Bikini Alert State: “Black”. In the context of a beautiful Mediterranean island, this roadside sign could create all kinds of images. Yet it has nothing to do with swimwear, this is a coded military warning conveying the current degree of danger to British forces in Europe’s last divided country.

You find the sign in the midst of a small chunk of the Home Counties. Replete with neat lawns and gently rolling hills, this “little England” has drifted to the eastern end of the Mediterranean and made landfall on beautiful, benighted Cyprus. The Sovereign Base Areas that Britain retained after Cyprus’ independence in 1960, are symptomatic of the island’s fragmentation for the past three decades. Yet Cyprus’ deep wounds are now healing, as you discover beyond the “Bikini Alert”, heading to the Green Line that divides the island.

Travelling around Cyprus in the spring is joyful. Half-an-hour and six miles earlier, in the Sport Cafe in the village of Frenaros, the roof was getting hammered by belligerent rain, while the occupants were getting hammered on Keo beer. They were still perfectly capable of dispensing impeccable hospitality to a damp, squelching visitor.

At the other end of the island, in the Aphrodite Hills Resort, near the legendary birthplace and temple of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, guests are enjoying the widest range of thalassotherapy treatments. I dare say some are wearing black bikinis. We’re all soaking, and, in our different ways, having fun.

Even the tempestuous weather that has strafed the eastern Mediterranean this month has not dampened the allure of this island. Compressed into a territory half the size of  Wales, layer after layer of history has been daubed on a landscape of crumpled hills constrained within a corrugated coastline. Ancient churches and castles dissolve into the rock whence they came, the meadows are embroidered by flourishes of dandelions and poppies, and down on the beaches, a million people will enjoy carefree holidays this year on a careworn isle, Europe’s land of make-believe.

“Heaven bless the isle of Cyprus”, wrote Shakespeare. Four centuries on, so sensitive and complicated is the fragile political status that the airlines should show a bluffers’ guide on the final approach to Larnaca or Paphos, the only two airports allowed to accept flights from Britain.

The essentials: after the island had passed through the hands of all the usual Mediterranean suspects, from the Myceneans via the Crusaders to the Venetians, Cyprus was picked up by Britain as imperial booty. By the time of independence, in 1960, the Greeks formed a substantial majority, with Turks, Maronites and Armenians as significant minorities. Before relinquishing its strategically important possession, the UK insisted on retaining a military toehold in the Eastern Mediterranean. So a couple of Guantanamo Bay-style bases were annexed from Cypriot soil.

Cyprus was a beacon of diversity, interspersed with terrorist activity. Then larger powers began to fight their proxy battles, whereupon Cyprus became a victim of Shakespearean intrigue. In the summer of 1974, the Army colonels who ruled Greece orchestrated a coup that overthrew President Archibishop Makarios, and provided Turkey with a pretext to invade the island claiming protection of Turkish Cypriots. After scenes of carnage and atrocity that owed more to the First World War than modern warfare, the Turks ended up controlling more than 35 per cent of the island. “The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”, is what they call this occupied territory of The Republic of Cyprus. Yet no one other than Turkey believes in, or recognises, this strange piece of political flotsam.

As a make-believe nation, occupied, Turkish military controlled north areas of Cyprus is a land of negatives. No direct flights from anywhere other than Turkey, no diplomatic representation, which could make life difficult for travellers if things go wrong, and no extradition treaty with Britain, which explains why there is a steady stream of criminals beating a path to this notional nation. And that is where I am heading, too, as soon as I have passed the neat, semi-detached houses, well-trimmed cricket pitch and Naafi supermarket. Everything seems remarkably calm considering the peril this base was considered to be in two years ago. You remember Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction? This is where they were alleged to be pointing, ready to obliterate this curious suburbia within 45 minutes.

Considering its well-publicised vulnerability, visiting this British military base is easy. You simply drive, cycle or walk along the main road from Nicosia, and obey the notices that, in three languages, ban photography.

A couple of miles on, a Republic of Cyprus checkpoint: the predominantly Greek and entirely legitimate nation that is part of the European Union. The same government that produces lots of excellent tourist information, including a good map of Cyprus. The upper third of the island is marked “Inaccessible due to Turkish Occupation”. Yet a polite and helpful official Greek Cypriot official is explaining just how accessible the occupied north of the country now is. I am welcome to cross the frontier here and return whenever I like, either through this checkpoint or the one in Nicosia, the divided capital of this disjointed island. And no, a visit to the occupied north does not place me at risk of being barred from Greece.

