Cypriot Cats

Driving between the Kourion Ruins and Kolossi Castle, we spotted this Cat Sanctuary. Some animals rushed the gate to meet us and then played too cool to look at our cameras, as cats do. Others continued to laze in the sunshine on the hot-plate concrete of their lot. Signs implored our help, in first person. "Help us!" The urgent tones sort of belittled their sanctity. Stumbling upon this wasn't as surprising as you'd think. We were actually more surprised we hadn't seen one yet. You see, Cypriots are real cat people.
The reason for the Cypriot love of cats runs much deeper than an affinity for fur and whiskers. In 2001, an archeological finding proved that Cypriots were the first civilization to domesticate cats - 9,500 years ago, before the Egyptians. Owner and feline were found buried together in an ancient tomb - cuddling. Cats run around everywhere in Cyprus. Here, one little guy pokes his head out in Agios Athanasios. Earlier, we'd seen the Fat Cat of the village back a few smaller kitties into a corner. When he walked away, I thought I spotted some sort of growth or tumor dangling down from his orange fur. Turns out, I'd just never seen a male cat in tact before. I'm American - we like them spayed and neutered.
Recently, Cyprus has tried to attain recognition for two breeds of cat that they claim are indigenous to the country. Named "St. Helen" and "Aphrodite," the breeds have become another conflict point between the Turkish and Greek Cypriots. Both want to call them their own. Since both cats are said to be evolved from an ancient Turkish breed, the Northerners have a point - but efforts to mix them with modern Turkish cats and present the offspring as "Cypriot" too seems a little disingenuous. The bottom line is, for a culture so proud of cats' place in their history (and their place in the history of cats) an internationally recognized breed would mean so much.Down the road from the Cat Sanctuary was a sign for St. Nicholas of the Cats Monastery. The ancient site is said to have brought cats from Egypt thousands of years ago (just as St. Helen's namesake did) to fight off snakes. We skipped the opportunity, already on the way to a castle and feeling like we see enough cats in our day to day life. Every evening, no matter where we stay, a cat tries to come in through the door with us. They are at our feet under outdoor tables. They screech in a brawl, startlingly, at night. Plus - when we went to India years ago, Merlin and his brother were warned that a visit to the Monkey Monastery required a stick to fend them all off. We figured that a visit to the Cat Monastery would probably be better with a spritz bottle in tow.

