The World Without Us

He wandered through the deserted town. About 20,000 people had lived or worked in Varosha. Asphalt and pavement had cracked; he wasn’t surprised to see weeds growing in the deserted streets, but hadn’t expected to see trees already. Australian wattles, a fast-growing acacia species used by hotels for landscaping, were popping out midstreet, some nearly three feet high. Creepers from ornamental succulents snaked out of hotel gardens, crossing roads and climbing tree trunks. Shops still displayed souvenirs and tanning lotion; a Toyota dealership was showing 1974 Corollas and Celicas. Concussions from Turkish air force bombs, Cavinder saw, had exploded plate-glass store windows. Boutique mannequins were half-clothed, their imported fabrics flapping in tattered strips, the dress racks behind them full but deeply dust coated. The canvas of baby prams was likewise torn—he hadn’t expected to see so many left behind. And bicycles.

The honeycombed facades of empty hotels, 10 stories of shattered sliding glass doors opening to seaview balconies now exposed to the elements, had become giant pigeon roosts. Pigeon droppings coated everything. Carob rats nested in hotel rooms, living off Yaffa oranges and lemons from former citrus groves that had been absorbed into Varosha’s landscaping. The bell towers of Greek churches were spattered with the blood and feces of hanging bats.

Sheets of sand blew across avenues and covered floors. What surprised him at first was the general absence of smell, except for a mysterious stench that emanated from hotel swimming pools, most of which were inexplicably drained yet reeked as though filled with cadavers. Around them, the upturned tables and chairs, torn beach umbrellas, and glasses knocked on their sides all spoke of some revelry gone terribly wrong. Cleaning all this up was going to be expensive.

For six months, as he dismantled and rescued air conditioners, industrial washers and dryers, and entire kitchens full of ovens, grills, refrigerators, and freezers, silence pounded at him. It actually hurt his ears, he told his wife. During the year before the war, he’d worked at a British naval base south of town, and would often leave her at a hotel to enjoy a day at the beach. When he picked her up afterward, a dance band would be playing for the German and British tourists. Now, no bands, just the incessant kneading of the sea that no longer soothed. The wind sighing through open windows became a whine. The cooing of pigeons grew deafening. The sheer absence of human voices bouncing off walls was unnerving. He kept listening for Turkish soldiers, who were under instructions to shoot looters. He wasn’t certain how many assigned to patrol knew that he was there legally, or would give him a chance to prove it.

It turned out not to be a problem. He seldom saw any guards. He understood why they would avoid entering such a tomb.

_________

By the time Metin Münir saw Varosha, four years after Allan Cavinder’s reclamation job ended, roofs had collapsed and trees were growing straight out of houses. Münir, one of Turkey’s best-known newspaper columnists, is a Turkish Cypriot who went to Istanbul to study, came home to fight when the troubles began, then returned to Turkey when the troubles kept going on, and on. In 1980, he was the first journalist allowed to enter Varosha for a few hours.

The first thing he noticed was shredded laundry still hanging from clotheslines. What struck him most, though, wasn’t the absence of life but its vibrant presence. With the humans who built Varosha gone, nature was intently recouping it. Varosha, merely 60 miles from Syria and Lebanon, is too balmy for a freeze-thaw cycle, but its pavement was tossed asunder anyway. The wrecking crews weren’t just trees, Münir marveled, but also flowers. Tiny seeds of wild Cyprus cyclamen had wedged into cracks, germinated, and heaved aside entire slabs of cement. Streets now rippled with white cyclamen combs and their pretty, variegated leaves.

“You understand,” Münir wrote his readers back in Turkey, “just what the Taoists mean when say they say that soft is stronger than hard.”

Two more decades passed. The millennium turned, and kept going. Once, Turkish Cypriots had bet that Varosha, too valuable to lose, would force the Greeks to the bargaining table. Neither side had dreamed that, 30-plus years later, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus would still exist, severed not only from the Greek Republic of Cyprus but from the world, still a pariah nation to all except Turkey. Even the UN Peacekeeping Force was exactly where it was in 1974, still listlessly patrolling the Green Line, occasionally waxing a pair of still-impounded, still-new 1974 Toyotas.