Ceausescu's Bucharest

I had briefly visited Bucharest 20 years before, for an academic conference. On that occasion, there was hardly time to see very much, but with some companions I had a short tour in a taxi. While Bucharest has many attractions, including fine old churches and a beautiful neoclassical concert hall, it was the buildings associated with Romania’s communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, which were particularly fascinating to me then, as now. The monstrous Palace of the Republic, now the Palace of Parliament, became notorious as an enormous folly, one of the largest buildings in the world, a colossal monument to the megalomania of Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena. The destruction of a large part of Bucharest’s old city, the levelling of a hill, and the forced displacement of some 40,000 people to make way for Ceauşescu’s vanity project brought wide condemnation as an act of wanton vandalism. Apart from the palace itself, a whole new district was constructed, including a broad avenue that was deliberately designed to outdo the Champs-Elysée in Paris, in scale, although not in style.

The Palace of Parliament, Bucharest

Before visiting the Palace of Parliament, I walked to the Piața Revoluției, Revolution Square, to the former headquarters of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party. Now government offices, it was on the balcony of this building that in December 1989 Ceauşescu made a speech to a huge crowd denouncing the uprising that had unfolded in Timişoara over the preceding days. The shock and disbelief on the ruling couple’s faces as the crowd jeered and whistled at them, and chanted “Timişoara, Timişoara”, was one of the defining moments of the revolution. Worse for Ceauşescu, it was broadcast live on national television, so that the whole country witnessed the mass defiance. The convergence of demonstrators on to the square, and the violence of security forces which turned it into a battle ground, was followed by the flight by helicopter of the ruling couple, and their trial by a kangaroo court and execution on 25 December.

These were heady times. As a student at London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the time, I watched with rapt attention. The previous month, I had been attending a regular weekly seminar on East-central Europe at the London School of Economics. During the seminar, a lady slipped in and whispered something in the ear of the seminar’s chair. He paused, took a breath, and announced that the East German government had resigned. It seemed extraordinarily dramatic, one among a whole series of momentous changes that autumn, as the geopolitical map of Europe was redrawn in a matter of weeks, and long subject peoples reclaimed their freedom from communist oppression. And what seemed particularly remarkable after the decades of Cold War confrontation, was that it happened mostly peacefully. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the crowds that thronged central Prague during the Velvet Revolution. It was all overwhelmingly joyful. And then came the violence in Romania, as Ceauşescu’s dreaded security forces fought back. Such dramas playing out before our eyes on our television screens were quite a novelty in 1989. Excitement and awe at the courage of the revolutionaries waving their flags, with holes in the middle where the symbol of the communist regime had been, mixed with nail-biting horror at the violence, and the shocking end of the Ceauşescu couple.

Ceauşescu’s speech had been intended as a reprise of an earlier speech he had made from the same balcony in 1968, condemning the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia to quash the Prague spring. That speech asserted Romania’s independent line from Moscow, which Ceauşescu pursued for the rest of his rule, and it won him genuine support in Romania at the time. But those days were over, and by 1989, in the brave new world ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev, Ceauşescu was out of step not only with the region, but with his own people.

A collection of memorials in front of the building includes a rather shabby marble-clad monument inscribed with the words “Glory to the Martyrs”. Some of the marble panels were cracked, and weeds grew up between them. Nearby is a tall column, with what looks like a metallic bird’s nest attached near the top. The monument sparked controversy when it was inaugurated in 2005, with many artists saying its symbolism was unclear. Next to it is a semi-circular wall bearing the names of those who fell. On the corner of the square is perhaps the most striking monument, the brick shell of a ruined building that once housed the headquarters of Ceauşescu’s feared security service, the Securitate, now with a glass and steel tower emerging out of it.

Approaching the enormous Palace of Parliament, I was most struck by how dead and soulless the surrounding area was. None of the bustle of what remains of the old city after Ceauşescu’s destruction, just a short distance away. The tree-lined Bulevardul Uniri, Boulevard of Unity, that connects the palace with the Piața Uniri, has fountains, but it lacks the shops or cafes that might have given it life. There were few pedestrians. There was nothing for anyone to do there. It was all built on a grand scale, but without people in mind. At the end of the boulevard, in front of the palace itself, there is a big open space. A few cars were parked on it, and a handful of tourists were taking pictures of the late dictator’s monstrous edifice. Almost entirely empty, a great big hole in the heart of the city. There was nothing alive about this place. Nothing that would draw people there other than to gawp at the grotesque pile. A curiosity to be looked at, but not a place to linger. I wondered whether there would be anything that could improve this, that could bring life to a place whose origins were so flawed?

At the time of the Ceauşescus’ demise, the building was not yet completed. So much had been destroyed in its making. But however grotesque, it had been built at great cost, and it could hardly be abandoned. Uses had to be found for it. So it became the seat of the two houses of parliament, a venue for international conferences, as well as a museum. The scale and extravagance of the interior is as striking as that of the exterior of the building. Vast quantities of marble were used, as well as enormous numbers of chandeliers. Different rooms were designed in different styles, with different materials and different colours. The megalomania of the ruling couple is as striking inside as out. Two sweeping marble staircases descend into an expansive entrance hall. Apparently it was intended that the Ceauşescu couple would descend from both sides to greet visiting dignitaries. At either end of one large and opulent reception room are two spaces which were apparently intended to be filled with large portraits of the couple.

Inside the Palace of Parliament

I had been prepared for the scale of the place. I had expected a palace of kitsch. But touring the building, I found myself surprised by the quality of the craftsmanship. The materials used were mostly sourced in Romania, and they are of the highest quality. The details are all finely worked. I have visited many state buildings from the communist era in several east European countries that were shabby, with a veneer of quality that had quickly faded and deteriorated. This one in Bucharest was not like that. Its halls, its galleries are genuinely impressive.

But to be truly grand, a palace should have a soul. The grandeur of Versailles is inextricably linked in our minds with the glory of Louis XIV, the sun king. Blenheim Palace near Oxford reflects the great victories of the Duke of Marlborough. The Palace of Parliament, by contrast, is associated with one of the most absurd little dictators of the 20th century. It was intended to project the grandeur of a couple who were as small and petty as they were nasty and vicious. Their rule was a tragedy for Romania, and it is hard to see how their building can ever escape from such awful origins. Perhaps future architects and town planners may find a way to reshape the palace and its surrounding area that allows it to escape the legacy of its appalling creators. More than 30 years after they were swept away, it hasn’t happened yet.

Histories and Legends in Transylvania

Criss-crossed by migrations over millennia, settled by successive waves of nations and tribes, many regions of Europe have been the subject of conflict among different claimants, each advancing their own historical assertions to ownership. Few lands in modern times have been the subject of such intense competition as Transylvania. Dominated for centuries by Hungarians, many of its towns islands of German settlement and culture, and, until its incorporation in Romania in 1918, with a downtrodden Romanian majority, Transylvania’s history has been a battlefield in the clash of national claims.