Gypsy Kitchens: Citrus Season

As we already mentioned, it's citrus season here in Cyprus. Groves cover large stretches of the landscape and are heavy with fruit. Lemons, grapefruits, and especially oranges are impossible to escape. And why try? Costas, our host at Asty Hotel in Nicosia, insisted we take as many oranges from the breakfast room as we could. "I just bought 10 kilos this morning!" he said, inspecting our pickings and deciding they were too slim. Our rental in Agios Athanasios came with a stocked fruit bowl. If we ran out, there was always the daily citrus vendor. Clementines were set out in wicker baskets at outdoor tables in Girne, the healthiest bar snack we'd ever seen.
At first, we kept pace. Two juiced oranges with breakfast, two more for lunch, one in the evening. They are incredibly thick-skinned, which initially fooled us into thinking they were under-ripe. Each orange, once peeled, is about a third of the size it appeared. But, just like great shellfish, any thought about "so much work for so little return" is immediately dashed once the flesh hits your mouth. We have never had oranges like this before. And the mandarins - divine.
Soon, we had to actually buy our own oranges. All of our lovely hand-outs consumed. As soon as the thought came to mind, we only had to look five feet in any direction to find the nearest citrus vendor. With such an abundance absolutely everywhere, it's impossible to buy less than a bundle. The fruit was warm to the touch, sun-soaked, as we placed one after another in our bag. The vendor looked at the amount, gave us a price and then threw a few more in for good measure.
As anyone who has ever gone apple picking knows, there is such a thing as too much of a good fruit. Looking for ways to use all of our perfect Cypriot oranges we created three easy salads, using other ingredients that have been popping up on plates and market stands all around us: beets, chickpeas, local cheese and anchovies. Each salad is designed to utilize one of the orange's great qualities, its sweetness, its sourness and its juiciness.
The first salad is the most traditional, meaning that its base is a leafy green. Complimenting the orange's sweetness, we paired it with bitter rucola, spicy red onion and salty anchovies. Canned fish is a Gypsy Kitchen favorite not just because they keep so well, but because we don't always have a bottle of olive oil available. Use anchovies packed in oil so that you can just drizzle the liquid out of the can right onto your salad. The orange slices provide the acid needed to make it perfectly dressed.
The second salad brings out the orange's tartness and sourness. It's difficult for anything to taste super sweet when put up against a beet. We advise against canned beets, but those pre-cooked whole beets in plastic found in some produce aisles work well if you don't want to cook them yourself. To ground those two vibrant flavors, add cubes of semi-hard mild cheese - cubed so that it will be a third in the trio of ingredients as opposed to glomming on to the other two. We used local dry anari, made from a blend of sheep, cow and goat's milk. Mozzarella would work as well. As would brebis. If you use feta, don't add any extra salt. In Cyprus, parsley is ubiquitous and it's easy to find a big, fresh bunch at any store. As in the other salad, we added red onion, dicing it for some crunch. Dress with olive oil, a little balsamic vinegar and salt.
The third salad plays off of the orange's juiciness. We've been eating a lot of humus in Cyprus so chickpeas seemed only natural. They make a wonderful salad ingredient, but can be a little starchy, even dry. In come the oranges, along with a good amount of parsley to add a little flatness to all the round flavors. We added a little olive oil, red onion and some chili powder, which goes very well with both chickpeas and orange and injects a little Turkish-Cypriot flavor.
The easiest way to add orange to a salad is to cut it into slices, unpeeled. Cut a slit into each slice, unlatching the ring, and pull straight so that the little triangle of orange stick up like teeth from the peel. It's really easy to catch and remove seeds this way and the fruit is easier to work with. Just pull each piece off (working over your salad so that any discarded juice doesn't go to waste). Smaller pieces will mix into your salad more evenly.
Three pieces of fruit remain. If we had the means, we would attempt preserving them, like lemons, as they were served to us a few nights ago at Skourouvinnos Tavern. Chances are, they will be mixed into some sheep yogurt at breakfast tomorrow. And, then, we'll just have to buy some more. Because we can't help ourselves. 'Tis the season.

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Agios Athanasios, The Village That's Still There

We were walking with Kyriakos through the outskirts of Limassol. A self-described “refugee” from Famagusta, Kyriakos had come to Limassol in 1974, along with so many other Greek Cypriots from the north. As we walked, he told us about a little hamlet called Agios Athanasios. On the horizon, construction projects jutted into the sky. Just below us, a raised line of concrete, the main island highway, groaned with traffic. Limassol sprawls. It has spread out along the shore and trudged determinedly up towards the mountains. There’s no real center, no focal point. It is just a massing of buildings and twists of road.

It took us a while to realize, as we walked and talked, that we were actually in the little village. Agios Athanasios is still there, all but swallowed up.

The village shows up in the details – an old stone wall, faded paint, a small square with lemon trees and a church. Old houses pinched the streets into lanes, barely wide enough for a car to squeeze by. In the mornings, a man came through selling oranges from his truck, yelling “mandarinas!” out his window. Kyriakos told us how people had begun to seal up the stone with plaster, how it had changed the place. A new town hall had recently been built in a blocky, modern style.

“Once it was all fields around Agios Athanasios,” we were told. “These are the farm houses.” It was possible, in some little corners, to still see a farming town – in the corners where the old buildings were arranged just so, and the highrises were blocked out.

