The jasmine scent of Nicosia: of returns, revolutions, and the longing for forbidden pasts

In the past decade in Cyprus, the jasmine flower has become the symbol of Nicosia, the island’s divided capital, and subsequently of a revolution within the Turkish-Cypriot community. As symbol of Nicosia, the jasmine flower evoked a purer time when the city had not yet been “tainted” by an influx of poor workers from Turkey into areas of the walled city that had been abandoned by Turkish-Cypriots. As such, the flower also came to stand for Turkey’s purported colonization of the island and Turkish-Cypriots’ rebellion against it. And because the jasmine came to represent a city that had once been multicultural and a call for a re-valuing of the local, it was easy enough for the Jasmine Revolution to be translated into a semblance of bicommunalism. But as we show here, rather than a multicultural nostalgia, the nostalgia expressed by the symbol of the jasmine is for a period when Turkish-Cypriots lived in enclaves, a period of deprivation but also of solidarity

Performing Peace: Vernacular Reconciliation and the Diplomacy of Return in Cyprus

The Cyprus conflict is usually described as one between a majority Greek Cypriot and minority Turkish Cypriot population, with their opposing visions of the island’s future. In that conflict, more than 200,000 Cypriots from both these communities were displaced between 1958 and 1974. Lost in this standard narrative, however, are the conflict’s other ‘Others’: the smaller Maronite, Armenian, Latin, and Roma populations, who also experienced displacement in the course of the conflict. This paper concerns the Maronite community’s struggle to remain in or return to their historic lands in the island’s northwest. We examine the acts of everyday diplomacy that, over the past decade, have resulted in a revival of the largest Maronite village, a removal of restrictions on their rights, and most recently the partial withdrawal of the Turkish military from another Maronite village so that it may be reopened to settlement. We use these as instances of what we term ‘vernacular reconciliation’, ways of rebuilding coexistence that suspend questions of sovereignty that remain at the heart of the Cyprus impasse. We argue that this pragmatic approach calls on cultural knowledge of past patterns of coexistence through performances that in turn produce deeply felt senses of responsibility and patterns of reciprocity. Such patterns of reciprocity, we show, are reappropriated in the context of ongoing conflict

Performing Peace: Vernacular Reconciliation and the Diplomacy of Return in Cyprus

The Cyprus conflict is usually described as one between a majority Greek Cypriot and minority Turkish Cypriot population, with their opposing visions of the island’s future. In that conflict, more than 200,000 Cypriots from both these communities were displaced between 1958 and 1974. Lost in this standard narrative, however, are the conflict’s other ‘Others’: the smaller Maronite, Armenian, Latin, and Roma populations, who also experienced displacement in the course of the conflict. This paper concerns the Maronite community’s struggle to remain in or return to their historic lands in the island’s northwest. We examine the acts of everyday diplomacy that, over the past decade, have resulted in a revival of the largest Maronite village, a removal of restrictions on their rights, and most recently the partial withdrawal of the Turkish military from another Maronite village so that it may be reopened to settlement. We use these as instances of what we term ‘vernacular reconciliation’, ways of rebuilding coexistence that suspend questions of sovereignty that remain at the heart of the Cyprus impasse. We argue that this pragmatic approach calls on cultural knowledge of past patterns of coexistence through performances that in turn produce deeply felt senses of responsibility and patterns of reciprocity. Such patterns of reciprocity, we show, are reappropriated in the context of ongoing conflict