My journey through Transylvania in the summer of 2022 began in Cluj, known as Kolozsvár in Hungarian and Klausenburg in German. Settled in the Middle Ages by German “Saxons”, the city became the centre of the Hungarian landed aristocracy in Transylvania, and of Hungarian national and cultural life in the region. The city retained its ethnic-Hungarian majority well after Transylvania’s unification with Romania after the First World War. However, industrialisation under the post-1945 Communist regime, which transformed Cluj into one of Romania’s largest cities, led to an expansion of its Romanian population and the steady dilution of its Hungarian character. For many Hungarians this process of Romanianization has been deeply painful.

As a student in 1989, I attended a conference on Romania at Cambridge University. We didn’t know at the time that the violent end of the regime of the communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, was only a few weeks away. As we arrived at the lecture hall, men at the entrance photographed every one of the participants. We supposed they were officers of Ceauşescu’s dreaded Securitate secret police, sent by the Romanian embassy. The affect for any Romanians attending must surely have been intimidating. A large part of the audience was made up of Hungarians, mostly emigres. For these Hungarians, the overwhelmingly important issue of the day was Ceauşescu’s rural systematization programme, which had got under way the previous year. Under this programme, thousands of villages were to be razed, and their inhabitants resettled in agro-industrial towns. Hungarians saw this as an attack on Hungarian communities, aimed at their assimilation into the wider Romanian society. At that conference in Cambridge, their anger was boiling over. Some of the British speakers, specialists on Romania, reacted with irritation, pointing out that the problems facing Romania went beyond the tribulations of its Hungarian population. One of them gave a presentation on the ideological motivation of the programme, to eliminate the differences between rural and urban societies. But this cut little ice with the Hungarians. What they could see was that Hungarians in Transylvania were under attack. As I walked towards Cluj’s city centre that morning, this history was on my mind.

St Michael's church, Cluj

While Cluj expanded in the 20^th century, its historic centre has nevertheless retained its charm. The central square is dominated by the 15^th century Gothic church of St Michael. Built when the city was under Saxon control, it became a protestant church for a time following the reformation, firstly Lutheran and then Unitarian. Cluj was a centre of Unitarianism. However, the church was later returned to Catholicism with the support of Hungary’s, and Austria’s Hapsburg rulers. Next to the church stands an equestrian statue of the great 15^th century Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus, which was erected at the beginning of the 20^th century, when Transylvania was still part of Hungary.

Outside the house in Cluj where Matthias Corvinus is thought to have been born is a plaque put there during the tenure of the controversial city mayor, Gheorghe Funar. It states that Matthias Corvinus, Hungary’s greatest King, the son of the great Voivode (military leader) of Transylvania, Iancu de Hunedoara (János Hunyadi in Hungarian), was in fact Romanian. This assertion is based on the Wallachian ancestry of Hunyadi’s family, although an improbable legend has it that Hunyadi was actually the illegitimate son of King Sigismund of Hungary. Funar, who was mayor from 1992-2004, was an extreme nationalist who took a petty delight in baiting the city’s Hungarian minority. He was famous for having objects such as park benches, pavements and rubbish bins painted in the colours of the Romanian flag. Funar was also responsible for the rather grotesque statue of Avram Iancu, a leader of the Romanian revolution against Hungarian rule in 1848, that towers above the square in front of the city’s Orthodox cathedral, an archetypal example of nationalist kitsch. The Orthodox cathedral itself, built between 1923-33, after Transylvania’s incorporation into Romania, was a triumphal statement in the centre of Hungarian life in the province, that this was now Romania.

The nationalist agenda can be seen even in the name of the city, which, since 1974, is officially Cluj-Napoca. The addition of Napoca by Ceauşescu was intended to draw a link with the pre-Roman Dacian settlement of that name on the site of modern-day Cluj. In the competing narratives about Transylvania, Romanian nationalists claim a continuity between ancient Romano-Dacian civilisation and modern Romanians, as opposed to a counter-claim preferred by some Hungarians that modern Romanians are descended from Vlachs who migrated northwards from the Balkans at a later date.

Excavations of Roman remains in Cluj, some of which can be seen covered by glass on the central square, did not escape from this modern competition over history. For Romanian nationalists the finds bolstered their claim to have preceded Hungarians in the region, while some Hungarians retorted unconvincingly that the remains were fake. In any case, the whole debate is sterile. Our knowledge of the historical ethnic-make-up of this and other regions is limited. What can be said with certainty is that numerous peoples have settled in the region, including Goths, Huns, Avars and Slavs, as well as both Romanians and Hungarians. Both nations have been present in Transylvania for centuries, and Romanians were in a clear majority well before the region’s unification with Romania.

From Cluj, I travelled to Sighişoara (Segesvár in Hungarian, Schässburg in German), and then on to Braşov (Brassó in Hungarian, Kronstadt in German). Along with a number of other Transylvanian towns, Sighişoara and Braşov were settled by the German Saxons in the Middle Ages. The Saxon elite enjoyed a privileged position in Transylvania, as one of the three estates recognised in the 15^th century Unio Trium Nationum (“Union of the Three Nations”) together with the largely Hungarian nobility and the free military Székeleys, a Hungarian sub-group mainly residing in eastern Transylvania. Thus the Romanian population, as well as the Hungarian peasantry, were excluded from political life.

Clock tower, Sighişoara

Sighişoara and Braşov were both fortified towns, with city walls and defensive towers at regular intervals. Each of these towers was assigned to one of the city’s craft guilds, which were responsible for their upkeep and defence. Sighişoara’s beautifully preserved hilltop citadel, with its cobbled streets and brightly coloured buildings, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Nine of the fourteen defensive towers remain, as well as the imposing clock tower at the citadel entrance. I particularly liked the tinsmiths’ tower, perched on a steep bank on the edge of the citadel, which still carries traces of shots fired during the last siege of the town, at the start of the 18^th century. Inside the clock tower, there is a museum which includes many of the instruments associated with the crafts of the various guilds that were so central to the town’s life.

Tinsmith's tower, Sighişoara

A steep covered wooden staircase, the Scholars’ Stairs, dating from the 17^th century. leads up a hill to the Bergschule (School on the Hill), and the Saxon Church on the Hill, another of Transylvania’s impressive Gothic churches. A graveyard slopes down the other side of the hill. Most of the German Saxons have left Transylvania. Having already declined in numbers during the 20^th century, most of those who had remained left after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime. Sighişoara is now a mainly Romanian town, with a sizeable Hungarian minority, a smaller number of Roma, and very few Germans. But the graveyard bears witness to the town’s Saxon past, almost all the graves bearing German names, testament to a bygone age.

Sighişoara’s most famous son was Vlad the Impaler, who is thought to have been born in a house close to the town’s main square. Vlad’s bloody career as ruler of Wallachia, and his notorious brutality, may have inspired Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Dracula. Vlad’s family name was Dracul, derived from the chivalric Order of Dragons, of which his father had been a member. But although Romania and the wider region had a long tradition of belief in vampires, there is no evidence that Vlad was ever believed to have been one. That has not stopped Transylvania’s tourism industry from milking the connection for all it is worth.

