hanging bats.
Sheets of sand blew across avenues and covered floors. What surprised him at first was the general absence of smell, except for a mysterious stench that emanated from hotel swimming pools, most of which were inexplicably drained yet reeked as though filled with cadavers. Around them, the upturned tables and chairs, torn beach umbrellas, and glasses knocked on their sides all spoke of some revelry gone terribly wrong. Cleaning all this up was going to be expensive.
For six months, as he dismantled and rescued air conditioners, industrial washers and dryers, and entire kitchens full of ovens, grills, refrigerators, and freezers, silence pounded at him. It actually hurt his ears, he told his wife. During the year before the war, he’d worked at a British naval base south of town, and would often leave her at a hotel to enjoy a day at the beach. When he picked her up afterward, a dance band would be playing for the German and British tourists. Now, no bands, just the incessant kneading of the sea that no longer soothed. The wind sighing through open windows became a whine. The cooing of pigeons grew deafening. The sheer absence of human voices bouncing off walls was unnerving. He kept listening for Turkish soldiers, who were under instructions to shoot looters. He wasn’t certain how many assigned to patrol knew that he was there legally, or would give him a chance to prove it.
It turned out not to be a problem. He seldom saw any guards. He understood why they would avoid entering such a tomb.
By the time Metin Munir saw Varosha, four years after Allan Cavinder’s reclamation job ended, roofs had collapsed and trees were growing straight out of houses. Munir, one of Turkey’s best-known newspaper columnists, is a Turkish Cypriot who went to Istanbul to study, came home to fight when the troubles began, then returned to Turkey when the troubles kept going on, and on. In 1980, he was the first journalist allowed to enter Varosha for a few hours.
The first thing he noticed was shredded laundry still hanging from clotheslines. What struck him most, though, wasn’t the absence of life but its vibrant presence. With the humans who built Varosha gone, nature was intently recouping it. Varosha, merely 60 miles from Syria and Lebanon, is too balmy for a freeze-thaw cycle, but its pavement was tossed asunder anyway. The wrecking crews weren’t just trees, Munir marveled, but also flowers. Tiny seeds of wild Cyprus cyclamen had wedged into cracks, germinated, and heaved aside entire slabs of cement. Streets now rippled with white cyclamen combs and their pretty, variegated leaves.
“You understand,” Munir wrote his readers back in Turkey, “just what the Taoists mean when say they say that soft is stronger than hard.”
Two more decades passed. The millennium turned, and kept going. Once, Turkish Cypriots had bet that Varosha, too valuable to lose, would force the Greeks to the bargaining table. Neither side had dreamed that, 30- plus years later, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus would still exist, severed not only from the Greek Republic of Cyprus but from the world, still a pariah nation to all except Turkey. Even the UN Peacekeeping Force was exactly where it was in 1974, still listlessly patrolling the Green Line, occasionally waxing a pair of still-impounded, still-new 1974 Toyotas.
Nothing has changed except Varosha, which is entering advanced stages of decay. Its encircling fence and barbed wire are now uniformly rusted, but there is nothing left to protect but ghosts. An occasional Coca Cola sign and broadsides posting nightclubs’ cover charges hang on doorways that haven’t seen customers in more than three decades, and now never will again. Casement windows have flapped and stayed open, their pocked frames empty of glass. Fallen limestone facing lies in pieces. Hunks of wall have dropped from buildings to reveal empty rooms, their furniture long ago somehow spirited away. Paint has dulled; the underlying plaster, where it remains, has yellowed to muted patinas. Where it doesn’t, brick-shaped gaps show where mortar has already dissolved.
Other than the back-and-forth of pigeons, all that moves is the creaky rotor of one last functioning windmill. Hotels—mute and windowless, some with balconies that have fallen, precipitating cascades of damage below—still line the riviera that once aspired to be Cannes or Acapulco. At this point, all parties agree, none is salvageable. Nothing is. To someday once again lure tourists, Varosha will have to be bulldozed and begun anew.
