CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

A mosque in Peja, Kosovo. Photograph by Matthew Stevenson.

In search of winter sun, I decided to travel from Geneva (where I live, despite the risks of “civilizational erasure”) to Cyprus and ride my bike along the contours of the Green Line—the dividing line between the largely Greek Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Wallowing in central European fog, I decided I knew almost nothing about the politics of the divided island—as all I knew had come from reading Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons (Cyprus circa 1953-55) in the late 1970s.

I also wanted to read—on location, so to speak—Brendan O’Malley’s and Ian Craig’s The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion, a detailed diplomatic history (2001) that has a menacing picture of Henry Kissinger on the jacket, as so far, away from Aphrodite’s island, I had never made it past page 10. Maybe, I reasoned, I would get through it while bike riding along the Green Line?

Cyprus was partitioned in 1974, in no small thanks to the evil machinations of Henry Kissinger and the Nixon administration, then in the last throes of its president’s resignation.

Unfortunately, in winter, there are no direct flights from Geneva to Larnaca (on the Greek side). There are several connecting flights through Istanbul to Ercan International Airport, the runway for Lefkosia, what the Turks call their (northern) side of Nicosia, once the capital of all Cyprus.

If I chose to fly into the Turkish “republic” in northern Cyprus (other than Turkey, no other country recognizes it), I might well be hassled if I then tried to cross the Green Line into the south, for “entering Cyprus illegally through occupied territory.” Nor could I then leave from Larnaca or—so I was warned—later return to Cyprus on good terms with its border department.

I decided, instead, to enter Cyprus through its front door at Larnaka International Airport, which replaced the old Nicosia International Airport, which in the 1974 partition, found itself lost in the no-man’s land of the Green Line and abandoned.

For those whose Cyprus geography is wobbly, Nicosia is inland, roughly in the center of Cyprus, while Larnaca is on the southern Mediterranean coast. At least by arriving in Larnaca, I could ride my bicycle without always looking over my shoulder.

The problem with my idea for “Green Lining” was that all the connecting flights from Geneva were either prohibitively expensive or involved an overnight plane change in some concrete oasis such as Luton,........

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