In the middle of Braşov’s beautiful central square is the Casa Sfatului, the old town hall, now a historical museum. The broad square is lined with what were once the houses of wealthy merchants, now lively cafes and restaurants spilling their terraces out on to the square. Braşov’s situation, close to the Carpathian passes, was important for defence and also for the trade between Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, which enriched the town’s Saxon merchants. As in Sighişoara, the town’s defensive towers were maintained by the craft guilds. Some of them remain, although less of the city’s walls are preserved than is the case in Sighişoara. Two of the city’s gates, the Şchei Gate and Catherine’s Gate, remain. Viewed from the surrounding hills, the old town is dominated by the huge bulk of the medieval Black Church (the name relates to its colour, which was at one time black, some say due to a seventeenth-century fire that destroyed much of Braşov). Built in the Gothic style, it is now a Lutheran church, the faith of the dwindling numbers of Saxons.

Braşov

Braşov holds an important place in the history of Romanians in Transylvania. As a lady at the town tourism office explained to me, in the past Romanians had not been allowed to reside within the city walls. They could enter the city at certain times to sell their wares, but only through Catherine’s Gate. Romanians, as well as Bulgarians, lived outside the city walls, in the Şchei district, although by the 19^th century the Bulgarians had been Romanianised. There, in the grounds of the 15^th century Orthodox Church, the first school to teach in the Romanian language was established. Built at the end of the 15^th century, it had switched to Romanian-language teaching a century later, from the Church Slavonic that had hitherto been used. It was also in Braşov that Transylvania’s first Romanian-language newspaper was established, in 1838.

Today the square at the heart of the Şchei district is a pleasant, quiet refuge from the much more touristy centre of the old walled city. I enjoyed a supper in a very good traditional Romanian restaurant. In the 19^th century, Braşov was a centre of the Romanian national movement in Transylvania. For many Hungarians, the loss of Transylvania continues to be painful. In Hungary, one can still see maps of pre-1918 Greater Hungary, and hear people lamenting how the country lost two-thirds of its territory. Yet in an age of nation states it would surely have been anomalous if the Romanian majority, which had for centuries suffered an inferior status in Transylvania, would not have been able to assert its right to unite with Romania. To have continued to maintain that this was Hungarian land would have meant disregarding the Romanian population. That they simply did not count. To be sure, having been subjected to Magyarization pressure during the 19^th century, Romania was far from a model of respect for the rights of national minorities, including Hungarians, during the 20th, including under Ceauşescu and afterwards, as exemplified by the Funar period in Cluj. During my travels, I was told more than once that relations between Romanians and Hungarians are now much more comfortable than had previously been the case. Hopefully that will continue.

On the other side of the old town from the Şchei district are signs of more recent strife. At the end of 1989, I watched with mixed excitement and horror as the drama of Romania’s uprising against the Ceauşescu regime played out on our television screens. The media focused largely on events in Timişoara, where the revolution started, and in Bucharest. But the violence afflicted many other towns, including Braşov. On the side of a building not far from the city centre, a scattering of bullet holes have been framed, with a plaque commemorating the revolution. In a little park nearby, a row of graves commemorates those who died in the revolution in Braşov, including a six-year old girl caught in the crossfire.

A short distance from Braşov, in a pass linking Transylvania with Wallachia, is Bran Castle. The castle was built in the 14^th century by the Saxons of Braşov, to defend the pass. Perched high on a rocky crag, with its towers and ramparts it looks just the part to be a vampire’s castle, and indeed the tourism industry has made much of the Dracula story and the vampire legends of Transylvania. In fact it appears the castle was built purely as a fortification and a garrison for troops defending the pass. There is no evidence of any connection with either Bran Stoker or Vlad the Impaler, although Vlad did travel through the pass on many occasions. The description of Dracula’s castle in Stoker’s novel is quite different.

Bran Castle

The castle today looks much as it did in the 1930s, when it was a favourite residence of Queen Marie of Romania, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Having been built for defence rather than luxury, a warren of small rooms and narrow staircases, the castle is perhaps an unusual residence for a Queen. But it has considerable charm, and it is easy to see why Marie loved it. Having spent her childhood largely in England and Germany, Marie became highly popular in Romania. Having persuaded her husband, King Ferdinand, a member of the German Hohenzollern family, to enter the First World War on the side of the western Triple Entente in 1916, she won admiration for her work as a nurse treating wounded soldiers. Following the war, she attended the Paris Peace Conference and, using her international connections, proved to be a highly effective lobbyist for recognition of Romania’s enlargement into neighbouring territories.

Ottoman Budapest

I first visited Budapest in the summer of 1991, travelling up from Belgrade to take a short break from the increasingly fraught atmosphere amid the gathering storm of war in former Yugoslavia. Hungary had only recently freed itself from the yoke of Soviet rule, and there were still Soviet soldiers in the city. Like many visitors, I was impressed by the grandeur of Budapest, by the splendid views along the Danube of the parliament building, the Chain Bridge and Buda castle stretched along the hill overlooking the river. I feasted on rich, spicey Hungarian food, and tipped the obligatory Romany musicians. Over the years I visited Budapest several more times. I spent over a week there in 1993, visiting the Yugoslav (Serbia and Montenegro) embassy on Heroes Square every day in a forlorn attempt to acquire a visa to go to Serbia. I went mushrooming with a friend’s family in the Buda hills, north of the city, and stayed in an ethnic-Slovak village, enjoying the local specialities of goat’s cheese and yoghurt. I visited the Serbian Orthodox churches and the art galleries in Szentendre, north of Budapest.

Spending nearly two months in Budapest in the spring of 2022, I searched out the city’s Ottoman heritage. The city’s separate parts, Buda and Pest, were united only in the 19^th century. Buda, overlooking the Danube on the western side of the river, had been the medieval capital of Hungary before the cataclysmic defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent at Mohács in 1526, and the capture of Buda itself in 1541. The Ottomans held sway in Hungary for not quite 150 years before they were expelled by the Hapsburgs at the end of the 17^th century. Their influence was shallower than in the Balkan lands to the south, where Ottoman rule lasted for several centuries. Most of Hungary’s population remained Christian, although many left and sought refuge in territory still under Christian rule. But as in the Balkans, towns became largely Muslim bastions surrounded by predominantly Christian inhabited countryside. So it was with Buda, where in the 16^th and 17^th centuries the view across the Danube was dominated by minarets, and the splendid Matthias church was converted into a mosque.

Rudas baths, Budapest

Not a lot remains of Ottoman Buda. But remnants can be found, notably in some fine Ottoman-era baths. Communal baths were important centres of urban Ottoman life. Architecturally beautiful, they were not just places for keeping clean, but for social gathering, where people could catch up with friends, with news, and with business. Buda is blessed with hot thermal springs that had first attracted the Romans to the area a millennium and a half before, when they built the city of Aquincum. After the Romans, Christian Europe largely lost the habit of cleanliness and of regular bathing. But the Ottomans revived the custom in the lands they conquered, and took full advantage of the hot springs in Buda.

