Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

A wall; two sides, similar to a conflict. Two versions of a shared history.In such a conflict there also always remain two types of people: wall-builders and wall-breakers. Those who stubbornly insist on building walls, in the gardens of their neighbours, in the minds of their children and in the cities of the future. On the other side, there is those who dare to question the construct, those who peek over the fence and deconstruct divisions. Such people we met at the Home for Cooperation, a unique community centre located in the heart of Nicosia, in the heat of the conflict, the UN Buffer zone. Already due to its location the venue challenges physical and culturally constructed barriers, as it provides a platform for intercultural dialogue and peacebuilding. A city, and especially a capital city, serves as a space for nationalist ideologies to be sensed from its particular architecture, language, food, traditions, events. However, the shared city of Nicosia/Lefkosia is in many ways taken over by the ethnic dispute between the Turkish and the Greek islanders. Therefore the buffer zone seems to be a the perfect non-place, where both sides could meet.

In a walking tour with social anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis through the old city of Lefkosia, Papadakis started off with emphasizing the importance of memory. Starting with the Green Line, he says many Greek Cypriots assume it came into being in 1974 and never think of it as existing before that. The Turkish Cypriots, on the other hand, are obsessively focused on the 1960s, condensing the whole of history into that single period and forgetting that there existed a time other than conflict. Interestingly, both sides have slogans about memory that are more or less identical, Greek Cypriots with Den Xechno (I don’t forget), and Turkish Cypriots with Kanlı Noel Anildi (Bloody Christmas Memorial). Greek Cypriots will not forget their occupied lands, lost homes and villages, while Turkish Cypriots won’t forget the Bloody Christmas of 1963, the slaughter and violence of the ‘60s, events that Greek Cypriots hardly remember at all. While walking through Nicosia, I figured that it is not only a matter of remembering and forgetting the history selectively, it is also the subjective nature of human vision in terms of ‘seeing’ and ‘unseeing’ signs that matters. This concept of ‘unseeing’ in context of a divided city has been the main plot device in China Mieville’s The City & The City (2009). In this novel citizens of the overlapping fictional cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma are taught from birth to “unsee”. Just as in Nicosia, where you often feel borders but you don’t see them, where you cross from one side to the other with a beer in your hand, as if entering a festival terrain, the institutionalised practice of ‘unseeing’ is a crucial tool in order to reaffirm cultural and political borders between the Turkish and the Greek.

One of the things Nicosia, and especially Papadakis’ walking tour taught me, was that what we perceive in our daily lives is worthy of re-examination from varying levels. By the way, what do you prefer? The Cypriot or the Turkish coffee?