The Green Line in Nicosia
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The Green Line divides Nicosia between the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish-occupied north. John Kiriakou was taken to it in July 2026 during a three-day visit that also included the old town inside the Venetian walls, the Troodos Mountains, and the eleventh-century Saint John Lampadistis Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

He said he had forgotten how powerful it is to see the line, the occupation forces and the settlers on the other side, and was explicit that he did not want to make the situation sound worse than it is, but characterised much of what happens along it as done "just in order to humiliate." He cited one of the biggest flags in the world laid out on the mountainside and lit at night, visible every day and every night for fifty-two years of occupation, and the call to prayer pointed at the Greek neighbourhoods of the city.

His conclusion was that the Turks are not interested in a settlement: "They like the status quo just the way it is and that's not acceptable."

The city's mayor took him up to the roof of the municipality, about seventy metres from the gate leading into the occupied sector. From there, Kiriakou said, one side is modern and first world with tall buildings and a moving economy, and on the other "there's literally nothing happening there. It's like out of the early '60s."

Crossing the line, and the refusal that preceded it

Speaking at the Cyprus Diaspora Forum in Limassol on 8 May 2026, Kiriakou described an earlier arrival in the divided capital in similar terms. He had driven up from Larnaca after dark, stepped onto his hotel balcony, looked up at the mountainside and asked what the illuminated crescent was; the friend he was calling told him it had been there, lit in their faces, for years. He dated its absence to his own 1992 visit, when he did not remember it being there.

He had, on principle, never crossed to the occupied side and had refused to. He went only after the mayor of Nicosia urged him to, stayed forty-five minutes, and came back telling his friend, "I feel like I have to take a shower. I can't do this anymore."

He drew a sharp distinction between populations. Of the professors, lawyers, activists and political figures he spoke with that week, "every single person I talked to had nothing but nice things to say about Turkish Cypriots. It's the Turkish occupiers and the settlers that are the problem." The settlers, he stressed, are "Anatolians we're talking about. They're not Cypriots. They're not ethnic Cypriots", and the resulting demographic change is, in his assessment, "the most dangerous component here," compounded by the fact that the generation displaced in 1974 is now elderly and the living memory of a bicommunal population is disappearing.

Asked by the mayor's own account whether settlers looking across at the Republic's prosperity felt any envy, Kiriakou reported the mayor's answer that they do not have that conversation: the Turkish state supplies what they need, including land taken from Greek Cypriots, so there is no incentive to upset the arrangement.

See also

- Kiriakou's Cypriot ancestry
- British Bases in Cyprus