I visited the Rudas baths one evening. Enclosed within a more modern building, nothing can be seen of the Ottoman building from the street. But inside it felt like I was entering a bygone world. The baths were built not long after the Ottoman conquest, and were rebuilt and used by the governor of Buda Vilayet, Sokollu Mustafa Pasha. The octagonal bath is surrounded by eight pillars supporting a cupola with small openings through which shine shafts of light. Around the central bath, in the corners of the room, are smaller baths with different water temperatures. Men wandered around (I went on a men-only day), many of them wearing skimpy loin cloths. They sat in the baths, relaxing, contemplating, chatting in soft tones, against the background of the gentle tinkling of falling water. It was all very relaxing. I could not know how it would have been in the bygone days of Ottoman Buda. No doubt there were customs, etiquette from that era which would have been unfamiliar to us today. But somehow I felt that the essence of the baths, as a place of rest, relaxation and social intercourse, was probably not so different. If the experience was not quite of a time warp, I had perhaps caught some inkling of a past age.

Király baths

Another of the Ottoman-era baths, the Király baths, tucked behind the foreign ministry, was closed to the public when I was there, but, unlike the Rudas baths, the low, stone building, with its green domes, can be seen from the street. The modern city has been built around it, leaving it a little forlorn and out of place, deprived of the context of the city it once inhabited. Yet its discreet presence reminds of the world that was once here.

Another such reminder, renovated with Turkish funds, is the Gül Baba türbe, or tomb, a steep walk up the hill overlooking the Margaret Bridge, not far from the Király baths. Gül Baba was a Bektashi dervish who died either during the Ottoman conquest of Buda, or shortly after it. He was declared the Wali, or patron saint of the city, and Suleiman the Magnificent was said to have been one of the coffin bearers at his funeral. The tomb became a place of Muslim pilgrimage, but after the reconquest of Buda by the Hapsburgs it was converted into a Christian chapel. Perhaps that is why it was one of the few buildings of Ottoman Buda to survive. By the late 19^th century the building was in private hands, and was again accessible to Muslim pilgrims. The Ottoman government commissioned the restoration of the tomb, which was completed in 1914. Today the property of the Turkish state, the most recent renovation was completed in 2018, and the site was opened by the Hungarian prime minister and the Turkish president, a marker of the close ties between the two countries and their like-minded leaders. Like other such tombs in the Balkans, it is a simple, but elegant little building, nowadays shaded by trees and surrounded by rose gardens. Gül Baba was known as the “father of roses”.

Gül Baba türbe

While the visible legacy of Ottoman rule in central Europe may be slight, Hungarians acknowledge other enduring influences apart from the handful of buildings in Budapest and elsewhere. These include borrowings from the Turkish language, as well as dishes such as stuffed cabbage leaves and paprika, a key ingredient of Hungarian cuisine. It was also through the Ottomans that coffee was introduced to central Europe. For Christian Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Sultan’s armies reached the gates of Vienna, the Ottomans represented an existential threat. Recovering Buda and the lands of central Europe at the end of the seventeenth century must have been a profound relief. Yet when we consider the legacy of the Ottomans, not only their aggressive expansionism, but also the fine architecture and the beautiful baths of Budapest, it is hard not to concede the rich contribution they made to European civilisation.

Isaac Babel's Odessa

The Odessa of Isaac Babel’s youth was a vibrant, notoriously rumbunctious place. A city of wealthy merchants and squalid poverty, of high culture and unbridled gangsterism. A melange of nationalities drawn by the opportunities offered in one of the Russian Empire’s most important ports. Odessa was one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea regions, along with Istanbul, Smyrna, Salonika and Alexandria. Babel was born there in 1894, in the rough and tumble district of Moldavanka, a largely Jewish neighbourhood notorious for its lawlessness and dissipation. The family soon moved to the nearby town of Mykolaiv, but returned to Odessa, to a more salubrious district, in 1906.

Babel wrote his Odessa Stories during the early 1920s. His portrayal of life in Moldavanka in the first two decades of the 20th century, with its close-knit Jewish community and its notorious gangsters, did much to build the legend of old Odessa that continues to define the city to this day. According to this legend, while they preyed on their fellow Odessans, these flamboyant hoodlums became popular heroes, a part of the city’s heritage. In her book, Tales of Old Odessa, Roshanna P. Sylvester portrays the “unsavoury terrain” of Moldavanka, with its “dark allies, filthy streets, crumbling buildings and violence”, but also the “businesslike criminality” of the “thieving aristocrats” and “gentlemen burglars”.

Comprising up to 30 per cent of the city’s population, the Jews of Odessa played a crucial role in the city’s life and its character. As Charles King describes in his history of the city, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, they had mainly come from western Ukraine, in the Pale of Settlement on the western fringes of the Russian Empire. Many of them thrived in Odessa, becoming rich from the trade in grain from their old homelands in Galicia down to the port of Odessa and onwards from there. Odessa, with its freeport status, offered a degree of freedom denied to Jews elsewhere in the Empire, although Odessa too was scarred by murderous anti-Jewish pogroms. The world of the Jewish community in Odessa was quite different to that of the shtetls of the western border lands, with a higher degree of integration in the wider community. Just as Odessa’s Jews were prominent among the city’s wealthy bourgeoisie, they were also conspicuous in the seamier side of the city, in the slums and among the criminal gangs of Moldavanka. This was the side of Odessa that Babel portrayed in his stories.

Benya Krik, as portrayed in the 1926 Soviet silent film

Among Babel’s rich cast of characters, most famous of all was Benya Krik, the gangster “king” of Moldavanka. It was a world of filth and squalor, of thieves and prostitutes, violence and murder. But in the character of Benya Krik there was also a kind of gallantry. There was honour among these thieves. When Benya extorted money from Odessa businesses, he sent them his terms in polite, business-like letters. When a senseless murder takes place during one of Benya’s raids, the gangster provides a pension to the victim’s mother and a lavish funeral for her son. For while Benya Krik preys on his fellow Odessans, in his fashion he also provides for the people of Moldavanka.

Babel based the fictitious character of Benya Krik on a real-life Moldavanka crime boss, the notorious Mishka Yaponchik (real name Mikhail Vinnitsky), Mishka the Japanese, so-called because of his physical appearance. According to a profile of Yaponchik in the October 2020 edition of the Odessa Journal, while still in his early teens he took part in a Jewish self-defence unit during the 1905 pogrom. He held on to the weapon he had been given, and was soon robbing the shops and the homes of the wealthy, and extorting money from businesses. Through guile, force of character and sheer nerve, Mishka Yaponchik established himself as the leader of Odessa’s gangs of thieves. Merchants and shopkeepers paid him tribute, and the police were in his thrall. Despite the fear he inspired, Yaponchik presented himself as a dandy, with his well-cut suits, his bow tie, and lilies in his buttonhole. He had a seat at the Opera and his own table at the fashionable Fanconi Café. But like the fictional Benya Krik, he didn’t forget Moldavanka, putting on lavish feasts for the people from whom he had sprung.

Eventually Yaponchik’s luck ran out. With the coming of the Bolsheviks, the world which had made him, in which an astute gangster could reach an unspoken accommodation with the authorities, was gone. He tried to adapt to the shifting sands of the Russian Civil War, making approaches to General Denikin’s Whites when they controlled the city, and even forming a Red Army unit when the Boslsheviks took over. But his cunning and wiliness were not enough to preserve him. Betrayed by his fellow gangster, Grigory Kotovsky, who had also become a Red Army commander, Yaponchik was shot in the summer of 1919.

