The World Without Us

The town of Varosha, on the Greek end of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, was built in the early 1970s as a high-end resort—“Cyprus’s Riviera.” After the civil war between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in 1974, Varosha ended up under Turkish control, and the hotels were all hastily abandoned. The town was temporarily fenced off to keep squatters out, but the Greek-Turkish conflict was never resolved, and Varosha was never reclaimed. Allen Cavinder, a British electrical engineer who inspected the area two years later, was surprised to find not just weeds but entire trees already sprouting in the cracked pavement. Rats and pigeons had colonized the empty, windowless hotels. By 1980, “shredded laundry [was] still hanging from clotheslines,” but “roofs had collapsed and trees were growing straight out of houses,” and “entire slabs of cement” had been heaved aside by flowers germinating in cracks (96). Twenty years later, Varosha was completely overgrown, the buildings entirely unsalvageable.

At a museum in the port city of Kyrenia, a salvaged 2,300-year-old Greek merchant ship is, by contrast, in remarkably good condition. The wooden hull is intact, having been protected from oxygen by being underwater; the copper nails are not rusted, and lead fishing weights and ceramic urns are preserved.