Issue 11 - January - 2014
Welcome to
Varosha, the
Mediterranean's
best kept
secret.
tles nesting in them.
Pictures of the devastation circulate online but
the photographers won't always admit to taking them.
Anything of value is likely to have been looted
long ago and the infrastructure is now damaged beyond repair. But Markides has big
plans for Varosha.
"From the moment I saw it, I felt driven to see
this place revive," she says. "You could feel
the energy, its potential, the energy that was
once there."
Now living in New York, Markides is spearheading a proposal to turn Varosha into an
eco-city - a model for sustainability and peaceful coexistence. Her plans have gathered the
support of both Greek and Turkish Cypriots,
and she has formed an unlikely friendship.
"It was just like living next-door to ghosts,"
says Ceren Bogac, 34, a Turkish Cypriot who
grew up in a house overlooking Varosha. "The
houses had flower pots, curtains, but no one
was living there - it was a space which had
been left suddenly." Her school was by the
fence too, so if a ball got kicked over by mistake, it was gone forever.
Bogac's grandparents were refugees from Larnaca in the South and had been given a Greek
Cypriot home in exchange for the property
they had to abandon. Bogac grew up there, but
when she was five or six years old she made a
troubling discovery.
"One day I found, in a box, the personal belongings of other people, like photo albums
and journals," says Bogac. "I asked my grandmother: 'Who does this belong to?' She said: 'It
belongs to the real owners of this house.' And
that was the first time I realised that we don't
own the house that we are living in.
"I was shocked," she says. "I was thinking
about how this happened, why these people
had to leave their place and what their psychology was when they were running to get
out. What kind of situation they had been
faced with in order to leave everything behind
- the children's toys, the photo albums, everything."
This childhood realisation shaped Bogac's entire career - she became a psychologist and architect in order to understand how it affects
people to live in someone else's home. As part
of her research she came across Vasia
Markides' 2008 documentary Hidden in the
Sand in which Famagustians on both sides talk
about how they feel about the division.
Bogac emailed the documentary maker and
they began to correspond regularly.
One day Markides called and said: "Are you
still interested in Varosha? Because it's haunting me."
"Yes," said Bogac, "it's haunting me too."
They began to share ideas about how to improve the situation and that's how the Famagusta Ecocity Project first took off.
The idea is for Varosha to become a model for
green technologies. "We need to pay attention
to the signs that nature is giving us," says
Markides, referring to the ݅䁹