The walkers are first through the gate at 8 AM: solo or in pairs, phones in hand, AirPods in place, they power down a boulevard whose violent emptiness marks the wreckage of Cyprus’s first, failed experiment in democratic self-rule.
Overgrown gardens, ransacked houses, hollowed-out hotels, and derelict side streets unfold before them, the silence punctured only by the rustle of rats in the building husks and the soft slap of sea against sand. Next come the first of the day’s tourists, poking around the city’s remains with coronial curiosity. Around 9 AM, the tour groups start to appear; by noon, there are traffic jams throughout the site, as bikes, scooters, and golf carts—all available for rent at the entrance—join swarms of tourists throwing back beers and pausing for pictures as they explore the eviscerated city on foot. On the few short stretches of beachfront open to the public, day trippers splash in the shallows of the Mediterranean under the shadow of rotting hotel towers once considered the pinnacle of European glamor.
More than fifty years since its thirty thousand inhabitants—most of them Greek Cypriots—fled before the advancing Turkish army, the resort city of Varosha on Cyprus’s southeastern coast has been reborn. In 2020, Turkish-Cypriot authorities in the divided island’s north reopened a slice of the abandoned settlement, fenced-off since Turkey’s 1974 invasion and kept as a bargaining chip for negotiations over the nation’s future, for tourism. Now, from 8 AM to 6 PM every day, visitors are free to enter this modern wasteland through a casually guarded gate (“Do you have a drone?” was the only question I was asked on a recent visit) and wander a small portion of its once-thriving streets. The leader of one Turkish tour I spoke to said the group under her guidance had flown in from the mainland for just one day; Varosha was the penultimate stop, sandwiched between the Venetian castle in the old town of Famagusta and the vast ruins of the Ancient Greek city-state of Salamis, before the flight back to Turkey. Critics describe this as a form of “dark tourism,” decrying the Turkish-Cypriot government’s conversion of the city into an amusement park built on the ravages of war. From what I’ve seen, the tourism may be less dark than dumb, kitschifying the skeletal city into yet another selfie backdrop.
But this place still has the power to move, and even instruct. Despite its devastation, Varosha remains a curiously vital ruin. This is partly because many of the city’s original inhabitants are still alive and nurture hopes—however faint—of eventually returning to their former homes. They may be entering old age, but their attachment to the city remains fierce. One Varoshan, who was 19 when her family was forced to evacuate to Larnaca in the island’s south, showed me a video of her childhood home that she took in 2021, shortly after the city’s reopening, when surveillance was light and visitors could still, with a little cunning, jump the security ropes to explore beyond the streets cleared for tourism. As she walks through the house, her rediscovery of long-forgotten childhood objects—an overturned bookcase, the books that once sat in it now flung across the floor in a chaotic carpet, her father’s old bath towel, still hanging in the bathroom decades after its last use—triggers a visceral response, and her voice thickens with tears. “My home, my home, my home,” she repeats.
Unlike the city that houses them, the conflict that created these memories is a living thing: Cyprus, which last year marked half a century of de facto division between the Turkish-occupied north and the Greek-Cypriot south, remains a problem that seemingly defies all solutions. Touristic Varosha is the Cyprus stalemate made cement and steel: a place where pain is brushed aside and life goes on over the debris of history in a manner that satisfies neither the Greeks nor the Turks.
Ranging along the coastal southern strip of the port city of Famagusta and extending over an area slightly larger than Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Varosha was once the jewel of Cyprus’s tourism industry—a paradise of honey beaches and chic hotels that drew the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Brigitte Bardot, and Raquel Welch to the island’s shores. Evidence of the city’s lost sophistication can still be seen in the ruins today—in the curves of its art deco facades, the sleek International Style lines of its high-rise hotels, the cosmopolitan flavor of its shattered storefronts (Europa Furs, Edelweiss Café, New Smokey Joe’s, Maison Jenny), and the warm brutalist wit of the Ayia Triada church, a midden of brown concrete shells that almost looks as if it’s been hauled inland straight from the beach. Varosha’s growth exploded after Cyprus, following a four-year armed struggle led by right-wing Greek-Cypriot militias, achieved independence from the United Kingdom in 1960. By the time of its evacuation fourteen years later, the city held over half of all the hotel beds in Cyprus.
