The bells ring from the small church in the Old Town, their sound bouncing off stone and air. Twenty minutes later, the hoja sings for another audience on the north side of the wall. Two faiths, two worlds, separated by nothing more than a few metres of barbed wire and fifty-one years of waiting.
For someone from Limassol, this proximity feels almost surreal. You grow up in a city where the Green Line is a distant term, something you learn in history class or hear about in political speeches. You don’t see it. You don’t feel it slicing through streets and families. You don’t live with the flag of another hanging above your skyline.
But here in Nicosia, you can’t avoid it. The line is right there. It hums quietly beneath the traffic, a permanent pause button pressed on the island’s history. Across it, UN soldiers drive back and forth, keeping watch over an arrangement that was never meant to last this long.
Politis’ headquarters stand right across the Green Line, and as faith had it, my newly found office faces the 2nd floor window with a first-class view. You lift your eyes up from your computer screen and they rest on the bullet marks on the tower across, the one stuck permanently in that terrible summer of 1974.
And life goes on. A Limassolian working above the Green Line, an artist painting the walls of a checkpoint, the birds that cross without passports. Even the palm tree inside the buffer zone stands as a witness, untouched not because it is sacred, but because no one is allowed to care for it. It grows in neglect, and in its own quiet way, it resists.
This week, as Turkish Cypriots elected a pro-unification leader, there was a flicker of something rare. Hope. For many Cypriots, it is a cautious, almost painful hope. They have seen it come and go too many times. But for someone from Limassol, where the line is invisible, the idea feels lighter, almost possible. We imagine the island whole again, not because we can see it, but because we’ve never had to look at its division every day.
Maybe that’s why the buffer zone feels so absurd to me. A moment of peace suspended between two halves of chaos. A place where time has stopped, and yet where, every so often, something as small as an election north of the line can make you believe that maybe, just maybe, it hasn’t stopped forever.