A shell of memory: The Cyprus conflict and Nicosia’s walled city

Introduction

Once grand Ottoman residences, many of the buildings that compose the north-east corner of Nicosia’s walled city today are used as pansiyon, or hostels, for single male workers recently arrived from Turkey. This area today is a black hole for most Cypriots who have no reason to venture into this part of the city, defined by its dilapidated buildings. One young Turkish-Cypriot woman describes the visceral sense of discomfort she feels while in this area, even when passing through by car, when she has to drive through some of these streets from the center, in order to exit the city walls. ‘You feel scared because you feel like you are suddenly in a foreign environment … but at the same time it is in your own country. You feel nervous because if your car breaks down there, no one will be able to help you because they may not even speak Turkish [but Kurdish or Arabic].’ These types of comments are not uncommon among Cypriots, and many describe this part of the city as a terrain that is vague, distant and foreign. It is rumored that in these narrow lanes entire families share single rooms in houses that do not have electricity or running water. There are even darker whispers that speak of violence and abuse in these dim interiors.

Wanderings in this neighborhood make it clear that this is a forgotten corner of the city – one populated as much by the rumor and atmosphere of otherness as it is by obvious physical neglect. Upon emerging from this area onto a street that marks the edge of this murky territory, a littered slope used for parking can be found, leading down to the main commercial corridor. From here the edges of a small, and apparently inaccessible, cemetery can be made out below. I discovered months later, on a subsequent trip to Nicosia, that this is the Tekke Bahchesi Shehitli, a cemetery for martyrs that was created in a large garden in 1963 when Turkish-Cypriots were unable to access their cemeteries outside of the walls. Here they buried people killed in intercommunal fighting in 1963, and later in 1974 the bodies of Turkish-Cypriots who had been found in a mass grave were moved here. For years this was the site of a hypertrophy of memory where memorial ceremonies were frequently conducted. However, as Turkish-Cypriots tired of the rhetoric of ‘blood and martyrdom,’ (Bryant, 2004: 200) they suspended these annual ceremonies. This cemetery now lies hidden – approachable only from a back road off of a side street, faced by the rear exits of stores. While it is neatly maintained it has been years since a ceremony of remembrance has been conducted at this site. This cemetery, an important site of memory that now lies sleeping in the city – as well as the unclear means of its access – are emblematic of the nature of place and memory in Nicosia.

It is this intertwined nature of memory and forgetting in Nicosia’s walled city center that makes it a nexus for memory, distinguished from newer parts of the city. This has much to do with its location as a borderland, one marked by the many outward symbols and images of conflict, as well as certain formal and spatial characteristics. This article will examine this place as an important locus of memory: looking at the relationship of those memories to the Cyprus conflict. Today the intersection of memory, place, and conflict is emerging as an area of inquiry in several different disciplines. ¹ Additionally, recent scholarship has focused on the relationship between memory, imagination and the city. ² Within this context, this article will explore memories and imaginings related to Nicosia, highlighting how conflict impacts upon several broader themes of enduring significance to investigations of memory: the relationship between remembering and forgetting, between past and present, and between inside and outside.

It can be difficult to speak of memory in concrete terms, but place has proved to be a vehicle through which memory can be explored, enabling the grounding of this ephemeral phenomenon in a material substrate that can then be more accessibly interrogated. This article will attempt to grapple with memory as it manifests in the city in spatial practices, materiality and symbolic representation. The aim is to thereby use the material substrate of the city itself to locate and describe elusive aspects of memory as they relate to the conflict in Nicosia. Here, in relation to the divided historical narratives and divided official memories that inform this divided city, the unique capacity of place to embody memory is amplified in importance. Even the officially forgotten can be retained in place. For Ricoeur ‘forgetting has a positive meaning insofar as having-been prevails over being-no-longer in the meaning attached to the idea of the past’. ‘Being-no-longer’ is what is often pursued in contested environments through the imposition of official histories, and the banishment of entire sets of memories. Place, however, resonates with the aspect of ‘having-been’, as its reconfiguration or erasure is always imperfect, always incomplete. And ‘having-been makes forgetting the immemorial resource offered to the work of remembering’ (2004: 443).

