CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Cyprus: A Green Line Bike Ride

Up against the Green Line on Cyprus. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.

I realize that the time to visit Cyprus is high summer, when the coastline is transformed into a nonstop beach party, but I was there in February hoping both to find a touch of winter sun and to ride a bicycle on both sides of the Green Line—yet another European dividing line (this one between Greek and Turkish Cypriots) that was drawn up in 1963 but only became a hard border in summer 1974.

My flight from Skopje landed in Larnaca on the southern coast around 11 p.m. In weighing options for my flights, I had thought of flying directly to Nicosia, but Ercan International Airport is located in the Turkish sector and with it as my entry point I didn’t think I would be granted access into the Greek sector, otherwise the Republic of Cyprus.

Only Turkey recognizes the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, although as Brendan O’Malley and Ian Craig argue in The Cyprus Conspiracy: “The Cyprus crisis was no failure of American diplomacy, but a deliberate Cold War plot to divide the island and save the top secret spying and defence facilities from the twin threats of a communist takeover or British withdrawal.”

For my first two nights on the island, I had reserved a small Larnaca hotel that was several blocks from the main beach. I didn’t quite think that I would be swimming there in February, but I still warmed to the idea of seaside meals, as when I had left my home in Switzerland it was encased in its trademark winter fog.

At the luggage carousels I asked several taxi drivers about the cost of a ride into Larnaca, about four miles from the airport. I got two quotes: one of €30 and the other of €40, which got me thinking that maybe the island was divided to bail out the taxi industry. I might have paid €30 just to be headed to bed, except that both offers came with contemptuous taxi-driver snarls, which sent me in the direction of a €1.25 city bus.

I cannot say that the bus driver was more cheerful than the hacks; at one point he tried to persuade me to leap off the bus several miles from my hotel. But in the end I alighted (Cyprus was, after all, British as a result of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin) several blocks from the beach, and I had no trouble finding a hotel key with my name on it and a comfortable room that had shuttered........

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