How the world has changed from the Cinderella days that prevailed for almost three decades after the Turkish invasion. Crossing from free south to occupied north could be achieved only at the UN checkpoint beside the former five-star Ledra Palace Hotel, now the no-star barracks for whichever foreign troops get the gig of guarding the Green Line. The Ledra Palace crossing was Europe’s last Checkpoint Charlie experience. You could submit to the laborious bureaucracy and reproachful glances from frontier officials only between 8am and 1pm, and you had to be back from the pariah occupied land in time for tea: 5pm.

Anyone who took the alternative route to occupied northern Cyprus, by boat or plane from Turkey, was regarded as having entered the island illegally. Evidence such as a passport stamp is enough to make you non grata in Corfu, Cephallonia and all Greek islands to Crete. So immigration officials issued a separate piece of *…. * paper.

A few years ago, the people of the Republic rejected the Annan Plan, brokered by the UN Secretary-General himself, for a settlement with the unlawful and illegal regime in the occupied north. A week later the Republic joined the EU, and the Green Line started to melt. Brussels has no great love of frontiers, particularly within member nations, and has provided cash to prise open the border. Clearing the mine fields is taking time, as is soothing the feelings of aggrieved Greek Cypriots. But islanders from both sides of the divide are growing accustomed to crossing the line with ease and civility. And finally, the Ledra Street crossing in downtown Nicosia, which remained closed for about 40 years, has opened.

So far I have passed the Bikini Alert without incident, and entered a kind of no-man’s-land within a no-man’s land. I have left, or not left, from the Greek perspective, the official Republic. Now to enter a land which, in the eyes of the world, does not exist. The next bureaucratic hurdle is hard to take seriously. Mustafa is sitting inside a white-and-red plastic hut that looks as though it has been requisitioned from a local ice-cream vendor, right down to the frilly red-and-white awning.

Old habits die hard. Mustafa did not stamp my passport, instead, I was given a slip of paper that bore a close approximation to my name and announced itself to be a visa.

This process has taken a couple of minutes, but in that time I have gone from a tidy British military enclave to a vision of blight: barns and cottages laid waste in the fighting that split the nation and caught in no-man’s-land. But a mile later, I am passing a garage that announces itself to be a “United Nations Filling Station” on the scruffy outskirts of a busy town: Occupied Ghost Town of Famagusta.

Around 1300, this port’s position astride the main trade routes made it one of the richest places on earth, and around 1974, prosperity was once again returning with the peaceful invasion of tourists. The British holidaymakers who happened to be there that summer were bundled out by the Navy with a thrilling tale to tell, but the Greek Cypriot property owners tell a tale of treachery.

The heart of Famagusta is an exquisite warren of lanes guarded by absurdly muscular walls, with the handsome Cathedral of Saint Nicholas, now the main city mosque, at the heart. I fell in for coffee and chats with a fine bunch of men: warm and welcoming chaps of the kind I had not met, well, for a good couple of hours since the Sport Cafe on the other side of the border. They really should get together sometime soon.

Occupied south of Famagusta lie the abandoned hotels in the resort area of Varoshia, marooned in no-go territory, to the north, the ancient city-Kingdom of Salamis, and to the east, the curve of the bay tapers to a peninsula that points directly at a fully-fledged member of the axis of evil, Syria. But I am heading west, towards one of the great ports of the Mediterranean: Occupied Kyrenia. 

My awkward moment has arisen because this part of the island is in a different currency zone. I have brought a few euros across the frontier, but most of my funds are in the form of Turkish lire: tens of millions of them. I became a multimillionaire by changing 100 euros. I expected them to have declined in value but they appear to have lost all of it. 

The bus fare to occupied Kyrenia is now three mighty lire, but the rate of exchange for a Cyprus euro is a tantalising 1 = 2.90 lire. Simple, says the man in a bureau de change that appears not to have seen a customer all day, let me nudge up the rate a little for you so you need not change more than a hundred. That doesn’t happen at the bureau de change at any European city.

On board the bus that is racing across a land of Anglian flatness, the view has been nudged up by an order of magnitude as the sky of fractured cloud conspires with the landscape to create a Biblical vision. Shards of sunlight slice where they can through the steely shield, illuminating the terrain like searchlights. To the north, the horizon is serrated by a menacing line of mountains, from the south, a sequence of storms is marching towards us, for another aerial bombardment of heavy rain.

We make it through the mountains, followed by a splendid descent to occupied Kyrenia or Girne, as the official process of Turkification dictates. The Anglicisation has been more effective: the Greek Cypriot owned Dome Hotel looks like a remnant of Eastbourne, though with an impressive seawater pool hewn from the rock. The restaurants around the hemispherical harbour are aimed squarely at Brits, some have illegally bought second homes here, though properties are still legally owned by Greek Cypriots. An ancient arm of rock curls around the port, which is dominated by a Byzantine fortress.