By the time Babel wrote the Odessa Stories, in the early 1920s, the Odessa he depicted, the Odessa of Misha Yaponchik and Benya Krik, was already a thing of the past. But the image of Odessa from those times lived on in peoples’ imaginations, both in Odessans’ sense of themselves and their city, and in the way that others perceived them. Odessa’s reputation as a free-wheeling port city, and that of its people as sharp-witted hucksters, living off their wits, not always on the right-side of the law, has endured. Odessans are especially proud of their distinctive humour, which, while the Jewish population of the city is much diminished, is said to have its roots in Jewish wit.

Moldavanka is no longer the slum portrayed by Babel, although many of its old buildings are crumbling and run down, and the district is in a much worse state than the vibrant city centre. At weekends, Moldavanka holds a sprawling flea market. Among souvenir stands selling Soviet era medals and other memorabilia, traders lay out pitiable little assortments of tattered clothes and dilapidated household ornaments, the wretched possessions of impoverished households hoping for a bit of change to keep their heads above water. Perhaps this desperate commerce is in some way a throwback to the shady entrepreneurialism of Babel’s Moldavanka.

Was the romance of old Odessa, with its gallant gangsters and gentleman crooks ever real? I have my doubts. Corruption and criminality in today’s Odessa take a different form, and are found above all in the corridors of power and among the well-connected business figures who are granted government contracts, and the construction tycoons who are allowed to flout planning rules. As in Babel’s day, many in the police are biddable, and prosecutors are all too often for sale. In the face of these modern-day besuited hoodlums, ordinary Odessans are powerless and largely resigned. They pay their bribes when they have to, and their expectations of the corrupted state are low. But that they are resigned does not mean they like it. Were Odessans of a century ago who accepted the gangsters who preyed upon them but who every now and then threw a big party any more content with the state of things?

Sumgait: An unendurable legacy

On a previous visit to Azerbaijan in 2014, I had travelled from Baku north-westwards to Sheki, and from there on to Tbilisi in Georgia (see entry of 24 March 2015). Along the way I visited towns and villages that illustrated the diversity of the country’s history and heritage, the remnants of peoples and civilisations that had been swept away by the moving sands of history, the migrations of peoples, by conquest or assimilation. A notable recent example had been the abrupt obliteration of the Armenian presence in Azerbaijan amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conflict between the nascent post-Soviet states of Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. On this occasion, in February 2020, I travelled to Sumgait, a short distance up the coast from Baku. The town had become notorious for the “Sumgait pogrom” in February1988, when a rampaging Azeri mob had hunted down Armenian residents, murdered them and raped them, forcing the rest of the Armenian community to flee.

The Lonely Planet guide had a very brief entry for Sumgait, describing the city as a “dystopian nightmare”, referring to its Soviet-era chemical industry. Perhaps the most uncomplimentary entry in a guidebook I had ever seen. Sumgait is indeed rather a drab city, but its depiction by the Lonely Planet seems harsh. Long, broad avenues lined with apartment buildings, typical of many Soviet towns, do little to inspire. Perhaps it was even more grim in the Soviet period. But there is a park, and monuments have been erected to give the town a civic identity. There is a long sandy beach that could indeed have been much better framed by more imaginative town planners than the architects of Soviet Sumgait. We found nice places to eat. Notably a restaurant overlooking the beach, where we ate qutab, a speciality of Sumgait, delicious pastries served with a variety of fillings, including meat, herbs, cheese and pumpkin.

Peace Dove, Sumgait

The city’s most famous monument, dating from Soviet times, is the Peace Dove sculpture, a swirling abstract representation of a dove that is the symbol of the town. Given the 1988 events for which Sumgait is famous, the monument seems grimly ironic. In the late 1980s, Sumgait had a population of over 220,000, of whom around 17,000 were ethnic-Armenians. The backdrop of the tragedy of the Armenians of Sumgait was the escalating conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenians had long been aggrieved at the inclusion of the Armenian-majority province of Karabakh in Azerbaijan. As the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, loosened the Soviet regime, Armenians were emboldened to push for its transfer to Armenia. That February 1988, Armenians began demonstrating in Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital, Stepanakert, for their province to be joined with Armenia, and the province’s Supreme Soviet voted to that effect.

Disquiet among Azeris in Sumgait was aggravated by inflammatory statements by some Azerbaijani officials as well as stories told by Azeris from Armenia who claimed they had been beaten and forced out. As demonstrations erupted in Sumgait, some prominent local Azerbaijanis tried to calm the crowds, telling them that the rumours were false. But this message did not go down well. Others called for Armenians to be expelled or killed. Speeches ended with the cry “Death to Armenians.” Violence broke out on 27 February, as Azeri mobs entered apartment buildings seeking out Armenians. Unspeakable acts of savagery were carried out, including gang rapes. Some bodies were so mutilated as to be unrecognisable. Thousands of Armenians were given refuge by Azeri or Russian neighbours, but notably, the local police did nothing. Interior ministry troops tried to restore order on 28 February, but were attacked by the mobs. Some of their armoured personnel carriers were turned over or put out of action with Molotov cocktails. Finally, on the 29th, armed forces with tanks entered the city, imposed martial law and escorted surviving Armenian residents to safety. The official tally of victims released by the Soviet Prosecutor’s office counted 32 dead, of whom 26 were Armenians and six Azeris. Armenian sources claimed numbers in the hundreds.

Trials were held in Moscow. While some of the perpetrators received heavy sentences, many were treated lightly, being sentenced for mere hooliganism. While Armenians were dissatisfied that the main instigators had not been punished, many Azeris felt the punishments were too severe, and even campaigned for the release of the “heroes of Sumgait.” For Armenians the pogrom was quickly linked to the 1915 genocide, and a cross stone commemorating the violence was placed at the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan. But among Azeris a conspiracy theory gained currency that the pogrom had in fact been contrived by Armenians in order to discredit Azerbaijan. In Azerbaijan the pogrom is euphemistically referred to as the “Sumgait events.” There is something particularly distasteful about blaming the atrocities dealt upon the Armenian population of Sumgait on the victims themselves, and the failure of Azerbaijan to face up to this dark moment in its recent history is as shaming as the event itself. The massacre in Sumgait was followed by pogroms against the Armenians in other Azerbaijani cities, in Kirovabad (today known as Ganza), Azerbaijan’s second city, in November 1988, and in Baku in January 1990.

For most Azeris, the narrative is about the heroism and sacrifices of their own people, the hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis driven out of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding districts captured by the Armenians in the war of the early 1990s. Outside a school in Sumgait I saw a memorial to eight former pupils, young men who had been killed in the fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, “our martyrs” my guide told me, a young woman who had not yet been born in 1988.

