Nicosia Beyond Barriers: Voices from a Divided City

by Alev Adil (Editor), Bahriye Kemal (Editor), Aydin Mehmet Ali (Editor)

Cyprus’ capital Nicosia has been split by a militarised border for decades. In this collection, writers from all sides of the divide reimagine the past, present and future of their city.

Here, Cypriot-Greeks coexist alongside Cypriot-Turks, the north with the south, town with countryside, dominant voices with the marginalised. This is a city of endless possibilities – a place where an anthropologist from London and a talkative Marxist are hunted by a gunman in the Forbidden zone; where a romance between two aspiring Tango dancers falls victim to Nicosia’s time difference; and where an artist finds his workplace on a rooftop, where he paints a horizon disturbed only by birds.

Together, these writers journey beyond the beaten track creating a complete picture of Nicosia, the world’s last divided capital city, that defies barriers of all kinds.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

Published June 6, 2019

Reviews

[Margie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fairly long and diverse collection so some of it landed better than the rest. But for me the whole was greater than the sum of its parts and painted a diverse picture of a city and history that was unknown to me.

[Manon · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars.

[Aisha (thatothernigeriangirl) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Caught between a 3.5 and a 4 star 🌟
Thank you Saqi Books for sending me a review copy

I know it’s probably cliché to say that books help us understand cultures and societies that are unfamiliar to us but time and time again, there come books that remind us of the immortality of this sentiment. For me, Nicosia Beyond Barriers is one such book.

Nicosia is the only divided capital in the world with Turkish-Cypriots living in the northern part occupied by the Turkish government and the Greek-Cypriots living in the southern part under the Cypriot government. There is an official divide called the Green Line/ Dead Zone/ No Man’s Land, that is occupied by the UN to “keep the peace” and occupants of both sides have to tender their passports at checkpoints (and collect white seals that serve as visa) before crossing.

The book contains 56 entries by writers from both sides of the divide as well as immigrants who live in the city. As with The Things I Would Tell You and Don’t Panic I’m Islamic, it took me a while to connect with entries. The thing about anthologies is that there is always an entry that will portray the main aim to each reader so it’s very rare for a reader to come away from it without a connection. After about 12+ entries, I connected with Gardening Desire by Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, which tells the struggles of being homosexual in a divided city. I later went on to enjoy most of the entries, my fav being The Guard Post by Haji Mike.

Maybe because they discussed the harsh reality of migration but I also really love Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s Nicosia’s African Diaspora and Melissa Hekkers’ Island in the Sun. I think this is a very important book and I highly recommend it. You’ll come away from it with a truckload of information

[Janna Brancolini · Rating 4 out of 5]

A haunting exploration of a partitioned city, with works from writers on both sides of the divide, "Nicosia Beyond Barries" is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the many faces of this complicated, fascinating city.

[Lyssa Harakis-Parish · Rating 4 out of 5]

a beautiful range of poems, short stories and short essays. with so many contributors there's something for everyone and it's definitely an anthology you come back to in pieces from time to time after finishing it

[Steve Coombs · Rating 2 out of 5]

Half of it is incredibly pretentious, a quarter of it is quite good, and a final quarter is fantastic.

[Jonathan Fryer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicosia has a population of little more than 200,000, yet Cyprus’s capital contains more complexities and stressful memories than far larger cities. For three decades, from 1974, the city was physically divided, by the euphemistically-named Green Line, that had literally been drawn with a green pen on a map, though the polarisation of the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot people — with accompanied ethnic cleansing — predated that by several years, latterly becoming almost absolute. Add to the island’s mix the legacy of the Venetians, the Ottomans, Armenians, the colonial British, then the conscript army of the occupying Turks in the North, refugees from Syria and Lebanon, followed by black Africans (without even mentioning post-Soviet Russians) and you have an extraordinary human pot-pourri, not always giving off the sweetest of perfumes. In the 1990s, when the island was still rigidly divided, I used to love slipping with my British passport through the forbidden zone and past the fabled Ledra Palace Hotel — transformed into a barracks for UN troops — hopping between two worlds in a way that was forbidden to most Cypriots, and inevitably reminiscent of earlier shuttling as a journalist between East and West Berlin before the Berlin Wall came down. But this privileged access also left me feeling uneasy sometimes, an unease that intensified when the Republic of Cyprus (i.e. Greek Cypriot) was allowed into the European Union, while the Turkish-occupied north languished in a sort of half-way-house limbo.

Ledra StreetInevitably, foreign visitors tend to gravitate either north to Kyrenia or south to Limassol, to savour the sea, but it is Nicosia, inland, that is the troubling and sometimes troubled heart of Cyprus, even now that many tensions have calmed. And it is Nicosia that is the subject of an ambitious and enchanting new anthology of short stories, poetry, prose poems, memoir, reportage and fantasy: Nicosia beyond Barriers: Voices from a Divided City (Saqi, £12.99), edited by Alev Adil, Aydin Mehmet Ali, Bahriye Kernal and Maria Petrides. The voices are diverse, with women’s being particularly strong, not surprisingly given that the project was the child of the Literary Agency Cyprus, a women-led literary and arts movement based in Nicosia. But the selection encompasses a striking diversity of genres and perspectives. One moment the reader sits with a writer in a cafe near the Green Line in Ledra Street, watching with irony the cats and birds who flit casually from one side to the other; the next one is cruising in the city’s most popular gay pick-up park. Rather than separating the book into sections that group topics or literary forms together, the work of the 50 contributors is all mixed together, so one stumbles from one fascinating line of thought and mode of expression to another, wondering what will come next. What really impressed me, however, is that the whole collection has an under-current of nostalgia and loss, a sadness that is part mourning and part celebration — what the Portuguese call saudade. The whole can be read productively in a few sittings, but I suspect that this is also a book into which many readers will dip on return encounters.