loose. Barbed wire spindles and tough spiked bushes attacked the ground. Sand bags lay amongst the ruins and tumbling walls, relics of the war. This side of the border, a small tavern sat on the corner. A sign on the wall above read “the last divided city.” It was shocking to think that this kind of separation and segregation is still occurring, right on the border of the European Union. The northern occupied area of Cyprus is still not recognised as an independent state, except by Turkey, its founding father.
We walked away from the deserted battleground of no-man’s-land and headed for the tallest building in Lefkosia, and perhaps all of Cyprus; a twelve-story block holding Debenhams on the first four floors and a museum of Lefkosia on the fifth, sixth and twelfth. From the top, we had a commanding view of Lefkosia, the mountains to the north and the plains and hills to the south. Beyond the border, marked by Greek flags on rooftops, Andreas pointed out a number of old Greek Orthodox churches amongst the scraggly rooftops. The soft curves of the many domes stood out a pale orange against the plaster-white of its surroundings. Andreas said most of the churches that side of the border were now converted mosques; those remaining simply decayed, left in disrepair. The same seemed to have gone for most of the other buildings too: it wasn’t just near the no-mans-land that bullet holes still scarred facades; the houses were riddled across much of the Turkish sector.
Below and around us, the few buildings still wounded from the war remained untouched in their entirety, abandoned never again filled. Those that were happily used again were as good as new. There were a couple of mosques in the South of Lefkosia too, but rather than being left to crumble, or converted to another purpose, they had been renovated and repaired after the war for the few Turkish-Cypriots still around to use. Inequalities like this between North and South Cyprus became a theme. A bitter theme, but a theme non-the-less.