There is, perhaps, some irony to the resort’s early development as a beacon of international openness, since the settlement of Famagusta’s southern coast by Greek Cypriots was a response to their historic exclusion, starting with the Ottoman conquest of the island in 1571, from the old Venetian walled city by Ottoman authorities. (Varosha comes from the Turkish “varoş,” meaning suburb.) On the other hand, Cyprus, tucked into the armpit of Turkey and sitting astride vital naval routes between the Middle East and Europe, has always been open to the world: occupiers, proselytizers, traders, and invaders have all made their mark on the island. As the historian Fernand Braudel once wrote, “The events of history often lead to the islands,” and Cyprus has long had to manage the tension between its precarious and threatened internal life and its role at “the forefront of history” as a great-power prize. In the last millennium alone, this flick of red soil painted over the Mediterranean has been ruled by the Byzantines, the French House of Lusignan, Republican Venice, and the Ottoman Empire; the British acquired Cyprus from the Ottomans in 1878 and governed it until 1960.
Greeks have inhabited the island since the Bronze Age; Turks first settled in significant numbers after the Ottoman conquest in the 16th century. In the centuries preceding independence, a kind of cultural syncretism emerged as local and vernacular traditions—both Greek– and Turkish–Cypriot—mixed with the influence of various occupiers. The Greek-Cypriot dialect, which has been described by one linguistic scholar as “the first modern dialect to appear in its distinctive modern guise” and is still the lingua franca of most of the Greek-controlled Republic of Cyprus’s nine hundred thousand inhabitants, bears the imprint of this cultural osmosis in its peculiar blend of Ancient and Byzantine Greek with Provençal, Italian, Arabic, and Turkish loanwords and phonologies. Bilingualism—now virtually unheard of in modern, divided Cyprus—was common by the time of independence: many Turks spoke Greek, some Greeks spoke Turkish, and the island’s’ two main dialects, while emerging from completely different language families, grew up as musical siblings, with similar cadences, inflections, and rhythms. The pointed Cypriot arch, still visible across many historic buildings on the island, fused Gothic and Byzantine architectural features, while Christians and Muslims living on the island for many centuries shared religious festivals, folk ballads, and even saints; the members of one sect, the Linobambakoi, practiced the rites of both Islam (in public) and Christianity (in private) simultaneously. Though Cyprus was no idyll and relations were not always harmonious, the various ethnic groups present on the island—not only Greeks and Turks, but also Armenians, Maronites, Jews, and “Latin” Catholics—learned over time to coexist, often in close proximity.
Into this beautiful stew of languages, faiths, and cultures dropped the deadly force of nationalism. Its disruption of the modus vivendi achieved by the peoples of the island took place slowly at first, via the transplantation of educational curriculums and values from Greece and Turkey, but gathered pace after the 1930s, as literacy and education levels rose and specifically Greek and Turkish ideas of national consciousness—along with the assumption of the two nations’ mutual antagonism—took root throughout the local population. A place like colonial Cyprus, with its confusion of ethnicities and cultures, was no match for the segregationism that governed nation building and border consolidation in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse following World War I. The Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923 saw nearly one and a half million ethnic Greeks evacuate their ancestral homes in Asia Minor and migrate to the Greek “homeland,” while almost half a million ethnic Turks moved the other way. This became a template by which nations throughout the 20th century resolved the perceived problem of ethnic coexistence and purged their own populations of foreign impurities, inspiring the postwar partitions of Israel and Palestine. “For those seeking segregative solutions,” writes historian Asli Iğsiz in Humanism in Ruins, her exploration of the exchange’s political legacy, “the 1923 Greek-Turkish exchange not only constituted a legal precedent but also a successful case of so-called repatriation.” Amid the mass displacements caused by the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Israel drew inspiration from the Greek-Turkish agreement in its own efforts to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees and encourage the migration of Jewish communities from the Arab world to the newly formed Israeli state. The 1923 exchange was “the first great experiment in the wholesale transfer of population in modern times, and it was eminently successful,” argued Moshe Sharett, the Israeli foreign minister, in 1950.
