Summer in Cyprus #5

A day in occupied territory.

Some of you have said you enjoy the written descriptions, some of you the photos.  So, the next two posts will give some of both.  Today's blog entry details a visit to the Turkish side of the island (with a few photos), and tomorrow's entry will have few words and many pictures of the students.  Subsequent days will give an equal amount of both and you can simply do with it as you please!

Generally, I have been traveling alone and have chronicled my exploits via e-mail to family.  On this trip Alicia has taken over the duties of family scribe and so I glady (and with her permission) borrow many of her words for these blog reports. 

The weather gets very hot in the mid-afternoon, which is a time that the wise avoid, usually holing up in some cool spot to wait out the hours from about one p.m. to about 4.  We ventured out at 4:30, this time with the goal of entering into the occupied zone of Lefkosia, for which passports would be necessary.

It’s a very strange feeling to pass through the border.  On the Greek side, there are officers but no checkpoints, as the Greek Cypriots view the entire country as their own and bitterly resent the fact that the Turks are requiring passports for entry into the occupied zone.   However, once you pass the dead zone (the area between the borders held by the UN, in which you MUST NOT take photographs), you are required to stop at the Turkish checkpoint.  The goal here is to avoid having your passport book stamped because of the fact that the majority of the world view the occupation as illegal and a stamp from Turkish Cyprus might make entry into other countries difficult.  So, the very bored young man sitting in his air-conditioned office reaches through his little glass opening to hand you a sheet of paper (visa) on which you must write your name and passport number.  Once this is filled out, he consults his computer and makes entries, presumably of the information contained in your passport, humming some Turkish pop tune while clicking away.  One finished, he firmly thumps the stamp of a red rectangular entry symbol onto the paper and hands it back to you.  He has enough English to say “Thank you,” but that is about all.

Once on the Turkish side, men in army uniforms are visible everywhere.  They stroll through the neighborhoods, ride in clusters in the backs of covered jeeps, and zip through on motor scooters as the shoppers flow in a stream from one shop to the next.  All signs are in Turkish at this point and very little Greek or English is heard.  However, you can hear the music of other languages – Turkish, Russian, Eastern European, French – swirling around you as you pass through the narrow lanes.

Turkish is a very complex language, containing sounds for which we have no symbol in our alphabet.  To my untrained ear, it has a similarity to Russian, with lots of “lyu” combinations and the “g” sound that exists in the ending consonant for our word “garage.”  We asked one shop lady how to say “thank you,” but – alas – I will never be able to remember or reproduce it.  Alicia, who has a much better ear for all things musical and linguistic, will probably be able to pick it up in no time.  If I did not love her so, I would find that a very irritating quality in light of my linguistic shortcomings!  They have adopted, however, the French “Merci,” so I will resort to that when attempting to be polite.  Otherwise, the language and signs are completely incomprehensible to me.

In this area of North Lefkosia, the people seem to be rather friendly, probably because a good part of their income relies on tourists coming over from Greek Cyprus.  The men are not behindhand in staring and occasionally making what I assume is their version of a catcall, which is a sharp “Tsss” sound.  I observed them doing this for any woman they found attractive, regardless of her nationality or dress.



We were thrilled to be able to view the Cathedral of Agia Sophia, which is now the Selimiye Mosque.  This building is the largest and oldest surviving gothic church in Cyprus, erected in the beginning of the 13th century and possibly constructed on the site of an earlier Byzantine church.  It is a huge structure and impossible to capture in one photograph, but lovely in its lines and conformation. The floor was covered with a carpet featuring diagonal lines to help the men line up to face the east when the muezzin leads the call (adhan) to prayers.  The call was electronically amplified from one of the minarets of the cathedral/mosque (added when it was converted into a mosque during the Ottoman occupation in the 16th century.)

After we wandered for a bit through the shops and an open market, we found a café that  seemed suitable for eating supper.  The tiny café is run and owned by a man named Mustafa Seyten, and so is known as Seyten’s Place.  We ordered a grilled chicken dinner (schwarma) and sheftali (the grilled sausage known in Greek as sheftalia that is so traditional to Greek Cyprus.)  The food was wonderful but quite different to that found on the other side of the border.  The sheftali was made from lamb but contained no pork because this territory is Islamic, and Mr. Seyten made his sausage fresh every morning.  Lemon wasn’t served with the meal (as in the Greek side), but a side dish of pickles and hot peppers was placed on the table and the food was served with a generous dollop of unsweetened, thick white yoghurt made from sheep and goat milk.



Mr. Seyten was a chatty man who seemed disposed to enter into conversation with us, especially when he learned that we were from the states.  He has two children who attend universities in California (he couldn’t remember which ones) and are studying to become doctors.  He talked about many things:  the cats that sinuously wound around our ankles and the table legs, begging for food; the Greek women who come to eat in the café but drink so much water that they end up eating very little and leave most of the food on the plate; and about his daily routine of making the sheftali.  He asked for our names, repeating each one after we said it, and boasted that the next time we visited his café, he would be able to call each of us by name.  He had difficulty pronouncing Dagan’s and Bradley’s names, but seemed to find “Alicia” very beautiful and said it several times. The name  “Bob,” of course, is quite simple and must sound mysteriously truncated in a land where names are usually more than two or three syllables.




After we said our goodbyes to Mustafa Seyten (“Bye Bye” is said everywhere), we wandered into the Buyuk Han, an old inn that has been converted by the EVKAF Administration (an Islamic administration which accumulates properties known as evkaf) into a cultural center for arts and crafts.  It was a lovely building, consisting of a large courtyard surrounded by a two-story structure built in the shape of an open square.  In the center is what looks to be a springhouse, an attractive little round building roofed with a dome.  It must have been a beautiful place to stay when it was still an inn.  We arrived rather late in the evening, when the shops were beginning to close up and restaurants just beginning to get busy, so we will try to return on another day and get there earlier.

On our way out, we stopped once again at the Turkish checkpoint and presented our passports and visas, this time receiving a blue exit stamp, administered with sharp thud onto the white paper.