Memory can be seen as embedding in materiality in the manner in which individuals or groups ‘see themselves’ in the built environment. Walter Benjamin describes this in an autobiographical sense where moments ‘steal along … walls like beggars that appear wraithlike at the windows, to vanish again’ (Crang and Travlou, 2001:171). Nietzsche has discussed this in terms of the ‘antiquarian’ historical thinker, where ‘The history of his city becomes for him the history of his own self. He understands the walls, the turreted gate, the dictate of the city council, and the folk festival, like an illustrated diary of his youth’ (2010[1873]: 15). And in divided cities, where conflict has disrupted the relationship between place and memory, this dynamic takes on other aspects, as this article will discuss. Conflict has a significant impact on memories related to place as it disrupts existing patterns of dwelling and inhabitation. Memories of conflict are attached to the places in which they were sited, while, at the same time, intentionally crafted historical narratives and national memories are projected on to places – creating ideological constructions and images of places as they should be remembered. Conflict can create borders, refugees and scarred landscapes of war; and urban conflicts in particular are often territorial in nature. In this way memories related to conflict come to be attached to place. This article will begin to question how collective and individual memories about such contested sites are reconfigured.

In many ways, Nicosia is the classic example of a divided city – split neatly down the middle by a border that divides the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities, who call it respectively Lefkosia (Greek) and Lekosha (Turkish). Looking at the city in plan, we see the perfect circle of the city’s historic core and the violent rupture of the Buffer Zone – a no man’s land that disrupts this ideal geometry(Figure 1). Historically, the Ottoman Turks and Greeks shared this space, living in separate neighborhoods yet coming together at the city center. This perfect circle is a massive stone structure, three miles in circumference, an excellent example of Renaissance military architecture built in the 16th century by the island’s Venetian rulers. Demolishing the existing medieval city walls and outlying structures, they constructed this new shell to protect and contain the existing town center. Thus the tension between container and contained, between form and use, has been inherent in Nicosia’s walls for centuries.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Nicosia’s walled city

The shell presents a similar dynamic: an object that appears solid and static, yet is formed by the living organism within it. Even the emptiness of the shell resonates with the remnants of the presence of what is now absent. What child has not held a seashell to their ear and thought ‘I can hear the ocean’? Levinas writes of the ‘rumbling’ silence of the child’s bedroom as resembling ‘what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were full’ (Alford, 2004:160). Container and contained, empty and full – the shell presents many such contradictions. Housing the invertebrate within, it involves the hidden and the manifest. Like the hard exoskeleton of some mollusks, whose small holes allow for the creature’s exhalation of water, the shell contains, while allowing for elements to leak out. The figure of the shell is introduced here in this article because it proves useful in describing how conflict impacts place and memory in Nicosia’s walled city.

Psychoanalysts make reference to the agency of self-protection as an ‘ectoderm’ or ‘shell’, which is directed both ‘inward and outward … yet, the shell itself is marked by what it shelters’ (Abraham and Torok, 1994: 80). This article argues that the city walls act as a shell of memory, offering inward-directed protection against signs of conflict – ruins, military structures, a changed population – holding them inside, apparently forgotten on the outside. Materially, these ‘markings’ take the form of abandonment and neglect. Here, place articulates forgetting, extending beyond the individual and embedding in the materiality of the city. Asked why they do not spend time in the walled city, young Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots offered responses such as, ‘it’s not preserved as it should be, you walk around and you see windows hanging off, it makes it look scary.’ ‘It looks empty, there’s no life there.’ ‘I know that it’s not dangerous, but the way it looks, it feels insecure.’ ³ Thus, forgetting manifests in less obvious, less physical, ways as well – in the distancing from the walled city, whereby Cypriots may relate to it as an image or representation, rather than as a site that is experienced through the senses. Similar to the study of a shell – the remnant of the life that created it – this article will examine the physical and imaginative construction of the walled city today, as affected by the conflict. Mirroring the seashell’s liaison between life and artifact, the city too presents its own extreme contradictions as it reflects these dialectics between past and present, between inside and outside, and between remembering and forgetting.

Remembering and forgetting

A river once ran through the center of Nicosia’s walled city. It was diverted by the island’s Venetian rulers in the 16th century, and the riverbed streets later formed the backbone of a major commercial corridor running east–west through the city. It is along these streets that Cypriots came together – streets that contained a mixture of Greek, Turkish and Armenian businesses. Here craftsmen worked in shops, almost all of which were long and narrow. Therefore the tall, wide doors were often left open, creating a rich and vibrant streetscape (Bakshi, 2012). While the historic urban topography of the riverbed streets has endured, today most of them fall within the completely inaccessible Buffer Zone, radically transformed into lines of division.

The form and fabric of Nicosia today are not only the result of the play of history on the physical landscape, but are also strongly connected to the relationship between remembering and forgetting, which influences attitudes towards place and the subsequent forms of inhabitation of the walled city. In divided cities, the past can intrude more forcefully into the present. Just as the shell is marked by the traces of the life form that created it, the past leaves its evident markings on the materiality of the city. With the building of the Venetian Walls, Nicosia was based on an ideal form, a geometric abstraction. But division distorted its natural geometries and the center became instead two peripheries. The reality of the city today, the uses and residents in the walled city, are the result of this dramatic rupture. ⁴ Clearly the physical alteration of the fabric of the city that has had the greatest impact on its development is the interruption that runs through its historic center.