Now for Berlin, or what is claimed to be the world’s last divided capital. If ever a city deserved to be kept intact, Nicosia is it. The hub of the city is contained within a circular curtain of stone, from which 11 bastions protrude in the shape of spades from a pack of cards, each named for the family that originally funded that particular fortification. Like the old city of Jerusalem, a confusion of religions, Orthodox, Catholic and Armenian Christian, plus Judaism and Islam, have put down roots within this hot-house. But unlike Jerusalem, a jagged divide runs right through the middle.

Ledra Street, the main retail drag in the south of this city, demonstrates this dramatically. After a latte at Starbucks, turn left out of the door and walk north for couple of minutes. You would collide with a wall, complete with spectators’ photo gallery provided by the Republic, and allegations of atrocities committed by the Turks. Within days, about a year ago, this was dismantled, and the barrier replaced by a pedestrian thoroughfare that will, one day, re-unite the city. And further along the Green Line at another Cold War cul-de-sac, a Greek Cypriot soldier was painting new road markings that hint at the imminence of another crossing point and a more porous frontier. Not quite tearing down the walls of anguish, but, for a stranger in a strange land, a sign of hope.

Aphrodite Hills, Paphos [tel 26829000, www.aphroditehills.com]. 

Cyprus Tourism Organisation >  www.visitcyprus.org.cy 

The ceremony was the reason I found myself on the west coast of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. My niece had married a Greek Cypriot with a large extended family, some years ago. When their son was born, the opportunity for a family celebration and vacation was too good to pass up.

So we went, and for the better part of two weeks we lived with, toured with, ate, drank, partied and laughed with Cypriots across Cyprus. I didn’t just travel across a country, I journeyed into a culture.

Cyprus is a small island, 140 miles long and 60 miles wide. But what it lacks in size it makes up for in sun, spectacular beaches, pine-covered forests, gorgeous mountains, picturesque villages and bustling modern cities. Add to that a history that is mind-boggling in its complexity.

Our first base was Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. At Nicosia’s center, the Old City sits inside brooding walls built by the Venetians in the late 16th century in a failed effort to protect against invading Ottomans. A walk through the area today is quintessential Old Europe, with narrow streets, quaint shops, outdoor cafés and centuries-old churches.

But deep in the district I came face to face with Cyprus’ most disturbing reality, the Green Line, emblematic of the country’s painful division into two communities.

In a nutshell, a right-wing Greek government in July 1974 sponsored a coup aimed at bringing down the Cypriot government and uniting Cyprus with Greece. In response, Turkey invaded the island claiming it was aiming to protect the interests of Turkish Cypriots. When a cease-fire finally in mid August 1974, took effect, Turkey already controlled the northern 40 percent of the Republic’s area. In the ensuing chaos, thousands [200,000] of ethnic Greek Cypriots in the north left their homes and land or were forcibly evicted, in many cases with their clothes only, while Turkish Muslims in the south made the trek north.

The partition still cuts like a knife. For nearly 35 years the Green Line was sealed tight, but in 2003 the Turkish Cypriots agreeded to loose travel restrictions and the occupied and military controlled north was open again. Still, many Greek Cypriots chafe at having to present a passport and obtain a visa at a Turkish checkpoint to travel to their own occupied land, their own and rightful land where grandfathers of grandfathers were living for centuries.

Occupied Kyrenia and the occupied North > North Nicosia, and the north in general, not surprisingly, is quieter, noticeably poorer and far less developed than the booming south. Recognized only by Turkey, the self-proclaimed and illegal regime of the so-called “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” struggles under sanctions and with little tourism.

The jewel of the occupied and military controlled north is Kyrenia, with a beautiful harbor and a 12th-century Byzantine castle later rebuilt and enlarged by the Venetians.

On the east coast of the occupied land of Cyprus are the archaeological ruins of the great city-Kingdom of Salamis, near Famagusta. Destroyed by the Persians in 306 B.C., it was rebuilt by the Romans in the first century B.C. The remains of Roman baths, a gymnasium, exercise area, an amphitheater that held 15,000 spectators and the shells of ancient basilicas can be eerie to walk through.

A revered site for Greek Cypriots is the Apostolos Andreas Monastery on the occupied easternmost tip of the island, the Karpasia peninsula, it’s believed by many to be the site of miracles dating back to the time of Saint Andrew the Apostle, who landed here. The Monastery is one of only a few in the occupied north that the Turks have not yet closed or converted to other uses. However, according to latest information gathered, they wanted to convert it into a hotel!

An old, black-robed woman greeted us and ushered us into the church, lighting candles as she went. Later, we learnt that the woman was famous for defying the Turks after the 1974 invasion by refusing to leave.

