Chapter 7 Chapter 7 Falling apart

In the summer of 1976, Alan Kevender got an unexpected call.The Constanta Hotel in Varosha has been unoccupied for two years and has reopened under a different name.Electrician jobs are in high demand - ask if he's available? This is very unexpected.Varosha is a resort on the east coast of the Mediterranean island country of Cyprus. The war two years ago tore the country apart, so it became a restricted area.The war between Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots actually lasted only a month before the United Nations stepped in to broker a haphazard truce.The opposing armies have drawn up a no-man's land known as the "Green Line" where all ceasefires have occurred.In its capital, Nicosia, the "Green Line" wandered like a drunk through bullet-riddled streets and houses.In the narrow streets of hand-to-hand combat, where the opposing sides bayonet each other on balconies, no man's land is drawn here but ten feet wide.In the country it can be as long as five miles.The weedy strip that the United Nations patrols is home to hares and quail, and now the Turks live to the north and the Greeks to the south.

When war broke out in 1974, most of Varosha's buildings were less than two years old.Stepping into a crescent-shaped sandy land south of the deep-water port of Famagusta, it is a walled city. Its history can be traced back to 2000 BC, and later the Greek Cypriots developed it into a tourist resort.By 1972, a three-mile stretch of hotel buildings stretched along Varosha's golden sands, with supporting facilities such as shopping malls, restaurants, movie theaters, holiday bungalows and staff housing.The resort is located on the east coast of the island, with a pleasant climate and calm seas.The only downside is that almost all seaside high-rises are built to be as close to the coast as possible.It was only later that they realized that at noon the shadow of the tall hotel building would cover the entire beach.But it was too late.

In fact, people didn't worry for long. In the summer of 1974, the war kicked off, and after a month of truce, the Greek Cypriots in Varosha discovered that the resort they had built with huge sums of money was actually on the territory of the Turks south of the "Green Line".They and the inhabitants of Varosha had to flee to the area belonging to the Greeks in the south of the island. The mountainous Cyprus is about the size of Connecticut in the United States. It is located in a calm and green sea. People from several surrounding countries are related by blood but hostile to each other all the year round.The Greeks came to Cyprus about 4,000 years ago, and later Assyrians, Phoenicians, Persians, Romans, Arabs, Byzantines and Venetians successively occupied here. In 1570, the Turkish Empire became the ruler here.By the 20th century, Turkish immigrants made up nearly one-fifth of the island's total population.

After World War I, the Turkish Empire ceased to exist and Cyprus became a British colony.The Greeks on the island are Orthodox believers. During the rule of the Turkish Empire, they set off several uprisings. They did not welcome the rule of the British, so they clamored for unification with Greece.The Turkish Cypriots, who are Muslim and outnumbered, protested.Hostility and anger persisted for decades, with several bloody outbreaks in the 1950s. In 1960, the two sides compromised, and there was an independent Republic of Cyprus, shared by Greeks and Turks. But from that time on, racial hatred became a habit; the Greeks slaughtered the Turks' families, and the Turks took wild vengeance.Military action in Greece sparked a coup on the island, and the CIA helped a lot by admiring Greece's new anti-Communist leader.The war didn't last long, with both sides accusing the other of killing civilians.The Greeks put anti-aircraft guns on the roof of the seaside buildings in Varosha, so the Turks bombed with American Mirage fighter jets, and the Greeks in Varosha had to flee for their lives.

Alan Kevande is a British electrical engineer who came to the island two years ago in 1972.He has been working in the Middle East for a company in London.When he saw Cyprus, he decided to stay.Except for the hot July and August, the climate on the island is very pleasant.He settled on the north coast, where yellow limestone hills frame villages where villagers live by harvesting olive and carob trees, which they buy from Kyrenia's harbour. The war started, and he decided to wait for it to end.He thought his expertise would be useful after the war was over.His judgment was correct.But he didn't expect the hotel to call him.After the Greeks abandoned Varosha, the Turks felt that instead of letting those who squatted the land take advantage of it, it would be better to use such a beautiful resort as a bargaining chip at the negotiating table for permanent reconciliation.So they erected a metal fence around the resort, and a barbed wire fence was stretched across the beach, guarded by Turkish soldiers, and signs were posted warning others to leave.