This divide is the result of a contentious history, one that is represented differently by each side. While they had lived together in Nicosia since the establishment of Ottoman rule in 1571, intercommunal relations between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots deteriorated drastically in the 1950s. At this time Greek-Cypriots began to actively pursue Enosis, or union with Greece, in an anti-colonial movement against the island’s British rulers. The Turkish minority, only 18 percent of the island’s population, fearful of a future as Greek subjects, forwarded the option of Taksim, or partition of the island. Neither of these proposals came to fruition, and instead the independent Republic of Cyprus was established in 1960, with both communities sharing power. It lasted for only three years before dissolving into conflict and the physical separation of these communities in 1963. ⁵

The period from 1963 to 1974 was one of intercommunal strife and violence. During these years of insecurity most Turkish-Cypriots gathered together in enclaves, the largest one in Lefkosha. A Greek-Cypriot imposed blockade limited the entry of food and supplies (Borowiec, 2000: 63). In 1974, Archbishop Makarios, the Republic’s legal leader, was overthrown in a coup, and Nicos Sampson, who had a reputation for acts of violence against Turkish Cypriots from the EOKA years, (Bolukbasi, 1988: 185) was installed as the new president. In response, Turkish forces entered Cyprus in 1974, controlling 37 percent of the island. Declared a sovereign republic in 1983, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) has never been officially recognized by any country other than Turkey, which maintains a large military presence on the island. Since 1964, in the longest peace-keeping mission in history, the United Nations has retained control of the Buffer Zone that divides the island, with the borders remaining closed until 2003.

Inside the walls of this divided city, daily life is marked by concrete and symbolic signs of what does or does not belong to Greek-Cypriot or Turkish-Cypriot space. The center of the city is rife with symbols of conflict that demarcate division, and in turn demarcate the conflict in the imagination. The edges of the Buffer Zone are littered with flags, graffiti and various signage, animated by evidence of the activity of nearby residents, such as lines of laundry strung up to dry adjacent to strictly demarcated forbidden military areas. Less obvious signs are those that call out the Berlin Cafe and No Border Underwear, names of private businesses that clearly reference their location near the center of division. These images, located in places throughout the walled city, are part of a directed ‘art of memory’ (Yates, 1966). ⁶ Here we can extrapolate from Michael Billig’s thesis of ‘banal nationalism’, which ‘operates with routine words … that offer constant, but barely conscious, reminders of the homeland’, to this discussion of the walled city where images that mark out territory operate in the same way as these ‘prosaic words’ (1995: 93). The walls contain the physical infrastructure of division, including military structures, observation points and barriers to the Buffer Zone, which is itself an ever-changing, eroding topography of ruins consisting of the shells and facades of buildings that formerly signified the inclusive environment of the riverbed streets. Unlike the Berlin Wall or Belfast’s Peace Walls, there is no visual barrier to what lies beyond: the ruins compose its visual skeleton. Its edges are demarcated by a varied composition of walls, fences, sand bags, barrels and empty buildings. Forgotten pockets exist along these edges, scars on a landscape of conflict that can still be seen along with tunnels and trenches long abandoned. The visitor is left with the sense that the old city has been neglected – relegated to the edges of contemporary urban life in Nicosia (Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Near the Buffer Zone within the walled city

The spaces, uses and populations of the old city have largely been defined by its division. Whereas prior to the 1950s almost everyone resided within the walls, today few Cypriots live in the old city (Attalides, 1981). The center began to draw peripheral urban functions as carpenters, mechanics and a variety of other tradesmen settled into abandoned buildings, using them as workshops. The ring of parks and parking lots that encircle the walls serve as a kind of ‘seal’, contributing to the old city’s isolation from the larger urban area. A large portion of the walled city consists of areas of low-income housing, generally occupied by migrants, overlapping with areas of dilapidation where the effects of time and the lack of maintenance can clearly be seen (Figure 3). In the predominantly Greek-Cypriot south 55 percent of the old city’s population is composed of migrants, and in the north this number jumps to nearly 70 percent (UNOPS, 2004). ⁷ This presence is quite visible, and has affected the efforts of the bicommunal Nicosia Master Plan, ⁸ where they have had difficulty attracting Cypriots back to the old city despite major residential renovations of several neighborhoods. ⁹ These peripheral urban functions and the demographic composition of the old city indicate forgetting and distance, yet at the same time, as this article discusses, there is an unwillingness to let go.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Workshops (left) and residential areas (right) inside the walls

