- This was homes. These were people's homes,
But they got swept up in the conflict.
Let's pause here.
If you zoom out and look at where we're at right now,
you can see that I'm moving through these dashed lines.
I've been moving in and out of these dashed lines all week.
This is a border crossing,
but every time I call these things borders, I get corrected.
- We do not use the term a term Border.
- These are two ceasefire fire lines, these are not borders.
Yeah, so Cypress remains one country,
that one member state is within the United nations.
- Yes, the lines and what you call them
are very sensitive here.
But it's hard to deny that they still feel like borders.
They exist like borders, in that
their goal is to divide people.
This right here, for example,
is a crossing through one of these dash lines to get into
the north of this island into a self-declared country,
a country that no one recognizes besides Turkey.
And it's supposedly not a real border crossing.
This crossing over here, that's not a border crossing,
sure felt like a border crossing.
There are gates and passport booths and customs
and PCR tests.
So did I just enter into a new country?
No, but kind of? I'll let you decide.
- There is no Greek Cypriot politician
who supports a two state solution.
- These lines are ambiguous. They're emotional,
they're political,
and you can learn a lot about them simply by crossing them.
And now I am driving on the left side of the road
for the first time in my entire life.
And I can't tell you that I feel calm about it.
Which is why I came to this island Cyprus to cross as many
of these lines as I could, to understand them.
These lines, that envelop towns that cut up farmland
bleed into the ocean and infamously
cut this capital city in half,
making it the last divided capital on Earth.
(upbeat music)
- Nicosia City has many faces and many tongues English,
Armenian, French, Arabic, Christian, and Mazda.
- As a result Turks hold more than
two thirds of the island's wealth.
- Nearby liberal state has been known as the murder mines.
- Greeks and Turks live on easily side by side.
- Nicosia the capital city of Cyprus,
is center of the bitter struggle between Greek and Turk
is engulfed in war.
- [Main Speaker] Let's make one thing clear,
despite what you may be thinking
after you watched episode one, Cypress is not a war zone.
It's not all military barriers and troops,
quite the opposite.
This place is actually a tourist paradise.
Not too far from all the barriers,
2 million tourists a year, most of them British
can be found sunbathing in these
beautiful Mediterranean waters.
The largest city and capital called Nicosia feels like
many other cities full of shops and stores
people going about their lives.
But if you walk around here long enough,
you'll start to notice that a lot of these streets stop
at an abrupt dead end.
These dead ends are made up of military barriers, sandbags,
barbed, wire, military outposts,
soldiers with guns and flags, lots of flags.
These dead ends are the dashed lines you see
when you look at Google maps.
The ones that cut through this city, but in real life,
these lines are not dashed, they're not porous.
These are actually very thick lines that successfully divide
this city into the Greek side to the south
and the Turkish side to the north.
And in the middle there space, sometimes thick,
sometimes thin, a space that is given this sterile name,
the buffer zone.
And remember, these are ceasefire lines,
not borders.
At least not according to any Greek Cypriot or UN official
that you talked to.
But call them what you want on paper, I want to see
what these dash lines actually feel like
when you cross them.
In reality, this space, this buffer zone is a scar.
A messy series of curves that in the sixties and seventies
acted as a sort of shock absorber in a war
that ripped this city and island apart.
It was the United Nations that helped hastily
draw these lines to stop the fighting
between the Greek and Turkish sides.
To keep these two groups who had lived side by side
for centuries, away from each other.
- [Aleem Siddique] Here in the center of Nicosia,
the narrowest part of the buffets zone
is only three meters from one side to the other side.
Two soldiers on balconies on either side of the street
could touch each other.
- I spent time in both
the Turkish and Greek sides of Nicosia,
but I really wanted to get a peek over these walls,
into that ambiguous space that used to be
the central downtown, but now lay locked
between these dashed lines.
So I'm on a roof now
that is in the middle of Nicosia the capital.
And I am walking closer and closer to this buffer zone.
This scar that rips through the center of the city.
The Republic of Cyprus effectively ends right here.
And right there, that street is no man's land.
I mean, that's the north right there,
like I'm looking across the border into Northern Cyprus.
This was just a normal part of the city,
but because of the fighting the line pushed back and forth
and back and forth and eventually settled here.
But it wasn't always like this.
I mean, I'm down on the street,
walking in this no man's land.
It just really gets thin.
I mean, it's like,
we've been in places where it's really wide,
but right here it's 30 meters.
Greek side, Turkish side is right there
And just looking at these businesses and these homes,
you can envision them alive and thriving.
And this street seems like a very busy main street
with all of these businesses and places
and these signs that are just left.
One Greek Cypriots house was right here.
Her name was Annie and she refused to leave.
She lived here for decades with the UN soldiers
often bringing her, her groceries.
Her front door walked right out into the buffer zone,
right in the crosshairs of Turkish military,
it would have been within their right to fire.