An old Turkish institution that owns Varosha's northernmost hotel has asked for a fresh coat of paint to open its doors after two years.It's a reasonable thought, and Kevin De can understand it.Renamed Palm Beach, the four-story hotel complex is set back from the shoreline so its terraces and sand get sun all afternoon.The hotel next door, which had been used by the Greeks to store their machine guns, collapsed in a Turkish air raid.When Alan Kewende entered this area, he found that apart from the hotel being a pile of rocks, other places seemed to be undamaged. He was shocked by the speed at which humans abandoned this place.The hotel was still open for registration and reception in August 1974, and then the business suddenly stopped.The key to the room was left on the front desk, it's still the same.The windows facing the sea were open, and the sand carried by the wind formed small dunes in the lobby of the hotel.The flowers have withered in the vases; the turkey cups and breakfast plates, licked clean by mice, are still on the tablecloth.

His task was to get the air conditioning system working again.But this routine work is difficult.The Greek islands in the south were recognized by the United Nations as the legitimate government of Cyprus, but the Turk-founded state in the north was recognized only by Turkey.Since there was no way to get spare parts, the Turkish military holding on to Varosha made such an arrangement: Kevind could quietly remove any spare parts he needed from other empty hotels. He wanders around this abandoned town.About 20,000 people live or work in Varosha.The asphalt and sidewalks were cracked; he wasn't surprised to see weeds growing out of the abandoned streets, but he didn't expect trees to grow there, too.Australian acacia trees, fast-growing acacias that the hotel used for landscaping, were now rising up the middle of the road, some almost three feet high.Ornamental succulents that climb the walls meander from the hotel gardens, across the road and up tree trunks.Souvenirs and tan lotions are still on display in malls; a Toyota dealership has a 1974 Corolla and Celica on display.Kevin De saw that the shock wave after the Turkish Air Force bombing shattered the thick glass of the mall.The mannequins in the fashion clothing store only had half of their clothes left, and the imported clothes turned into tattered rags, fluttering in the wind. The hangers behind them were full of fashion, but a thick layer of dust had accumulated.The canvas on the pram was also in tatters—he hadn't expected so much from humans.There are even bicycles.

The empty hotel has a honeycomb façade, and the glass sliding doors on the tenth floor facing the ocean-view balcony are all broken—they are now exposed to the elements and become shelters for pigeons.The carob rats camped in the guest rooms and lived on the Jaffa oranges and lemons from the citrus groves that once beautified Varosha's landscape.The bell towers of Greek churches were splattered with blood and covered in bat droppings. The sand blows across the street and covers the floor like layers of bedding.What surprised him most at first was that there wasn't any bad smells in general, except that the hotel pools were emitting an inexplicable stench - most of them had been drained, but still stank , as if filled with the smell of corpses.Surrounded by overturned tables and chairs, torn beach umbrellas and broken glasses, they all speak of a party that went awry midway through.It will cost a lot of money to clean it all up.

For half a year, he disassembled and reinstalled air conditioners, washing machines and dryers, and a kitchen full of ovens, grills, refrigerators and freezers, but the silent environment made him unbearable.It even damaged his hearing, he told his wife.In the year before the war, he worked at the British naval base in the south of the town, and he often let her stay in a hotel and enjoy the beach scenery.When he came to pick her up there was always a dance band playing for tourists from Germany and England.Now, the band is gone, only the waves of the sea are not as calm as before.The wind whined through the open windows.The cooing of the pigeons became deafening.I can't help but feel physically and mentally exhausted when I can't hear the bounce of human voices on the wall.He listened to the voices of the Turkish soldiers, who were ordered by their superiors to shoot at the looters.He wondered how many of the soldiers on patrol knew he was authorized to be here, or if they would give him a chance to prove it.

This didn't seem to be a problem, as he rarely saw the guards.He could understand why they didn't want to enter such a tomb. By the time Madin Mounir saw Varosha, Alan Kevender's stint here had been over for four years.Roofs have collapsed and trees have grown from houses.Munir is the most famous newspaper columnist in Turkey. He is a Turkish Cypriot who was educated in Istanbul. Later, he came back to fight when the disputes arose, but the problems were not resolved, so he returned to Turkey. In 1980, he became the first journalist to be allowed into Varosha, but only for a few hours.