Limassol was once not much more than a small town located on the sleepy southern coast. Because the ports in the north were better positioned and deeper, the southern shore was neglected – the coast here is more exposed and less interesting, the beaches aren’t as good, historically it was a backwater. The British colonizers preferred the area around Kyrenia, which was founded by Greeks in the 10th century BC, and traditionally had one of the more Greek populations on the island. Limassol, by comparison, was heavily Turkish. When the 1974 conflict segregated Cyprus, the people of the two towns essentially switched places.
The influx of new people into Limassol wasn’t entirely from Kyrenia, though. Many rural refugees from the north ended up in the city, as well as people from Famagusta and northern Nicosia. A much bigger impact was made by tourists, as foreigners became wary of the Turkish occupied area. Holiday homes went up, hotels were built and the beaches were developed. As Cyprus became more of a destination, Limassol increasingly became the hub.
An exit sign for Agios Athanasios on the highway has the grim, smokestack symbol for “industrial area.” When we were renting our car in Nicosia, a man knew exactly where the town was – “oh Agios Athanasios,” he said. “We have a service center there.” It’s sadly true that the village has become something of a warehouse neighborhood for Limassol. The space around the town square is unsightly, jammed up against an offramp and bounded by trash-strewn lots. At the same time, it’s the only part of the city where we saw any semblance of tradition – this bread oven, for example. Old women in kerchiefs, too, and chickens in a little courtyard.

It’s increasingly hard to reconcile the idea of Cyprus as a holiday paradise with the reality of the coast. This is a place where construction still means progress, and where a vacation means being cramming into the space between condo and sea. Limassol is a city of sleek, bland tourist cafes mixed with American fast-food brands and seedy “cabarets.”

Our way of traveling isn’t the same as vacationing. We like to see how a place really functions, how the people really live. Though it’s disappointing, it’s still interesting to find a wasteland of new development – this is reality, not the brochure.

But at night, Agios Athanasios' Skourouvinnos taverna blends both worlds together. It’s a modern place, full of young people from Limassol proper – but it still feels a hundred miles from the bustle of the city. Yiannakis, the young chef and owner, bounced around the dining room energetically, his cell-phone ringing constantly. “Everyone wants to come,” he said to us. “I have to say no to all my friends.” The house is old and rustic, the atmosphere is communal and convivial. It’s the only real restaurant in Agios Athanasios, something like the village pub.
Cypriots appreciate traditional tavern food just as much as we foreigners do, and so they’ll drive up to this little village-within-a-city, find the town square amongst the chain-link bracken, and crowd into Skourouvinnos until there’s nowhere left to sit. Just like in the villages, the food is simple, delicious and plentiful – we were sitting at the bar and the waitress had to begin piling plates on top of one another to fit it all.

As we walked home, it really did feel as though we were in a small town – leaving the taverna, the din of voices quieted and then dropped away, all we could hear were our own footsteps on the street. The lights of town lit up the sky around us, but Agios Athanasios hadn’t been completely swallowed up.

