Some call it the dead zone; some a no-man’s land; some the green line. For more than four decades, a United Nations-patrolled buffer zone has bisected Nicosia, running through the middle of the Cypriot capital and dividing its historic heart.

It was a casualty of war: at first, the result of inter-communal fighting that took the form of Turkish Cypriot ghettos in the 60s; then as a no-man’s land between ceasefire lines delineated by little more than what two opposing armies agreed were their last defended positions.

At 6am on 18 August 1974, the dead zone officially came into being. On account of it, Nicosia is Europe’s last divided capital.

Behind reinforced sandbags, barrels and barbed wire, it remains for the most part a lifeless strip – with the exception of the odd UN patrol, the exclusive terrain of feral cats and dogs. As such, the strip, which stretches across the whole island for 112 miles, but is sometimes barely yards wide within the Venetian ramparts of the old city, is both septic gash and effective partition: the ultimate divide between Cyprus’s Greek-Orthodox Christian majority and minority Muslim Turks. Its crumbling buildings and weed-infested interior are testimony to a conflict that is frozen in time.

But while, at intermittent points, Greek and Turkish Cypriot conscripts in national service still face each other down the barrel of a gun, this time warp also offers hope. For the past 18 months the island’s leaders, Nicos Anastasiades and Mustafa Akinci, have been holding peace talks here, in an abandoned airport complex inside the dead zone. These talks are aimed at uniting the island’s internationally recognised Greek-run south, with its non-recognised Turkish-controlled north.

In this week’s crucial discussions in Geneva, which culminate today in a historic summit between Greece, Turkey and Britain – Cyprus’s post-colonial guarantor powers – the dead zone will have been uppermost in these politicians’ minds. For the first time, everyone agrees that the island possesses leaders who are determined to overcome the division. In another first, they have agreed to pore over maps focusing, as never before, on the territorial trade-offs needed for a solution to a dispute that has defied international resolution for so long.

A UN soldier walks by the abandoned buildings inside Nicosia’s no-man’s land. Photograph: Petros Karadjias/AP

A diet of propaganda

I first encountered the dead zone in 1977, three years after the Turkish invasion – itself prompted by the island’s failed attempt at enosis (union) with Greece.

Forty three years later, it is still unclear how many casualties the military operation left in its wake. On the Greek side, around 6,000 are believed to have been killed, wounded or listed as missing; on the Turkish side, around 1,000 are thought to have perished.

What could not be contested was the no-man’s land that divided the two – with its bullet-pocked houses, sandbagged barriers, hastily built gun ports and overgrown minefields. There was no street bordering the buffer zone that did not end in a makeshift blockade, brick wall, or conscript wearing a tired uniform.

Back then, the Cypriot capital was among a handful of metropolises to be split by war. Like Beirut, Belfast and Berlin, fear and loathing had left Nicosia fractured and confused; its noble monuments – legacies of every conqueror, usurper or passing invader army that had coveted the Levantine island jewel – scattered across its divergent ethnic sectors.

The fact that Nicosia, of all those cities, is the only one still partitioned says much about the enduring power of hate. In the 70s, it infected all aspects of life in Cyprus, and lay at the root of the mental diet of hate and propaganda on which schoolchildren were raised. I know because I was enrolled at The English School – founded by the island’s former colonial administration “to train English-speaking clerks for government offices”, and was raised on it too.

Unabashedly elitist, the school had introduced football, hockey and cricket to Cyprus and took pride in the fact that, after achieving independence from the British in 1960, much of the island’s political establishment – including Greeks and Turks who would go on to play a prominent role in Cyprus’s division – were educated under its sandstone arches.

In theory, the school also took pride in being open to all “communities, races and denominations”. Unlike local schools, it did not believe in marshalling students on rowdy flag-waving demonstrations marking national holidays or exhibiting maps of a greater Greece, whose boundaries stretched all the way to Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine empire now known as Istanbul. In practice, however, the school was a nationalist breeding ground for Greek-Cypriot Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Maronites and Latins from the tiny Catholic community.

Helena Smith is fourth from the right with arms crossed and eyes closed. The picture was taken 1979 at the English School in Nicosia

In my own class, Three Green, there was only one Turkish Cypriot among three still enrolled at the establishment as tokens of its founding pledge to ethnic tolerance (most had chosen to withdraw after the invasion). Four Britons, two London-born Cypriots and several deracinated Greeks recently returned from Canada, South Africa and Australia complemented the mix.

Modern Greek was obligatory for all. With memories of the invasion still fresh, it was the means by which the horrors of Turkey were inevitably invoked. Pupils, including a “floaters” class of itinerant internationals, were daily inculcated with the misdeeds of the “Terrible Turk”. I can still see our own teacher, a man of ample girth, wielding his large frame around the green-shuttered classroom, threatening to mete out the worse “Turkish punishments” if standards weren’t kept.

Even now, such poison is hard to erase

Truculent students who failed vocabulary tests frequently got the ear lobe treatment – a sharp tug delivered with the warning that the Ottomans had thought nothing of removing body parts from each and every Greek since their capture of the island in 1571. “You should know,” he would boom, “that the good Turk is the dead Turk.”

The fear, hate, loss and pain that both sides had engendered were as prevalent on the other side of the dead zone.

Turkish Cypriots, just a few miles away, were also being raised on hate speech and propaganda. From textbooks and teacher handouts, they, too, were being nurtured on the seeds of mistrust, lopsided views of history that academics would go on to study. Had it not been for the invasion – a campaign that to this day Ankara prefers to call an “intervention” – the Turkish Cypriot minority, the argument went, would never have been able to sleep safely at night.

