North Cyprus – Part One

We are in Cyprus, taking a package tour of the Turkish northern part, although we did dip our toes in to the Greek part yesterday by crossing the Green Line in Nicosia for an hour or so. I don’t remember having done a package holiday before. It’s the kind of holiday where you get to the airport and can disengage your brain once you have passed through customs, because the tour operator takes you by the hand and takes you everywhere.

It was a shame that they didn’t take my hand earlier, when we left Anne’s son’s in London, ideally before it had closed the front door leaving my wallet and phone in the hallway. We had no key on us, and our Uber was on his way, and it was only through Dan’s brisk pedalling on his bike, back from work that a near disaster was stopped before we had even begun. 

However, suffice to say, after a long roundabout trip, where we had to land in Turkey before we could fly to Erçan – because North Cyprus is not recognised by most countries – we got to our first hotel in Nicosia. 

It must be a weird thing for the people living somewhere to be invisible to the majority of the world. Even though the UN police the length of land between the north and the south, and clearly see a need to do this, no country aside from Turkey recognises it as a separate state. 

So hence, a hop and a skip to Antalya before we could land in the north.

Although I had brought running gear, I don’t think there is any way I will be able to run. On our first full day here, we set off on our coach at eight in the morning and didn’t get back until half five, and I suspect most days will be similar. 

Still, Osman the guide and our driver Mr Vellie (don’t know if that is the right spelling) have shown us some interesting sights so far. 

In the morning, we stopped first near Mağusa (Famagusta) to see the monastery and tomb of St Barnabus. He’s Cyprus’s most famous home boy as he was into Christianity from almost the beginning. He was apparently St Paul’s friend while Paul was still called Saul and Barnabus was called Joseph. According to Osman, there is debate as to who converted first but however it happened, they began as companions spreading the word. Then they broke up after Paul thought that Jesus was the son of God, and Barnabus thought he was just a man. A great man, but with zero divinity. 

The tomb we visited is apparently his final resting place after being stoned to death by either a local Jewish group or a Roman group, or both, for collecting too many followers when Barnabus came back home after his falling out. Poor guy – how to not win friends and influence people, I guess. 

Having heard this dramatic story and wondered around the beautifully tranquil monastery grounds, we then went to the nearby ruins of Salamis, an ancient city-state, where Barnabus was born and raised. 

In his time, it was totally Roman – although it was possibly founded by the Greeks – with grand bath houses, marble and mosaics, and communal latrines. Only around twenty percent of the city has actually been excavated but we got to see a little of how the mechanics of the underfloor heating in the bath houses worked, and the channels where the running water helped shift the poo out to sea. Fascinating.

Salamis used to be a major trading port because of Cyprus’s position at the junction of the three continents: Europe, Asia and Africa, but when a major earthquake in the eight hundreds reduced it to near rubble, it was abandoned for nearby Famagusta.

Being in such a geographically central location has meant that Cyprus has been taken over by many nations: Greeks; Phoenicians; Romans; Persians; French; Venetians; Ottomans; British. There may have been more.

You can tell from the architecture, especially in Lefkoşa (Nicosia), just want a mixed bag of culture has left its mark on the country. There is a column in the centre that had originally been moved from Salamis by the Venetians to show their strength. They popped a golden lion on the top for their patron, Saint Mark. Then the Ottomans knocked it down to show their might. Finally, the British came along and put it back up, possibly half inching the lion and replacing it with a sphere; to show they ruled the world. Meanwhile, the regular folk had to just get on with living through all this posturing.

We found a very lovely second-hand bookshop cum café to have a lunch time bite, along with a couple of Aperols. You needed to go through the shop, laden to the ceiling with books of a thoroughly random nature, to the courtyard café. A moment of cool, calm ambience after our hectic long morning of sight-seeing.

We walked then to the checkpoint, where we showed our passports and could go through to the Greek side. Osman, our guide, as a Turkish guy would not have been allowed apparently. He had warned us that the two sides are noticeably different to one another, and he wasn’t wrong.

The Turkish side, whilst clean and ordered, was shabbier, and the buildings were generally lower, many only one storey high. A lot of the shops and museums weren’t open, and there were fewer people about, but we are in the middle of Ramadan, so that might have been a factor.

The Greek side, on the other hand, was larger, fresher, and felt more busy. To be honest though, most of the shops were indistinguishable from the shops you would find in any Western high street. 

What was eerie, however, were the buildings left standing in between the two zones. Houses and warehouses left abandoned or having to be cut in half by this Green Line of separation. Some of the buildings still had bullet holes from when the fighting had taken place. A sobering reminder of what took place in 1974.