Today the news talks about Nicosia finally seems to have a place on the map, the failure of the global economy has succeeded. Never mind the Nicosia I know, the place that I have being documenting during the last two years, the European capital divided for forty years. No mention of the passport control line to cross a street in the main center, or the wall that you find when you walk around a corner.
The images I present show the old city of Nicosia, a curious landscape I found within the Venetian walls of the old city that limit and are crossed by the barrier dividing the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot ethnicities
Southern Europe wounded by the constant reminder of the invader who lives just in front, leaving it away from the rest of the modern city. At the middle is the abandoned buffer zone, where life ceased to exist 40 years ago and whose only inhabitants are the UN troops patrolling the Green Line. In northern poverty of the settlers who lived to repopulate the area from Anatolia after the Turkish invasion to that area of the island
Overall an historic city degraded by a conflict that solution have failed and a wound that is still bleeding.
You can remove a country, you can design new boundaries that separate people, but a city is destined to remain united, must come together and protect themselves, and just be a re-look inward. All cities have rebuilt their historic centers, have them washed and cleaned up for display to the world. Nicosia is not less, must be protected and returned to the living world, politicians and citizens must understand that the city is above them, that was here before and not theirs, they are in it to take care of her and show proud as those who came before and did.