Gypsy Kitchens: The Durrell

English writer Lawrence Durrell lived in Cyprus for about three years in the 1950s and remains one if its most talked about residents. It's no surprise, being as Durrell told the world about his time here in a memoir called Bitter Lemons of Cyprus. We'd never heard of it, nor had we heard of him until we began to research the country. His name came up as often and with as much assumed interest as Van Gogh's in Provence. The home he lived in, the school he taught at, the hotel he listed as "the best in town," are all considered historic sights. In his home village of Bellapais, two trees contend for the title of "The Tree of Idleness," an important landmark in Bitter Lemons. The fact that he found Limassol "unsightly" comes up in Lonely Planet's history of the city. In Limassol, we bought the book and created a cocktail in his honor. That way we'd be able to curl up with them both.
The man at the used bookshop told us "not to believe everything - it is just Lawrence's opinion." We doubt this came only from his distaste for Limassol. Three chapters in, he has happily drank Commandaria with Greek-Cypriot friends and Coca Cola with Turkish-Cypriot friends. His life was a blissful convergence of the two cultures that would divide the country in a clash. Durrell left Cyprus after the "enosis" based EOKA resistance movement really heated up. This was the desire of Greek-Cypriots to break from England and become part of Greece. As Lawrence was a Brit, I'm sure his take on the events of 1955 don't mesh with the old book seller's. We're enjoying Bitter Lemons and enjoying The Durrell cocktail even more.
Obviously, we began with Schweppe's Bitter Lemon. Any American traveling to Western Europe will come home with tales of the stuff. A friend of ours shipped a case of it to themselves, not wanting to have to quit cold turkey after two weeks of drinking it in Portugal. Usually, candies and drinks that are going for "lemon" go more for the sweet and sour aspects of its flesh. This leaves you thinking more about its peel. It tastes like a very bitter tonic water, very zesty. Obviously, Bitter Lemon goes well with gin, but we wanted to keep things more local. Ouzo, ours made by the Cypriot company KEO, is the Greek version of France's Pastis or Turkey's Raki - an anise aperitif that turns cloudy when you add water. The third ingredient is, you guessed it, bitters. A local Limassol company, Magousta, has been making "Magic Drops" since the 1930s. However, it was originally called "Cock Drops," a fact made more unfortunate by the label's recommendation to "snip the top" of your Cock Drops bottle to have it dispense correctly. Last ingredient, lemon.
It's citrus season here in Cyprus. The oranges, clementines and mandarins are being harvested. The grapefruit is almost ready and the lemon trees are bare from earlier collection. Lemons in Cyprus are big and sweet. And abundant. Most houses have at least one lemon tree, every meze dinner comes with a plate full of wedges. Greek Cypriot recipes feature lemon prominently, so our Greek Cypriot cocktail does, too. We only needed a quarter of a lemon for each glass because the wedges were incredibly juicy.
You never really know when conceptualizing a cocktail, but somehow we created a truly delicious drink. The Durrell's ingredients go so well together that we now mix one up any evening we have available ice. The ouzo, on its own, is sweet and heavy. Adding the biting, carbonated Bitter Lemon really balances that out. A drop of bitters adds a little complexity, like a single bay leaf does in a big pot of soup. Since Magousta's Magic Drops is bright red, this tints The Durrell pink. Ole Lawrence is a little flushed. A good squeeze of lemon and you've got the final note: fresh, vibrant citrus. Now, go ahead and pick up a guide book about Cyprus. Every time Lawrence Durrell or Bitter Lemons of Cyprus is mentioned, take a sip of The Durrell. We assure you it will be a very educational and dangerous drinking game. Here's the recipe. Serve on the rocks.

2 parts Ouzo
1 part Schweppe's Bitter Lemon
A drop of bitters
1 - 2 quarters lemon, depending on juiciness
Ice 

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A Different Kind of Ruin

Picture Cyprus in 1973, the year before division, when the island was still whole. Salamis, the vast ruin on the northeastern coast, was just beginning to be mapped out and dug up. Kourion – or Courium, as it’s sometimes called – was a spare, scattered collection of rocks and pillars. Much smaller than Salamis, it had always been considered something of a secondary site. Not much had been unearthed, Limassol hadn’t become a tourism destination yet.

Thirty-nine years later, Salamis is much the same. Kourion, on the other hand, is spick and span, with a plush visitors center, immaculately kept mosaics and a reputation for tour-group crowds. When we visited, there weren’t too many people, but it was all so clean - was this a ruin or a museum?

Set in hardpacked, much brushed dirt, some of the finest old mosaics on Cyprus lie. The red soil (as fine as velvet) holds gleaming bits of stone and tile - perfectly clean. The best of them are protected from rain and sun by arched, wood-beamed canopies. Walkways have been installed so that visitors can pass over them without damaging the tiles, information plaques give details about each scene. It’s all in strange contrast with unprotected, unadorned Salamis, where it took us almost forty-five minutes just to find two small scraps of mosaic.
Kourion was built along a ridge above these lime cliffs, just in off a stony beach. The position is one of the more easily defended spots along the southern coast, and there’s evidence of Neolithic man inhabiting the same place, and a formative city being built as early as 1300 BC. High up, with spectacular views, the complex eventually became a Byzantine religious site, which is when it was likely at its peak. A grand basilica was built in the fifth century, but there are surprising suggestions – found in jewelry, most importantly – that Kourion was predominantly Christian as early as the third century.

