Fire (16 page)

In the early-morning hours of July 20, 1974, advance units of the Turkish amphibious force started coming ashore in a small cove about three miles west of this house on the north coast of Cyprus. It marked the beginning of what Turkish Cypriots still call the Peace Operation. A matter of definition, perhaps, because the most immediate results of that operation were the deaths of as many as four thousand soldiers and civilians, the dislocation of over two hundred thousand more, and an international crisis that very nearly led to regional war. I'm not here to quibble, though; the old man starts toward the house, and I follow.

It was a cold overcast day, and I had headed west out of the coastal resort town of Kyrenia to explore the nearby beaches where the Turkish soldiers had first come ashore in 1974. I had stopped at a memorial park on a bluff overlooking the sea, an austere mausoleum with the graves of some seventy Turkish soldiers arrayed before an abstract sculpture of bent black metal. To one side lay another kind of graveyard, some two dozen old tanks and armored personnel carriers parked in neat rows and surrounded by flower beds and trees. Most of the weaponry appeared to be of 1950s vintage, the feeble armor the Greek Cypriots had mustered to oppose the Turkish Army, and the joint ravages of combat and pilferage had transformed them into empty husks. It was while walking amid the tanks that I had glanced over the fence to see the man and his dog by the swimming pool.

At the entranceway to the house, the old man stops and draws my attention to the scars in the flagstone wall. “This is where they killed Karaoglanoglu,” he says, referring to the Turkish ground forces' commander killed early in the invasion. He points to a nearby clump of trees. “The Greeks were hiding in there, and when Karaoglanoglu peacefully approached this door—
tok!
—a mortar.” He shakes his head sadly, then pushes open the door and motions me inside.

The far side of the house is a wall of windows, and just beyond is the Mediterranean, all whitecaps and thrashing waves on this stormy day. The bottom floor is taken up with display cases of captured Greek weapons, fragments of shells and grenades. Upstairs are four rooms, each lined with row upon row of black-and-white photographs of young men in formal pose, Turkish soldiers killed in the Peace Operation. Some of the photos appear to be from high school graduations, the teenagers in civilian dress and smiling, whereas others look to be enlargements of military identification cards, the subjects more somber and with shaved heads. Here and there are glass display cases containing the dress uniforms of dead officers and their personal effects: wallet-size photographs of wives or children or girlfriends, letters home written on thin paper, medals.

If not much of a Peace Operation, the first phase of the Turks' 1974 invasion was also not much of a military triumph. In fact, it was pretty much a fiasco, a detail glossed over by the Turkish government but given unintended confirmation by the neat juxtaposition of the rows of “martyr” photographs in the oceanfront museum with the display of antique enemy weaponry in the adjacent field.

On that first day, all had gone rather smoothly for the Turkish soldiers. Coming ashore at the western end of Five-Mile Beach, the six-thousand-man vanguard had met little resistance and by evening had fanned out along the coastline; in the morning, commanders planned to cross over the Kyrenia Mountains and link up with the paratroop unit that had landed just outside Nicosia—or Lefkosa, as it is known to the Turks. It was with nightfall that things began to go awry.

Incredibly, the naval armada that had delivered the vanguard to the Cyprus coast headed back to Turkey at dusk, and so did the jet fighters that had provided air cover throughout the day. Even more incredibly, there was virtually no communication link between the landing force on the island and military planners on the mainland. Greek Cypriot fighters, complemented by Greek soldiers, seized the moment to attack all along the Turkish line, surrounding the paratroop unit outside Lefkosa and streaming down from caves in the mountains above Five-Mile Beach to fall upon the landing units strung out along the coast. Throughout the night, ferocious battles raged as positions were overrun, retaken, and lost again in a chaos of close combat made worse by raging brushfires.

At dawn the Turkish Air Force finally returned to the skies, and what had been a seesaw battle now turned into a slaughter. Turkish planes bombed military positions across the island, decimated Greek Cypriot armored convoys caught in the open, and cleared their entrenched mountain positions with napalm. By the time a cease-fire was declared the next day, the Turkish Army had carved out a narrow enclave that extended all the way to the Turkish Cypriot neighborhoods of Lefkosa.

