The Pillars of Hercules

Dawn was bright, the glare of a dusty shoreline and a fortress, a Gothic church in the distance among rooftops, Northern Cyprus. It was not a province of Turkey—silly me for thinking so—but a sovereign state, the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, bankrolled and backed and guarded by Turkey, the only country in the world which recognizes it. It was about a third of Cyprus. The southern part was Greek, and the Green Line, guarded by United Nations soldiers, divided the two. Ever since this partition there had been peace on Cyprus.

Famagusta had been renamed by the Turks Gazimagosa—the Gazi an honorific term for a warrior, since the town had come through the war with valor. It was a small town, and its port was located in the old part, surrounded by a Venetian wall. It was very ruinous, all of it, and my impression was that Turkish North Cyprus was having a very bad time. Walking slowly with Samih Pasha, Fikret and Onan, it took us thirty-five minutes to see the whole of Gazimagosa, including the church, which was no longer a church: the Gothic cathedral of St. Nicholas had been turned into the Lala Pasha mosque by the grafting of a minaret onto one of the spires.

“This is it,” Samih Pasha said, tweaking his mustache. “So we go to Girne.”

“You come with us, effendi,” Onan said. “We worried about you in Israel when we didn’t see you.”

Greek Kyrenia was now Turkish Girne. It was about sixty miles away. The four of us found a taxi, and I let the Turks haggle with the driver. They came away saying, “No, no. Ridiculous!”

The driver had said that he could not take us for less than eight hundred thousand Turkish liras. This was $25—an outrageous amount to the Turks. I did not say that it seemed reasonable, because I was curious to know what their solution would be. It was a seventy-five-cent ride in an old bus to Lefkosa (Nicosia), a city that had been bisected by the Green Line. From there we would have to catch another bus to Girne.

On a bus that swayed down an empty road, past unplowed fields in the November heat of Cyprus, the wobbly wheels raising dust, the passengers dozing, the landscape looking deserted and arid—water was scarce, the last harvest had been terrible, the little nation was ignored by everyone—I was thinking how odd it was to be here, traveling across this bogus republic. The bus was uncomfortable, the road was bad, the food was awful, the weather was corrosive. But I had never been here before, which was justification enough; and I felt a grim satisfaction in being with a little Turkish team of men who kept telling me they worried about me when I was out of sight.

It was only an hour and a half to Lefkosa. The onward bus was not leaving for another two hours. In spite of his age, Samih Pasha walked quickly into town. He said he was eager to see the Green Line.

“Have you been here before?”

“Yes, but not on the ground,” he said, smiling. When he smiled his big mustache lifted in a big semaphore of happiness. “I was flying.”

In the ethnic fighting of 1964 and again at partition in 1974, it had been Samih Pasha’s task to fly his F-100 fighter plane from one end of Cyprus to the other, from his air base in Turkey. The object was not to engage Greek planes—the Turkish air force dominated the skies—but to break windows.

“I am flying at ten meters,” Samih Pasha said, “and when I get over Lefkosa I let out the afterburner and make a big noise—an explosion, you can say—and all the windows break!”

“Greek or Turkish windows?” I asked.

“Both! Impossible just to break Greek windows!”

And he described with pleasure the way his fighter jet streaked low across Cypriot airspace, scaring the bejesus out of the Greeks, and reassuring the Turks, who (so it was said on this side of the Green Line) had been systematically oppressed by them.

We walked down one rubbly street and up another, past some shops just closing for the lunch time siesta, to the United Nations checkpoint: a sentry post, a shed, a barrier, and a bilingual English-Turkish sign, STOP/DUR.

“I’d like to pass through,” I said to the soldier in the blue beret who stood holding an automatic rifle.

“No.”

“I just want to see Greek Cyprus and come straight back.”

“It is impossible.”

“You see?” Onan said. The others had watched me. They were much too polite to ask the soldier.

A woman came out of her house nearby and said hello in English. Her house had a colonnade in the front, and a pretty porch. I asked her whether she had crossed the Green Line, which was fifty feet away. No, she said, not for twenty years.

“This house was given to me by my father,” she said when I complimented her on it. “That was in 1930. Over there”—she pointed across the street to some abandoned houses—“was an Armenian family, and some Greeks. But they left.”

“Were they forced out of their houses?” I asked.

She got my point, and without replying directly to the question, she said, “My house in Limassol [in Greek Cyprus] is wrecked. They took my antiques. They took my Mercedes car.”