But a journey into the occupied north of the Republic of Cyprus, is not without its ironies. Although Muslim, the Turkish Cypriots practice a form of Islam that might be described as easygoing. Women dress in western fashion, much more freely than in other Muslim countries. Ouzo and a Turkish beer, flow in the dockside restaurants of occupied Kyrenia. And there’s nothing quite like listening to a Turkish, and presumably Muslim, band playing “Black Magic Woman” on a party boat in the harbor, just after the Muslim call to prayer echoes from the minaret.

The occupied north, too, evokes a flood of memories for Greek Cypriots of a certain age who fondly recall a pre 1974 unity. We were sipping beer near the harbor on a warm afternoon in the occupied Kyrenia when a family friend began telling stories of land and fortunes lost and boyhood visits to the beaches in the now occupied north. He talked as if part of his body had been amputated.

In quiet, learned tones, another family friend who was traveling with us, spoke eloquently about the word nostalgia, and how Odysseus longed for his home in Ithaca in Homer’s epic “The Odyssey”. The word is formed by combining the Greek words for home or homecoming and pain. Nostalgia cloaks the soul of Cyprus.

The mountains > While the Pentadaktylos or Five Fingers Range dominates the occupied north, the larger, more impressive Troodos Range lies to the west of Nicosia. Up curving mountain roads we traveled one day, passing villages where little has changed for decades or more, and where many, usually older, women still wear the traditional black dresses and scarves.

Our Cypriot hosts made much of the fact that, with peaks 5,000 to 6,000 feet high, there’s enough snow in the Troodos in the winter to ski in the morning, then head down to a seaside lunch in the port city of Limassol.

The mountains, though, are best known for the amazing frescoes that adorn churches built and painted between the 11th and 15th centuries. Ten of the churches, in tiny villages and on placid hillsides, are recognized by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites.

Kykko Monastery is famous among Cypriots as being the richest Monastery on the island, the owner of vast amounts of property. There’s a Museum, a gift shop and liquor store selling Kykkos brand wines and other spirits. Very secular, yet guards won’t let visitors in shorts or bare shoulders enter the grounds. Luckily, an enterprising woman up the road rents pants and skirts to hapless tourists.

On another day, a few of us made the trip to red-roofed Lefkara in the foothills of the Troodos close to Nicosia. The village has been famous for its intricate embroidery as far back as the 15th century, when Leonardo de Vinci came to town, leaving with an altarpiece for the Milan Cathedral. Village women still sit outside quaint shops on narrow streets, sewing, chatting and inviting visitors to buy.

After a few days based in Nicosia, we made our way west to the city of Paphos, passing by the spot where the mythical goddess of love, Aphrodite, arose out of the sea. Her cult flourished here thousands of years ago, some say she still casts spells.

Once a vibrant city, then a backwater for centuries, Paphos was reborn after the island’s 1974 invasion and occupation of the most touristic areas, namely Kyrenia and Famagusta. Today is a preferred beach destination and resort for Greek Cypriots and foreign tourists alike. Classy hotels and restaurants and ritzy shops and clubs abound.

One day trip in Paphos took us from the elaborate 2,300-year-old Tombs of the Kings to striking, colorful mosaics from the Roman period to the Pillar of Saint Paul, where the Apostle is believed to have been chained and scourged before converting the Roman authorities to Christianity.

On another day we lost ourselves in the wonderful sights, smells and sounds of the farmers market. It was packed with country folk selling everything from soutsioukkos, a ropelike food made of grape juice and filled with ground almonds, to fresh meats, fruits and vegetables and nuts.

When we weren’t day-tripping we’d kick back with a Keo beer or Cypriot wine and smell the aromas of oil and lemon and oregano of family’s wonderful cooking. Then we’d go to the beach to cool off. But not before much time had passed discussing the best place, the best route to take and dozens of other time-consuming details. Time. The Cypriots, like many others in the Mediterranean, have a curious sense of time.

Cypriot Food > Try either fish or meat mezedes, or a meal of numerous small dishes. Among many other local specialties are kleftiko, oven-baked lamb, sheftalia, a type of sausage, halloumi, a soft cheese great on the grill, and souvlaki, charcoal-grilled pork.

Cypriot Dining > Taverna Plaka, on the west side of Nicosia near many Embassies, is popular with Cypriots as well as foreign dignitaries. The Mountain Rose, in the Troodos mountain village of Pedoulas, is a solid choice, and Pedoulas makes a good base for exploring the region. 

Shopping in Cyprus > Archbishop Makarios Avenue in Nicosia has many upscale shops that reflect current fashions. The Exclusive Art Shop in Lefkara has a great selection of icons as well as embroidery. In Paphos, visit Lemba Pottery or Savvas Pottery for handmade pottery. The Covered Market in Paphos has a huge selection of Cypriot arts and crafts.