Even now, such poison is hard to erase. As I discovered during a visit four decades later, accusations of nationalist bias still haunt the English School – despite the intake of Turkish Cypriot students having increased dramatically in recent times, and the election of the first Turkish Cypriot head boy in 2015.

Likewise, young Turkish Cypriots on the other side of the ceasefire line speak openly of their nationalist education, including the assertion that Greek Cypriots actually welcomed the 1974 partition because it allowed them to create their own Turk-free state.

A Turkish army tank passes through the Turkish section of Nicosia in 1974. Photograph: Anonymous/AP

Competing forms of nationalism

Nicosia is the only capital to possess two museums of national struggle. Even now, with peace talks in full throttle, both indulge in competing forms of nationalism, with the past viewed as a way of laying claim to the island.

The Turkish-controlled north’s museum stands behind a military complex (one of many erected to house some 40,000 mainland troops stationed in the rump state), flanked by armoured personnel carriers and a large artillery cannon.

In a concrete building reminiscent of Soviet-era communism, visitors are exposed to gory photographs, exhibits and guns telling the history of the struggle of Turkish Cypriots from 1878, when the British took over the island from the Ottomans.

What have we got to unite us? The answer is nothing

“We have nothing in common with Greek Cypriots, neither religion, culture nor language,” says the museum’s young, blonde-haired warden, welcoming her first visitors in several days. “What have we got to unite us? The answer is nothing.”

In the south, the national struggle museum is housed in a cavernous edifice opposite the Greek archbishopric, which co-funded its refurbishment in 2000 and for Hellenists is the keeper of the nationalist flame. Here, too, visitors are treated to a history of heroism, martyrdom and sacrifice – although this time through the lens of the 1955-59 national liberation movement against the British yoke, celebrated as the prelude to enosis with Greece.

Turkish Cypriots are, at best, represented as British collaborators. “We have a lot of schoolchildren coming through,” says Marios Georgiou behind the reception desk. “Our fight for independence from the British was honourable, everyone should know about it. The Turks were always brutal, but things have changed now. Maybe we could live with them under the right circumstances, if an agreement was fair.”

In suggesting this, Georgiou is in tune with something new. Memories of co-existence are fading fast; memories of horrors past are fading too. Though rejectionists are vocal – with influential parts of the media on either side equating reconciliation with betrayal – many hope that, this time, the communities’ two leaders have gone too far to roll the clock back.

“We are literally in the process of writing history,” says Fikri Toros, seated in his pristine office where he has long-headed the Turkish Cypriot chamber of commerce. “Both communities have come to terms with the reality that economic sustainability is impossible on an island that is politically conflicted.”

The time, Toros says, has finally come to reunify in a bi-zonal, bi-communal federal state.

Barrels and sandbags mark the dividing UN buffer zone. Photograph: Petros Karadjias/AP

Memory wars

The main gateway to the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is at the crossing where the Ledra Palace hotel still stands. This sandstone building – famous before the invasion for its brandy sours – is now a bullet-spattered billet for British squaddies seconded to the UN.

Since 2003, when the breakaway republic eased restrictions announcing that cross-border travel would be free for all, Greek and Turkish Cypriots have been able to cross at will. But passage through the checkpoint is as much psychological as anything else. For Greeks (nearly 200,000 of whom lost their homes in the invasion), compulsion to identify themselves at the checkpoint still weighs heavily.

“It makes me feel uncomfortable that I have to show my passport in my own country,” says Lakis Zavallis as we cross the line. “But it won’t stop me doing it.”

Zavallis, a sprightly 72-year-old who commanded a platoon during the invasion, belongs, by his own admission, to the “silent majority” now hoping that their nation will at last be united in peace. So, too, does Dervish Yashar, six years younger, but no less moderate. Yashar was among the first Turkish Cypriots who, with his pre-1974 identity card in hand, crossed the Ledra Palace checkpoint on 23 April 2003.

“I kept my old passport, I kept my Republic of Cyprus identity card, I kept my old driving licence waiting for that day,” Yashar says. “Turkish Cypriots have been isolated for 60 years – it is enough,” he tells me, referring to Greek-Cypriot raids against Turkish Cypriot villages in the late 1950s. “No one but Turkey recognises us. If a solution doesn’t come from the top, it will come from the bottom.”

For a long time the desire to end the ethnic divide seemed odd, even surreal. Only a hardy bunch of Greek and Turkish Cypriots, led mostly by trade unionists and civil society, indulged in bi-communal efforts.

My classmates were the last generation that still had memories of the “other side”. After 1974, partition and the “memory wars” that both communities adopted took over, and history was re-written. The buffer zone was a place to be avoided, both menacing and dark.

“Don’t you remember?” says my childhood friend, Cleopatra Kitti. “It marked the beginning of the big dark unknown. We were always told: ‘Don’t drive near it, don’t go near it, lest you fall into the clutches of the Turks.’”

“In Cyprus we have two ethnic groups who, up to a point, shared the same time and space before they devised inherently opposed ‘memories’ of what the common past entailed,” says the anthropologist Yannis Papadakis. “Both insult the memory of the other.”

For decades, the dead zone was the most potent symbol of that division. But now, in its Home for Cooperation – a community centre opposite the Ledra Palace in the middle of the no-man’s land – has become a zone of life and interaction, a place of mingling and common dreams for people who no longer want to insult the memory of the other.

It is in the Home of Cooperation that I meet Marilena Spyrou, 32, and Hayriye Ruzgar, 25. One is Orthodox, the other Muslim, but neither wants me or anyone else to describe them as Greek or Turk. They are Cypriots who look only to a common future, beyond the obstacles of partition, in the fair isle that they share.

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