On a hill overlooking the city and the Caspian Sea in Baku, the Martyr’s Alley commemorates the Azeri dead of the fist Nagorno-Karabakh war in the 1990s, as well as the victims of the “Black January” crackdown by Soviet forces which followed the pogrom against the city’s Armenian population in January 1990 and mounting disorder in the city amid demonstrations against communist rule. More than 130 people were killed during the Soviet crackdown, which succeeded in largely uniting Azerbaijanis against communist rule and strengthening demands for independence. The Martyr’s Alley had first been established as a cemetery for Muslim victims of the so-called March Events of 1918, during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, when thousands were killed. Upon coming to power, the Bolsheviks destroyed the cemetery and replaced it with an amusement park, but after the end of the Soviet Union the site was reinstated as a burial site for national heroes. Lines of graves under the trees, many with fresh flowers, and pictures of the young men they contain, mostly casualties of the Karabakh war. At one end of the Alley, overlooking the sea, is the tall domed eternal flame memorial.

The Martyr’s Alley reminds us of the thousands of Azeri casualties of the conflicts with Armenia, not just the young soldiers killed in the war, but the hundreds of thousands of Azeris driven out of Nagorno-Karabakh and the territory surrounding it that was seized by the Armenians. Atrocities had also been carried out against Azeris, notably the massacre by Armenian troops of civilians fleeing the village on Khojaly during the first Karabakh war, in February 1992. Both sides focus on the sufferings and tragedies of their own people, and the crimes committed against them, often barely even recognising that people on the other side were also wronged. What hope that one day Azerbaijan might acknowledge the massacres of Armenians in Sumgait, Baku and Kirovabad, and that Armenia might acknowledge that there was no possible justification for the killing of civilians fleeing Khojaly? More than a hundred years after the Armenian genocide in 1915, such a prospect unfortunately looks far off, and the wounds of conflict look likely to remain open.

Crusader castles in Limassol, Cyprus

Today Limassol is Cyprus’s second largest city. Known as Lemesos in Greek, it is best known to history as the place where Richard the Lionheart landed in 1191, on his way to the Third Crusade. During a storm, some of the ships in his fleet put into Cyprus, or were wrecked on its shore, including one containing his fiancé and his sister, and another his treasury for the crusade. The Byzantine governor of the island, Isaac Komnenos, had mistreated his fiancé and sister, and also imprisoned survivors of the wrecks. Richard’s troops, led by Guy de Lusignan, quickly conquered the island. Richard initially sold Cyprus to the Knights Templar, before handing it over to Guy de Lusignan, thus inaugurating 300 years of rule on the island by the French Lusignan dynasty. Before his departure from Cyprus, Richard married his bride in Limassol.

Guy de Lusignan is said to have built a fortress in Limassol, but the castle we see today was built by the Ottomans following their conquest of the island in the 16th century. It is now a museum. The town has had its ups and downs. It fell into decline under the Ottomans, who favoured the port of Larnaca, along the coast to the east. But it experienced a revival under British rule, and by the end of the 19th century was an important port. Limassol’s rising importance was further boosted following the 1974 Turkish invasion of the island, both because of the loss to the Republic of Cyprus of the port of Famagusta, Now under Turkish control, and because of an influx of Greek Cypriots displaced from the north of the island. Modern Limassol has stretched eastwards along the coast, and has become one of Cyprus’s most important tourist destinations. It has also acquired a multicultural air, with migrants from Russia as well as well as middle eastern countries. The town centre, close to the castle, is now filled with bars and restaurants mainly catering to foreign visitors. Even in January, when I visited, tourists were very much in evidence.

Kolossi castle

From my perspective, Limassol was less appealing than other places I visited on Cyprus, the tourism overdone. To the west of the town is the British sovereign base of Akrotiri. An unexpected benefit of the presence of this base is that it blocked the spread of the tourism industry along the shoreline with its sandy beaches west of Limassol. I took a bus that skirted around the British base, meandering through small towns and villages as it went, to visit the medieval castle of Kolossi. The original castle on the site was built by the Knights Hospitaller in the early 13th century. It was an important crusader stronghold, especially after the fall of Acre in 1291, when Kolossi became for a time the principal base of the Hospitallers.

Reduced to ruins by Mameluke attacks in the 15th century, the castle we see today, a hulking square keep, was built in 1454 by the Hospitaller commander, Louis de Magnac. His coat of arms can be seen on the exterior of the castle, together with that of the Kingdom of Cyprus and two grand masters of the order. The interior rooms of the three-story castle, with their imposing fireplaces with the Magnac coat of arms, may well have been splendid in their time. Today it is hard to imagine how these bare stone walls, without furnishings, the window alcoves with bare stone seats, might have looked. Did the occupants live in comfort and luxury in these vaulted chambers? Did they have splendid feasts? Without the trappings that would have given these walls life, the bare stones appear austere, the world that once existed here hard to fathom.

Close by the castle is large vaulted building that looks very much like a church, although it is in fact the remains of a medieval sugar factory. Cyprus became an important producer of sugar for Europe in the middle ages, and in the 15th century was the biggest producer in the Mediterranean. In the 16th century Cyprus was overtaken by the sugar plantations of Madeira and the Canary Islands, and later the Caribbean. Like them, the sugar plantations of Cyprus employed slave labour, probably from the Black Sea region. Sugar production continued in Cyprus until the 17th century, by which time it could not withstand the competition from the West Indies.

Nicosia, Cyprus's divided capital

I arrived in Cyprus’s divided capital of Nicosia by bus from Larnaca, on the south coast. I first spent a couple of days in the south of the city, the Greek-inhabited capital of the internationally recognised state, before crossing over to the north through the pedestrian Ledra Street crossing. The city is known in Greek by its older name, Lefkosia, and in Turkish as Lefkoşa, rather than the Frankish Nicosia.

The first crossing between the north and south of the island after the 1974 Turkish invasion was opened in 2003. Passing through the pedestrian Ledra Street crossing in the centre of the city is now a quick and painless affair. Very few people were crossing on the days that I passed to and from the north of the city, and I was through in minutes, with just cursory checks of my passport. On my first afternoon in the city, I saw a group of girls arriving in south Nicosia through the crossing, and being stopped by a Greek Cypriot policeman who asked, in English, where they were from? “Lefkoşa”, replied one of the girls. “You are Cyrpiot?” asked the policeman? “Yes”, they replied, and he waved them through without further fuss. An apparently normal occurrence, a group of Turkish Cypriot girls visiting the south of their city. Who knows what they planned to do? Perhaps some shopping. South Nicosia has the well-known western brands of clothes shops that are not found in the north.

Nicosia became the capital of Byzantine Cyprus in the 10th century, its relatively safe inland position preferred to coastal settlements such as the ancient city of Salamis, close to present-day Famagusta, which had been plagued by frequent Arab raids. The Frankish Lusignan dynasty, which ruled the island from the end of the 12th century, fortified the city, as well as building the gothic Cathedral of St Sophia and other Catholic churches and palaces. The impressive walls we see today, with their star shape and eleven bastions, were built by the Venetians, who ruled for nearly a hundred years from the late 15th century.