An enduring theme in the investigations of memory is that of the interrelatedness of remembering and forgetting. From Nietzsche’s notion of ‘active forgetfulness’ to avoid painful memories, to Freud’s discussion of the involuntary yet purposive forgetting of early childhood memories, this association has been widely explored. Opposite yet interdependent, this fulcrum of memory that is the walled city is for many Cypriots, who rarely venture there, a complete void. Nietzsche argues that even if one rejects a past, ‘No matter how far or fast he runs, this chain runs with him.’ Does this manifest materially as well? Even if a place is rejected, ¹⁰ as can be witnessed in the non-Cypriot residential composition and the neglect and dilapidation of the walled city, this does not mean that it remains free from the tentacles of memory.

Orhan Pamuk touches on this in his discussion of Istanbul’s hüzün, which he defines as not just ‘the melancholy of a solitary person but the black mood shared by millions of people together.’ In Istanbul, he claims, relics of a glorious past civilization are visible everywhere in the great monuments of the city, inciting painful emotions, hüzün, over everything that has been lost. He writes of Istanbul residents today that:

the fastest flight from the hüzün of the ruins is to ignore all historical monuments … History becomes a word with no meaning; they take stones from the city walls and add them to modern materials to make new buildings, or they go about restoring old buildings with concrete. But it catches up with them: by neglecting the past and severing their connection with it, the hüzün they feel in their mean and hollow efforts is all the greater. Hüzün rises out of the pain they feel for everything that has been lost, but it is also what compels them to invent new defeats and new ways to express their impoverishment. (2008: 301)

Here the materiality of the city holds a past that, although it may be ignored, is not possible to forget.

In Nicosia, the pervasive use of the image or representation of the walled city leaves a clue as to this inability to forget completely. The walls are recognized as symbolically important, even though many Cypriots do not participate in the lived experience of the division of the old city – largely unconnected to the reality of the divide outside of their suburban context. Here, memory is divided in many ways. There is not only the division of official memory between north and south, but also the division of the memory of the city as a symbolic space as compared to the lived memory of division that is created by experience through the senses. Where the dynamics of forgetting can be illustrated by the current uses and demographics of the walled city today, we can look to the manner in which the image of the walls is being used, by both sides, in order to begin to understand the dynamics of remembering that are also connected to this site.

The Venetian Walls appear often as a symbol, always rendered as an inviolable whole, which is how they appear in both municipal logos. In the south, Lefkosia’s logo consists of the Venetian walls encircling a dove with open wings, representing peace and optimism. ¹¹ The municipality’s website underwrites the logo with ‘The Last Divided Capital in Europe’. Lefkosha’s logo, again, consists of the Venetian Walls encircling the Mevlevi Tekke, a symbol of Nicosia’s Ottoman past. The date of the official founding of a separate Lefkosha municipality, 1958, is written below. ¹² Thus this logo contains an ethnic and religious symbol, and marks the date of separation, yet ironically still houses these elements within the unbroken city walls. Not found only in the municipal symbols, the image of the walls is to be seen everywhere – in a number of logos for organizations, clubs and museums, in promotional literature, advertising campaigns, signage, street paving and even on rubbish bins. This image of Nicosia’s cultural heritage appears throughout the city, on both sides, through a variety of mediums. This highlights that memories about place have to do with sites as they are experienced, as a setting or background for the activities of daily life, and they also involve the image or the imaginary of a place.

It is not surprising that the walls appear often in symbols and logos. As Barthes has discussed, generally we do conceive that ‘the center of our cities is always full: a marked site, it is here that the values of civilization are gathered and condensed’ (1982: 30–2). Yet, the peripheral uses and the populations that exist today in the old city suggest emptiness. In relation to the widespread use of the symbol of the walls, this positions the walled city as both a site of remembering and forgetting. Underused and apparently forgotten, it remains an important focus of official memory as both sides have co-opted the symbol of the wall. The fact that in the walled city these notions of emptiness and fullness are so intertwined aligns it with the figure of the shell, where it is the very emptiness of the shell that implies an invitation to contain – to be filled with meaning. Regardless of whether we take the void or the solid as our starting point, we arrive at the end result of fullness. Current memory politics in Cyprus, which mine the past for memories to mobilize in the interest of the needs of the present, as discussed below, exemplify this interrelatedness of remembering and forgetting.