But the Peace Operation wasn't done just yet. Over the next three weeks, as diplomats frantically sought a solution to the crisis, Turkey quietly built up its force on Cyprus to some thirty thousand troops, and they were ready to roll when the peace talks collapsed. In just three days the Turks poured out of their bridgehead to seize more than a third of the island and create the frontier they still hold today.

It's all a little hard to picture at ground level, however. Up close, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus resembles nothing so much as a quiet, slightly raffish tourist destination. The once-pretty villages along the northern coast have been transformed into sprawls of cheap hotels and fish restaurants, weird concoctions in faux-Tudor or-Bavarian style to lure the British and German vacationers who predominate. Those who tire of lolling on the beach can take hikes in the hills, visit the ruins of castles, or play the slots at one of the grim roadside casinos. Along with tourism, the TRNC has become an international tax haven—“an ideal place for foreign businessmen,” government brochures exhort—with an array of dubious-looking offshore banks tucked away in the back streets of Lefkosa.

Lurking at the edges of the landscape, however, is a parallel universe: the martyrs. Over the past twenty-five years the Turkish Cypriots and their mainland Turkey protectors have studded the countryside with monuments and cemeteries and museums dedicated to those who have fallen, and the message these buildings and fields carry is directed equally at the villagers in the hills and the tourists on the beach: This is a land created by blood and defended by blood; there can be no return to the old days.

In the story of their existence, the Turkish Cypriots weave an epic tale of victimization and dominance. From their vantage point, history has been a four-hundred-year-long siege in which the majority Greek Cypriots have never ceased trying, through both force of arms and guile, to force them into an intolerable union with Greece—or to push them off the island altogether. Nowhere does this mythology more radically diverge from that of the Greeks than in the interwar period of 1964 to 1974, between the collapse of the republic and the arrival of Turkish troops.

In the Greeks' telling, this was the island's golden age, an idyllic time when the two communities coexisted in harmony. In the Turks' rendition, it was the time when the noose was steadily tightening around their necks, when they were forced to seek safety in tiny vulnerable enclaves, and any trip outside the “ghettos” meant constant harassment by Greek Cypriot authorities or worse. With the bloody EOKA coup against Makarios in July 1974, Turkish Cypriots figured that they were the next targets for annihilation, once the Greek moderates were dealt with, making the Turkish Peace Operation a justified act of defense.

That sentiment is firmly on display in the monument built above the little cove on Five-Mile Beach where the Turkish soldiers came ashore. Just down from a great pillar of concrete jutting out of the ground at such an angle as to be nicknamed the Turkish erection are seven concrete stele that purport to tell, in brief words and bad etchings, the history of modern Cyprus.

The first two stele borrow heavily from Picasso's
Guernica:
lots of unhappy people and animals afloat in flames. By the third panel, help is on the way: Lantern-jawed Turkish soldiers stride into the fiery wasteland with drawn swords, their progress heralded by flittering doves of peace. For the rest of the monument, the warriors for peace continue apace, the flames gradually tamped out, the doves joined by blooming flowers and pretty—if slightly lantern-jawed—girls.

Other honorifics to the Turkish Cypriots' version of a martyr-filled history are scattered throughout the TRNC. The former Greek fishing village of Ayios Yeoryios, where Colonel Karaoglanoglu was killed, has been renamed in his honor, and Five-Mile Beach is now officially the Beach of the Resolute Outbreak. Beside the old Venetian wall of Famagusta is a little graveyard with a sign in Turkish, English, and German that reads:
ARMED GREEK CYPRIOTS AND GREEK THUGS TRIED TO ELIMINATE EVERYTHING TURKISH TO ACHIEVE
ENOSIS
;
IN THIS CEMETERY LIE TURKS WHO
,
UNARMED AND DEFENCELESS
,
WERE MARTYRED BY GREEK CYPRIOTS AND GREEKS
. In Lefkosa the government has built a Museum of National Struggle, perhaps to maintain parity with the Museum of National Struggle on the Greek side of the city.

