nicosia_cyprus « Ramblings of a Hopeless Khowaga

Tag: ‘nicosia_cyprus’

Champions

Sunday, July 4th, 2004

Nicosia [GP:Nicosia], 27 degrees, clear skies with fireworks

Greece won the European Football championship tonight, 1 – 0 over Portugal. It was the first time that either country had made the finals, and the ecstasy in the streets of the Cypriot capital is indescribable. The mayor of Nicosia turned out to watch the finals, broadcast on big screens set up in the middle of Plateia Eleftherias, occasionally waving the crowd on to cheers from below the old Venetian walls that ring the old city.

With the proliferation of Greek flags all over the place, one could be forgiven for thinking that this was Athens instead of Nicosia – replace the Turkish Cypriot flag glaring down from the Pentadaktylos mountains with the Acropolis and you’d pretty much have it. The contradictions continue to amaze me – we’re Greek, we’re not, we’re Greek, we’re not. I wonder if there’s this much euphoria on the other side of the Line.

Anyway, who am I to throw water on the fire? The game was spectacular. Let Cyprus enjoy itself – joy seems to be in short supply around here. Maybe this, like the overabundant rains last winter, will fill the Cypriot reservoirs to overflowing and reduce fears of drought for a couple of years.

Tags: euro-cup-2004, football, greece, nicosia_cyprus, soccer
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Two Sides to Every Story

Friday, July 2nd, 2004

Nicosia [GP:Nicosia], 40 degrees, sunny.

After a rather unproductive couple of sessions at the University of Cyprus this morning (the highlights: we were treated to not one but FIVE lectures by a professor of mathematics), I left the University uninspired. The campus is too small, the information was too little too late. The vice-rector was very accommodating in some respects – offering more honest assessments of the Cypriot educational system, for instance, but overall it was another pointless bureaucratic meet and greet.

In the afternoon, we crossed the line for the first time. Gülsen from Fulbright and a couple of tour guides – Mehmet and Faiz, brought us across the line to the unknown other. If the southern half of Nicosia is trying to be Athens on every level of its being, the northern half of Nicosia is trying to be Ankara. Atatürk’s visage is everywhere, scowling down at the populace from statues, billboards, pictures hanging on walls. The people in the north were somewhat friendlier – the hustle and bustle of Greece replaced with the smell-the-roses attitude that seems to go with Turkey.

The north is poorer than the south. Some of the others in the group were less struck by the difference than I was, but I saw it in the goods and services on offer. There was less excess. The trendy boutiques in the south were absent, as were the filling stations on every corner. There are less cars on the road. Greek is gone, replaced with Turkish, but as is the case with Greek, the Turkish spoken in Cyprus is distinct from that on the mainland. For my own part I found it rather easier to understand because the Arabic and Persian loan words weren’t stricken from the lexicon with the Kemalist reforms in the 1930s like they were in Turkey. The Turks in the north here speak a language much more similar to the language of the Ottomans than do their cousins on the mainland.

There’s quite a bit of animosity in the north toward the settlers from Turkey – there are about 90,000 of them. The Cypriots consider them backwards peasants, opportunists taking advantage of the misfortune of others for their own gain. Fair or not, the issue of the settlers has been – and will continue to be – one of the primary stumbling blocks as Cyprus moves toward reconciliation.

And yet, from conversations with people on both sides of the island, I get the sense that Cyprus is ready. The Greeks and Turks here are beginning to grasp the concept of a unique Cypriot identity. They’re not Greeks, they’re not Turks, they’re Cypriots with a common heritage, and a common goal. It’s the reason I think that this problem will eventually be worked out. The question that remains, of course, is how long it will take.

Tags: Cyprus, nicosia_cyprus, northern-cyprus, turkish_cypriot
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Pandemonium

Thursday, July 1st, 2004

Nicosia [GP:Nicosia], cloudless, nearly full moon, 25 degrees

Just back from Plateia Eleftherias (Freedom Square) where we watched Greece score an amazing 1-0 win in overtime over the Czech Republic along with 5,000 other Cypriots. Pins and needles for two hours right up to the winning goal, followed by celebration and pandemonium. The pride that the Cypriots feel over the Greek victory is overwhelming – the television stations have all broken into programming, showing the celebrations here, in Athens, and in Porto, Portugal, where the game was played. Cars are driving through the streets honking their horns – and it’s now been nearly 45 minutes since the game ended. We don’t look for it to end anytime soon. If I understood the broadcast right, the European finals will be on Sunday afternoon, and we’re already planning to be there. This is what it comes down to – raw emotion, enthusiasm, and energy. The bureaucrats can have their boardrooms. Tonight, what Cyprus is thinking and feeling is plainly visible in the streets outside.