The spot gained notoriety in the 1860’s, when an American man supposedly dug up a trove of gold, silver and jeweled objects – which he then sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Many people, even at the time, are skeptical that the objects were actually found at Kourion, but the intrigue was such that other archaeologists were drawn down to the southern coast. Much of the excavation work was done shoddily, and not a whole lot was really discovered at first. The focus for a long time was on finding artifacts – there are so many ancient ruins in this part of the world that Kourion’s buildings themselves didn’t espouse much enthusiasm. By the 1950’s and 60’s, the focus had shifted to the much larger and more important ruin at Salamis.

Then, in 1974, Cyprus was divided. Salamis fell on the northern side, Limassol grew from a town into a city. Tourism boomed in the south, and the Cypriot government started looking for new attractions.

In these warm, sunny March days, we bleached-skin visitors from the cold aren’t an overwhelming presence on Cyprus. Life is still fairly local, the high season is another month away. But the mark of tourism is on everything – from the “luxury apartment” for-sale signs, aimed at Brits, to the cruise ships lurking offshore. Kourion is no exception. It’s been spruced up and beautified, with elegant walkways and benches looking out over the sea.

And every square inch of interesting tile has been brushed and restored and preserved. Cyprus climbed its way out of destitution on the backs of foreign guests. The country is well aware that attractions like this need to be invested in.

The frustrating thing for us – and for many archaeologists – is that Salamis possesses a trove many times the size of Kourion’s. After the Turkish invasion, though, virtually all excavation and study was halted at the northern site, and almost no researchers have been given access since. It’s almost a given that further exploration would uncover works just as important as the ones at Kourion – the two sites are just so unequal in terms of size and importance. When this little rocky hilltop was at its peak, Salamis was one of the principal capitals of the eastern Mediterranean. One look at the Salamis bath ruins will tell you how much there is still uncovered – they alone feel almost as large as the entirety of Kourion.
We walked in the sun for a while, looking at broken pillars and bath house floors. Down along the beach, kiteboarders had unfurled colorful sails. In the meadows below, a few horses grazed on the spring-green grass. We looked at the much-touted basilica, which was ruined by an earthquake not long after being built. Kourion was largely abandoned in the sixth and seventh centuries – drinking water was scarce, the threat from pirates had increased, life was easier further inland.

After hearing and reading so much about the place, Kourion felt a little disappointing. If it wasn’t so close to Limassol, if it wasn’t in the tourist-clogged south, it wouldn’t be what it is today. Local children would probably be climbing on the rock, mushroom pickers would be walking through the uncut grass, the whole thing would lie exposed to the elements. That’s what Salamis is like – as though no-one really cares about the treasure they have. Though it’s impossible to blame them, people care about Kourion a little too much. It’s what they have, after all.

It’s funny how several millennia can be clouded by the current politics of place. As we drove back to Limassol, we talked about the difference between the two places, and realized that we were talking less about the ancients and more about the present.

Why Don't They Have This in America?

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. Such is the case on the island of Cyprus, where water shortage has been a historic problem. Luckily, Cypriots have always been pretty ingenious at coming up with solutions. Some of the world's oldest wells have been found in Cyprus' West. Modernity brought strict rules about water conservation and large desalination plants, which have created 50% of all domestic water in the last 10 years. These water vending machines are what really impressed me.
You won't go thirsty in Cyprus. In places where the tap water isn't drinkable, hosts proved bottles of water. Such was the case at our hotel in Nicosia, but we drink a lot of water. So, we purchased the biggest jug we could find - a 10 liter, intended for water coolers, not a couple. Anyway, we finished it and when it came time to get more, we looked to the water vending machine across the street.
It had a picture of a bottle just our size and "80 cent." So, we rummaged up change and, excitedly, went for it. Merlin inserted our first coin, a fifty center, and water immediately began to gush out. Yeah! Let's see how much fifty cents gets! Wait... oh no... oh gosh. It continued past our 10 liters, which made us both wonder how much the recommended 80 cents actually gets you. We closed the door, hoping that would somehow stop the deluge, but it continued to seep out.