In at least one sphere of the museum competition, however, the Turkish Cypriots have achieved hegemony. Located on Mehmet Akif Boulevard, the Museum of Barbarism is a single-story whitewashed building set in an unruly yard of flowers and fruit trees and surrounded by much newer and taller structures: chrome and glass auto dealerships; five-story office buildings. The particular acts of Greek barbarism it is dedicated to are those of 1963, and the curators have clearly opted for the scared-straight approach. Lining the walls of the foyer are a dozen ghastly black-and-white photographs of Turkish Cypriots of all ages lying dead in fields, in morgues, being exhumed from burial pits, their bodies bullet-riddled, knife-slashed, decomposed.

The Museum of Barbarism stays on its theme. In each of its several small side rooms, each lit with a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling, is an unbroken line of similarly grotesque photographs mounted at eye level. Some of the captions identify the victims and detail the circumstances of death, but others are more general: “Another innocent victim of the brutal Greek campaign to exterminate the Turkish population.”

In the museum's largest room, one comes to an ominous display, a glass sarcophagus filled with bath towels and baby shoes. Instead of murder photos, two walls of this room are lined with the personal snapshots of a young family. One shows a young boy at a table crowded with other young boys, staring at a large cake set before him. “Murat, pensive on his seventh birthday,” the caption reads. “With his left hand on his cheek, he tries to guess what the future has in store for him on this happy occasion, not knowing of course that he has few days left to live.”

As it turns out, in 1963 this little house on Mehmet Akif Boulevard was the home of an army doctor, Major Nihat Ilhan; his wife, Muruvet; and their three young sons, including seven-year-old Murat. The major happened to be away when EOKA gunmen attacked on the night of December 24, but they found his family huddled for safety in the bathtub; the next morning, a photographer dutifully recorded the grisly scene. That photograph—Muruvet Ilhan lying dead in the bathtub, her three dead boys clutched to her chest, the bathroom walls and floor sprayed with blood—is now such an iconic image in Turkish Cyprus that the museum curators have hung several large copies of it, along with two paintings that seek to replicate the scene faithfully, as if only repetition can convey its awfulness.

But it is more than just an image, for beyond the sarcophagus of bath towels is the bathroom itself, untouched for thirty-six years. Beneath a coat of dust, a white bottle of liquid soap still stands on the edge of the bathroom sink, and the tub and walls bear the same cracks and bullet holes as in the photograph. “The marks on the ceiling,” a small sign above the tub reads, “are brain pieces and blood spots belonging to the murdered.”

Sebastian Junger

REPUBLIC OF CYPRUS

P
osted at the Ledra Street viewpoint—alongside photos of Greek refugees and buildings pancaked by Turkish bombs—is a list of what the Turks gained by invading Cyprus. According to the Cyprus government, the Turks gained 70 percent of the island's gross output, 65 percent of the tourist accommodations, 83 percent of the general cargo capacity, and 48 percent of the agricultural exports. Those are just numbers, though; Greek Cypriots generally don't grab you in bars and complain about their loss of cargo capacity. They grab you and complain about the city of Famagusta.

Famagusta lies near the center of a long scallop of bay on the eastern shore of the island, facing Syria. In the thirteenth century it was the wealthiest port in the Mediterranean, and before 1974 its Varosha district, now a Turkish military base, was the most fashionable beach resort on the islands, flooded every spring by English and Scandinavian tourists. Like Nicosia, it is surrounded by massive stone walls that were reinforced in the sixteenth century by Venetian military engineers bracing for the arrival of the Ottomans. The invasion finally came in 1570. As any Greek Cypriot can recount, fifty thousand Turks came ashore in the withering heat of midsummer, led by a sadist named Lala Mustafa. After sacking Nicosia and killing twenty thousand of its inhabitants, Mustafa led his forces against Famagusta, which was defended by a garrison of Venetian soldiers.