Nicosia Water Tanks

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About Nicosia Water Tanks

YIANNIS PAPADAKIS / University of Cyprus
"Lefkosia/Lefkosha: A River, A Bridge and a Dead Zone"
(from ANTONAS / HARI / OREOPOULOS / XAGORARIS, Paradigmata, Venice Biennale, 2004)



A line crosses walled Nicosia in medieval maps – another line in contemporary ones. They more or less coincide, crossing the city in an east-west axis. On medieval maps this was a river, a natural divide which much later turned into a human-made one. Even though the river later became a bridge, later yet, once again through human effort, it turned into a chasm, a dangerous ‘no-man’s land’: a Dead Zone (Nekri Zoni). As usual, when two sides are involved it often depends on how one decides to view the divide. A wall, for example, has two sides. For those on one side it may signify the protection of their rights and security, for those on the other exclusion and the violation of rights. Other dimensions may be as important. The fearsome visible border above ground yields to a different picture underground. And is a border merely a point of division, or also one of contact?

The river was called by various names: proper ones and improper ones, official appearing on maps and unofficial which people used, Greek Cypriot ones and Turkish Cypriot ones, some shared, some not. Officially Greek Cypriots called it Pedhieos (from pedhiada meaning plane) though locals, including Turkish Cypriots, more often referred to it as Pithkias. Among Turkish Cypriots it was also known as Kanli Dere (Bloody Torrent) due to the reddish colour of its water. During the medieval period, until 1567 it used to flow through the Venetian walled city of Nicosia, but it was later diverted outside, into the newly built moat for strategic reasons, due to the expected Ottoman attack. From 1570 when the Ottomans took over Nicosia, the old river bed through the walled city was left open and was used as a dumping ground for refuse, where rainwater would rush through clearing it temporarily. The old river bed thus came to be known as Kotsirkas (Turdy) in Greek and Chirkefli Dere (Filthy Torrent) in Turkish. During that period the major administrative Ottoman centre lied north of the river bed, while the Greek Orthodox one south. Later when the British took over, the old river-bed was covered in 1882 for hygienic reasons. When the river bed was covered a road emerged in its place over the ground: Hermes Street. This road which bridged the old river bed in its entirety became the major commercial axis of the city, a trading zone which would draw the multi-ethnic inhabitants of Nicosia together for commercial exchanges. It thus brought people together bridging ethnic particularities for purposes of trade. Hermes, was even the ancient Greek deity protective of traders. In due time, this site was to come to fulfil all its different names with their different associations and its diverging functions. It came to fulfil functions such as a bridge and a chasm between the two major communities of the city: the Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots.

After the 1960s, it came to fulfil its name and, this time, darker associations with Hermes related to death as it turned into a Dead Zone with even a Cerberus in proximity (the fierce mythical dog guarding the entrance to Hades, the kingdom of the dead). This was after the interethnic fighting that began in 1963 when Greek Cypriots changed Turkish place-names, thus changing the street Chinar Sokak into Cerberus Street, a practice that Turkish Cypriots authorities would enforce on a larger scale after 1974 in the north.

The now covered river bed came to be a violently fought over border, a site of much bloodshed. After 1974, the river bed underground came to become the modern city’s main carrier of dirt, thus fulfilling also the older names associating it with dirt. This was when it became the main artery of the city’s sewerage system, the largest and most successful bi-communal project undertaken in Cyprus by the two mayors of the now divided Lefkosia/Lefkosha. The fearsome division on the ground hid a project of cooperation underground, an apt metaphor for other projects to bring people together for dialogue and cooperation that initially worked almost underground until they gradually became more tolerated. The Dead Zone, the site of division, became the prime site that brought people together (in the UN-controlled Ledra Palace Hotel) where peace activists from both sides met in an effort to bridge and overcome the chasm of the Dead Zone.
Yet, Lefkosha/Lefkosia as a whole gradually turned into another kind of a Dead Zone for people living in social, legal and spatial margins: the various foreign economic migrants in both sides of the Old City living a shadowy existence crammed in crumbling old houses under conditions of discrimination and exploitation.

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