Past and present

A Venetian fortress in the model of that exemplified in the nine-pointed star built at Palmanova, Nicosia’s walls form a perfect circle punctuated by regular bastions. ¹³ In such cities, ‘city-state ideal all’antica … one of the fundamental geometrical shapes embedded in man’s consciousness was given supreme example – the mystic circle’ (Manuel and Manuel, 1979: 161). Thus, the walled city is visually and graphically connected to the notion of the ideal city. Such configurations were thought to be able to improve mankind via the affect of a harmonious physical environment, representing visions of an ideal society. In the case of Palmanova the expected population never arrived, and the city remains, to this day, eerily devoid of life and activity, its symmetrically laid out roads and squares often unoccupied (Harbison, 1993). But Palmanova was the manifestation of a utopic vision for the future, whereas Nicosia’s walled city today is a utopia steeped in nostalgia.

Differing utopic constructions of the walled city are related to memory of the Cyprus conflict and the selective forgetting of different key historical periods. As Anthony Smith has argued, ethnonational ‘nostalgia is so often linked with utopia; our blueprints for the future are invariably derived from our experiences of our pasts’ (1988: 177). ¹⁴ The official stance of rapprochement influences Greek-Cypriots to refer back to an idealized past: a time of living together ‘like brothers’ in one community. What is problematic about this is that periods of intercommunal violence are forgotten, especially the period of 1963–74, which is not widely discussed or covered in history textbooks in the south. In the north however, history generally starts at this point. The two sides construct their historical narratives with different key dates (Papadakis, 2005). In Greek-Cypriot history the war, the troubles, the notion of refugees begins with the Turkish ‘invasion’ of 1974. ¹⁵ For the Turkish-Cypriots, however, this period began in 1963, when many of them became refugees, leaving their villages to settle in several enclaves throughout the island. They do not officially remember the previous period of peaceful coexistence. For them, national memory begins with the founding of their homeland in 1974, one rapidly repopulated with new memories. ‘Officially Turkish-Cypriots had to forget their old homes in the south. Talk of a past life with Greek-Cypriots could only include the bad times. Now they lived in their homeland’ (Papadakis, 2005: 149). Two kinds of forgetting were required to create this new state: Turkish-Cypriots had to forget their lives and homes before 1974 as well as the presence of Greek-Cypriots in the north – town and street names changing to erase them from the land. ¹⁶

The nostalgic utopias are linked to what each community officially remembers, and elements that do not fit into these timeframes are left out of the imaginative constructions of the walled city. The Greek-Cypriots refer to the old city, in its entirety, as a place of brotherhood and unity where the two communities lived well together. The Turkish-Cypriot idealization of the past of the walled city is tied to a longing for a period of independence from Greek-Cypriots, free from domination by Turkey, and is also linked to resentment felt towards Turkish migrants. Discussions with shopkeepers, now in their 70s and 80s, who knew the city well prior to division, certainly do suggest that individual narratives generally align with these official versions. ¹⁷ Many Greek-Cypriot shopkeepers spoke of the old city as being ‘like a paradise.’ In recalling this idealized place, they leave out the increasing tensions between the two communities and the changing nature of the city from the 1950s onwards. The city did not change until ‘they drew a line and separated us’. Turkish-Cypriot shopkeepers, on the other hand, spoke openly about these tensions, with some even ‘forgetting’ life before 1963, in denying that they even went to the ‘Greek side’ of what was previously a mixed city.

The Jasmine Revolution opposition movement in Lefkosha at the turn of this century, created in response to government policies and nationalist politics that were seen as linking Northern Cyprus too closely with Turkey, used nostalgia as a form of cultural politics and resistance. This nostalgia is connected to the enclave period, 1963–74, when the walled city was the site of the Turkish-Cypriots’ first experience of having their own space. Bryant and Hatay argue that jasmine-scented Nicosia:

the Nicosia of a youthful communal past, came to represent the lost hopes of a community whose struggle for self-determination appeared to have been hijacked by those sent to save them. Their reference to Nicosia’s narrow streets, to specific shops and the scent of coffee, to the simple pleasures of life together, was also a longing for a different sort of isolation, one of an interdependence that was lost through dependence on Turkey (2008a: 427–30).

Thus, while Turkish-Cypriots may not want to live in the old city, it still maintains its presence in collective memory. ‘This increasing distance from the historic center of Turkish-Cypriot cultural life, as well as the sense that it had been unrecognizably transformed, made it an appropriate symbol for a movement that saw itself as culturally and politically “under siege”’ (2008a: 434). While the utopic reconstruction of the old city is partly a political formulation, neatly concordant with the concerns of the Jasmine Revolution, and though all Turkish-Cypriots may not share the political concerns of this counter-hegemonic movement, still, their nostalgic narrative can easily find ground.