Tags: Cyprus, euro-cup-2004, football, greece, nicosia_cyprus, soccer, sports
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“No One Has Been Shot in Cyprus”

Thursday, July 1st, 2004

Nicosia [GP:Nicosia], sunny, 40 degrees.

A couple of observations.

I don’t like bureaucrats. People whose sole duty it is to spout off propaganda representing some official line or another. We had a meeting at the Ministry of Education this morning during which we were talked at (not to) by a group of official bureaucrats. They had prepared elaborate PowerPoint presentations with a lot of distracting bells and whistles, which they read to us word for word and offered little embellishment upon.

I don’t like PowerPoint presentations. I don’t like PowerPoint presentations that are read to me when I’m perfectly capable of reading them myself, particularly if the presentation is in my own native language and not that of the speaker. I know that’s being catty, but honestly, if you’re just going to read what you wrote, take the agonizing 30 minutes of halting English narrative out of the equation and do everyone a favor. Then answer questions.

I don’t like bureaucrats. I know I said that before, but it’s worth repeating. What I got out of the morning’s presentation is the following:

1. The educational system in the Republic of Cyprus (what our hosts referred to constantly as “free” Cyprus) is flawless. It is the system upon which all other systems should be based. In fact, the modifications made to suit the European Union requirements were really just a slight change of language, because the Cyprus system is, as previously mentioned, perfect. Do yourself a favor and don’t forget this, because it will save time later.

2. There is no ministry of education in the North (or what our hosts referred to as “illegally occupied Cyprus.”) Even if there were such a body, the Ministry we visited this morning is the only one that matters. Do yourself a favor and don’t forget this, because it will save time later.

3. There being no ministry of education in the North, there is absolutely no point in comparing the wonderful schools of the perfect Republic of Cyprus system with the schools that may or may not be operated by the criminal illegal occupying entity in the North. Our schools are better, theirs suck, and anyway they aren’t legitimate and therefore don’t count. Do yourself a favor and don’t forget this, because it will save time later.

If the whole purpose of this exercise, of our being here in Cyprus in the first place, is to understand the situation on the island as it exists today, I fail to understand the point of this morning’s meeting. We were talked at, not to. Our questions were answered with rhetoric that would have pleased Ari Fleischer to no end. Obvious contradictions – such as the fact that hammering a Greek identity into students in the Republic is perfectly acceptable while the Turkish administration of the North doing the same for its students with a Turkish identity is criminal – were left unaddressed and open to speculation, which is what I’m doing now.

As a point of our separation of reality, when asked about what the Cypriots thought of the American educational system, we were given a response that had to do with the schools here being far less violent (even though violence was raised as one of the first issues in the meeting), which culminated in the Head Inspectress delivering the following pearl of wisdom: “No one has been shot in Cyprus.” It was worth writing down.

I digress.

This afternoon we took a self-guided excursion to Lefkara, a village in the lower end of the Troodos mountains, which are the predominant geographic feature of the island. It was quite a nice change from rushing around Nicosia. Afterwards, we went to Larnaca and sat on the beach for a couple of hours, and it was a very nice way to finish the day.

I’m off to meet people to watch the Greece-Czech Republic game. Like the Olympics, Cyprus has bought in lock, stock, and barrel to Greece’s success in the European tournament, and we are promised a crazy night in the streets of Nicosia if the Hellenic team wins again. Should be fun.

Tags: bureaucrats, Cyprus, lefkara, ministry_of_education, nicosia_cyprus, republic_of_cyprus
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ΟΧΙ

Wednesday, June 30th, 2004

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
Posted in Travel, Turkey & Cyprus 2004 | Comments Off

Tag: ‘nicosia_cyprus’

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