INTRODUCTION Cyprus, the Mediterranean's third largest island after Sicily and Sardinia, defers only to Malta as the newest state in the region, having come into existence on August 16, 1960. For the first time, following centuries of domination by whatever empire or nation held sway in the eastern Mediterranean - including, from 1878 to 1960, Great Britain - the islanders seemed to control their own destiny. Such empowerment proved illusory: no distinctly Cypriot national identity was permitted to evolve by the island's Orthodox Christian Greek and Muslim Turkish communities. Within four years, tension between these two groups rent the society asunder, followed in 1974 by a political and ethnic division of the island imposed by the mainland Turkish army.
However, calm for the most part now reigns on the island, and for British visitors there's a persistent sense of dj vu in Cyprus, perhaps more than with any other ex-Crown Colony. Pillar boxes still display "GR" and "ER" monograms near zebra crossings; grandiose colonial public buildings jostle for space with vernacular mud-brick and Neoclassical houses; Woolworth's, Next and M&S are present in the largest towns of the South; and of course driving is on the left. Before the recent founding of universities in both South and North, higher education was pursued abroad, preferably in the UK, and English - virtually the second, if unofficial, language in the South - is widely spoken. Despite the bitterness of the independence struggle against the UK, most is forgiven (if not exactly forgotten) a generation or so later.
Even the most ardent Cyprus enthusiast will concede that it can't compete in allure with more exotic, airline-poster destinations, yet the place grows on you with prolonged acquaintance (as evidenced by the huge civilian expat population, estimated at 20,000). There's certainly enough to hold your interest inland once you tire of the beaches, which tend to be small, scattered coves in the South, or longer, dunier expanses in the North. Horizons are defined by one of two mountain ranges: the convoluted massif of the Trdhos, with numerous spurs and valleys, and the wall-like escarpment of the Kyrenia hills, seemingly sculpted of papier-mch.
In terms of special-interest visits, archeology buffs, wine-drinkers, flower-sniffers, bird-watchers and mountain-bikers are particularly well catered for, though state-of- the-art nightlife and cultural diversions can be thin on the ground, in keeping with the predominantly forty- and fifty-something clientele, and the island's enduring provincialism. This has a natural consequence in the overwhelming presence of the package industry, supported by law in the South, by circumstance in the North, which has effectively put at least two of the bigger resorts and numbers of multistar hotels off-limits to independent travellers. But for an undemanding, reasonably priced family holiday most months of the year, Cyprus is still a good bet.
Divided Cyprus
Long-dormant rivalry and resentment between Cyprus' two principal ethnic groups was reawakened late in the 1950s by the Greek-Cypriot campaign for nosis or union with Greece. Following independence, disputes over the proper respective civic roles of the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot communities, and lingering advocacy of nosis, or taksim (partition of the island between Greece and Turkey) by extremists in each camp, provoked widespread, ongoing communal violence.
Abetted by interested outsiders, these incidents - and a CIA-backed coup against the elected government - culminated in the 1974 operation by the Turkish army which effectively partitioned the island, with both Greek and Turkish Cypriots on the "wrong" side of the ceasefire line compelled to leave their homes. Nicosia, the capital, approximately at the centre of Cyprus, was divided like Cold War Berlin, and remains so at present; much of Famagusta, formerly home to about seven percent of the island's current population, lies abandoned. If this all sounds eye-rollingly familiar in the wake of events in former Yugoslavia and the Russian Federation, there was during the 1960s and 1970s a relative novelty to the crises that repeatedly convulsed Cyprus.
In the aftermath of 1974, the two zones of Cyprus nurse grievances against each other that are difficult for many outsiders to fathom, and North and South remain mutually isolated, having developed over time into parallel societies, destined, perhaps, never to converge again. The island's division is comparable to that of pre-1990 Germany, though as Cyprus is a far more intimate place the scale of human tragedy has been more visible. Reunification, if and when it comes, is bound to be hedged with conditions, and fraught with pitfalls similar to the German experience: while South and North are both avowedly capitalist, the linguistic and religious gulf separating the two communities, compounded by nearly three decades of enforced segregation and a growing prosperity gap, may prove impossible to bridge.