The first thing he noticed were the tattered clothes still hanging on the clothesline.But what surprised him the most was that this place was not a dead city, but full of vitality.The builders of Varosha are gone, and nature has concentrated on filling the void.Just six miles from Syria and Lebanon, Varosha has a warm climate that doesn't suffer from repeated freeze-thaw cycles, but the sidewalks are crumbling.Munir was amazed that not only trees but also flowers were doing the "filling in the gaps".The tiny seeds of Cyprus cyclamen stuck into the gap, took root and germinated, and lifted a whole cement slab next to it in one fell swoop.White cyclamen crowns and beautiful colorful leaves make small waves in the street. "You finally understand," Munir wrote to readers after his return to Turkey, "what Taoism calls 'surpassing strength with softness'." Another twenty years passed.Another thousand years of reincarnation, but time still flies.In the past, the Turkish Cypriots believed with full confidence that the Greeks were reluctant to give up Varosha, a treasured land, and would definitely return to the negotiating table.Neither side expected that after more than 30 years, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus still existed. Not only did the Greek-ruled Republic of Cyprus cut off ties with it, but the world turned a blind eye to it.Therefore, apart from Turkey, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus still has not been recognized by the international community.Even the U.N. peacekeepers are still stuck in 1974 positions, listlessly patrolling the Green Line and occasionally waxing an impounded 1974 Toyota or two, which are still relatively new. Nothing has changed, except Varosha - which is entering a period of rapid decay.The surrounding fences and barbed wire are invariably rusted, but what can protect them but ghosts?Drinking Coca-Cola pays for nightclub service, its advertisements and posters hang at the door, and no customers have visited here for at least thirty years, and there will be no more.The casements were left open and whirring, and the battered frames were glassless.The peeled off limestone veneer was in pieces.A large piece of wall fell from the building, revealing an empty room, but the furniture inside had disappeared like a ghost.The color of the paint had faded; the plaster underneath had turned a dull yellow.Where the plaster had peeled off, brick-like voids were exposed. Apart from the flying pigeons, the only moving thing was a creaking windmill--the last working one.The balconies of some hotels have broken down, causing chain damage below; hotels that once aspired to be Cannes or Acapulco14 are now empty and their windows have fallen.At this point, both parties felt that there was really no way to repair the place.Everything is useless.If one day Varosha wants to welcome guests again, it will definitely need to be demolished and rebuilt. Meanwhile, nature continues to reclaim its territory.Wild geraniums and philodendrons grow from roofless houses, knocking down facades.Poincianas, neem trees, hibiscus bushes, phlox and passionflowers take root in hidden corners, where indoors and out are indistinguishable.Houses disappear into red-purple bougainvilleas.Lizards and whip snakes zip through wild asparagus, prickly pear and six-foot weeds.The ground was covered with lemongrass, and there was a hint of its sweetness in the air.At night, the beach gradually darkened, no one bathed in the moonlight here, only loggerhead and green turtles crawled slowly on the beach. * The island of Cyprus is shaped like a cooking pot, with its long handle stretching out towards the sandy beaches of Syria.The bottom part of the pot is traversed by two parallel, east-west mountains. Between the mountains is a vast central basin, and there is a ridge on each side of the "green line".Aleppo and Corsican pines, oaks and cedars once covered the mountains.Cypress and juniper forests cover the central plain between the two mountain ranges.Olive, almond and carob trees grow on the barren slopes facing the sea.At the end of the Pleistocene, dwarf European elephants, about the size of cows, pygmy hippos, and farm pigs, roamed these trees.Cyprus is an island that rises from the ocean, unconnected to the three surrounding continents, and these species obviously crossed the sea.Ten thousand years later, humans also came here.At least one archaeological site has evidence that Homo sapiens hunters killed and cooked the last pygmy hippos. Assyrian, Phoenician, and Roman shipbuilders were fond of Cypriot forests; during the Crusades, most of the forests were felled to make Richard the Lionheart's warships.At that time, the number of goats was astonishing, and not a single tree grew on the plain.In the 20th century, Japanese golden pine was introduced in an attempt to restore the wooded scene.However, after a protracted drought, nearly