More information > www.visitcyprus.org.cy

Kyrenia is still under Turkish military occupation since 20 July 1974 when military Turkish troops invaded The Republic of Cyprus. We recommend you NOT to visit the northern part of the occupied island until peace, justice, freedom and the return of the 200,000 Greek Cypriots refugees back to their own homeland and properties is restored.

Nicosia, the capital of the Republic of Cyprus, a member country of the European Union, is the ONLY  divided capital in Europe like Berlin used to be some years ago.

Perhaps only Trieste, the cosmopolitan port on the shadowy, disputed borderlands between Italy and the former Yugoslavia, and Lisbon, with its brooding sense of an empire lost, have quite the same atmosphere as Cyprus: the same sense of vivid ghostliness.

With its geographic position between three continents and as the troubled juncture between clashing civilisations, Cyprus is a country not of one dividing line, but many.

Drive north for a couple of miles out of boisterous Ayia Napa and you soon arrive on the edges of the occupied ghost town of Famagusta [Ammochostos], once the most vibrant tourist centre in Cyprus but now a site of monumental dereliction. Soon you can drive no further because you have reached the heavily fortified “Green Line” that runs like a scar across the island, separating Greek free areas from Turkish military controlled and occupied areas, a scar of war and ethnic hatred.

Tourism on the island had yet another record-breaking year. The popularity of Ayia Napa has contributed to the boom. A former fishing village, Ayia Napa suddenly, supplanted Ibiza as the hedonistic capital of the Mediterranean, a place where the bullet-headed British young come to dance and drink and, they hope, have sex in a kind of frenzy. Mindless b******s, the locals call it.

Today it is eerily quiet in occupied Famagusta. It always is. No one seems to be stirring in the late afternoon sunshine. Peering through binoculars across a nowhere zone of barren scrubland, razor wire, barricades and ruined white-washed cottages, I am startled to see a Turkish soldier looking back at me through his own binoculars. Mounted high on a sentry post, he is the only moving object in a landscape of stillness and desolation. To visit occupied Famagusta is like finding yourself adrift on a film set of a JG Ballard novel: there are empty houses, abandoned shops and hotels, and even a garage, replete with a showroom full of big, gas-guzzling Fords, all largely untouched since the Turkish invasion and de facto partition of the island in July of 1974.

The young soldier probably wasn’t even born when the ethnic Greek villagers of the now occupied Famagusta fled their homes after the invasion, never to return. As a car pulls up, I watch an old woman get out, approach the UN-patrolled “Green Line”, and begin gesturing forlornly. She used to live in Famagusta, her son, the driver, tells me. Every weekend they drive out from Larnaca to one of the watchtowers that are strung out along these borderlands, from where she looks through a telescope at her old house, which she can neither visit nor reclaim.

Her story is a familiar one: wherever I travelled on the island, on both sides of the line, I met people for whom the events of July 1974 had given their lives an ineradicable undertone of mourning. More than 200,000 people were, in the contemporary argot, ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1974, as the Turkish army responded to a coup in mainland Greece by occupying the fertile, more affluent northern part of the island, including the treasured port of Kyrenia. As the terrified Greeks, who constituted more than four-fifths of the population of the occupied areas, fled south, Turkish Cypriots made the journey in reverse, abandoning their homes. The two communities have remained divided ever since. It is hard to believe that only a couple of miles down the road from Famagusta, the bars and nightclubs of Ayia Napa will soon be opening for yet another night of licentious abandon.

But that’s the appeal of Cyprus, too often it is caricatured as being no more than a bucket-and-spade destination for the cheap sun and booze crowd, but, in fact, it is one of the most appealing resort locations in Europe, certainly if you like to combine sun and sea with history and a little bit of politics.

I spent virtually all my time on the island line-hopping, as it were, moving between the town and the country, the ancient and the modern, the past and the present, and between sites of Islam and Orthodox Christianity. “Different invasions have weathered and eroded Cyprus, piling monument upon monument”, wrote Lawrence Durrell in Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, his travelogue of 1957, in which he obliquely monitored the mounting tensions between Greeks and Turks, and the Greek campaign for Enosis, unity with the homeland.

It is still the same: for everywhere you visit there are traces of what has been before, often in the most incongruous locations. In popular Paphos, for instance, which since 1974 has been transformed into a teeming tourist town, you can step out of your bright, shining, air-conditioned, high-rise hotel and within minutes find yourself wandering among Greek and Roman architectural sites of extraordinary richness and variety.

