North Cyprus: Good Intentions, Lazy Execution
Written by Allegra Rifai
“It’s so weird we’re going away just the two of us isn’t it?” I ventured to my husband, testing the waters to see if we may be on the same page. We had just left our children with my mother in Norfolk for the first time and were due to depart for Cyprus the next day.
“Not really,” he replied. “I’m really happy we’re doing this. We need it.”
Ah right, I thought to myself.
After an incredible flight sans children where I spoke to no one and read uninterrupted for four hours straight, we landed in Larnaca, South Cyprus.
“What’s the vibe on travelling to North Cyprus?” my husband asked in his best nonchalant, hypothetical voice to the man at the Avis desk.
“It’s not allowed,” replied the Avis man. “And your insurance doesn’t cover it, but do what you want.”
We scurried off to our little Toyota - that looked and felt like it had been 3-D printed that morning - and headed off into the unknown.
North Cyprus is like a very handsome, very obnoxious, man. It’s so beautiful that sometimes it feels like a joke, and you stare slightly open mouthed at the towering mountains and smooth sea, feeling the shimmering, intoxicating heat melting everything together. But then, you become aware of the other side. It’s not an undercurrent, because it’s right there in your face along with the staggering beauty: the rampant nationalism. There are flags everywhere - quite literally red flags. They are on bunting strung across streets, larger ones on buildings, larger still rippling in slow motion from giant flag poles, and the largest actually somehow painted onto the mountain side. If you were driving, and saw a flag and immediately started counting in your head, you would not get to ten before you saw another one. Similarly the face and figure of Ataturk - the founder of modern Turkey - are everywhere. Statues on roundabouts, twenty foot high photos on the front of buildings, and perhaps most troublingly, drawn astride a horse emerging from fire.
This tension between stunning scenery and latent aggression was the most apparent in Famagusta. There is a section of the town that was deserted during the civil war, and has been abandoned ever since. It’s a falling down ghost town, with no glass in its windows and bullet holes pockmarking its facades. Directly underneath these war torn buildings, is a beach with turquoise sea and soft white sand, with families playing on floaties, lazing in the bath-like water.
This was my main feeling with North Cyprus - dissonance. No cohesive narrative I could latch onto to make anything make sense. Ladies in tiny bikinis lounging next to ladies in burkinis. Giant mosques sitting across the road from giant billboards advertising Johnnie Walker. Everyone smokes. The restaurants are massive and therefore often empty. The fake handbags are very, very good. The cars are shiny and flashy, but many of the houses are unfinished. The food is hit and miss. One morning, a friendly and charismatic man invited us into his restaurant. Well, not so much invited as shouted the word “organic” at us as we walked by, which was all I needed. He proceeded to give us floury white hamburger baps with cold supermarket cheddar cheese cut in orange slabs arranged on top, exclaiming with a flourish as he set it down in front of us that this was a “special Cypriot breakfast”.
“I fear we may’ve been had,” I said to my husband, through cheesy teeth as I tried to swallow it.
By contrast, my husband’s Turkish Cypriot friend took us for breakfast a few days later and it was one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had. The restaurant was down a dirt track and totally deserted save the obligatory army of stray cats, so I didn’t have high hopes, but they put on the most amazing spread. Small dish after small dish of food kept arriving at our table. Perfectly cooked eggs, spicy sucuck, little doughy balls filled with herbed mincemeat, flaky pastry tubes filled with warm feta, Turkish bread, jam, it went on and on until we gratefully surrendered.
By the time we left I felt a little sad. When you get used to a place that initially felt totally alien, the bond feels that much stronger because it was hard won. As the feelings of oddness and tension ebbed away, the sun-drenched, chaotic charm of North Cyrpus started to take hold of me. What was once alarmingly weird was now charmingly eccentric. What was over the top and vaguely threatening now seemed passionate. I stopped trying to make it make sense, and revelled in the disjointed appeal.