Ethnic Mixture Makes Village a Cypriot Model

Greek and Turkish Cypriots live together quietly in this village. But the children go to separate schools and play soccer on separate fields. Their fathers sip coffee and trade gossip at separate cafes.

It’s a strained togetherness in one of Cyprus’ few ethnically mixed villages, although some people think it offers a model for reuniting the divided island.

“Many people say we Greeks and Turks cannot live together in peace, but here in Pyla we prove every day that we can,” said Takis Costa, 63, sipping coffee at a Greek cafe on the main square, where a mosque towers over a church at the heart of the village.

After years of ethnic violence, Cyprus was partitioned in 1974 when the Turkish army invaded and occupied the northern third of the island after a coup by Greek Cypriots who supported union with Greece. The Turkish Cypriot state is recognized only by Turkey, which maintains 35,000 soldiers there.

Ethnic Greeks and Turks have lived together for centuries in Pyla, staying through the long years of communal violence, the 1974 fighting and a quarter-century of partition.

The village is in a U.N.-patrolled buffer zone between the two sides of the island and is also near a British military base--two factors that increase safety and thus may have persuaded the residents to stay. Some 800 Greeks and 400 Turks live in Pyla, about 25 miles southeast of Nicosia, the island’s capital.

After years of international nudging, leaders of Cyprus’ two sides are exploring the possibility of making the island whole again. Reunification negotiations began under U.N. auspices in New York last month, and Greek Cypriot leader Glafcos Clerides and Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash are to resume the talks at the end of January.

But the parties are far apart.

Denktash wants only a loose connection between independent Turkish and Greek states. Clerides envisions a federal system with each community running its own local affairs, but defense and foreign policy to be decided by a central government in which both groups are represented.

Even in Pyla, the idea that ethnic Greeks and Turks might be able to work together is tested. The United Nations gave $1 million several years ago to the village for a much-needed face lift, but the money remains mostly unspent because leaders of the village’s two communities couldn’t agree on the details.

Frictions also arise from time to time over issues like water supplies or adherence to schedules agreed with the village’s U.N. police force on when and where each side can fly the national flag of Greece or Turkey.

The flags fly permanently over Pyla’s two schools. Otherwise, on certain occasions, such as national days, flags are allowed only for a limited period at sports clubs and coffee shops.

“A common complaint is that a flag had gone up early or gone down late,” said Bridget Shelley, an Irish member of the six-officer U.N. police force stationed in Pyla along with a 35-man contingent of Austrian peacekeepers.

Residents, however, play down the occasional flare-ups and seem keen to project an image of a village living in harmony. Pyla has almost no crime and was untouched by the ethnic violence that ravaged Cyprus in the 1950s and 1960s.

With the town square resounding to the amplified, melancholy voice of the mosque’s imam calling the faithful to prayer, Costa recalled that the mosque’s construction caused “some tension” 10 years ago.

“It is not true,” declared Nicholas Georgiou, another 60ish patron at the Greek Cypriot cafe. “Such tensions are stoked by politicians and outsiders.”

Elsewhere in Cyprus there is an economic gulf between Greek and Turkish Cypriots--the Greek side’s gross domestic product averages $15,000 a person, nearly five times that of the Turkish portion. But in Pyla, both communities make a similar living off farming and jobs in nearby towns or at the British base at Dhekelia.

Many of the island’s 700,000 Greek Cypriots appear confident the two communities can live together again, but analysts say their optimism stems in part from their majority status and their relative economic prosperity.

Turkish Cypriots, who number about 120,000, fear their minority status would mean living under the shadow of a dominant Greek culture.

Some in Pyla seem resigned to living at a distance from their neighbors.

“I think it is best for us to live apart,” said Kareem Pasha, a 40-year-old Turkish Cypriot builder and a father of two.