The British, for their part, nurtured and stoked ethnic divisions to solidify their control over Cyprus, much as they did in the subcontinent and the Levant. Amid the fervor of postwar decolonization, both the Greek and Turkish communities of Cyprus began to agitate for a version of independence that entailed integration with their respective motherlands. For Greek Cypriots, who were around 77 percent of the population in 1960, this meant “enosis” or union of the entire island with Greece; for Turkish Cypriots, representing 18 percent of the population, it meant “taksim” or separation into separate Turkish- and Greek-controlled entities.
Independence for Cyprus, when it arrived in 1960, was a compromise between the Greeks and the Turks that left neither community happy. The failure of either group to achieve their ethno-nationalist objectives—enosis or taksim—could have provided the opportunity for Cyprus to take a different path than other states in the region, toward a peaceful consolidation of the island’s tradition of inter-communal comity. But the drumbeat of ethno-nationalism did not abate with independence, and the country’s founding constitution, which established an intricate and cumbersome power-sharing apparatus between the different ethnicities, soon proved unworkable. Ethnic violence erupted in 1964 and Turkish Cypriots, driven by legitimate fears for their own survival, soon fled the biggest cities and retreated into enclaves. The UN patrolled a fragile peace but was powerless to stop further bloodshed in 1974, when the military junta then ruling Greece orchestrated a coup to remove the popularly elected Greek-Cypriot president and install a puppet regime intent on pursuing enosis. Turkey sent troops in shortly after, eventually capturing 36 percent of the country’s territory. Within the space of a few weeks, thousands were killed and almost a quarter of a million Cypriots—180,000 Greeks and 50,000 Turks—found themselves displaced. Among them were the residents of Varosha.
Today Cyprus lies very low on the list of priorities for the UN and the great powers. The days of Christopher Hitchens and other public intellectuals agitating for an end to the conflict are long gone, and the indefinite assignment of the current US ambassador to Cyprus to the American embassy in Kyiv illustrates how marginal the island has become in the global strategic consciousness: Cyprus is still, as Hitchens once called it, a “hostage to history,” but history appears to have moved on. By law, the Greek Cypriot-controlled Republic of Cyprus still has sovereignty over the entire island, and no nation except Turkey recognizes the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) that occupies the territory’s upper third. In practice, Cyprus has split along ethnic lines, falling prey to the same demographic essentialism that characterized the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, a nationalist logic that continues to cause so much suffering throughout nearby warzones—from Ukraine to Palestine—today. All of these conflicts are different in their origins and pathologies, of course, but they are driven by a common folly: the idea that ethnic coexistence is anathema to the coherence of the nation-state. Varosha’s damaged grid of vegetation and concrete reverberates beyond Cyprus as a forceful reminder, from the ongoing horrors in Gaza and Ukraine to the delicate reconstruction of post-Assad Syria, of the enduring shadow of the murderous ethnic politics of the 20th century.
Various initiatives to reunify the island in recent decades have come up short: in 2004, when Greek Cypriots rejected a peace plan backed by the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (“I received a state, I will not deliver a community,” the Greek-Cypriot leader told voters in an emotional address on the eve of a referendum on the plan); and again in 2017, when talks came close to an agreement then suddenly collapsed over the parties’ inability to reach a compromise on vital security issues, including the future of the forty thousand troops that Turkey has stationed in the north. More than half a century after 1974, the conflict has settled into a kind of gentle freeze. The opening, twenty years ago, of border checkpoints along the UN-controlled Green Line dividing the island has enabled free movement between the north and the south, removing some of the conflict’s territorial mystique and underscoring the cultural continuities that survive through folk and culinary traditions: the swarming hospitality that engulfs any visitor to a Cypriot household, Turkish or Greek; the shared love of a charcoaled meat patty wrapped in caul fat, made with pork on one side of the island (the Greek sheftaliá) and lamb on the other (the Turkish şeftali). As the Greek-controlled south joined the EU and the booming, casino-choked north welcomed thousands of settlers, investors, and tourists from mainland Turkey, the division of the island has come to seem normal, almost comfortable. It is the only reality that many young Cypriots now know.