In the meantime, nature continues its reclamation project. Feral geraniums and philodendrons emerge from missing roofs and pour down exterior walls. Flame trees, chinaberries, and thickets of hibiscus, oleander, and passion lilac sprout from nooks where indoors and outdoors now blend. Houses disappear under magenta mounds of bougainvillaea. Lizards and whip snakes skitter through stands of wild asparagus, prickly pear, and six-foot grasses. A spreading ground cover of lemon grass sweetens the air. At night, the darkened beachfront, free of moonlight bathers, crawls with nesting loggerhead and green sea turtles.
THE ISLAND OF Cyprus is shaped like a skillet, with its long handle extended toward the Syrian shore. Its pan is gridded with two mountain ranges oriented east-west and divided by a wide central basin—and by the Green Line, with one sierra on each side. The mountains were once covered with Aleppo and Corsican pines, oaks, and cedars. A cypress and juniper forest filled the entire central plain between the two ranges. Olive, almond, and carob trees grew on the arid seaward slopes. At the end of the Pleistocene, dwarf elephants the size of cows and pygmy hippopotamuses no bigger than farmyard swine roamed among these trees. Since Cyprus originally rose from the sea, unconnected to the three continents that surround it, both species apparently arrived by swimming. They were followed by humans about 10,000 years ago. At least one archaeological site suggests that the last pygmy hippo was killed and cooked by
The trees of Cyprus were prized by Assyrian, Phoenician, and Roman boat builders; during the Crusades, most of them disappeared into the warships of Richard the Lionhearted. By then, the goat population was so large that the plains remained treeless. During the 20th century, plantations of umbrella pines were introduced to try to resuscitate former springs. However, in 1995, following a long drought, nearly all of them and the remaining native forests in the northern mountains exploded in a lightning inferno.
Journalist Metin Munir was too grieved to return again from Istanbul to face his native island in ashes, until a Turkish Cypriot horticulturist, Hikmet Ulucan, convinced him he needed to see what was happening. Once again, Munir found that flowers were renewing a Cyprus landscape: the burnt hillsides were blanketed with crimson poppies. Some poppy seeds, Ulucan told him, live 1,000 years or more, waiting for fire to clear trees away so they can bloom.
In the village of Lapta, high above the northern coastline, Hikmet Ulucan grows figs, cyclamens, cacti, and grapes, and reverently tends the oldest weeping mulberry in all Cyprus. His moustache, Vandyke beard, and remaining tufts of hair have whitened since he was forced to leave the South as a young man, where his father had a vineyard and raised sheep, almonds, olives, and lemons. Until the senseless feud that tore apart his island, 20 generations of Greeks and Turks had shared their valley. Then neighbors were clubbed to death. They found the smashed body of an old Turkish woman who had been grazing her goat, the bleating animal still tied to her wrist. It was barbaric, but Turks were also slaying Greeks. Murderous, mutual loathing between tribes was no more explicable, or complicated, than the genocidal urges of chimpanzees—a fact of nature that we humans, vainly or disingenuously, pretend our codes of civilization transcend.
From his garden, Hikmet can see down to the harbor at Kyrenia, guarded by a seventh-century Byzantine castle built atop Roman fortifications that preceded it. Crusaders and Venetians subsequently took it; then came Ottomans, then British, and now Turks were having a turn again. Today a museum, the castle holds one of the world’s rarest relics, a complete Greek merchant ship discovered in 1965, scuttled a mile off Kyrenia. When it went down, its hold was filled with millstones and hundreds of ceramic urns containing wine, olives, and almonds. Its cargo was heavy enough to mire it where currents buried it in mud. Carbon dating of the almonds it carried, likely picked in Cyprus only days earlier, shows that it sank about 2,300 years ago.
Shielded from oxygen, the ship’s Aleppo pine hull and timbers remained intact, although they had to be injected with polyethylene resins to keep from disintegrating once exposed to air. The boat builders had used nails of copper, also once plentiful on Cyprus, also impervious to rust. Equally well preserved are lead fishing weights and the ceramic urns whose varied styles reveal the Aegean ports of their origin.
The 10-foot-thick walls and curved towers of the castle where the ship is now displayed are of limestone quarried from the surrounding cliffs, bearing tiny fossils deposited when Cyprus was beneath the Mediterranean. Since the island was divided, however, the castle and the fine old stone carob warehouses of Kyrenia’s waterfront have all but disappeared behind unlovely infestations of casino hotels—gambling and loose currency laws being