A sense of the proximity of the past is all around you, especially in the small hill villages surrounding the main towns, where you may find abandoned mosques, Roman mosaics or ruined castles. The effect of all this is the same as when you stumble on a pillbox in the English countryside or a trench line in a field in northern France, the past, you realise, is never actually past: it always reverberates strangely in the present.

As Durrell wrote, in Cyprus you “never stop stumbling upon many echoes from forgotten moments of history with which to illuminate the present”.

Cyprus has been predominantly Christian since its conversion by Saints Paul and Barnabas in 45AD, but the occupation of the island by Ottoman Turks, in 1571, means that there has been a long Islamic influence and presence, too. Mosques are part of the cultural patrimony of the island and they survive even in the Greek Cypriot enclaves, a reminder of a time when Greek and Turk lived together, if not in harmony then at least in uneasy alliance.

Across the Green Line, however, in the rogue Turkish sector of Nicosia, the last divided capital in Europe, there is very little religious tolerance. All the old Greek Orthodox churches I visited had long since been converted into mosques. It was the same in Kyrenia. There is a community of elderly Greeks living in the remote Turkish-occupied and military controlled Karpasia peninsula, the north-east tip of the island, but their numbers are dwindling fast.

The history of Cyprus is so curious and complex, so much of its growth haphazard and serendipitous, that the streets of its ever-changing towns are like a palimpsest with successive generations failing quite to erase the influence of those who have gone before. A sense of the past is what impresses itself most; and it is this perhaps, as much as the long hot summers and Mediterranean languor, that is the source of the island’s fascination.

On my last day I decided to visit the now occupied Kyrenia [a privilege denied to anyone with a Cypriot passport or, indeed, with a Greek name]. You cannot take your hired car across the border, nor can you stay later than 5pm, unless, of course, you go direct to occupied, military controlled north Cyprus in the first instance, which, as it happens, is anything but direct as the “North” is not internationally recognised and hence no airline will fly there.

Fortunately, once you cross the line, there are any number of Turkish taxi drivers touting for business at the border checkpoint. Business is swiftly done and you are on your way to occupied Kyrenia, which is certainly worth paying black market rates to visit. With its intimate harbour of small fishing boats and bars, crumbling castle, labyrinthine streets and surrounding mountains, the town is surely the loveliest in all Cyprus. Greek Cypriots have never stopped mourning their exclusion from Kyrenia. I lost count of the times I spent in waterfront bars listening to songs, which had the melancholy appeal of Portuguese fado music, about the loss of Kyrenia.

On this side of the Green Line, despite the settlement of more than 100,000 mainland Turks here since 1974, it isn’t hard finding someone who remembers a time before partition. My taxi driver, for instance, who was born and grew up in Paphos. His questions were the same as those of the Greek Cypriots I had met. What is it like on the other side? How has it changed?

The sadness of contemporary Cyprus, with its actual and metaphorical lines of division, is that today only a fortunate traveller can attempt to answer such questions.

Travelled as a guest of the Cyprus Tourism Organisation. Flew return with Cyprus Airways to Paphos. Stayed at The Palm Beach Hotel (tel 4644500, http://www.palmbeachhotel.com), Larnaca, The Annabelle (tel 6238333, http://theannabellehotel.com), Paphos, and The Coral Beach Resort Hotel (tel 6621601, http://www.coral.com.cy), Paphos.

Recommended reading > Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell, Faber & Faber.

The south coast of Cyprus is just the kind of place that Brits really enjoy. Alas! From Paphos in the west to Ayia Napa in the east, Greek Cypriots have cannily exploited Brit’s national need to get wasted somewhere hot every year. Many tourists never stir beyond the beach unless it’s down to the Aphrodite Disco. And yet, less than half an hour north of Paphos is a wholly different Cyprus, beautiful but tragic, which most visitors never see.

The coastal route that runs from Polis Chrysochous to Kato Pyrgos shows Cyprus at is best: tiny churches, huge mountains, tavernas with Greek families, fields where farm-workers harvest courgettes and back roads where little old ladies in black sell bags of grapes.

 A partial view shows a nearly deserted road in the southwestern Cypriot village of Kato Pyrgos.

Reality cuts in when this winding road stops abruptly, east of Kato Pyrgos, at a small concrete entry box where a youth in military fatigues sits reading a graphic novel. Beyond the barrier that he is notionally guarding, the coast road has fallen apart, sacrificed to the UN’s Green Line, which keeps this island from tearing itself apart 35 years after Turks invaded and occupied the north part of the Cyprus Republic.

Kato Pyrgos is spoken of as a ghost town, blighted by an unresolved conflict that even casts doubts. When the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union, it is the only member with a divided capital and enclaves of isolated territory which need the UN to guarantee their survival.

