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- Herausgeber: Globetrotter Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
‘On the Way to Bellapais’ takes us to a country that no government in the world recognises apart from Turkey - to the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”, the northern part of the Mediterranean island that has been divided since 1974. The author travels on foot, by bus and by hitchhiking across the Turkish part of Cyprus: from Girne and Bellapais via Famagusta and Varosha to Dipkarpaz on the Karpas Peninsula, from there to the divided capital, Levkosa, and meets locals who tell him about their hopes and fears. In many places, he follows in the footsteps of the British writer Lawrence Durrell, whose 1957 Cyprus classic ‘Bitter Lemons’ achieved world fame. - Illustrated edition.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Inhaltsverzeichnis
On the Way to Bellapais
Kai Althoetmar
On the Way to Bellapais
Northern Cyprus. Journey Through an Unknown Country
Imprint:
Title: On the Way to Bellapais. Northern Cyprus. Journey through an Unknown Country.
Year of publication: 2025.
Publisher:
Globetrotter Publishing
Kai Althoetmar
Am Heiden Weyher 2
53902 Bad Muenstereifel
Germany
e-mail: Althoetmar[at]aol.com
Text: © Kai Althoetmar.
Cover photo: ancient columns of Salamis, Northern Cyprus. Photo: Kai Althoetmar.
The research for this book was self-financed and without grants or benefits from third parties.
Map: CTO Zurich, Creative Commons.
I - Varosha. ‘Forbidden Zone’.
The wall still stands here. The Iron Curtain may be history in the rest of Europe, but Aphrodite's kingdom remains divided. Varosha, Northern Cyprus. A memorial and open wound of the divided Mediterranean island. The fence stands at the end of the road leading southwards from Famagusta along the sea. Not wire, not concrete, not a wall of boards marks the border - a black cloth is stretched metres high. A red cardboard sign with the stencil-like image of a soldier armed with an MP on it warns in five languages: ‘Forbidden zone’. Behind the curtain, the skeletons of former hotel tower blocks rise into the sky like carious wisdom teeth. They were never completed, they were still shell buildings when the Turkish army seized the north-eastern third of Cyprus in a ten-day coup d'état in 1974 with Operation ‘Attila’ to create a protectorate for the Turkish Cypriot minority on the island.
Varosha. Photo: ThomasNY, CC BY 2.5.
The skyscraper corpses look like Stalingrad 1943, a Stalingrad by the sea. The north side of a twelve-storey concrete ruin has been bricked up, while the flat blocks are open to the sea. Steel girders gape out of the corpus. How many millions of pounds have been wasted here? Tourism perdu. A ghost town on the beach. Varosha was the money-making machine of Cyprus tourism until 1974.
Today, the security service has set up on the balcony on the first floor. A man in civilian clothes uses a radio and binoculars to check the section of beach on the edge of the UN buffer zone. Monstrous parasols lie on the beach like fallen soldiers, their concrete feet stretched into the air, the round roofs made of withered palm leaves in the sand. As if landing forces had ploughed up the beach, as they did on Omaha Beach in 1944. A placard warns the viewer: ‘No photography allowed!’ If you ignore this, the walkie-talkie man scares you from his observation balcony with a sermon in Turkish. Retreat under a parasol.
II - The phantom state.
No state in the world apart from Turkey recognises the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’, TRNC for short, or KKTC in Turkish. This puts Northern Cyprus on a par with Somaliland, Abkhazia or Transnistria in terms of diplomacy and international law. The Greek-inhabited and internationally recognised southern part, the Republic of Cyprus, has been a member of the EU since 2004. The south considers the north to be occupied. Turkey, on the other hand, does not recognise the Republic of Cyprus.
In 2004, the Gordian knot could have been cut. However, the referendum initiated by the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on the establishment of a ‘Federal Republic of Cyprus’ ended in a fiasco. In the south, which for thirty years had postulated the right of its citizens to return, two thirds of the electorate voted “no”. In the north, which had fought for its own state for thirty years, two thirds voted in favour of unity.
Since then, the unification process has stalled. Turkey is still blocking harbours and airports for ships and planes from the Republic of Cyprus. The EU has not kept its promise to establish direct trade relations with Northern Cyprus. It would also be tantamount to recognising the TRNC. The Republic of Cyprus has always demanded the withdrawal of Turkish troops from the north. This is out of the question, replies the Turkish government. First, the EU Commission should allow Northern Cyprus to trade directly with the EU. A stalemate. Whoever moves first loses. In July 2017, the last talks on the reunification of Cyprus for the time being failed due to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's refusal to withdraw his troops from the northern part of the island.