The Kyrenia Gate, then and now

As with Famagusta and Kyrenia, the Venetians substantially upgraded the city’s fortifications in preparation for an expected Ottoman attack. For the most part the walls are still intact, although in places they were breached in the 20th century to make way for modern roads into and out of the old city. The Kyrenia gate, in the north of the city, one of the three city gates built by the Venetians, now stands in a gap in the wall, with roads passing either side. A postcard from 1922 shows the walls linking up with the gate, with paths sloping up on to the walls on either side. The walls are better cared for in the south of the city. In the north they are overgrown with greenery and the ground level is higher, burying the lower part of the walls and diminishing their impressive bulk.

The efforts the Venetians put into building the walls were to no avail. When the Ottoman force invaded Cyprus in June 1520, the Venetians withdrew to their fortified towns, Nicosia, Kyrenia and Famagusta. The siege of Nicosia began in July, and lasted only seven weeks. The victorious Ottomans set about massacring the inhabitants, sparing only the women and children, who were sold into slavery. The city was ransacked, and St Sophia’s and other Catholic churches were converted into mosques. Nicosia remained the administrative seat of the island under the Ottomans, but it was devastated by the conquest, its population reduced to not much more than 1,000 from the 21,000 it had been under the Venetians.

The city recovered under Ottoman rule, unlike the coastal city of Famagusta, whose walled old town has a somewhat ghostly appearance, many of the buildings from the Venetian and Lusignan periods left to crumble, the empty spaces left empty, and relatively little new Ottoman construction. In Nicosia, by contrast, the Ottomans left their mark. The notable Ottoman-era architecture is more to be found on the northern side of the city. Long before the division of the city into Greek and Turkish halves in the 1960s, Muslims settled in greater numbers in the north of the city, where the seat of the governor of the island, the Konak or Saray was situated. The Saray, which had earlier been the palace of the Lusignan kings and Venetian governors, was demolished during the period of British rule, and replaced by law courts. The square is still known to locals as Sarayonu square, despite being officially named after Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic. In its centre stands a column which had been brought to the city by the Venetians from the ancient city of Salamis. The fine-looking law courts are typical of civic buildings from the British period, bright and open, with shady colonnaded terraces, a style appropriate for the Mediterranean, quite unlike architecture of the period in Britain. There are other, more familiar mementoes of British rule, notably the post boxes with the initials of British monarchs, now painted yellow in the south of the island.

Buyuk Han

Perhaps the loveliest building in Nicosia is the Buyuk Han, the Great Han, a caravanserai or inn built shortly after the Ottoman conquest. Its layout is fairly typical of caravanserais around the middle east and central Asia, a square two-story building around a large central courtyard, with colonnaded terraces off which there are rooms which on the ground floor were used for commerce and on the first floor as accommodation for travelling merchants. In the courtyard is a small mosque which was for the use of travellers. Under British rule the han was briefly a prison, and then reverted to its original purpose, as an inn and shops. For a while it served as accommodation for poor families. The building was beautifully restored in the 1990s, and now houses handicraft and souvenir shops, as well as cafes with terraces on the courtyard. It was particularly lovely in the late afternoons, when the January sunshine slanted on to the sandstone arches of the courtyard, while visitors sat and drank their tea or coffee.

Typically of Cyprus, many of the buildings of the Ottoman period were converted Lusignan churches. Nearby the Buyuk Han is the Buyuk Hammam, the Ottoman baths, which had previously been the Church of St George of the Latins. It appears lower than it would have been, as a result of the rising of the street level over time. Also nearby is the Selimiye Cami, Nicosia’s biggest mosque, once the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Sophia. Its conversion to a mosque involved the building of two minarets either side of its entrance. Strung between them today are the flags of Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), which is recognised only by Turkey. Like the converted Cathedral of St Nicholas in Famagusta, on the inside the gothic arches and vaulted ceiling of St Sophia’s have been whitewashed. The tombs of Lusignan kings lie beneath the carpeted floor whose lines point Muslims towards Mecca, its direction indicated by the ornate Mihrab on the side of the cathedral. In the southern, Greek part of the city is the Omeriye mosque, built on the site of the 14th century Church of St Mary, part of an Augustinian monastery. The church was badly damaged during the Ottoman siege, and was rebuilt as a mosque, with the addition of a minaret. However, the outline of the original church is clear to see, with its apse at the farthest end from the entrance, where the alter had once stood. On the outside, behind the minaret, a small rose window can be seen.

Selimiye Cami

Next to the Selimiye Cami is a partially ruined building that has been re-purposed multiple times over the centuries, the Bedestan, or covered market. This started out in the Byzantine period as an Orthodox Church. The Gothic entrance across from the Selimiye Cami dates from the Lusignan period, when it may have served as a Catholic church for a time. Under Ottoman rule it became the Bedestan. When the British took over in Cyprus in the 1870s, they wanted to convert it back into a church, but were unable to do so due to the Islamic prohibition on having a shrine of another religion close to a mosque. Having been recently renovated, it is now a cultural centre.

The south of the city was and is predominantly Greek, and includes the Archbishop’s residence and the Orthodox cathedral, as well as the residence of the Dragoman, a senior Greek official who was the link between the Ottoman authorities and the Greek Orthodox population. The present-day archbishop’s palace, which was built in the 1950s, is large, with spacious grounds. Perhaps this reflects the importance of the Orthodox Church in Cyprus’s history. Archbishop Kyprianos, whose bust stands outside the palace, founded the Pancyprian Gymnasium, the island’s first secondary school, in 1812, and was among more than 400 Greek Cypriots who were executed by the Ottomans in 1821, in response to the wide support of the Greek community for Greece’s independence struggle. Archbishop Makarios III held a leading position in the Greek Cypriot community as it struggled for independence from Britain in the 1950s, and became the country’s first president following independence in 1960. The Cathedral of St John the Theologian, in contrast to the archbishop’s place, is a small, modest building. Built on the site of a Benedictine monastery, it had been turned over to the Orthodox Church in the 15th century, and the church was rebuilt in the 17th. Its modest exterior was required by the Ottoman authorities, but on the inside the cathedral is fabulously ornate.

Not far from the cathedral and the archbishop’s palace is the residence of Cyprus’s most noted dragoman, Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios, who held office in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The term dragoman literally means interpreter, but his duties were much more extensive, including collecting taxes from the Christian population on behalf of the Ottoman authorities. He was a powerful figure, and the opportunity to cream off his share of the taxes enabled him to accumulate great wealth. His fine house, now a museum, attests to that wealth, and is a fascinating insight into how a powerful Christian figure in Ottoman Cyprus could live. The reception room, with its ornate wood carvings and low divans around the walls, indicates that the Greek Cypriot elite in many ways lived in much the same style as their Turkish overlords. However, Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios’s power and the heavy taxes he collected were resented. He was executed in Istanbul in 1809.

Wandering the streets of Nicosia, there are many beautiful districts where the traditional buildings from the Ottoman period, with their covered balconies, have been preserved, and in many cases sensitively restored. This is particularly the case in the north of the city, perhaps because the relative economic stagnation of north Cyprus meant there was less new development in the old city than was the case in the south. The Arabahmet quarter, in the east of the city, close to the city walls just north of the green line, is particularly attractive. Many of the inhabitants of the district had been Armenian, clustered around their church. There had been an Armenian community in Cyprus for centuries, but during intercommunal violence in 1963-64, when the city was divided between its Turkish north and Greek south, the Armenian quarter found itself in the Turkish north, and the Armenians themselves were expelled. In subsequent decades much of the Abrahmet district and the Armenian church fell into decay and dereliction. More recently the quarter is gradually being renovated, the old houses beautifully restored. While the Armenians are gone, their church has been restored by the UN. It was open when I visited, but without its flock, its community, it was an empty and rather forlorn place.

