Colonial and Postcolonial Cyprus by Daniele Nunziata

Author:Daniele Nunziata
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030582364
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Nationalism here is the discursive reiteration of colonialist binaries: the oppositions of Europe/‘Asia’ and lightness/‘darkness’ are re-appropriated to denigrate cultural differences. This Orientalist schism associates Turkish-speakers with an essential, timeless violence which threatens the stability of the island. However, the repetition of the instruments of conflict used by ‘Turks’ and ‘Greeks’—the ‘knives and axes’ of the former become the ‘pickaxes [and] knife’ of the latter—imbricates parallels between the two groupings, like the shared figure of the nationalist ‘flag bearer’, to deconstruct absolute difference. Indeed, counter to racialist concepts of physiognomic characteristics including those constructed by colonialist ethnologists, the physical, cultural, and social identities of ‘a Greek or a Turk’ cannot be visually differentiated by the narrator. Instead, he creates a subject position which sympathises with the mutual experiences of mourning across the island, regardless of linguistic ‘sides’.

Breaking from Hellenistic historical narratives, he stresses that the modern history of the island involves centuries of intercommunal cohesion, one which, having been ruptured, distorts the intrinsic identity of Nicosia itself. Framing these ‘change[s]’ as the product of a colonial ‘divide and rule’ policy, the account gestures metatextually to the changing structures of the increasingly-divided Nicosia of the 1960s (foreshadowing the climax of 1974), in opposition with pre-colonial unity described here and in Baybars’ text. In addition to imperialism, however, the allusion to all three Guarantor Powers—Britain, Greece, and Turkey—distributes culpability among all three metropoles. Commencing with Greece, the monumentalised centres are re-written as sources, not only of culture, but sectarian politics. Nationalism and nationalist division are framed as a discursive ‘story’ reshaping history, society, and urban infrastructures for their agendas—a ‘story’ here repeated, but then revised, in the narrator’s writing-back to political interventions by both the British Empire and the equally-expansionist bodies of Greece and Turkey.

A preceding description of Nicosia presents it, like Baybars, as an essentially-pluralistic space ‘with Greek, Turkish, and Frankish quarters’ within its Venetian walls. Stressing that ‘[w]ithin a few steps of one another were churches, mosques, covered Venetian balconies, the square of Serai where the Turkish Pasha’s palace had stood…’,151 the narrative imagines a transcultural city where religious buildings of different denominations exist peacefully and the last structure, the ‘Pasha’s palace’, is recognised as an alternative to the Orthodox ‘Archbishop’s Palace’ detailed in the Hellenocentric first chapter. While the narrator initially argues that outside ‘the walls the new city of Nicosia began, free from the memory of conquerors, completely Greek’, as part of a nationalist, anti-colonial restructuring of the space in response to Western European modernity, he revises this summary in the chapter’s conclusion to suggest that ‘[t]he new city did not break from the past… it had been built on the same foundation of history’.152 The closing refers ambivalently to how both British imperialism has failed to be fully repudiated and how Nicosia’s layered, pluralistic ‘past’ cannot be elided by purist nationalisms.

Indeed, in the final chapters of the work, almost all references to Greece and Hellenism are suspended. The final allusion appears during a depiction of the parades celebrating the advent of independence.

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