Water vending machines. What an excellent idea. What the water cooler is for an office, the vending machine could be for a neighborhood!

A-Meze-ing in Cyprus

Meze is an eastern Mediterranean thing, not a Cypriot thing. The word comes from the Persian word for taste, or snack. We had meze in Turkey, we will have it in Greece, it's popular in the Middle East, there are versions as far west as the Balkans. In this part of the sea, the word "meze" is as commonplace as the word "appetizer."

In Cyprus, though, it takes on a whole different meaning - a meze can be a whole meal. We've had half a dozen examples now, and are feeling just as intrigued about the process as we were in the beginning.

But what is meze? Above, part (yes, just part) of a seafood version at Zigiana Taverna in Zygi, on the southern shore.

In most of the meze world, the word refers mainly to a selection of small dishes served as an accompaniment to drinks or a prelude to dinner. Hummus is a common meze dish, as are tahini and babaghanoush. Fried cheeses, fresh cheeses, small salads, olives, anchovies, artichokes, tzatziki or cured meats - just about anything can be considered part of the offering.

Cypriot mezes are interesting for two reasons. First, they are often, in effect, much more than just the small plates - the word connotes a type of meal and a style of eating. Second, the island's unique location brings together a huge range of different cultures.

Cyprus is tucked into such an interesting corner - the most eastern island in the mediterranean it is Greek and Turkish culturally, but with heavy influences from the Levant - the coast of Syria is only sixty miles away, Lebanon is less than a hundred miles distant.

The intriguingly-titled "Syrian-Arab Friendship Club" restaurant in Nicosia features this overwhelming Syrian spread - some of the more interesting plates were the batata maftooteh (top row, second to left; a kind of mashed potato) and the muhammara (bottom row, red: walnut, tomato and pomegranate paste). Near the entrance, a gas-fired oven roared. A man pulled steaming, puffed-up pitas from it with a long peel - baskets of the bread were whisked from table to table. The meal continued with smoky-flavored haloumi breads and grilled, minced chicken loaded with cumin.

Not surprisingly, the northern and southern parts of this divided isle bring different dishes to the table. In North Cyprus, the food is accented by Turkey - the eggplant reigns serenely as the sultan of the kitchen, spice plays its part with conviction and kebab is the inevitable endpoint.

At Niazi's, in Girne (Kyrenia), the "full kebab" meze is probably the most ordered dinner in town. It begins with about eight cold dishes (mostly unremarkable - boiled beets, russian salad, grilled vegetables), transitions to hot meats like pastırma (Turkish pastrami), and ends with as much charcoal-cooked meat as a diner can hold. This is what Cypriot meze is: a full meal, arranged something like a tasting menu, building on itself as it goes.
In the Greek south, the emphasis tends to be on fish first, meat second. Many restaurants, especially along the shore, offer entirely seafood mezes. Popular intermediary dishes include fried crab, cuttlefish, calamari and stewed octopus. Taramosalata, shown above, is a kind of Greek fish-roe spread that appears on a solid majority of platters. Meals usually end with some kind of grilled fish - Rebecca wanted me to mention that it's wise to hold off on the (often) fried stuff in the middle, and guarantee some room for the pièce de résistance.

Cyprus mezes are fun - they take the guesswork out of reading a menu, and you get to try a huge amount of different specialties. Like ordering a chef's menu, one has to release control over the dinner - we went to the same restaurant (6 Brothers) twice in Girne, and had a different meal on the second visit than we did on the first. It's freeing and relaxing. The dishes can be surprising (for example, blurry, at the bottom of this picture, 6 Brother's curried potatoes), and will almost certainly be culturally varied.

Don't feel the need to clean all the plates - almost nobody does. The mark of a good meze, as they say in Nicosia, is when everyone is too full to finish.

