The World Without Us

From his garden, Hikmet can see down to the harbor at Kyrenia, guarded by a seventh-century Byzantine castle built atop Roman fortifications that preceded it. Crusaders and Venetians subsequently took it; then came Ottomans, then British, and now Turks were having a turn again. Today a museum, the castle holds one of the world’s rarest relics, a complete Greek merchant ship discovered in 1965, scuttled a mile off Kyrenia. When it went down, its hold was filled with millstones and hundreds of ceramic urns containing wine, olives, and almonds. Its cargo was heavy enough to mire it where currents buried it in mud. Carbon dating of the almonds it carried, likely picked in Cyprus only days earlier, shows that it sank about 2,300 years ago.

Shielded from oxygen, the ship’s Aleppo pine hull and timbers remained intact, although they had to be injected with polyethylene resins to keep from disintegrating once exposed to air. The boat builders had used nails of copper, also once plentiful on Cyprus, also impervious to rust. Equally well preserved are lead fishing weights and the ceramic urns whose varied styles reveal the Aegean ports of their origin.

The 10-foot-thick walls and curved towers of the castle where the ship is now displayed are of limestone quarried from the surrounding cliffs, bearing tiny fossils deposited when Cyprus was beneath the Mediterranean. Since the island was divided, however, the castle and the fine old stone carob warehouses of Kyrenia’s waterfront have all but disappeared behind unlovely infestations of casino hotels—gambling and loose currency laws being among the limited economic options open to a pariah nation.

Hikmet Uluçan drives east along Cyprus’s north coast, passing three more castles of native limestone rising from the jagged mountains that parallel the narrow road. Along the headlands and promontories overlooking the topaz Mediterranean are remains of stone villages, some of them 6,000 years old. Until recently, their terraces, half-buried walls, and jetties were also visible. Since 2003, however, yet another foreign incursion has assaulted the island’s profile. “The only consolation,” mourns Uluçan, “is that this one can’t last.”

Not crusaders, this time, but elderly British seeking the warmest retirement a middle-class pension can buy, led by a frenzy of developers who discovered in the quasi-country of Northern Cyprus the last cheap, untouched seafront property left anywhere north of Libya, with pliable zoning codes to match. Suddenly, bulldozers were scattering 500-year-old olive trees to scrape roads across hillsides. Waves of red-tiled roofs soon oscillated across the landscape, atop floor plans cloned repeatedly in poured concrete. Upon a tsunami of cash payoffs, properly agents surfed to shore astride English-language billboards that appended terms like “Estates,” “Hillside Villas,” “Seaside Villas,” and “Luxury Villas” to ancient Mediterranean place-names.

Prices from £40,000 to £100,000 ($75,000 to $185,000 U.S.) touched off a land rush that overwhelmed trifles such as title disputes by Greek Cypriots who still claimed to own much of the land. A Northern Cyprus environmental-protection trust vainly protested a new golf course by reminding people that they now had to import water from Turkey in giant vinyl bags; that municipal garbage tips were full; that the total lack of sewage treatment meant five times as much effluent would pour into the transparent sea.

Each month more steam shovels gobble coastline like famished brontosaurs, spitting out olive and carob trees along a widening blacktop now 30 miles east of Kyrenia, with no sign of stopping. The English language marches down the shore, dragging embarrassing architecture with it, one sign after another announcing the latest subdivision with a trust-inspiring British name, even as the seaside villas grow trashier: concrete painted, not stuccoed; fake-ceramic roof tiles made of tacky polymer; cornices and windows trimmed with faux stenciled stonework. When Hikmet Uluçan sees a pile of traditional yellow tiles lying in front of naked town house frames awaiting walls, he realizes that someone is ripping stone facing from local bridges and selling it to contractors.

Something about these limestone squares lying at the base of skeletal buildings looks familiar. After a while, he figures it out. “It is like Varosha.” The half-finished buildings going up, surrounded by construction rubble, exactly recall the half-ruins of Varosha coming down.

But if anything, quality has sunk even further. Each billboard touting Northern Cyprus’s sunny new dream homes includes, near the bottom, notification of the construction guarantee: 10 years. Given rumors of developers not bothering to wash the sea salt from the beach sand they mine for concrete, 10 years may be all they get.