Because the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) isn’t a real country I assume their customs people cannot stamp a real passport. Instead, they stamp a white piece of paper when you cross over. In Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus and the world’s last remaining divided capital, you have to cross the UN buffer zone that slices the city in half. Then, you pass by some colorful European Union banners touting how much money they’re pouring into Cyprus, both South and North. Then, you’re in.
The crossing was about as anticlimactic as that. The TRNC customs officers were taking their sweet time looking over everyone’s papers. It was fairly hot that day and the line was obstructing what lay ahead. I was impatient. All I could think about was being kept a mere fifty meters from the nearest doner kabob, one of Turkish cuisine’s greatest contributions to stomachs everywhere.
A friendly Australian decked out in the United Nations standard issue powder blue beret stood about ten inches from a faint abnormality of concrete. It became pretty clear, pretty quick that the mark on the ground was the old ceasefire line.
“Is that the line?”
“Yes it is.”
“That little mark on the ground, there?”
“Yes.”
“C’mon, really?”
“Yes, but I cannot cross it,” he smiled politely. “It isn’t part of my mandate.”
“So you cannot step foot over it at all?”
“No.”
“What if you dropped something?”
“Nope.”
I wanted to yank the blue beret off his head and toss it across the line just to see what he would do. But since the UN probably does not have a sense of humor about such behavior, and I’m not that quick, Welled and I instead reenacted a classic tourist photo cliché. Welled straddled the line placing his right foot in a Turkish-propped quasi-state while planting his left in the European Union, his crotch hovering somewhere above the arbitrary divide.
The northern side of the city was starkly different from its southern half. The huge Greek Orthodox churches gave way to massive mosques. TRNC flags were strung up alongside flags of Turkey. The streets were narrower than the south side and its residents significantly poorer. Shops and markets cluttered the main drag and all of the commotion resembled a bazaar atmosphere. While geographically still in Europe, north Nicosia felt much more like the Middle East.
Welled and I wandered around the north side of the capital along with many of the other tourists who crossed over that day, mostly British. Many of the houses we saw were run down, hell I would even describe it as squalor in some parts. People were out, kids were running around playing with everything they could get their hands on and women strung laundry up on clotheslines. The shutter on my digital camera grew hot snapping daily life, one of my favorite subjects.
At the same time, I was a little hesitant. It always feels slightly odd to me to take pictures of people going about mundane daily activities, particularly in depressed areas, as if they were on exhibit. A middle-class American woman doing laundry in the suburbs is, for some reason, not nearly as interesting as her lower class counterpart speaking a foreign tongue and doing the same thing. I’m not really sure why that is. Is it just exoticism or the traveler yearning for the “authentic” experience?
Encircling Old Nicosia are fortifications built by the Venetians in the 1500s to fend off the Ottoman Turks. Needless to say, it didn’t work so well. You would think, or rather I thought, the word ‘fortification’ meant walls but instead, the entire old city sits on a giant platform a few meters off the ground. Separating the platform from New Nicosia is a belt of moats that have been turned into parking lots and public parks.
Welled and I had gotten to the end of the old Turkish half of the city and decided to return to our below average hotel in the southern half. As we were walking back through customs, I remembered the guard telling us as we crossed over earlier that I could snap photos of only what was in front of us. The customs area itself and anything on either side of Welled and I were off-limits.
Facing the southern side of the border, we saw bullet-riddled buildings with dark windows. Decrepit shudders barely hung on their hinges. Sandbag upon sandbag sat on the sills and barbed wire encased the whole grim scene.
Looking at something like that puts the happy pastel silhouettes on those EU banners into a bit more perspective. Those banners we walked between were trying to blanket a violent recent past in sunny PR about Europe helping Europe. While there is a ceasefire between the two sides, technically the two sides are still at war. There hasn’t been anything close to a peace treaty and the island remains divided; has been for the last 35 years. No banner alone could ever heal that schism.
The next day, Welled and I gathered our stuff and walked a couple of kilometers to the Ledra Palace crossing. The Ledra Palace was, before the Turks invaded, a chic and grand hotel. Post-invasion, the hotel lies within the UN buffer zone and now houses UN troops.
We were still definitely skittish a few days after Rental Counter Girl warned us about driving our rental in the north. The phrase, “Timmy, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?” kept reverberating in the back of my head. We thought it best to sling our packs across our back and bus around the north. The genial Greek Cypriot border guard thought that was silly.
“Where do you want to go?” the rotund man said as he came to the front of the customs booth.
“We were thinking about crossing over to go up to the north . . .”
“We do not call it ‘the north.’ It is occupied Cyprus,” he interrupted, correcting me like a schoolteacher.
“Ah.”
“Do you have a car?”
“Yes, but we heard horror stories about driving up there . . . ”
“No, no it is OK,” as if I told him there were monsters under my bed.
“Are you sure?”
“Sure, sure. Everyone does it. It is OK. If you cross here you will have to walk for awhile and then take a taxi and it can be very expensive.”
That sold the both of us.
We were keeping the border guard from his break, so we excused ourselves and walked over to a sign with a blown-up wedding photo of a young Greek Cypriot couple. The sign was falling apart and tattered. The guard had told us the groom in the photo was shot by Turkish border guards sometime in the 70s or 80s. But because tensions have lessened considerably since then, he explained, refurbishing the posters has been a much lower priority. Of course, improving relations wasn’t enough to remove the posters in the first place.
Unfortunately, Welled and I only had little more than a day to explore the north before hopping over to Lebanon. We walked back to one of the parking lots in what used to be the capital moat and grabbed our Honda Whatever. After getting turned around a few times due to those annoyingly British roundabouts, we made our way to one of the car crossing points. We had to get out of our vehicles and purchase Northern Cypriot car insurance before our white slip of paper was stamped again.