all of the Japanese golden pine and remaining native trees in the northern range were reduced to ashes in a lightning strike in 1995. Journalist Madin Mounir was so sad that he didn't want to go back from Istanbul to his ashes-born place until a Turkish-Cypriot horticulturist, Hekmet Urusan, convinced him that he should see What happened.Once again, Munir sees wildflowers giving the land of Cyprus a new look: scorched hillsides covered with crimson poppies.Urusan told him that some poppy seeds have survived for more than a thousand years, waiting for the fire to burn the forest to ashes to bloom. The village of Laputa overlooks the northern coastline.Hekmet Urusan grows figs, cyclamen, cacti and grapes in his village and religiously tends one of the oldest mulberry trees in all of Cyprus.His moustache, beard, and remaining tuft of hair had gradually grayed since he was forced to leave the South as a young man, where his father had a vineyard and some sheep, There are almond, olive and lemon trees.Twenty generations of Greeks and Turks lived together in the valley before the strife quietly tore the island in two.Then the neighbors were suddenly beaten to death with sticks.They saw the mutilated body of an old Turkish woman who had been herding sheep, the bleating animal still tied around her waist.It was brutal, but at the same time the Turks were killing the Greeks.The hatred and vendetta between two tribes is no more inexplicable and complex than the desire of chimpanzees to kill each other: in fact, we humans pretend that our model of civilization surpasses that of animals, but this is nothing but self-deception in vain. Looking down from his garden, Hekmet could see Kyrenia's harbor, guarded by a seventh-century Byzantine castle built on the site of a Roman fortress.The Crusaders and the Venetians then took it; then came the Ottoman Empire, then the British, and now the Turks again.Today the castle is a museum, housing the world's most precious heritage - a complete Greek merchant ship discovered in 1965 and sunk in the sea a mile from Kyrenia.When it sank, the ship was filled with millstones and hundreds of earthenware urns filled with wine, olives and almond fruit.The heavy cargo made it sink quickly, and the current buried it under the silt.The apricot fruit loaded on board was probably picked in Cyprus a few days before the death.According to carbon dating, the ship sank about 2,300 years ago. The hull and timbers of Aleppo pine remained intact because they were protected from oxygen, but they had to be impregnated with polyethylene resin to prevent them from cracking when exposed to air.The shipbuilders used nails made of copper, the metal that was once abundant in Cyprus, and they did not rust.Equally well preserved are lead fishing sinkers and clay urns, the variety of which suggests they came from Aegean ports. The castle's ten-foot-thick walls and curved towers are made of limestone, quarried from the surrounding cliffs and containing small fossil deposits from a time when Cyprus was still in the Mediterranean.However, after the island was split in two, the castles and fine stone warehouses of the Kyrenia docks were overshadowed by a flood of leisure and entertainment venues, gambling, and weak currency circulation laws became the only economy of this unrecognized country. way out. Hekemet Urusan travels east along Cyprus' north coast, past three other castles built of natural limestone, with jagged hills running parallel to narrow paths.Straits and promontories overlooking the topaz-coloured Mediterranean are home to the remains of stone villages, some six thousand years old.Until recently, their terraces, half-buried walls and breakwaters could still be seen.However, from 2003, another foreign invasion destroyed the face of the island. "The only consolation," said Urushan, "is that the invasion was not a long one." This time the invaders were not crusaders, but elderly Britons looking for a warm retirement home that a middle-class pension could afford.Fanatical developers discovered that in this unrecognized country in the north of Cyprus, there was still the last piece of cheap, unspoiled coastal land north of Libya, so people added the zoning code of the land use at will.Bulldozers suddenly downed olive trees that were more than 500 years old on the hillside.A wave of red-tiled roofs swept across the land before long, and the floor plan of the building was cloned repeatedly into cast concrete.As soon as the money came in, real estate companies flocked to the beach to put up English-language billboards, and words like "estate," "mountain house," "beach house," and "luxury villa" were added to ancient Mediterranean place names. Prices of £40,000-£100,000 ($75,000-$185,000) have sparked a buying frenzy.Although the Greek Cypriots still claimed most of the land, this nominal dispute was trivialized by the lure of money.An environmental