But both sides understand that the conflict cannot remain frozen forever, and that a permanent solution—whether partition or reunification—will have to be found. Turkish Cypriots rightly resent their international isolation and the fact that it effectively makes them dependent on Turkey’s patronage, while many Greek Cypriots feel that only reunification will help the island meet its economic and environmental challenges; on both sides many share the view that it is simply irrational for a territory this small and geographically unitary, with such a long history of governance as a single entity, to be divided. The major stumbling block may be an institutionalized refusal, on either side of the Green Line, to give up the historical blame game. The Greeks, with the fading weight of international opinion behind them, see Turkey’s actions in 1974 as an invasion, while the Turks claim they were performing a “peace operation.” Nicosia is not only Europe’s last divided capital, it’s also the world’s only city with two museums of national struggle, each of which tells completely different stories. The Greek-Cypriot museum memorializes the 1955–1959 anticolonial struggle against the British; barely a mile away, across the UN buffer zone that divides Nicosia’s old city in two, the Turkish museum recounts Cyprus’s modern history as a paradigmatic example of Turkey’s heroic resistance to Greek expansionism throughout the eastern Mediterranean, an irredentism Greeks know as the “Megali Idea” that the museum impishly misspells as the “Megalo Idea.” Now, it appears, Famagusta’s once-untouchable southern flank is the latest victim of this ongoing, island-wide struggle over historical meaning.
For decades following 1974, Varosha occupied a special place in the Cypriot peace process. Though derelict, much of its territory remained off limits, sparing the city the fate of other abandoned settlements throughout the island, which were used to house internal refugees left homeless by the war. The city’s protected status offered hope for an eventual return of its original inhabitants and some form of urban coexistence between Greeks and Turks. Now that hope appears to have been dashed, with the Turkish-Cypriot government presenting Varosha’s successful reopening (90 percent of all visitors to the north pass through the abandoned city, the government claims) as a rebuke to the international community’s isolation of the TRNC; it has also been promoted as a vital contribution to Ankara’s Blue Homeland doctrine, which aims to extend Turkish maritime claims in the eastern Mediterranean. Former Turkish-Cypriot president Ersin Tatar, elected in 2020 with the backing of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, last year outlined his government’s intention to redevelop parts of Varosha—a scheme that resembles, albeit on a smaller scale, the Trump administration’s ghoulish vision of postwar Gaza as an ethnically cleansed “Riviera of the Middle East.”
The touristification of the city is best understood as part of this longer-term plan. Placards and exhibits placed throughout the city by Turkish-Cypriot authorities—complete with footnotes, references to academic historical texts, and photos of centuries-old title deeds and other legal documents—advance a strikingly different history of a settlement commonly accepted as predominantly Greek-Cypriot. Despite the unmistakably Greek names that adorn Varosha’s abandoned storefronts and hotels, this new government-sanctioned account lays the groundwork for redevelopment without the participation of displaced former residents, arguing that Greek Cypriots have no claim on their old properties because they bought them from the British, who illegally expropriated the land on which the city now stands from Ottoman religious foundations. Whatever the historical merit of this narrative, its growing prevalence in the island’s north suggests a future in which reunification will become harder and harder to achieve, and segregation is made permanent. Indicative of this shift is the Tatar administration’s decision, shortly after Varosha reopened, to rename John F. Kennedy Avenue, one of the city’s main beachside thoroughfares, after Semih Sancar, the head of the Turkish army during the 1974 invasion of Cyprus. The city’s former internationalism is being usurped by a new provinciality; reconciliation has been trumped by real estate.