Although the old city has been given over to the migrants, Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots still have not let it go entirely. The utopic constructs have been influenced by certain versions of history, where the physical body of the city is embellished with memories that correspond to what is officially remembered or forgotten. James Hart refers to the aeonic character of nostalgia; it is ‘atemporal’ and ‘non-fleeting’ (1973: 406). Dylan Trigg argues that nostalgia disunites the dynamics of past and present, claiming that ‘the attraction of nostalgia structurally depends on an image of the past that is fixed in the present’ (2006: 56). But this image collides with the existing reality of a place that has changed significantly and no longer aligns with that image, if it ever did. Yet I have argued that the shell of memory that is the walled city links past and present – linking what is otherwise ‘disunited’ by nostalgia. This occurs in Nicosia because of the ongoing and unresolved conflict, which leaves the fate of this city and its sites undetermined. It is this indeterminacy that renders the city in the figure of the shell. The conflict leads to the development of a strong creative investment and belief that these images of place in the past can be retrieved in the present. This is critical for political movements and diplomatic bargaining positions that are built upon re-establishing these lost places as they once were.

The fact that the fate of the city is on hold allows for a reformulation of these dialectics of past and present as related to nostalgia. At the same time, these architectural fictions become imaginative sites in which places and people once located there are rewritten or erased. Such images or representations of the past, conceived to formulate official memories, also serve to enable forgetting whereby the presence of the representation causes an absence of memory, at times obscuring memories of what this place was once like.

Inside and outside

In Nicosia today, the city walls define an inside and an outside that differ from each other spatially, socially, culturally and economically. Here, we will look at inside in terms of the relationship between spatial characteristics and remembering, and the form of the walls, from the outside, as a space of projection and forgetting. While the form of the walls is associated with the ideal city, the prominent symbolic location of the old city also has much to do with its particular spatial characteristics: with the complex and intricate web of streets and spaces within the walls. Nicosia’s walls are a definitive boundary, separating differing spatial experiences. Inside, streets are narrow and dense, offering a walkable environment with many pedestrianized streets and small squares, allowing moments for pause – qualities that do not exist in newer areas, designed at the scale of the automobile. The old city features slow spaces and, even when in a car, its streets do not allow for fast movement. It is rich with particularity. Streets themselves are memorable because of twists and turns that define different views and house particularly sited buildings.

Paul Connerton’s discussion of memory and the modern city outlines why this contrasting spatiality is significant for the place–memory relationship. Referring to the ‘art of memory’, which entails the emplacement of certain mental images in an imagined space in order to assist in memorization, he argues that this tradition of thinking about place and memory involves understanding the particular ‘scale of emplacement’ of the settings in which this practice occurred. These were spaces within a ‘city-world’ – a world of urban entities contained within fortress walls. These spatially memorable cities were small in scale, defined by an easily readable perimeter and a central point of focus (2009: 99). They exhibited a certain density of experience and a condensation of images and associations – qualities that exist in old Nicosia, yet are lacking in the city’s newer areas.

Connerton’s discussion of the spaces of modernity suggests that the new neighborhoods of Nicosia offer a less substantial framework for memory than the spaces to be found in older cities:

In life-spaces so changed in their scale of emplacement that the city becomes less and less a physical entity that might yield a point of focus, one of the fundamental preconditions, which the art of memory as a method of loci took for granted as something which goes without saying, is blurred beyond recognition. (2009: 108)

The types of places that support memory – places that are rich with associations, places that enable encounter, places that provide a focus for social life – are to be found in the walled city. Frisby similarly discusses the difference between Old Vienna and New Vienna as one involving the contrast between ‘‘pillars’ of memory and the erasure of memory’ (2008: 36).

While Connerton’s work has been quite useful for thinking about place and memory on the inside, I believe that in Nicosia, a contested city, this relationship has many other layers of complexity, and therefore must also be examined from the outside. Places associated with difficult histories may be involved in the construction of screen memories, whereby place is remembered on the outside as an image that blocks out what exists on the inside. As Primo Levi suggests, ‘a memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in stereotype … crystallized, perfect, adorned, which installs itself in the place of raw memory and grows at its expense’ (1988: 11–12). According to Umberto Eco, the ars oblivionalis operates through the ‘multiplication of false synonyms’, whereby one forgets ‘not by cancellation, but by its superimposition: not by absence, but by multiplying presences’ (Boym, 2001: 108). Screen memories are involved in this process of forgetting through superimposition.

