No Man’s Land

Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.

Where we are: I wrote this last week, while we were still in Cyprus, but now we’re in Malta, where the official language is Maltese. It is a Semitic and Afroasiatic language. I didn’t expect that.

No Man’s Land

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Cyprus is divided by a UN buffer zone called the Green Line. There have been conflicts between Turkish and Greek (or Muslim and Orthodox) citizens since the Second World War, at least. (Or possibly since the Mehmed the Conquerer conquered Constantinople in 1453–either way, a long time.)

It is a long, bloody, and complicated history, but in a nutshell, the earliest version of the line was rather arbitrarily drawn on a map by a British officer in the mid-1960s, in an attempt to quell the violence that was tearing across the island. The line designated ‘Turkish’ and ‘Greek’ areas of the island (even though, historically, both ethnicities had always lived all over the island), but as far as I can tell, it was more of an abstraction than a physical boundary. In any case, it didn’t stop the violence. In 1974, Turkey launched a full-scale assault on the northern side of the island, and the invading troops only stopped when they reached the Green Line.

The UN sent a peace-keeping force, which expanded and fortified the line. It is, to this day, guarded and maintained by UN troops. Nicosia, the capital, is the last divided capital in the EU—some sources I read claimed that it’s the only divided capital in the world. I can’t think of another one off the top of my head, so maybe that’s true?

Anyway—if you go to Nicosia, you can see stretches of the buffer zone that are only a few meters wide. It’s a proper No-Man’s Land—the area within the buffer zone is uninhabited, and you can’t really bethere. In places where the line passes through neighborhoods, villages, even Nicosia, the buildings that existed were immediately abandoned.

Nowadays, the ‘border’ (the Turkish occupation is not officially recognized by either the government of Cyprus, or any other country) is relatively easy to cross at any official checkpoint. There are at least half a dozen, scattered all the way across the island. You show your passport on the Cyprus side, cross the buffer zone (either on foot or by car, depending which checkpoint you go to), then show your passport at the Turkish side. In Nicosia, there are tours and restaurants and a bar named after the Berlin Wall.

But we didn’t do things that way. We are far too lazy.

Nicosia is a 3.5 hour drive from our tiny little village, but the western end of the buffer zone is a 45 minute drive, so one morning last week, we went thataway.

We drove north and east, quickly turning away from the sea and winding up a steep mountain road. Soon we saw a series of gun emplacements dotted along the ridge tops, and some troop posts surrounded by lots of razor wire. Way off in the distance, on another mountain top, we could see a red Turkish flag waving under the cloudless blue sky. All along the road, signs forbade photography.

We stopped to look at a statue on the side of the road; it commemorated 3 Greek Cypriots who died in the fighting.

We stopped for a delicious lunch at a beachfront restaurant with only two other occupied tables, then headed for the ‘border.’ Five minutes up the road, we came to the Cyprus border stop.

The whole passport-check-wave-us-through situation happened so fast, we were kind of into the buffer zone before we realized, but once we did, we didn’t feel like we should stop or turn around. So we drove on for a few minutes. It was interesting in a purely theoretical way (as in, an ‘are we technically in a country right now, and what would happen if we got out of the car and walked away’ kind of way). Realistically, though, we were just driving along a quiet stretch of country road, Mediterranean-style.

Then we got to the Turkish checkpoint. We handed our passports to a very bored-looking officer, who asked if we had insurance. We said we did not, but we weren’t going to drive anywhere anyway. We just wanted to park and get out of the car.

He looked at us as if we were insane, and said there was nowhere to go, but waved us through anyway.

So we did exactly that. We drove past his little booth, pulled off the road, and got out of the car. Lee took a couple of pictures of the view (which looked exactly like the view we’d been looking at all morning—all month, even), then we got back in the car and did the whole thing in reverse.

I wouldn’t recommend our approach to anyone else. We didn’t see the last divided capital. We didn’t see abandoned villages, or places where former neighbors can wave at each other through the barbed wire. We had a nice drive, and a nice lunch, and saw some UN outposts in the woods, and didn’t take any good photos, because the signs said not to.

I would tell other visitors to Cyprus to take a proper tour, and actually learn about what life is like along the Green Line. We didn’t do that.

But we both really, really enjoyed our little adventure into randomness.

Take care,

Lisa

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