The World Without Us

Nothing has changed except Varosha, which is entering advanced stages of decay. Its encircling fence and barbed wire are now uniformly rusted, but there is nothing left to protect but ghosts. An occasional Coca Cola sign and broadsides posting nightclubs’ cover charges hang on doorways that haven’t seen customers in more than three decades, and now never will again. Casement windows have flapped and stayed open, their pocked frames empty of glass. Fallen limestone facing lies in pieces. Hunks of wall have dropped from buildings to reveal empty rooms, their furniture long ago somehow spirited away. Paint has dulled; the underlying plaster, where it remains, has yellowed to muted patinas. Where it doesn’t, brick-shaped gaps show where mortar has already dissolved.

Other than the back-and-forth of pigeons, all that moves is the creaky rotor of one last functioning windmill. Hotels—mute and windowless, some with balconies that have fallen, precipitating cascades of damage below—still line the riviera that once aspired to be Cannes or Acapulco. At this point, all parties agree, none is salvageable. Nothing is. To someday once again lure tourists, Varosha will have to be bulldozed and begun anew.

In the meantime, nature continues its reclamation project. Feral geraniums and philodendrons emerge from missing roofs and pour down exterior walls. Flame trees, chinaberries, and thickets of hibiscus, oleander, and passion lilac sprout from nooks where indoors and outdoors now blend. Houses disappear under magenta mounds of bougainvillaea. Lizards and whip snakes skitter through stands of wild asparagus, prickly pear, and six-foot grasses. A spreading ground cover of lemon grass sweetens the air. At night, the darkened beachfront, free of moonlight bathers, crawls with nesting loggerhead and green sea turtles.

THE ISLAND OF Cyprus is shaped like a skillet, with its long handle extended toward the Syrian shore. Its pan is gridded with two mountain ranges oriented east-west and divided by a wide central basin—and by the Green Line, with one sierra on each side. The mountains were once covered with Aleppo and Corsican pines, oaks, and cedars. A cypress and juniper forest filled the entire central plain between the two ranges. Olive, almond, and carob trees grew on the arid seaward slopes. At the end of the Pleistocene, dwarf elephants the size of cows and pygmy hippopotamuses no bigger than farmyard swine roamed among these trees. Since Cyprus originally rose from the sea, unconnected to the three continents that surround it, both species apparently arrived by swimming. They were followed by humans about 10,000 years ago. At least one archaeological site suggests that the last pygmy hippo was killed and cooked by Homo sapiens hunters.

The trees of Cyprus were prized by Assyrian, Phoenician, and Roman boat builders; during the Crusades, most of them disappeared into the warships of Richard the Lionhearted. By then, the goat population was so large that the plains remained treeless. During the 20th century, plantations of umbrella pines were introduced to try to resuscitate former springs. However, in 1995, following a long drought, nearly all of them and the remaining native forests in the northern mountains exploded in a lightning inferno.

Journalist Metin Münir was too grieved to return again from Istanbul to face his native island in ashes, until a Turkish Cypriot horticulturist, Hikmet Uluçan, convinced him he needed to see what was happening. Once again, Münir found that flowers were renewing a Cyprus landscape: the burnt hillsides were blanketed with crimson poppies. Some poppy seeds, Uluçan told him, live 1,000 years or more, waiting for fire to clear trees away so they can bloom.

In the village of Lapta, high above the northern coastline, Hikmet Uluçan grows figs, cyclamens, cacti, and grapes, and reverently tends the oldest weeping mulberry in all Cyprus. His moustache, Vandyke beard, and remaining tufts of hair have whitened since he was forced to leave the South as a young man, where his father had a vineyard and raised sheep, almonds, olives, and lemons. Until the senseless feud that tore apart his island, 20 generations of Greeks and Turks had shared their valley. Then neighbors were clubbed to death. They found the smashed body of an old Turkish woman who had been grazing her goat, the bleating animal still tied to her wrist. It was barbaric, but Turks were also slaying Greeks. Murderous, mutual loathing between tribes was no more explicable, or complicated, than the genocidal urges of chimpanzees—a fact of nature that we humans, vainly or disingenuously, pretend our codes of civilization transcend.