Ankara, which effectively dictates policy in northern Nicosia, has deemed permanent territorial division to be the solution to the Cyprus problem. Erdoğan, despite having backed a federal settlement for much of the past two decades, now supports a two-state solution for Cyprus that would turn the UN buffer zone dividing the two sides of the island into a hard border and pave the way for international recognition of the TRNC. Many Turkish Cypriots I spoke to are lukewarm on this idea. They resent the decades-long influx of settlers from the mainland, an attempt by Turkey at demographic manipulation analogous to Israeli expansion in the West Bank, decrying the new arrivals as “fija,” or seaweed—foreign objects that washed up on shore and got stuck to Cypriots’ feet. They also feel that the dilution of local Turkish-Cypriot culture—still proudly secular and liberal, in contrast to the increasingly pious mainland—will accelerate if partition is formalized and their connection to the Greek community is severed for good. As one Turkish Cypriot put it to me, highlighting the distinction between foods of the mainland and the Levantine, meze-driven culinary traditions of the island, “We don’t need more Adana kebab and lahmacun here.”
On the other side of the Green Line, a two-state solution is still seen as suboptimal, since it would effectively legitimize the 1974 invasion. Greek-Cypriot leaders enjoy far less interference from Athens than their Turkish-Cypriot counterparts do from Ankara, but they are no more independent of thought for this comparative freedom. The Greek-Cypriot political establishment continues to pay lip service to the idea of reunification, professing a long-standing preference for the island’s reconstitution as a bi-communal, bi-zonal federation, but in practice little is done toward this end. A general weariness prevails among the Greek-Cypriot population, while its leaders remain content with a status quo that allows them to appear principled, victimized, solutions-oriented, and absolved of any responsibility for action all at once. With the Cypriot economy beginning to show signs of life after its brush with collapse in 2013 and the country entering its third decade as a member of the European Union, a general sense of complacency has taken hold south of the Green Line.
Given his proximity to Erdoğan and mainland Turkey’s preponderance in Turkish Cypriot affairs, Tatar was widely expected to earn another term in October’s TRNC presidential election. In a major surprise, however, he was trounced by Turfan Erhürman, a pro-EU center-left moderate who campaigned on a promise to revive reunification talks. The scale of the victory was stunning: Erhürman won by a twenty-seven-point margin, earning 63 percent of the vote, enough to send a clear signal of what the Turkish Cypriot people want. Erhürman is the sixth Turkish Cypriot president since 1974 tasked with resolving the conflict, which means he has a long record of failure to contend with, but his shock victory has invigorated the peace movement. The new leader met his Greek Cypriot counterpart, Nikos Christodoulides, for the first time on November 20; the conversation was by all reports cautiously productive, as both men signaled a willingness to formally resume negotiations to resolve the conflict. Varosha, while still open, might now reclaim something closer to its earlier status as a bargaining chip rather than an outright provocation, as was the case under Tatar. Though Erdoğan has in recent weeks reiterated his continuing commitment to a two-state solution, the political momentum in Cyprus itself has clearly swung back toward reunification.
This reflects not only changing realities at the level of high politics but a continuity of feeling on the ground: At a grassroots level, Cypriots on both sides of the island have never truly given up on peace. Civil society mobilized through the 1990s to bring together Greek and Turkish Cypriots invested in the idea of a common future. This “bi-communal movement,” as it is known, continues to thrive despite the island’s drift toward permanent segregation. A loose, multi-generational milieu of academics, political activists, teachers, writers, and artists, the bi-communal movement emerged from the bi-communal technical committees—on issues such as health, education, and the environment—that were launched in 2008 as a way to build trust and understanding between the communities on both sides of the island. The technical committees were an early bridge toward inter-communal cooperation ahead of eventual reunification, and though they failed in their ultimate objective—to help bring peace to the island—they spawned a broader civil-society movement of advocates and practitioners for peace. Part academic conference, part activist caucus, part cultural festival, part youth group, the bi-communal movement has remained active despite the collapse of the 2017 peace talks and Ankara’s turn toward a two-state solution. The redevelopment of Varosha in particular has provoked universal anger and disgust in the movement: One Turkish-Cypriot history teacher told me she broke down in tears the day the abandoned city was reopened, knowing that the desecration of the once-sacrosanct ruin would push the Turkish and Greek communities even further apart.
