Discovering Famagusta
From bastardised churches to no-man's land
Log | Esper | Autumn 2008
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LIZ:
Abandonded Hotel In UN Buffer Zone, FamagustaJamie: This is one of my favourite photographs I've taken this
year. For some reason I suspect the woman in this image is not
a holiday maker but a local. What is she thinking as she looks at
the empty hotel, abandoned in minutes in 1974? Although the
viewer can't see her face one gets the impression she is looking
on forlornly.
In the following pages Liz describes perfectly the sensation one
gets when taking in this sad sight...
While we careered round the island in pursuit of anything worth (or not worth) buying we stumbled across some of the wonderful sites it has to offer, both in the north and south. On one epic expedition to the south we went via Famagusta to have a look at its world renowned medieval village. The day had been intended as an essential shopping trip coupled with a bit of sight-seeing along the way. As it turned out it is early closing day on Wednesdays in The Republic of Cyprus (this, we discovered just after lunch), so we made the best of it and turned it into a sight-seeing day, instead.
Famagusta is in the north of the island. Well, most of it is. Quite a large part of it is now sectioned off with barbed wire walls behind which can be seen the eerie no-man's land of skeletal hotels, tumble-weed roads and literal urban decomposition...
Log | Esper | Autumn 2008
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Famagusta:I normally use Wikipedia as my third party source of information on places we've visited, the content of which resides in this part of the page, in a green box. Wikipedia is written and edited by many people and therefore unbiased. Unfortunately the Wikipedia entry for Famagusta talks of 'Turkish invasion', 'recognised only by Turkey' and other phrases that lead me to believe that a cynical Greek Cypriot wrote the one-sided entry. Having done the research we firmly believe that the Greek attitude to the troubles, which is the accepted view taken by the outside world, is misinformed and biased. There are always two sides to a story and we feel that the Turkish one is still little known and little understood. The best, unbiased historical account I have read on the subject is actually Liz's, which she
wrote for this log. I leave you, the reader, to research the subject yourself. Do so with objectivity.
Jamie, Sept 2008
