The World Without Us

About the size of Connecticut, mountainous Cyprus floats in a placid aquamarine sea ringed by several countries whose genetically intertwined peoples often detest each other. Ethnic Greeks arrived on Cyprus some 4,000 years ago, and subsequently lived under a parade of conquering Assyrians, Phoenicians, Persians, Romans, Arabs, Byzantines, English crusaders, French, and Venetians. The year 1570 brought yet another conqueror, the Ottoman Empire. With it came Turkish settlers, who by the 20th century would comprise slightly less than one-fifth of the island’s population.

After World War I finished off the Ottomans, Cyprus ended up as a British colony. The island’s Greeks, Orthodox Christians who had periodically revolted against the Ottoman Turks, weren’t thrilled to have British rulers instead, and clamored for unification with Greece. The Turkish Cypriot Muslim minority protested. Tensions boiled for decades and erupted viciously several times during the 1950s. A 1960 compromise resulted in the independent Republic of Cyprus, with power shared between Greeks and Turks.

Ethnic hatred, however, had by then become a habit: Greeks massacred entire Turkish families, and Turks ferociously avenged them. A military takeover in Greece detonated a coup on the island, midwifed by the American CIA in honor of Greece’s new anticommunist rulers. That prompted Turkey in July 1974 to send troops to protect Turkish Cypriots from being annexed by Greece. During the ensuing brief war, each side was accused of inflicting atrocities on the other’s civilians. When the Greeks placed anti-aircraft guns atop a high-rise in the seaside resort of Varosha, Turkish bombers attacked in American-made jets, and Varosha’s Greeks ran for their lives.

Allan Cavinder, a British electrical engineer, had arrived on the island two years earlier, in 1972. He had been taking assignments with a London firm throughout the Middle East, and when he saw Cyprus, he decided to stay. Except for torrid July and August, the island’s weather was mostly mild and spotless. He settled on the northern shore, below mountains where yellow limestone villages lived off the harvests of olive and carob trees, which they exported from an inlet harbor at his town, Kyrenia.

When the war began, he decided to wait it out, figuring correctly that there would be demand for his expertise when it ended. He wouldn’t have predicted the call from the hotel, however. After the Greeks abandoned Varosha, the Turkish Cypriots, rather than let squatters colonize it, decided that the fancy resort would be more valuable as a bargaining chip when negotiations for a permanent reconciliation got underway. So they built a chain-link fence around it, strung barbed wire across the beach, stationed Turkish soldiers to guard it, and posted signs warning everyone else away.

After two years, however, an old Ottoman foundation that owned property that included the northernmost Varosha hotel requested permission to refurbish and reopen it. It was a sensible idea, Cavinder could see. The four-story hotel, to be renamed the Palm Beach, sat far enough back on a shoreline bend that its terrace and beachfront remained sunny through the afternoon. The hotel tower next-door, which had briefly held a Greek machine-gun placement, had collapsed during the Turkish bombing raid, but aside from its rubble everything else Allan Cavinder found when he first entered the zone seemed intact.

Eerily so: he was struck by how quickly humans had abandoned it. The hotel registry was still open to August 1974, when business had suddenly halted. Room keys lay where they’d been tossed on the front desk. Windows facing the sea had been left open, and blowing sand had formed small dunes in the lobby. Flowers had dried in vases; Turkish coffee demitasses and breakfast dishes licked clean by mice were still in place on the table linens.

His task was to bring the air-conditioning system back into service. However, this routine job was proving difficult. The southern, Greek portion of the island had UN recognition as the legitimate Cyprus government, but a separate Turkish state in the north was recognized only by Turkey. With no access to spare parts, an arrangement was made with Turkish troops guarding Varosha to allow Cavinder to quietly cannibalize whatever he needed from the other vacant hotels.

Abandoned hotel, Varosha, Cyprus.

PHOTO BY PETER YATES—IMAGE REPRODUCTION BY ’SOLE STUDIO.