group in northern Cyprus, protesting the golf course here, warns people: water has to be imported from Turkey in big plastic bags; dumps here are full; no sewage structure means five times as much The sewage was dumped into the transparent and pure sea...but the protests were of no avail. Every month more steam shovels gobble up the coastline like hungry brontosaurs, spat out the olive and carob trees and dump them on the tarmac thirty miles east of Kyrenia, the The road continues to widen, with no sign of stopping.On the coast, English is everywhere, and English signs are embarrassingly affixed to buildings.Signs one after another marked off each other’s territory, and the English names seemed to increase the credibility of the building, but in fact the quality of the beach house was deteriorating: the cement was not painted, but a layer of smearing; The ceramic tiles were knockoffs of broken artificial polymers; the cornices and windows were imitation stonework out of a mold.When Hekmet Urusan saw a pile of traditional yellow tiles in front of the bare, wallless frame of the town hall, he realized that someone had stripped the stone veneer from the bridge and sold it to contractors. The square limestone at the base of the building frame looks familiar.It wasn't long before he recognized it. “Too similar to Varosha.” The half-finished house, surrounded by building rubble, recalls Varosha, half in ruins. The quality of housing is still declining.Near the bottom of each billboard boasting of dream homes in the sunshine of Northern Cyprus: Construction Warranty for Ten Years.If the developer really didn't bother to rinse the sea salt when mixing sand from the beach into cement, as the rumors say, then the house might last ten years. After passing the newly developed golf course, the road finally narrows down.Crossing the small one-lane bridges that have been stripped of their limestone veneer, through a small canyon filled with myrtle and pink orchids, the path leads to the Capas Peninsula—a long, thin, Extends east to the Levant 16 area.Empty Greek churches line the peninsula, their interiors battered but not collapsed, a testament to the resilience of the stone buildings.Stone architecture best distinguishes sedentary humans from nomadic hunter-gatherers, whose makeshift huts of mud and tree branches didn't outlive a season's worth of weeds.Stone buildings will last forever after we are gone.Modern building materials don't last long. As they rot and decompose, the world gradually erases the traces of human beings and returns to the Stone Age. After the twists and turns, the landscape is different.Gravity tugged at the soil beneath the old wall, and it turned into a hill again.The islands will eventually become sand dunes overgrown with salt-loving shrubs and pistachio trees.And the beach will be flattened by the female turtle's belly. A leafy Japanese golden pine stands on top of a small limestone hill.The shaded parts of the rock face turned out to be caves.Nearer, the gentle arc of the low arched doorway revealed signs of excavation.This small, wind-swept island is less than forty miles from Turkey across the sea, and only sixty miles from Syria.Cyprus begins its Stone Age.By the time humans arrived on the island, the oldest structure we now know — a stone tower — was slowly rising from Jericho, the oldest city in the world.Although primitive by comparison, Cyprus' dwellings still marked a huge advance in human history - although Asians from Southeast Asia had arrived in Australia 40,000 years before that: the crews went beyond the horizon, Adventure in a world that cannot be seen from the coastline, and finally find that there is a brand new world waiting in front of you. The cave was so shallow, perhaps only twenty feet deep, that it was a little surprising how warm it was.Carvings on the sediment walls add flavor to the charcoal-blackened fireplace, two stools and daybed.The second room was slightly smaller than the first, almost square, and the arcade at the door was also at right angles. Australopithecus remains in South Africa show that humans began living in caves more than a million years ago.In a cliffside cave in Chauvet, France, the Cro-Magnon people lived in the cave 32,000 years ago, and they also created the first human art gallery-paintings of European megafauna they were looking for, or they longed for. Mystical powers to communicate with spiritually. There are no such prehistoric relics here: the first inhabitants of Cyprus were intrepid pioneers, and their quest for aesthetics was a later thing.Their bones were buried in the ground.When our buildings and the ancient towers of Jericho have long been reduced to sand and soil, the caves where we hid, the caves where we first learned the concept of "walls" - including their thirst for art - will remain down.In a world without us, they would quietly await their future occupants.