In addition to psychological wounds and other unseeable remnants of war (landmines, mostly), Cyprus also has many visible signs of war. This is remarkable when you consider its beaches and all-inclusive hotels host nearly three million tourists per year, most of whom probably see Cyprus the way American college students see Cancun. In addition to the UN buffer zone and many military bases on both sides of the island, one other fairly common sight is bunkers in various states of disrepair. Unlike Albania’s famous (and quite visible) bunkers, these are easy to miss if you don’t look closely. There is one just off the road about a half a mile from my house; I drive by it 4-5 times a week on my way to the stables, and it took me at least six months to notice it. I found another one coming back from the barn just a few months ago.
When we were driving up north a few weeks back, we came across a couple of huge bunkers right on the northern coast. We are guessing they were put here by the Greek Cypriot National Guard, probably in the late 1960s or early 1970s, but we don’t really know for sure. Severin initially refused to go in, but as long as there is no crawling involved (and also no immediately visible snakes or spiders) I’m generally pretty happy to explore. While the portion of the bunker you see above ground is probably a good eight or nine feet tall, once you step down into it there really isn’t even enough room to stand up. It would be pretty miserable to spend any amount of time in there.
The area around the bunker had been turned into a monument/memorial for Turkish paratroopers. The place was totally deserted, and judging by the amount of broken glass in the parking lot my guess is it’s a favorite drinking spot for the youths. The photo speaks for themselves:
I wasn’t really sure what the memorial was about, so we stopped to read the signs. They included the Turkish version of history vis-a-vis Cyprus and included some pretty provocative assertions. I love controversy so I took a few pictures, but I marked them as private on Flickr since I don’t want to be publicly associated with the Turkish version of history. Some day, once I’ve left the government and get my Flickr albums cleaned up, organized, and properly captioned, I’ll try to remember to come back and add them to this post.
The gentleman above is Cengiz Topel (and I believe the below is a portion of his plane). The official signage at the memorial was poorly translated and therefore a bit hard to follow, but based on Wikipedia this is what I have gathered: Topel and several other Turkish jets flew to Cyprus in August 1964 during the Battle of Tillyria. This battle was in the early days of the all-out inter-communal conflict; the Greek Cypriots believed the Turks were arming the Turkish Cypriots and sending supplies and reinforcements to the Kokkina exclave (Kokkina remains one of the problematic geographic oddities of Cyprus’ history; even today it is a Turkish military exclave surrounded on three sides by Greek Cypriot territory and on the fourth side by the sea).
Topel’s plane was shot down, and though he ejected from his plane and survived the landing, he later died in Greek Cypriot custody. The signs and various Turkish-aligned web sources allege he was tortured and killed.
