among the limited economic options open to a pariah nation.
Hikmet Ulucan drives east along Cyprus’s north coast, passing three more castles of native limestone rising from the jagged mountains that parallel the narrow road. Along the headlands and promontories overlooking the topaz Mediterranean are remains of stone villages, some of them 6,000 years old. Until recently, their terraces, half-buried walls, and jetties were also visible. Since 2003, however, yet another foreign incursion has assaulted the island’s profile. “The only consolation,” mourns Ulucan, “is that this one can’t last.”
Not crusaders, this time, but elderly British seeking the warmest retirement a middle-class pension can buy, led by a frenzy of developers who discovered in the quasi-country of Northern Cyprus the last cheap, untouched seafront property left anywhere north of Libya, with pliable zoning codes to match. Suddenly, bulldozers were scattering 500-year-old olive trees to scrape roads across hillsides. Waves of red-tiled roofs soon oscillated across the landscape, atop floor plans cloned repeatedly in poured concrete. Upon a tsunami of cash payoffs, properly agents surfed to shore astride English-language billboards that appended terms like “Estates,” “Hillside Villas,” “Seaside Villas,” and “Luxury Villas” to ancient Mediterranean place-names.
Prices from ?40,000 to ?100,000 ($75,000 to $185,000 U.S.) touched off a land rush that overwhelmed trifles such as title disputes by Greek Cypriots who still claimed to own much of the land. A Northern Cyprus environmental-protection trust vainly protested a new golf course by reminding people that they now had to import water from Turkey in giant vinyl bags; that municipal garbage tips were full; that the total lack of sewage treatment meant five times as much effluent would pour into the transparent sea.
Each month more steam shovels gobble coastline like famished brontosaurs, spitting out olive and carob trees along a widening blacktop now 30 miles east of Kyrenia, with no sign of stopping. The English language marches down the shore, dragging embarrassing architecture with it, one sign after another announcing the latest subdivision with a trust-inspiring British name, even as the seaside villas grow trashier: concrete painted, not stuccoed; fake-ceramic roof tiles made of tacky polymer; cornices and windows trimmed with faux stenciled stonework. When Hikmet Ulucan sees a pile of traditional yellow tiles lying in front of naked town house frames awaiting walls, he realizes that someone is ripping stone facing from local bridges and selling it to contractors.
Something about these limestone squares lying at the base of skeletal buildings looks familiar. After a while, he figures it out. “It is like Varosha.” The half-finished buildings going up, surrounded by construction rubble, exactly recall the half-ruins of Varosha coming down.
But if anything, quality has sunk even further. Each billboard touting Northern Cyprus’s sunny new dream homes includes, near the bottom, notification of the construction guarantee: 10 years. Given rumors of developers not bothering to wash the sea salt from the beach sand they mine for concrete, 10 years may be all they get.
Beyond the new golf course, the road finally narrows again. Past one-lane bridges stripped of their limestone ornaments, and a small canyon filled with myrtle and pink orchids, it enters the Karpaz Peninsula, the long tendril that reaches east toward the Levant. Along it are empty Greek churches, gutted but going nowhere, testaments to the tenacity of stone architecture. Stone structures were among the first things that distinguished sedentary humans from nomadic hunter-gatherers, whose temporary mud-and-wattle huts were no more permanent than the season’s grass. Stone buildings will be among the last to disappear when we’re gone. As the fleeting materials of modern construction decompose, the world will retrace our steps back to the Stone Age as it gradually erodes away all memory of us.
As the road follows the peninsula, the landscape gets biblical, with old walls turning back to hills as gravity tugs on the underlying clay. The island ends in sand dunes covered by salt scrub and pistachio trees. The beach is smoothed by the belly tracks of mama sea turtles.
A small limestone hill is topped by a lone, branching umbrella pine. Shadows on the rock face turn out to be caves. Closer, the soft parabola of a low-arched portal reveals that it’s been carved. At this windblown land’s end, less than 40 miles across the water to Turkey and only 20 miles more to Syria, the Stone Age began in Cyprus. Humans arrived around the same time that the oldest known building on Earth, a stone tower, was rising in the world’s oldest city that is still inhabited, Jericho. However primitive this Cyprus dwelling is by comparison, it represented a momentous step, albeit one taken some 40,000 years earlier by Southeast Asians who reached Australia—seafarers venturing beyond the horizon, out of sight of the shore, and finding another one waiting.
The cave is shallow, perhaps 20 feet deep, and surprisingly warm. A charcoal-smudged hearth, two benches, and sleeping niches were fashioned by cutting into the sedimentary walls. A second room, smaller than the first, is almost square, with a squared doorway arch.
Remains of
There are no such artifacts here: these first inhabitants of Cyprus were struggling pioneers, their time for aesthetic reflection still ahead. But their bones are buried beneath the floor. Long after all our buildings and what’s left of the tower at Jericho are reduced to sand and soil, caves where we took shelter and first learned the notion of walls—including that they begged for art—will remain. In a world without us, they await the next occupant.
CHAPTER 8
What Lasts
1. Earth and Sky Tremors
IT IS HARD to see exactly what holds up the enormous round dome of Istanbul’s formerly Orthodox Christian, marble and mosaic-encrusted church of Hagia Sophia. More than 100 feet across, it is slightly smaller than the dome that crowns Rome’s Pantheon, but considerably higher. An inspired stroke of design divides its weight through a colonnade of arched windows at its base, making it appear to float. To gaze straight up at it, a gilded sky hovering 185 feet overhead, with no easy sense of why it stays aloft, leaves a beholder half-believing in miracles, and half-dizzy.
Over a thousand years, the dome’s weight has been further distributed among so many redoubled interior walls, additional half-domes, flying buttresses, pendentives, and massive corner piers that Turkish civil engineer Mete Sozen believes that not even a major earthquake would easily shake it loose. That is exactly what happened to its first dome, which fell just 20 years after it was completed in AD 537. That mishap led to all the subsequent reinforcement; even so, quakes severely damaged the church (which became a mosque in 1453) twice more until Mimar Sinan, the greatest architect of the Ottoman Empire, restored it in the 16th century. The delicate minarets the Ottomans added to its exterior will one day topple, but even in a world without people, meaning no masons to periodically repoint the Hagia Sophia’s mortar, Sozen expects much of it and other great ancient masonry edifices of Istanbul to last well into future geologic time.
Which is more than he can say, unfortunately, for the rest of the city of his birth. Not that it’s quite the same city. Through history, Istanbul, nee Constantinople, nee Byzantium before that, has changed hands so many times that it’s hard to imagine what could fundamentally alter it, let alone destroy it. But Mete Sozen is convinced that the former has already happened and the latter is imminent, whether humans stick around or not. The only difference in a world without people is that no one would be left to try to pick up Istanbul’s pieces.
When Dr. Sozen, who holds a chair in structural engineering at Indiana’s Purdue University, first left Turkey in 1952 for graduate studies in the United States, Istanbul had 1 million people. Half a century later, it has 15 million. He describes that as a far greater paradigm shift than its previous transformations from Delphic to Roman to Byzantine Orthodox to Crusader Catholic and, finally, to Muslim—in all its Ottoman and Turkish Republican strains.
Dr. Sozen sees this difference through an engineer’s eyes. Whereas all the previous conquering cultures
