Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2022, pp. 46-48
Talking Türkiye
Photos and Article by Jonathan Gorvett
THERE ARE SIGNS OF LIFE nowadays on Varosha’s Kennedy Avenue.
The street has been freshly paved and a bicycle lane now runs from the hotel commandeered as a Turkish barracks all the way to the abandoned Golden Sands Hotel.
On the way, the wide boulevard runs past the bomb-blasted reception hall of the Asterias Hotel, the shrapnel-splattered vacation apartments of Kennedy Court and the bullet-pocked Lordos and Argolis holiday flats.
Go the other way, and you can also cycle or stroll back to the ruined Edelweiss Café, just below a U.N. observation post perched on top of an old, deserted office block.
In the cafe, where Hollywood A-list movie stars once sipped cocktails, an old juke box has exploded outwards like a mechanical flower, while outside, a set of traffic lights is now just a series of metal hoops on sticks.
Further on, a battered Coca-Cola sign still faintly promises, “It’s the real thing,” near a boarded-up and long-ago looted branch of the Bank of Cyprus.
This is the forbidden zone of Varosha, or Maras in Turkish, which until 1974, was one of the Mediterranean’s top resorts. Home to thousands of mainly Greek Cypriots, it was also bustling with holidaymakers until, on July 20, 1974, Türkiye invaded the island.
This triggered a mass exodus of the population, with some 40,000 people fleeing from here, and the surrounding Famagusta area, in just a few days.
Since then, no one has been able to return to their abandoned properties, hotel rooms and livelihoods. Many, indeed, never will, having passed away in the 47 years since those dark days.
The 1974 Turkish invasion, launched after a Greece-backed coup aimed to unite Cyprus with Greece, split the island into a largely Turkish Cypriot north and Greek Cypriot south.
Since then, negotiations under U.N. auspices have been trying to glue the two parts of the island back together—without success.
In November 2020, the then new Turkish Cypriot leader, Ersin Tatar, announced that he was abandoning the idea of reunification and would instead now argue for international recognition of two states on the island.
He also re-opened part of Varosha, which until then had been an abandoned bargaining chip in the reunification talks. Thus, the new pavement and bicycle lanes.
Now, at the entrance to the once forbidden zone, security guards keep a careful record of the numbers going in and out, with the Turkish Cypriot authorities claiming more than 200,000 had visited by August 2021.
Turkish Cypriot pop singer, Nihayet Elibol, even recently shot a video here, dancing on the sandy beaches to a backdrop of ruined and abandoned buildings. “Varosha is a very beautiful and touristic place for shooting clips and movies,” she tweeted after the video’s release.
Surreal is a more frequently used adjective.
“It’s a dystopic, zombie apocalypse-like place,” says Professor Erol Kaymak from the Eastern Mediterranean University in Famagusta, “but also oddly Disney.”
Indeed, on the beach, next to the buckled and ruined King George Hotel, a line of brightly colored food carts serves fruit smoothies and ice creams.
By a nearby boarded up Barclays Bank, a Turkish Cypriot security guard—one of many locals who have been given a Turkish police jacket and told to keep an eye on visitors—jests, “Sorry, the bank is closed today—and every day!”
THE FUTURE PAST
When Tatar reopened the roadways, he also invited the former Greek Cypriot inhabitants to either return to their property or seek restitution for it, via the European Court of Human Rights’ recognized Turkish Cypriot Immovable Property Commission.
The catch was, any Greek Cypriots who wished to return would have to do so as residents of Tatar’s Turkish Cypriot “state”—the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC).
Yet, recognized only by Türkiye, the TRNC is anathema to most Greek Cypriots, whose leaders unanimously state they want reunification of the island, rather than anything that might give recognition to its de facto division.
The U.N. talks—ongoing since intercommunal clashes led to the U.N. deployment on the island in 1964—are also based on the premise that both sides want to re-unite with each other, while Tatar’s move apparently making their resumption impossible.
The Turkish Cypriot leader’s actions, however, are backed up by his close ally, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“Federation is no longer policy,” Kaymak says. “Instead, we have a completely negative agenda, where Tatar knows there are no takers for ‘two states,’ but he also thinks talking about a federation leads nowhere, too.”
That latter point was recently underscored when Greek Cypriot newspapers printed leaked documents from U.N. talks at Crans-Montana in Switzerland in 2017. These strongly suggested that Greek Cypriot leader Nicos Anastasiades had walked out when a potential deal was floated by the U.N. and Türkiye.
“The problem is, no one wants to solve the Cyprus problem except entirely on their own terms,” says Kaymak, “so a negotiated solution isn’t popular on either side.”
1970S THEME PARK
For many who have campaigned for Cypriot reunification, this negative strategy is devastating. For them, reopening Varosha was long seen as a first step toward a reunited Cyprus, rather than “two states.”
“I wanted to throw up when I first saw it,” Mertkan Hamit, a member of the Turkish Cypriot pro-solution group, Famagusta Initiative, told the Washington Report. “It was like something from one dream had become hijacked by another—a nightmare.”
Over the summer, and in collaboration with Greek Cypriot allies, the Initiative organized activities to protest the re-opening.
They had to stop these, however, when it became clear “it was quite painful for our Greek Cypriot friends to go there,” says Hamit.
Indeed, for many Greek Cypriot former residents, a visit can be deeply traumatic. For other, younger Greek Cypriots, however, it can be difficult to recall what was lost—indeed, Varosha may not be a place they are familiar with at all.
“Some Greek Cypriots’ parents or even grandparents might have lived in Varosha, but have now died, leaving title deeds to a place their descendants never knew,” says Kaymak. “Those younger generations might think, well, if there’s never going to be a settlement and some developer will give me a few thousand for this title deed, why not?”
Many pro-reunification Greek and Turkish Cypriots now fear that, little by little, Varosha will be bought up, demolished and rebuilt, largely by mainland Turkish developers, who are closely linked to Erdogan’s presidency.
In this way, the division of the island would become solidified still further, in the fresh asphalt—and later, concrete—of a new resort.
Indeed, back in July, Tatar announced a small section of residential property would soon be reopened for resettlement or restitution.
“It’s a trial balloon,” says Kaymak. “They want to see just how many Greek Cypriots would accept.”
For now, the gates are closing again at Varosha, as the night falls and the tourists are ushered out.
For how much longer its streets will remain silent though, remains a key question for all Cypriots, both north and south on this divided island.
Jonathan Gorvett is a free-lance writer specializing on European and Middle Eastern affairs.
