Nicosia [GP:Nicosia], Cyprus, Sunny, about 36 degrees

Nicosia is a town divided. The Green Line and the UN buffer zone run right through the middle of town in a fashion that makes one long for the totalitarian organization of the East Germans. Buildings are split in half, school yards are strewn with barbed wire, and in places the other side is so tantalizingly close that you can almost reach out and touch it – provided that you’re willing to risk having your arm blown off by an Australian soldier in a UN uniform. As our tour guide put it this afternoon, the only creatures who inhabit the buffer zone are the cats, the rats, the mice, and the UN.

There is a sense of disappointment. Even when you’re in the fashionable district of the new city, away from the Green Line, out of the line of sight of the giant Turkish Cypriot flag that sits on the mountains like a giant “Fuck you” to the Greeks in the south, there is an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and disappointment, a growing realization that the massive orchestrated movement to organize a no vote in the April referendum on unification was a sham. The campaign must have been massive – the word OXI (no) is graffitoed on nearly every available surface in the old city, with spray paint, stickers, banners – I even saw a little kiosk on the side of the road that had changes its name to the “Oxi Cafe.” Now the Greeks who voted “no now to vote yes later” realize that later may never come. The UN mediator packed his bags and closed his office, and everyone is wondering where this will all go from here.

In the old city this afternoon, we went on a walking tour led by the first person to successfully sue in the European Courts to get compensation from Turkey for her lost property in Kyrenia, a town in the North. She didn’t mention this on the tour, but her past -as of that of Kyproula, Fulbright’s financial officer in Cyprus who sat at my table at dinner last night – is obviously the subject of most pain. When both women talked about Kyrenia, they sort of trailed off and said, “Well, it’s in the North.” There’s really nothing more to say.

In the old city, at one of the many checkpoints we’re not supposed to take pictures of, an old woman sat to make sure that we obeyed the rules. The solider at the guardhouse, barely 19 years old, laughed and called her his guardian. She told us, emotionally after 30 years, about her house – visible not even 50 feet away but behind the barbed wire – and about the Turkish neighbors who came over in the middle of the night in 1974 to beg her to leave before the Turkish soldiers came; and how she fled in the night with just the clothing on her back, and how her Turkish neighbors brought her what was left of her belongings … after. In Nicosia, time is marked by what happened Before and After. It’s like 9/11 in the US – you don’t even need to clarify before or after what. It’s just before and after.

What comes after the April referendum that failed is something no one really wants to talk about.

Tags: buffer_zone, cypriot_flag, Cyprus, nicosia_cyprus, turkish_cypriot