Close by the Armenian church, right on the green line, next to the Paphos gate, and just beyond the barbed-wire-topped barrier, is a Roman Catholic Church. A little further south is the Maronite church. The Maronite community has existed for centuries in Cyprus, although their numbers have dwindled since the middle ages. They had mainly lived in a few villages in the north of the island, but following the Turkish invasion almost all of them moved to the south.

On the two sides of the city are museums which attest to the different versions of the history of this bitterly divided island. In the south of the city, close to the Orthodox Cathedral, is the National Struggle Museum, dedicated to the struggle against British rule from 1955-1959. It is uncomfortable viewing for a British visitor. The armed struggle had as its aim unification, Enosis, with Greece. It was led by Georgios Grivas, a Cypriot who had served for many years as an officer in Greece’s army, and who founded the EOKA guerrilla organisation. As well as weapons and other possessions of the EOKA fighters, the museum contains photos of killed EOKA members, some of them tortured or executed by the British. Some historians assert that claims of torture by the British were exaggerated and inflated by EOKA for propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, in 2012 the British Foreign Office released documents alleging torture and other abuses by British soldiers. In 2019 the British government agreed to pay £ 1 million to 33 Greek Cypriots who claimed they had been tortured, although without admitting liability.

It is not clear to me why the British government of the time felt it necessary to fight an ultimately unsuccessful four-year war to maintain its rule in Cyprus. De-colonisation was already well under way. A number of former British colonies had already become independent, and several more would follow over the next few years. It was surely clear that the era of colonialism had passed. Shortly before the start of the Cyprus insurgency Britain had announced its intention to move its military command in the eastern Mediterranean from Egypt to Cyprus. No doubt Cyprus appeared to be strategically vital. But Britain could surely have reached agreement with a newly independent Cyprus to retain its military bases, as indeed happened after independence in 1960. Yet at the time the British government maintained that decolonisation should not apply to Cyprus.

The war in Cyprus was a senseless waste, and worse than that, it had long-term damaging consequences, especially in exacerbating intercommunal tensions between the island’s Greeks and Turks. The island’s Turks vehemently opposed Enosis, and thousands of them were recruited by the British as auxiliary police in the struggle against EOKA. This inevitably inflamed tensions between the two communities, as Turks responded to Greek demands for Enosis with their own demand for Taksim, partition of the island. For its part, EOKA extended its attacks against the British to the Turkish community.

In the end, the Greek Cypriots did not achieve the desired Enosis with Greece, and had to settle for an independent state, under an agreement guaranteed by Britain, Greece and Turkey. Most Greek Cypriots were not satisfied, and continued to strive for Enosis, with disastrous consequences, as the coup in 1974 in the name of Enosis provoked the Turkish invasion of the island. On one of the bastions of the city wall is the Liberty Monument, which commemorates the release of EOKA fighters in 1959, prior to independence the following year, one of many monuments to EOKA men in southern Cyprus. But the aftermath of the violence that brought independence left a bitter hangover.

The independence war, with the intercommunal violence that it involved, soured the already strained relations between Greeks and Turks on the island. The baleful influence of both Greece and Turkey made matters worse. Greece’s military junta was behind the coup in favour of Enosis in July 1974 that prompted the Turkish invasion. The Turkish Cypriot minority looked upon the prospect of Enosis with terror, having seen the fate of the Cretan Muslim population who had been forced to leave Crete in 1923 as part of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey.

In the north of Nicosia, Cyprus’s Turks have their own National Struggle Museum. It tells a very different story to that of its counterpart a few hundred yards away in the south. In its telling, EOKA was a terrorist organisation aiming not only to drive out the British and achieve Enosis, but at the elimination of the Turkish community. The 1974 Turkish invasion is presented as a “peace operation” to provide “a peaceful environment for both communities.” The museum contains a memorial to those who died in “the struggle to preserve the Turkish existence in Cyprus.”

The Turkish Cypriot position is related even more vividly at the Museum of Barbarism, in the house of Dr Nihat Ilhan in the suburbs north of the old city. Intercommunal tension and violence had continued after independence in 1960, involving the displacement of Turkish Cypriots into enclaves. This reached a peak at the end of 1963. On the night of 24 December that year, while Dr Ilhan was on duty with Turkish Cypriot paramilitaries, Greek Cypriot irregulars came to his home and murdered his wife and three children, as well as a neighbour. Harrowing photographs in the house show the three children and their mother dead in the bath. There are also photographs depicting other atrocities against the Turkish community. The violence led to the deaths of 364 Turkish Cypriots and 174 Greek Cypriots, as well as the displacement of some 25,000 Turkish Cypriots.

The Green Line, Abrahmet quarter

Following the December 1963 violence, a British general commanding a joint peacekeeping force with Greece and Turkey (a precursor of the UN peacekeeping force) drew an agreed line in green along a map demarking a Turkish North and Greek south of the city. As a consequence of the Turkish invasion in 1974 this green line was extended across the whole island. The green line remains a scar across the city, of abandoned streets and derelict buildings, in what was once its bustling heart. It is easier to approach the line in the Turkish north than in the Greek south, where soldiers keep watch from guard posts painted in the blue and white stripes of Greece’s flag, warning people not to take photos. On the northern side, while there are signs warning that it is a forbidden zone, it is possible to peer into the ghostly dilapidated streets. To someone not used to it, it seems quite bizarre. Just a few yards from narrow old-city streets with bars and shops, you come upon walls topped with barbed wire, beyond them the abandoned ruins of the green line, and just a short distance further the Greek south of the city.

The best place to get a view over Nicosia is from the top floor viewing point of the Shacolas Tower, in the south of the city. From that vantage point, one gets perhaps the best view of the Selimiye Cami. Surrounded by the narrow streets of the old city, it is hard to get a proper view from close up. Looking east towards the Abrahmet district, you can see the Maronite church and the nearby Catholic Church on the green line. Just to the north is the Ledra Palace Hotel, once Nicosia’s finest. Now stranded on the green line, after 1974 it had for decades served as the headquarters of the UN mission. But in 2019 it was vacated due to inadequate health and safety measures. On a mountainside north of the city a vast, provocative TRNC flag has been painted. Alongside, on a painted flag of Turkey, is the famous quote from Ataturk, in Turkish, “How Happy is the One Who Says I am a Turk.” Many Cypriots still live in hope that such provocations, and the bad memories of strife and violence, could one day be put behind. That Cypriots from both communities now travel back and forth and have renewed mutual contacts may give cause for that hope. Younger Cypriots are perhaps less burdened by the tragedies of the past. The incentives to reunite are strong, especially for the north, internationally isolated and unable to fulfil its potential. But the persistent failure to find a solution indicates that the obstacles remain great.