If she walked out into this buffer zone
and yet she remained.
And then in the nineties,
she died of old age here in her home. She was 91.
The soldiers removed her body and they gave her a funeral.
And according to the reports at the time,
her body was the last thing to leave her home.
Everything else stayed frozen in time,
much like the rest of this buffer zone.
We're in a wool shop and an old wool shop
and the owner's records are just here,
like just spread out on this table.
Goods of Italian origin, okay he had quite the business.
There was commerce, there was an economy, there was trade,
there was, this place was thriving.
And then it just collapsed.
- [Aleem Siddique] You're absolutely right.
The buffer zone is a unique environment.
The reality is, is that since 1974,
the buffer zone has been a defacto area
of very little human activity.
And what has happened as a result is
the ecology of the buffer zone is unique to this island.
You will find species of plant and forna
here in the buffer zone
that you will not find anywhere else.
- This divided capital and the time capsule buffer zone that
cuts it in half is one face of this divided island.
But as you drive you soon, see other versions of it.
As I moved into the Eastern part of this island,
it turned from divided city into these British bases.
And then more and more,
you start to see rural parts of this island.
And yet the dash line continues even all the way out here.
- [Off Camara Speaker] It spans 180 kilometers
from east to west.
Further to the east of the island are the flat farmlands
of the buffer zone, where we see a lot of farming activity.
- So one thing you see in the buffer zone is a bunch of
farmland like people's homes and land that they had to leave
in 1974.
Unsurprisingly, this was a giant loss for a lot of families.
And so the UN actually allows them to come back
into their old land and cultivate it.
So in addition to all of these farms,
there's also minefields.
This was where people lived and was just a part of Cyprus.
But for the past several decades,
this has just been no man's land.
In many ways farm life within the buffer zone
is similar to farm life anywhere else.
- I start to growing tomatoes and I picked this land all.
I put the tomatoes, I planted tomatoes,
but then I have there.
I have pick the land and to clean.
- Yeah.
But every day there are harsh reminders of what has become
of this farmer's land, of his home?
His work here is so distinctly juxtaposed to what you can
see in the distance, Turkish, military outposts,
barbed wire fences, UN escorts, growing political tensions.
And yet every day that passes,
this becomes a more permanent fixture
of life on this island.
- Its a war, it's a terrible thing.
I remember everything
and because I been in school for one a year in Famagusta.
And after its the war.
- Even despite all of this Greek Cypriots insist
that their country is not divided.
- [Andros Karayianni] When you use the term borders
that means even us, ourselves,
we have already been divided our country
and Cyprus is, is not divided.
It's is occupied effective 35% of the,
of the island of Cyprus is occupied.
- And while that's true according to the map
and to the international community,
the fact remains that this division is very real,
so real that it's embedded itself into the minds of people,
young and old, who live here.
- And I remember when I was in primary school
when I was first grade
and I've always seen the secret flag as divided.
So I was always seeing the red line
and we had to color the flag and I've actually drew it.
- Yeah.
And the teacher was like, Georgia, we're not,
you know, we're not divided.
- [Main Speaker] But as a kid,
you just thought that that's how it was.
- So I think it's the experiences that we get from like very
young and it's very difficult to get rid of these emotions.
- [Aleem Siddique] So since 1974, effectively,
the two communities have been divided.
And we had seen generations of young people since 1974,
who have not had any contact with the other side.
- And the power of these lines isn't how they affect
the treaties and the peace talks and the diplomats.
But instead how they stop the sides from seeing each other
from humanizing one another
leading to only more polarization.
- When people were referring to the other side,
we were thinking that there was no life
and it was just ghosts as kids because when people buy,
they also go to the other side.
When we had the first experience
of crossing from the checkpoint.
We did have a hesitation that what will happen
when people hear us talking in Turkish
and what will their reaction be?
- So while the UN might not recognize these as borders,
they serve the same purpose to divide people,
both physically and mentally from one another.
- [Andriana] I was born in a divided island
and then I can see
that in the last 20 years, nothing has changed,
really changed for me.
So I can't say that,
like and even hope that we had as children,
I think that now there's nothing to keep our faith up.
So it just seemed that even if change comes,
it's not something you imminent,
it's not something that will come like soon.
- And yet,
even though the younger generation grew up with these
barriers in their country and in their minds,
that has also allowed them to see these lines more clearly
to question them in a way that the older generation never
could.
Do you think that the younger generation has more of an
appetite for unity than maybe the older generations who
experienced some of the violence.
- History teaches us that Turkish Cypriots
and Greek Cypriots lived together side by side. Yeah.
For many, many years before the conflict.
They share the same history, they share the same culture,
they eat many of the same foods.
And that, that gives us hope that peace is possible.
And the young generation perhaps are
at the fore of leading that effort.
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