Part of the bi-communal movement’s surprising durability, in contrast, derives from a shared recognition that both sides committed atrocities in the years following independence. In the words of one veteran peace activist, both Greeks and Turks need to acknowledge that “we fucked up. It’s tragic, but we have to let the past go. It’s gone. Dead and gone.” The movement’s vision of a shared Cypriotism emerges not only through its facilitation of academic talks and panel discussions on contentious issues like Varosha, but also cultural activities like language-learning, music, dance, and sports, recalling an earlier period of cohabitation. The movement includes an intercommunal youth sailing initiative called “Winds of Change,” which organized the first Greek-Turkish circumnavigation of the island in half a century, and a virtual, bi-communal museum remapping and reimagining the city of Famagusta. Bi-communal “feeling,” especially among younger Cypriots, is now an important social signal of progressivism, openness to experience, and orientation toward a better future. This is not the deep syncretism of pre-independence Cyprus or the Linobambakoi, but it is something.
In some ways the reopening of Varosha—long thought to be off limits, both physically and politically—has invigorated grassroots peace activism on both sides of the island; serially disappointed by political elites, ordinary Cypriots are determined to create a new reality for themselves. Mete Hatay, a prominent Turkish-Cypriot researcher and Erhürman supporter, went so far as to suggest that the new TRNC leader should capitalize on the early optimism generated by his election to open the whole of Varosha up—not to tourists, but to its original inhabitants, with full restitution of property—and introduce a novel form of joint, bi-communal administration in the ruined city, with the aim of reviving it on more sustainable and cooperative grounds. Through these ambitious plans, the bi-communal activists show that they are determined not just to build a durable peace but to show, against the history of the last century, that a mixed population does not mean a diminished nation.
Though the obstacles are formidable, this mobilization may be starting to pay dividends, as influential figures in mainstream Cypriot culture join the call. Most notable is the popular twenty-five-year-old Greek-Cypriot YouTuber Fidias Panayiotou, who won a seat in the European parliament last year as an independent and has since made it his mission to open up the conversation about the Cyprus problem. Panayiotou, it should be emphasized, is a “just asking questions” contrarian and avowed admirer of Elon Musk, in the one-man Cypriot manosphere. But he’s shown a willingness to engage with Turkish Cypriots (in particular fellow influencer Ibrahim Beycanli, with whom he has recorded several joint appearances and discussions) and promote reconciliation, even in the face of attacks from the traditional Greek-Cypriot right: “Shame on you, old boy,” a prominent conservative lawyer tut-tutted on social media last year after Panayiotou visited the northern city of Kyrenia, which was majority-Greek before the invasion of 1974. On their own, these figures might seem isolated, their agitations—the idealistic initiatives of the bi-communal movement, the needy reels of the influencers—peripheral to the real motion of history. But Erhürman’s election suggests that they are part of a broader, island-wide yearning to re-suture the shredded whole. The road toward a lasting solution to the impossible problem of Cyprus lies tantalizingly open.
“We feel tired, weak, and alone, but we know that there is more to do,” a Turkish-Cypriot member of the bi-communal movement told me. A reversal of the global slide toward nativism does not, of course, depend on Cyprus alone. But if the inhabitants of this beguiling island can find a way to resist the tide of recent history, achieve a lasting peace, and revive their own rich tradition of cultural métissage, it will serve as a powerful example for a world still struggling to escape the legacy of the 20th century’s fanatical lust for bloodshed and purity. Tourism may have trivialized the traumas that haunt Varosha, but the future does not need to be a theme park.
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