Screen memory is defined as ‘the memory of an unacceptable but tolerable experience that unconsciously serves the purpose of concealing the memory of an associated experience that is more significant but emotionally more difficult to recall’. ¹⁸ They are constructed in order to stand in as substitutes for other impressions, disturbing memories that have apparently been forgotten. Certainly forgetting is critical for national memory; as Renan states in his oft-quoted work on nation building, ‘the essence of a nation is that its people have a great deal in common, and also that they have forgotten a great deal’ (1990: 11). Where Hobsbawm speaks of ‘invented traditions’ (1983), Terdiman (1985) argues that these inventions work only because of what he terms ‘genesis amnesia’. ‘The recency of these practices astonishes us because we have been induced to forget their greenness. They seem to inhere in our expectations of the world.’ The most consequential function of genesis amnesia is to ‘produce the state as a seemingly timeless entity’ (1985: 21).

Seeing the importance of forgetting in these historical constructions, I now want to pose the question of how screen memories, related to place, operate on the collective or national scale. For Ricoeur (2004), ‘the most troubling experiences of forgetting … display their most malevolent effects only on the scale of collective memories’. Referring to Freud’s work on unconscious drives that result in forgetting, he states: ‘The same cleverness, coiled inside unconscious intentions, can be recognized in another aspect of everyday life, in the life of peoples: forgetting things, screen memories, failed actions take on gigantic proportions on the scale of collective memory’ (2004: 447–8). ¹⁹ How do these collective screen memories relate to place itself, and do representations of place come to stand in for the forgotten? From the perspective of psychoanalysis, Bollas describes screen memories as ‘condensations of psychically intense experience in a simple object: the evocativeness of the commonplace’ (1995: 135). For Sturken, cultural memory is produced through vehicles of representation such as photographic images and television. ‘These mnemonic aids are also screens, actively blocking out other memories that are difficult to represent’ (1997: 8). Discussing St Petersburg, Boym contrasts the city’s ‘magnificent facades’ with the ‘squalid living quarters’ and ‘ruined hallways’ that lie behind. ‘The façade is a mere projection of utopian dreams and ideological visions; the ruin is a witness of historical cataclysms’ (2001: 130). What exists on the inside may be masked by what is projected.

The work of these scholars alludes to a relationship between collective memories and the object, place, image and screen. These certainly do seem to come together in Nicosia, where the walls act as a screen onto which certain national, historical constructs can be projected – as well as other oppositional concerns such as those of the Jasmine Revolution’s critical stance on a perceived colonization by Turkey. Here a parallel between the screen and the shell is made explicit, in that the walls, as the symbol of the whole city, act as a screen – hiding what lies behind. It is the image of the walls that is remembered, as municipal logos and symbols, while the shell contains that which remains forgotten: remnants of conflict, neglected buildings, and marginal populations. Memories connected to the walled city can be made simple, like the image of the shell from the outside. Thus, in the discussion of this dialectic, screen memory operates such that the inside or everyday aspects of the lived city are forgotten in lieu of outside associations which are embodied in the image of the walls – easily available to be filled with meaning (Figures 4 and 5).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Inside – the spatial characteristics of the walled city

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Outside – the walled city as a symbol

Referring to the phenomenon of difficult memories that are ‘much closer to the present moment than any past’, Lyotard (1990) speaks of an ‘excitation’, a ‘disturbance’ within the individual that cannot be dealt with or consciously processed, such that it ‘affects but does not enter; it has not been introduced and remains unpresented’. But nonetheless, it will make itself known later.

A feeling, it seems, born of nothing that can be verified in the ‘present’ situation in a perceptible, verifiable, or falsifiable way, and which therefore necessarily points to an elsewhere that will have to be located outside of this situation, outside the present contextual situation, imputed to a different site than this one. (1990: 12–13)

In the context of place itself, is it possible that this location ‘outside,’ this ‘different site’ is, for many Cypriots, the walled city – an ‘elsewhere’ to which they rarely venture? Does this ‘disturbance’ become projected onto the walls, the material representation of a difficult or unwanted past? It certainly looks like the past, like history embodied with all its scars, fissures and territorial markings. It does make sense that the desire not to engage with this past would involve a rejection of the walled city. The screen memory of the walls as an image from the outside allows this interior scarred reality to be ‘forgotten’. In contested environments it may be easier to relate to such simplified images, thereby avoiding the complexity that the interior of the shell exhibits – all of the tortured turnings and twistings of the life that had existed there previously.

Young Cypriots seem not to be overly concerned with history, and can be critical of the older generation’s ‘inability’ to leave the past behind. Like Pamuk’s Istanbulites, they may ignore the material reality of the relic of the past, the old city. Still, as one young Cypriot states, although she dislikes the walled city, ‘that is our history, and it is nice to have it there. To have the stories of our grandmothers.’ Some connection to this place of the past still endures. With the dynamics of memory, there is always the possibility, the threat, of the return of the repressed. What we see as the symbol of the walled city may indicate the manifest, but the hidden dimensions of memory are also wrapped up in that simple image.