The World's Last Divided Capital

Cyprus' Green Line, a UN buffer zone between the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish-occupied North Cyprus, runs right through the city of Nicosia. We crossed from North into South on foot, along with a man who had just hopped over for some groceries. The border is informal these days - a far cry from 1974. That's when Turkey came in and nabbed 38% of the island, right up to the Green Line, which was at the time a cease-fire line drawn in the 60s. We knew that the we'd see reminders of that year in Nicosia, but weren't expecting to encounter them in the ways that we did. Flashbacks to the 70s popped up in retro ice cream salon signage and abandoned vinyl stores.
Even as we crossed the border we felt a little time-warpy. This is a UN-protected border in 2012, hardly the place we thought we'd see a barrier made of sandbags. Combined with the checkpoint's palm-thatched roof, it conjured images of 1970s Hollywood 'conflict in the tropics.' The camou-wearing guards wielded machine guns yet still seemed less intimidating than some Manhattan doormen I've encountered. But, we weren't about to treat it flippantly and we didn't break any rules. So, no photography of anything in or around the Green Line. Just these 'vintage' signs from Nicosia's Old Town.
The Buffer Zone is quite literally "green," a defacto national park of protected area belting a country that is being developed at a rapid rate. There are cemeteries that no one can visit anymore, houses that had to be abandoned. In Nicosia, there's a big sign outside one of the pedestrian checkpoints. "The World's Last Divided Capital," it reads. The once murderously volatile dividing line is now a tourism selling point. Which is why I was even more shocked to see that so much of the Old Town was a derelict time capsule.
It makes sense, really. In the North and the South, we've met people who define themselves as refugees from the other side. In 1974, once Turkey's occupying forces made it down to that line, Turkish-Cypriots were relocated up North and Greek-Cypriots sought refuge down south - creating two ethnically defined halves. Houses, land, stores, etc were abandoned. So, I assume the same was true in Nicosia. Walking around the Venetian walled Old Town of South Nicosia, it felt like more than half of the businesses were shuttered - dilapidated, really.
The style of signage left behind all harkened back to one era. A gutted store with a sign that read "International Calls" had faded posters featuring tight white pants. A music store, the windows broken and door locked with rust, had stacks and stacks of old vinyls in boxes inside. All of the historical sites in the Old Town are beautifully preserved. Faneromeni and Archbishop Kyprianos Squares are filled with architectural sites. The Old Town has a good number of well-cared for and worthwhile museums, a cobbled shopping avenue and atmospheric, tourist eatery quarter. It's just that everything in between is grittily decayed. Some blocks feel like ghost towns.
In 2011, a study showed Nicosia to be the tenth richest city in the world according to purchasing power. It is the wealthiest city per capita in the Eastern Mediterranean. Usually, a city's Old Town and New Town is a division of exhibit and reality. One is twee and one is gritty. A poor country can have the glossiest, most renovated historic center - putting all their eggs in the tourism basket. It is the exact opposite in Nicosia where, it seems, all post 1974 prosperity is manifested in the New Town. It's sprawling and lively and mostly uninteresting. Big buildings, stores, traffic - which we saw stop dead when the first snow here in 18 years began to fall from the sky.
I wonder if part of the reason so many buildings in the Old Town remain ignored is a lack of interest in revisiting that moment in recent history. The cultural landmarks are part of a greater Cypriot history. They can be viewed as a part of everyone's identity. Cleaning, fixing, selling and re-opening a relocated family's shop when your own family was also transplanted just may not have felt too appealing. Knocking them down would be too harsh and would, no doubt, ruin the integrity of any "Old" Town center. So what is there to be done? Who even owns these buildings?
At least things look like they're changing a bit. The city is, day by day, being filled with new residents who are no longer attached to that recent history. Young business owners, who were born in an already divided city, have converted old stores into boutiques and arts centers. The other bright, new businesses joining them in the Old Town's back streets are run by the burgeoning Asian, African and Middle-Eastern communities. In the New Town, a massive project is underway to redesign Freedom Square. They broke ground years ago but, oops, excavated some archeological findings. So, they had to alter the blueprints a little. The newest of New Town had to work around the oldest of Old. A rare border crossing between South Nicosia's division of New and Old.