Kyrenia Harbour (in Greek) or Girne Harbour (in Turkish)
By 4pm I was back in my own place. Ever since I was a small girl my entire life plan has revolved around having a home of my own. I don't know what planted the idea in my mind but it certainly stuck. I am the only person I know whose house deposit cheque included my entire Holy Communion money. As I grew older and developed more detailed ideas of what this home would be like I wavered from 1980s jet-set penthouse to rose-covered cottage. I toyed with the idea of almost every variation between those extremes and naturally my home, when I eventually found it, was nothing like either of them.
The part of the home-owning deal which I wasn't prepared for despite all my dreams was just how deep a bond you develop with every square inch of it. I spent the rest of the day wandering around the place checking on it like a new mother tending her child. You would think that this couldn't possibly take more than an hour in the average suburban house, but trust me, it can be done.
Beautiful Crusader Monastery Garden of Bellapais
(once the home of author Gerard Durrell)
After pulling up a few handfuls I sat by the edge of the flowerbed and enjoyed the sight of my garden doing its absolute best. I marvelled at the way leaves and grass look even greener under a slate coloured sky, it is like divine compensation for having wet Summers in Ireland.
My mind was drawn back to the land I had left, Northern Cyprus. It's an island as economically, culturally and religiously divided as my own but possibly with even less chance of a resolution, despite the heartfelt hopes of the Cypriots themselves. I was thinking about the intense curiosity I had arrived with. As we drove to our hotel we passed suburban houses at bedtime and I wondered were those houses left behind by fleeing Greek-Cypriots almost 30 years before. Would it be possible to be happy living in someone else's home under those circumstances ? Would each resident feel like a thief in the night or a political protester ?
I spent a week there trying to understand what drives people to label and oppress their neighbours and had left without answers. But what I had left with was an abiding impression of dry fertility after driving across the central plain. Their harvest of this allegedly fertile river-fed area happens in March so by July all that is left it the truncated golden stalks of gathered crops. The resulting landscape is one of stark, dry, desertion. The riverbeds are nothing but boulder scattered empty veins. The heat in mid-summer repels locals from living on the plain so it lacks all but the rare village. The water shortages in recent years have been extreme enough to prompt Turkey into planning a water pipeline from there to the island.
Once a Greek Cypriot Cathedral, this is now a Turkish Cypriot mosque - note the addition of a minaret to accomodate the muzzein as he calls the faithful to prayer
Right across the plain runs the Green Line, the border between North and South. The UN troops sit in the middle of this area. Their silent guns are the real border between the mutual stony glares exchanged by Northern and Southern Cypriot soldiers. The Cypriots are just out of their teens. They have grown up knowing nothing but a divided island. The island was divided the year I was born.
As I sat in my beautiful garden I remembered the divides I had crossed earlier as I flew in from London and Istanbul - the division of land and sea, the barely perceptible division of Dublin from the Fingal suburbs which is disappearing as they merge, the division of the local world I knew as a child and the wider world I am exploring as a woman. Then there was the division of the arid land I left behind at departure and the fertility which greeted my arrival. As Irish people we mock tourists who exclaim in joy over our green countryside, but they are right. Some of that green land may be covered in weeds but at least it is green. Historians talk of the way generations of Irish were evicted from their own land and we react by being possessed by the desire to own a patch of land as if that can rectify things.
I usually react with dismay when the rain pours down, but as a few random drops fell on me that evening in the garden I felt relief. Relief that I was not condemned to live in a disputed house in a dry land.