I set out from Polis Chrysochous one bright Sunday morning in search of borders, enclaves and ghost towns. I’d hardly left this prosperous little town when the car in front of me braked suddenly and disgorged a Greek Orthodox priest, robes, beard, trainers and hair in a bun. As he carried his chalice up to the modern basilica I resumed my journey east. I soon realised that for all that this coastline is underexploited by tourism it’s certainly intensively worked for agriculture. The narrow strip of land between the Med and the mountains produces lemons, limes, pomegranates, bananas, grapes and hay. It also has its fair share of buildings in progress which look as if they may never be finished, something it shares with mainland Greece.

My first stop was at Pachyammos, which sits on a rise above the “broad sand” from which the village takes its name. A fine, small, roadside church sits here with a modern mosaic to Saint George on the outside and an old man and woman on the inside who, kept assuring me the church was “very good”. Pachyammos is home to the shrine of Saint Rafael and also to a roadside shop selling all kinds of tourist tat. More interesting is the track down to the beach which terminates in a modern Greek Orthodox cemetery built slap bang up against an abandoned concrete pill-box, vintage 1974, which flies two sun-bleached flags, one blue and white for Greece and the other white with a yellow outline of the island for Cyprus.

A large concrete UN compound sits on the other side of the track, half camouflaged and with a basketball net prominent above the parapets. The troops inside are guarding the entrance to the Turkish invaded and occupied Kokkina enclave.

At this point, my route diverted inland, climbing over 1,000 feet to look down into Kokkina, a small triangle of land where, in August 1964, General George Grivas-Digenis was halted in his move to eliminate the enclave by bombers sent over from Istanbul. The Turks carpet-bombed all around Kokkina and even up as far as Polis Chrysochous, and today the hillsides still have barren 20 ft swathes cut in them. The enclave remains wholly inaccessible to anyone approaching from the Greek side.

All I could do was put my car in second gear and climb into the mountains. At a modern picnic spot I got out my field glasses but there was little to see, a few white buildings along what used to be the coast road. Strips of territory that get fought over are rarely impressive enough to justify so much bloodshed.

Greek villages used to sit up here on the mountain road above Kokkina, but they have long since been abandoned, just in case the Turks come back. Alevka must have been beautiful once but now it is not so much a ghost town as a “goat town” with the gaping casements of derelict buildings acting as shelves on which skittish black goats display themselves. The odd camouflaged bus stop was the only sign that human life continues.

Descending towards the old Greek coastal town of Mansoura I spotted a UN observation post on a ridge looking down into the Turkish enclave. A large sign in whitewashed rocks marked out that this was UN 03 so I pulled over and asked if I might go up and take a look. Lest the two UN infantrymen suspect me of being a Greek spy, I stressed that I was English. Unfortunately, the squaddies turned out to be Argentinian. My request was roundly refused, the more senior trooper demonstrating graphically to me that if he let me through his throat would be cut.

Reaching Mansoura I found that most of it had disappeared behind the razor wire that marked out yet another UN post. What buildings I could see had fallen apart. All that the boys from Buenos Aires seemed to be guarding was an exercise machine.

On entering Kato Pyrgos I found it livelier than expected. A new marina wall and hotel had been built west of the old town and shops and holiday apartments were available to rent. The old town, though, had a sleepy feel to it. As my road narrowed and trees began to overhang, I saw old men sitting at cafés, playing cards and drinking tea.

I parked by the Oak Tree Café and discovered that the huge live oak which dominated its earthen courtyard was obscuring the fact that this café camped out on the ground floor of a hotel, left unfinished since the 1970s. Through unglazed windows I could see a concrete staircase descend to the first floor and then stop in mid air. The patron took my order for coffee but I never got to pay for it as Marios, a porter from the hotel where I was staying, generously intercepted the bill.

Thanking Marios I asked him about life in Kato Pyrgos. “A backwater”, he said, “since they built the border”. Marios did, however, recommend that I look at the church dedicated to Emperor Constantine and Helen, his mother. A small, square stone building with a beguilingly amateurish iconostasis, the church had walls lined with monastic pews of the kind that support the elbows of worshippers who might find themselves standing for hours. A new basilica was being built just opposite, but this church felt like a genuine glimpse of the Byzantine religion that came to Cyprus in the time of Constantine.

Kato Pyrgos’s beach resort turned out to be deserted. Grapes on the vines that covered its abandoned taverna had turned to raisins so I chose to visit the border itself, half a mile down the old coast road. Here it was that I came upon the uniformed youth with his comic book. He regarded me in a slow surly way and I looked back at him and we both decided that I wasn’t going any further towards Turkish-occupied Cyprus. It was time to go back. There was no way forward after all.

