TREAD carefully through the building sites that litter Paphos, testament to the city’s preparations for its stint as 2017 European Capital of Culture, and you eventually find your way to the enclave of Mouttalos. Thousands of Turkish-Cypriots once lived here, before intercommunal fighting, reprisal killings and Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974 drove their exodus to the island’s north. George Pachis, a local Greek-Cypriot, sometimes helps those who fled find the graves of relatives. Recalling one brings him close to tears. Accompanying an old widow through the cemetery recently, rather than the single tomb he expected, he found a gravestone listing nine names, including a two-year-old girl. All had been shot dead by Greek-Cypriot irregulars.

The scars of Paphos bear witness to the traumas of Europe’s last divided country. Cyprus’s cleavage may be peaceful today, but it is deeply entrenched. Its artefacts—barbed wire, rusting military outposts—are scrawled artlessly across the UN “buffer zone” that divides Nicosia, the capital. Checkpoints allow easy travel between north and south, but the two peoples lead separate lives; 48% of Greek-Cypriot students have never visited the north, and 43% “rarely” go. Cyprus’s rifts keep the island poorer, hinder the return of refugees, embarrass the European Union (Cyprus joined as a divided island in 2004, but only the Greek-Cypriot republic enjoys international recognition) and act as a regional spoiler, hampering EU-NATO co-operation and the EU’s relationship with Turkey.

The island has been formally split since Turkish troops occupied its northern third in 1974. Reunification schemes have come and gone, most recently in 2004, when the Greek-Cypriot majority rejected a plan devised by Kofi Annan, then UN secretary-general. But more recently Nicos Anastasiades and Mustafa Akinci, respective presidents of the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots, have brought a settlement within grasp. The two men, who enjoy a strong personal rapport, seek agreement on a “bizonal, bicommunal federation”, with a weak central government overseeing two autonomous communities. Hopes are high, despite the failure of a recent summit in Switzerland. If a deal is reached in the weeks ahead, a new constitution will be drawn up while the leaders drum up support for the double referendum that will follow. But that will take time, and not much is left: Mr Anastasiades faces elections in February 2018 that he may not win.

The outline of a deal has long been clear, and left alone the two men might have found agreement by now. But Cyprus has long been a pawn in the chess games of others. Today, unhappily, the island’s fate lies largely in the hands of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s authoritarian president. Under the provisions of Cyprus’s 1960 independence settlement, Turkey, along with Greece and Britain, maintains a right to military intervention if the island’s constitutional order is threatened. The Greek-Cypriots (and Greece itself) insist on scrapping those guarantees, and on the eventual removal of Turkish troops, several thousand of whom remain in the north. But despite fresh ideas from the UN to allay Turkish-Cypriot fears, such as a multinational police force stationed on the island, Mr Erdogan has so far refused to budge.

The security guarantees are at the heart of the Cyprus problem. Fix them, and you might unlock solutions to other outstanding issues, notably on territory and power-sharing. Only 1% of the island’s land mass remains disputed, and a compromise looks possible: the Turkish-Cypriots relinquish their claim to Morphou, a contested town in the north, in exchange for a rotating presidency, ensuring that Turkish-Cypriots run the federal state for part of the time.

But crossing red lines is hard when you feel the other lot’s guns trained on you. “In Cyprus we don’t fight facts, but ghosts,” says Harry Tzimitras, director of the PRIO Cyprus Centre in Nicosia, a research outfit. Memories of the violence of the 1960s make Turkish-Cypriots loth to give up their protector. Greek-Cypriots balk at the idea of mortgaging their security to Turkey. “It is like asking Latvia to accept a Russian security guarantee,” says Mr Anastasiades. Mr Erdogan’s frequent outrages at home are well noted by the many enemies of a settlement on the Greek-Cypriot side.

Will Mr Erdogan move? No one can be sure. His priority is winning a referendum on constitutional reforms, probably in April; some say he can compromise only after that. Others divine a willingness to help sooner, perhaps to get a piece of the hydrocarbon riches beneath Cypriot waters (and to wean the north off the subsidies it gets from the Turkish treasury). Two planned visits to Ankara by European leaders—Theresa May, Britain’s prime minister, on January 28th, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, five days later—will sound the president out.

Nervous in Nicosia

Even a deal will leave difficult referendums to be won. Neither leader will sign an agreement he cannot sell at home. But that job gets harder every year. Younger Greek-Cypriots, raised on a diet of Hellenic nationalism at school and with memories of nothing other than division, are the least likely to support reunification. Nor can support from the Turkish-Cypriots, who backed the Annan plan, be assumed, in part because Mr Akinci’s government is split. Tahsin Ertugruloglu, the Turkish-Cypriot foreign minister, describes the negotiations as a “total failure”.

If that seems unfair, caution is certainly in order. The Cyprus dispute is a repository of dashed hopes and broken dreams. Veteran island-watchers remain almost uniformly sceptical. (The expiry of the Obama administration, which quietly nudged both sides towards a deal, will not help.) It is noble to hope for a resolution to this wretched problem, and the courage of Messrs Anastasiades and Akinci has brought a deal tantalisingly close. But to bet on a reunified Cyprus implies a faith in Mr Erdogan’s statesmanship that the Turkish president has done little to warrant.

Clarification (January 27th): This piece has been updated to make clear that the Greek Cypriot election is in 2018.