Conclusion

In each of the paired tensions presented in this article Nicosia’s walled city manifests, either materially or imaginatively, aspects of both remembering and forgetting. Where the logo of the walls is an easily available symbol, a carrier of memory, the material and demographic composition within the walls suggests forgetting. The form of the old city and its association with the symbolic aspects of city walls locates it as a site for nostalgic imaginings. Yet these nostalgic utopias encompass the official forgetting of historical periods and entire sets of memories, differing on each side. The spatial characteristics inside the walls provide ‘loci’ that support memory. However, for many Cypriots these spaces inside, the lived reality of the old city, are blocked out by meanings projected onto the walls, as a screen, from the outside. This article explored how the relationship between place and memory is disrupted and affected by conflict. Place, as a structure for memory, is involved both in the implicit framing of events from the past, as in events ‘take place’ in certain sites, as well as in the explicit use of space as a focal point onto which certain selected memories can be projected. In contested environments, these places become part of the process whereby memories can be enforced, manipulated, and molded into official versions. Some memories are ‘forgotten’ for years, sometimes for generations, only to appear again: their traces remaining in the material structure of place. The figure of the shell was used to organize this discussion because it involves many of these same contradictions, as described in Bachelard’s (1994) phenomenological study of shells.

First we have the contradiction of the hidden and the manifest – of the imperfect containment of the shell. Whatever is held inside has the potential to leak out. Memories that are attached to places in the walled city are also invested with this quality. Memories ebb and flow, they retreat only to return in another form. As recent debates about the Stadtschloss in Berlin illustrate, memories and meanings related to place can lie dormant for quite some time until a particularly urgent need of the present reawakens them. Bachelard discusses the nature of the creature that dwells inside of the shell, where ‘the obvious dynamism of these extravagant creatures lies in the fact that they come alive in the dialectics of what is hidden and what is manifest. A creature that hides and “withdraws into its shell,” is preparing a “way out”’ (1994: 111). Thus the dynamics of remembering and forgetting also find a home in the shell, where what is forgotten remains motionless for the moment, yet always with the potential for an explosion of renewed movement – a movement that releases dormant memories out of the shell, back to those who dwell outside of the old city. This phenomenon of the hidden and the manifest can be seen in individual places – important sites of memory, such as the Tekke Bahchesi Shehitli, that now lie sleeping in the fabric of the city. Another such example, related to the old city as a whole, can be found in the jasmine-scented Nicosia movement. Thus, places inside, and the walled city as a whole, support this first contradiction of the creature and its shell.

Looking at a shell, it is easy to abstract its form – it is a simple spiral, or cone, and we can imagine hundreds of these abstractions lining countless shores. Yet, upon closer study, the complexity of the shell is revealed: the hundreds of lines and ridges, it’s continual folding in upon itself. While the outside may be a rough, even jagged mass, its interior is smooth ‘so soft, so pearly, in its intimacy’ (Bachelard, 1994: 115). A shell presents us with another contradiction – it is both simple and complex at the same time. The walled city, when reduced to the abstracted graphic of the encircling Venetian walls, is a simple symbol – one that is easily invested with outside meanings. At the same time, anyone entering its narrow and twisting streets would argue for the complexity of the urban fabric that it contains. The lived density of these streets is contained within the seemingly simple pure geometry of the shell. Likewise, memories connected to the city can be abstracted, using the logo of the walls to refer to collective meanings. Yet the places within this shell are heavily loaded with contested memories – memories that are constantly being renegotiated on the inside.

Finally, we find a feature of the shell that differs from the city, but one that implies a contradiction about the city itself. The interior of the walled city is the resultant of the city as a lived space. It is clear to see how its structures and uses were created from a particular way of life that was wrapped up within it; these were then transformed by the conflict and the subsequent division of the city. The city began to dissolve away from its center, it adopted a new population, and its structures – although they remained in the same places – were greatly transformed. Yet, its shell was artificially created from the outside, wrapped around the living body of the city. In this the city departs from the shell metaphor, where ‘the mollusk exudes it shell’ (Bachelard, 1994: 106). In the case of the shell, it is the life within it that creates its own exterior living form. ‘With each contortion, this limp animal adds a step to its spiral staircase. It contorts itself in order to advance and grow’ (1994: 122). But it could also be argued that the spaces of the walled city, encased within this consolidating shell, have been spun out organically – composed of experiences of conflict and upheaval and their accompanying memories.