Driving over the border was eye-opening. The border town looked nothing like the southern side at all. Backed by the Kyrenia Mountains, the town was a collection of five to seven-story concrete buildings, similar to the ones I’ve seen in Egypt. They were lived in but from the outside looked as if they were condemned. The local roads were noticeably in rougher shape and potholes were more common than road markings.
The enormous version of the red and white TRNC flag drawn onto the side of the Kyrenia mountain range really does slap you in the face, as I had read. The TRNC flag is a transparent rip-off of the Turkish flag, basically just a reversal of the red and white colors used by the Turks. The design choice was deliberate as Turkey keeps the TRNC functioning with roughly $400 million in annual aid. In this scenario, Turkey is like a giant corporation paying over, under and through the nose to plaster their name on a new stadium. This explains why the Turkish flag is represented everywhere in the north, even right there on the mountain alongside the TRNC flag.
Again, because time wasn’t on our side, we did our best to take as big a bite of northern Cyprus as we could. We ventured to the medieval Saint Hilarion Castle, the remains of which provided such a high-up view of the northern Cyprus coastline that the seaside town of Kyrenia looked like a satellite photo.
Kyrenia itself was lively with tourists, mostly British, and had a quaint little harbor crowded with mediocre fish restaurants (unfortunately, this claim has been field-tested) and pseudo-clubs playing pseudo-music. A gigantic castle, cleverly titled Kyrenia Castle, anchored the harbor and the lights shining on the exterior gave the castle a lovely golden glow at night.
My favorite parts of the north were the wild coastlines. For all of the natural beauty contained within Cyprus it is still a wonder that there are hardly any beaches on the entire island; at least none of the frolicking-on-the-white-sand-with-tropical-drinks type. Instead, the Mediterranean waves crash hard on rocky shores with a minimal amount of sand to stand on. The main highway ran right alongside, not a few meters from the shore itself.
Villas topped with terra-cotta perched themselves on cliffs just above those crashing waves. As part of new developments springing up at a rapid rate, signs aimed at Brits thinking of settling in Cyprus screamed that the villas could be had for about $50,000. Since many of the Greek Cypriots were chased out of their homes in the north once the Turks invaded, all of them still lay claim to their property. Any prospective buyers would have to painstakingly ensure that the houses they buy or the land they build on is not claimed by a Greek Cypriot. Otherwise, the sale would not be recognized. But where is the line drawn? When does a claim become a possession and vice versa?
“Maybe they should be separate.” Welled proclaimed as we sat at an outdoor eatery in Famagusta, an historic port town founded by French nobility. “I mean, they’re completely separate now anyway. Different religions, different cultures.”
“You think?” I said while slurping the viscous yogurt drink common within a mile of anything remotely Turkish.
“Yeah,” Welled took a healthy bite of his kofta kabob, “The north and south are completely separated anyway. Look,” a piece of rice flew out of Welled’s mouth as he motioned around our table, “it’s a completely different country.”
He was right. For the previous day, other than some English here and there, we heard nothing but Turkish spoken. Every sign and printed piece of paper was written in Turkish and the Turkish lira was the accepted currency. The same garish pictures of Turkey’s legendary founder, Kemal Ataturk, you would see everywhere in Turkey were also everywhere in the north. The difference between north and south Cyprus was far greater than between the United States and Canada.
“I know, but they should eventually reunite. Like Germany did.” As I searched for another lemon wedge to squeeze onto the addictive tomato-flavored bread cradling the kofta kabob, I wasn’t so sure I really meant what I had said. The two communities do share a common history but in many a sense are headed towards different futures. Maybe there really was merit to what Welled was saying.
In a 2004 island-wide referendum, the Turkish Cypriots voted in favor of a UN plan to reunite the island. Conversely, the Greek Cypriots voted overwhelmingly against the plan. The southern half of the island was invited to join the European Union and the north was left in the care and stewardship of Turkey. But as a reward for their ‘yes’ vote, the northern Cypriots also began to receive significant financial aid from the EU.
After a couple of hours of getting lost we got to Larnaca International Airport and dropped off our rental car. Other than a minor incident involving the entire front bumper completely falling off, we got the car back OK. Those bumpers just snap right back on. Relieved to have made it back accident-free, we headed to our gate.
I really wished we had more than five days there, especially in the north. The situation is way too complex, the stories to numerous to even begin to digest after less than a week.
As we walked, I kept thinking about how absurd a place Cyprus is. The little island country in the Mediterranean was technically a collection of four smaller countries if you count the British military bases and the UN buffer zone, all with their own administrations. To say you are from Cyprus requires a great deal more specificity.
Before boarding the flight I thought about ordering a Turkish coffee. Approaching the counter, I thought back to our first meal in Larnaca, five days prior. The mezze meal was superbly cooked by a genial older woman. As she served, she complained to us about Cyprus switching to the Euro. Costs had gone through the roof and the precious British tourists were not finding the island as cheap as it was just last year.
At the end of the meal, she asked me if I would like some Cyprus coffee and I said I would. She brought out the tiny cup of thick, black and angry which tasted suspiciously like Turkish coffee.
“Did you like it?” she said as she turned toward me from the stove, a grandmotherly smile on her face.
“Oh, it’s wonderful. It’s basically Greek coffee, no?” I smiled, making absolutely sure I didn’t say Turkish coffee.
She half-smiled back at me and cocked her head to the right. “No, no. Cyprus coffee.”
“Ah. Yes. Cyprus coffee.”