It was late afternoon now and I was hungry. After passing back through Pachyammos I turned off towards the sea and found the Kanalli Taverna at Pomos Point. The view back to Pachyammos, across Chrysochou Bay, showed a sweep of beautiful blue water and the new cemetery on its promontory, built so close to the Kokkina enclave and that fortified UN post. What I hadn’t noticed before was the hillside above where, in red and white stones, members of the enclave had fashioned a large Turkish flag. As a view it summed up both the beauty and sadness of this coastline. Unspoilt yet savagely marred by recent history.

The author travelled to Cyprus courtesy of Cyprus Tourism Organisation (www.visitcyprus.org.cy) and stayed at the Anassa Hotel (tel 26 888000, www.thanoshotels.com) in Polis Chrysochous. 

Backed into a corner of concrete and pavement, few Athenians have a garden or a grassy lawn to call their own. Each resident of this crowded metropolis, home to nearly half of Greece’s total population [10,964,020], has to make do with just 2.5 sq.m of greenery. There’s just not enough to go around. Other European cities, however, have an average of 10 sq.m per capita. Brussels has a whopping 27 sq.m of green space per inhabitant. Urban planners agree that Athens needs a massive injection of green. And while the average Athenian pines for more park facilities for leisure and recreation, many argue the only way out of this dead-end situation of over-development is to tear down buildings.

Recent town planning surveys show green spaces make up 10.3 percent of Athens’ total area. Combined with areas that are free of construction, the amount of open space represents about 24.6 percent. The largest areas of greenery are Pedio tou Areos Park [about 52.5 acres] and the National Gardens [37.5 acres]. Smaller parks include Alsos Syngrou [30 acres] and Alsos Pangratiou [7 acres]. But despite seemingly little green, there are some 750 acres of undeveloped, neglected and in many cases completely forgotten open spaces scattered around the city. This total area is about the size of 600 football fields.

Where is this vast expanse of open space? A recent study carried out by the Athens-based Coordinating Committee for Open Spaces found that centrally-located neighbourhoods contain the lion’s share of potential open areas. Patissia and Ambelokipoi each have a total 30 acres. The area near the senior citizens’ home, known as Gerokomeio, has some 47.5 acres. Neos Kosmos has a total area of 41.5 acres.

“These are small squares, parks and vacant lots that if used wisely can be turned into small oases for our much-afflicted city”, says civil engineer Panayotis Patarias, a technical advisor at Athens Municipality. Many other experts agree. Employees at the Environment Ministry’s Athens Organisation, involved in town planning and protecting the capital’s environment, concur the problem is not where to find open spaces, but how to make the most of them.

Dorgouti, an area of about 3.75 acres behind the Inter-Continental Hotel, is a classic example. Half of this area belongs to the Athens Municipality, about half an acre belongs to the Church and the rest to the Public Power Corporation. According to Patarias, this could be a “real oasis”. The problem is that those involved in managing it are not able to sit at the table and reach an agreement.

Deserted army bases and abandoned factories take up a lot of space in Athens. Katerina Sykianaki of the Athens Organisation, says the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens have finally set the wheels in motion, though problems still remain. “It’s our job to plan for greenery and open spaces”, she said. “Plans to create parks in the city, however, are caught up in procedures with the various agencies that share ownership of a specific plot of land to form agreements… Aside from conducting research and drawing up the plans, the implementation is not in our hands”.

She points to Goudi to illustrate the situation. The Athens Polytechnic hammered out a plan to create a 250-acre park in the area, but this ambitious design is still on paper. A similar example is the old airport at Hellenikon, where Sykianaki says more than a dozen different owners are involved. “Studies have been conducted, but they are never realised”, explains Sykianaki. “It is not just the money needed to fund these projects, it is trying to get all those involved to agree and to work together”.

The king of shock rock, the most “beloved” rock entertainer of the world according to The Rolling Stone Album Guide, Alice Cooper, comes to Cyprus for one and only concert.

Scandalous costumes, guillotines and electric chairs on the stage, combined with the “foggy” eyes which bleed black make up, create a unique audio-visual show that Cyprus has never experienced before.

The show in Limassol is part of the World Tour of Alice Cooper entitled “Theatre of Death” which is a spectacular new show with all his greatest hits and which will start in Europe on the 16th of May and will include Cyprus as the last European stop before the tour will move on to North America and Australia. Doors open at 19:00 hours. 

Tickets are available in all outlets of the ACS Couriers, tel 77777373, and the following locations >

• Nicosia: Musical Paradise, Armenias, Octagonο, Traffic DVD Shop
• Limassol: Musical Paradise, Brent Cross
• Larnaca and Paralimni: Acapella
• Paphos: Calypso

Related Links > www.alicecoopercyprus.com