Imagined Borders That Divide and Unite Us: The Politics of Memory in Cyprus

By walking on the south and north Ledra Street of Nicosia, the last divided city of Europe, one can easily discern the two different worlds: a prosperous European Union city, and a tumbledown city isolated from the rest of the world, except for Turkey. The barricades and borders are separating the people of southern and northern Cyprus since 1974. However, more important than the physical borders are the mental and psychological borders between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, which have produced conflicting memories regarding the ethnic conflict and the previously shared life with the Other. Both communities construct and articulate the modern history of Cyprus in different, even opposite ways with different ways of remembering, commemorating and forgetting the past. While the Greek part supports a vision of peace in a unified Cyprus and promotes a strong discourse of nostalgia and attachment to past, the Turkish part imposes a policy of deleting the past and creating a new future. This difference basically stems from the fact that the Greek and Turkish communities’ current objectives, interests, political and economic situations, identities, experiences and their relations with past are pretty different. This paper aims to discuss both existing and imagined borders between the peoples of Cyprus that both divide and unite them in their attempts to shape the collective memories of the communities. The paper depends on the ethnographic field research I conducted in Cyprus between 2010-2012.