Cyprus?
The island of memories
The old building opposite Kimon’s garage which collapsed — had the city not been divided, this might have been avoided. It’s hard to imagine that such an impressive old building, so close to the city’s heart, would’ve lacked investment for such a long time.
East doesn’t just meet West — they confront one another, scuffle, lock horns, until they have to be pulled apart and forcibly divided.
‘United Nations Buffer Zone’ signs adorn dilapidated buildings, where in better times a commemorative plaque would proudly adorn an antique (buildings wear their plaques like military medals).
Turkish side: prune-faced old ladies wrapped in shawls like figs in blankets. Minarets have replaced church spires. Brand names are emblazoned on shopfronts, twinkling from pixelated news tickers, leering at you from piles of counterfeit handbags, purses, shoes, heaped on the sides of the street like the fruit or grain of the ancients.
Alleys shaded by overhanging balconies, fruit trees decorating the pavement with lemons and oranges even though it’s February (apparently this is normal).
Shiny shopfronts and their showy awnings disguise an older Lefkosia, one of stained yellow concrete, rusting railings, shabby wooden windows. Vertical signs, baring the faded names of proprietors long past, stand ignored and spent above the boulevard. It’s all fashionable cafes with smart outdoor seating and R’n’B soundtracks, shoe shops, and fast food emporia.
Occasionally, upon an overlooked corner, a gabled yellow townhouse gives you a glimpse of a lost Lefkosia. A Lefkosia in thrall to Paris and Constantinople rather than New York City and LA, a Lefkosia where old men remembered the rule of the Ottomans, a Lefkosia shaped by the British Empire, the bicycle, and the telegraph.
Nowadays, Lefkosia bears a closer resemblance to other upwardly mobile EU capitals of the eastern Mediterranean, much more so than the long-lost Lefkosia of its half-remembered past. I grew up here in the 1990s, I am much more of the 21st century than the 20th, yet it is these fragments of my grandfather’s city that feel the more real to me.
At Yiayia Victoria’s, a cafe next to the Green Line (the UN Buffer Zone), we gaze over the barricade of barrels to an abandoned bookshop, the cafe’s neighbour. ‘Bibliopolio Savva Ionnaou’ is proclaimed by a metal frontispiece, faded and misted with rust. The curtains still frame the windowed shopfront, though there are no prying eyes to hide anything from, no shopkeeper to keep cool in the searing midday heat.
‘Imagine being the old man who owned that shop, and seeing your old business just across the line, so near and so far’ says my dad, wistfully. Almost everything my dad says about Cyprus is wistful.
An outstretched hand could graze its wood paneling with fingertips, yet in all likelihood no one has crossed its threshold in the decades since the Turkish invasion of 1974. Its advertised books are still on the shelves, untouched and fading away.
Here in the Cyprus of the living, we eat baklafila, rolled-up cigar butts of filo pastry and honey. We sip coffee and pour each other glasses of water, as if there isn’t a demilitarized conflict zone, with sandbags and barbed wire and broken glass, not three paces from our table. Closest to the wall, right in the shadow of the stacked barrels, is a pink-and-blue doll’s house, complete with a toddler-sized rideable cabriolet and firetruck, on a matt of imitation grass. Hopes for the next generation, overshadowed by the failure of the old.
Checkpoint Charly — cheerfully-titled restaurant on the Green Line. The centre of the city is strangely inverted, so that it becomes quieter the closer you get to the centre. The wall silences some of the bustle created by a capital city. The proud pillars of administration — law courts, diplomat’s houses, parliament buildings — stand quietly, diminished by the wall. Imagine the commotion if the city were open, if people could easily come from the north. Instead this is a city literally and metaphorically backed against a wall, violence physically etched upon its scarred centre.
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