‘Why can there be no peace?’ Cyprus remains divided 50 years on

For 47 years Giorgos and Despoina Kleitou have lived at 52 Democracy Street.

When they moved into the state-provided, three-bedroom house in Latsia, on the southern fringes of Nicosia, the Greek Cypriot couple were in their prime. And, like so many others forcibly displaced by war on this eastern Mediterranean island, they still had dreams.

“We dreamed we would go back to Angastina,” says Giorgos, now a sprightly nonagenarian breaking into a smile at the memory of his village in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus. “We fled with nothing, just the clothes on our backs,” he recalls. “On the first day of the invasion our home was bombed. There was a huge crater outside the door but we always thought we’d be back.”

Farther east, outside the great Venetian-walled city of Famagusta, Sema Kilinc, a former seamstress, has similarly spent the past 49 years living at 5 Mutlu Sokak, a narrow street of low-level buildings pervaded by the unmistakeable scent of jasmine when night falls.

Like the Kleitous, the walls and shelves of Kilinc’s home – a one-storey villa that once belonged to Greek Cypriots – are stacked with photographs that take her back to her own past in Paphos, the now buoyant resort town in the island’s internationally recognised south. “I left my home and all my memories in Paphos. It was where my entire family had always lived,” the 76-year-old Turkish Cypriot says. “They renamed our street Mutlu because it means Happy in Turkish but in truth no one is happy here.”

Today, as both sides of war-split Cyprus mark the conflict that began to unfold on the morning of 20 July 1974 – a conflict that would leave thousands dead, missing, raped, tortured and internally displaced – it will be in the knowledge that almost nothing has changed.

Fifty summers on, the trauma borne of a tragedy provoked by an Athenian-inspired coup still lingers on either side of the UN-patrolled ceasefire line that keeps Greek and Turkish Cypriots apart.

Related: Cyprus seeks to revive peace talks with Turkey over divided island

When, at 5.20am local time (0320 BST) on Saturday, sirens wail to commemorate the start of the invasion launched by Ankara in response to the attempt by Athens and its far-right junta to unite the island with Greece, families such as the Kleitous will not only relive the events that left them, and their five children, destitute and uprooted. After decades of false promises and no sign of a peace settlement, they will also ask “why?”.

“Two hundred thousand of us were displaced and yet, 50 years later we are still living like this,” says Pandelis, the couple’s actor son, taking in the cluttered surroundings of a sitting room that by necessity also serves as his elderly parents’ bedroom and living space. “And yes, you have to ask ‘why?’ What happened was a huge tragedy. It turned boys like me, a teenager at the time, into men overnight.”

“It did,” his mother agrees, tearing up at the memory of how the family had got into their car and fled “with Turkish tanks and armoured carriers behind us” to the nearest British base for sanctuary. “But what to say? Fifty years have passed and nothing has changed.”

In a military operation still remembered as one of the most successful in modern times, Turkish troops seized 37% of the island’s territory, prosecuting the invasion in two phases after naval ships loaded with soldiers, tanks and heavy artillery began landing on Cyprus’s northern coast from Turkey barely 25 miles (40km) away.

By 6am on that fateful Saturday morning, parachutists were being dropped north of Nicosia over the vast Mesaoria plain.

It was a campaign that Ankara, one of the former British colony’s three guarantor powers, claimed it had every right to make in the name of protecting the Turkish Cypriot minority, many of whom had been pushed into enclaves with the outbreak of intercommunal violence after the island’s independence in 1960.

Elsewhere the invasion was met with condemnation and dismay. “In every tragedy there is catharsis, a cleansing process, because punishment is meted out,” says Pandelis. “Here almost nobody was punished. Everyone involved in the coup that landed us in this mess got positions of power. And now, we as your children live that trauma too,” he told his parents.

To this day Cyprus remains the EU’s sole divided state, with the breakaway Turkish Republic of Cyprus – an entity that proclaimed independence in 1983 – recognised only by Ankara.

Half a century later the events of 1974, though expected to be commemorated with gusto on Saturday by the statelet’s nationalist leadership , are also a time for reflection for Turkish Cypriots desperate to end the isolation and abnormality of living in what many see as a parallel universe dominated by settlers and, increasingly, the authoritarian gaze that comes with aid from Ankara.

In her home on Happy Street where the mosaic floors, fixtures and wooden panelling are as they were when she first moved in, a nod, her three daughters say, to the family’s acceptance that the abode was always meant to be temporary, Sema also wants answers. In a single day in 1974 the mother of three lost her husband, Coskun, and two cousins believed to have been killed by the nationalist Greek guard who, responding to the invasion, targeted minority enclaves in retaliation.

Her brother, Mehmet, whose body has never been found, is among the more than 2,000 casualties of war considered “missing”. By December 2023 the remains of 958 people – mostly Greek Cypriots – had still not been recovered.

Related: Archive, 1974: Turkey invades Cyprus

“Why can there be no peace?” asked the septuagenarian among the estimated 45,000 Turkish Cypriots forced to migrate north. “Despite everything that has passed, everything that has happened, that is what we want.”

With memories of coexistence fading, time is of the essence if the west’s longest-running diplomatic dispute is to be resolved. The omens are far from propitious. The two communities have not sat at the negotiating table since talks aimed at reunifying the island as a federated republic collapsed in Switzerland in July 2017 .

Ersin Tatar, the Turkish Cypriots’ ultranationalist leader, says peace can only be guaranteed through a two-state solution that Greek Cypriots and the EU reject outright.

But the maximalist demands of successive Greek Cypriot administrations have also been criticised. “We lost the war and we should have compromised,” says Pandelis. “We should have voted for the Annan [peace] plan in 2004. After all, when has a conqueror ever left peacefully?”

This UN blueprint envisaged a loose federation of two largely autonomous “constituent states”. While Turkish Cypriots voted overwhelmingly in favour of the plan, it was torpedoed when three-quarters of the Greek Cypriot community, ignoring international appeals, voted to reject the accord .

The impasse, reflected in the ever-worsening images of decay along the island’s 112-mile long ceasefire line – in the capital Nicosia abandoned, bullet-pocked homes stand as tokens of time – also comes amid escalating tensions in the buffer zone. Earlier this month, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, warned of a dramatic rise in security breaches in the neutral territory, saying the violations undermined UN peacekeeping efforts.

Sixty years after the UN’s arrival, concerns are mounting over the tenability of sustaining what has become one of the oldest peacekeeping missions in the world. If the body pulls out, many fear it will be a matter of time before clashes erupt over the buffer zone.

In his colonial-era home, one of the few still standing in the heart of a capital whose skyline is being increasingly eclipsed by newly built high-rises, Takis Hadjidemetriou, a historic figure of the left, finds it hard to conceal his consternation. “The situation is very unstable and we cannot foresee what will happen,” he says.

At the age of 90, the former politician could be forgiven for playing down such fears if, after independence, he had not also experienced the turbulence of Cyprus so closely himself. “Of course we should all be living together in peace on this island and we should all be drawing lessons [from this anniversary],” he said.

“Bold decisions are needed to move forward … unfortunately we have continued to follow a political life based on myths rather than reality, and on propaganda rather than cooperation.”

So many years later few believe refugees from either community would return en masse to their ancestral homes if the possibility arose.

But 50 years on the need “to tie up the loose ends” that fuel the drama of Cyprus – trauma rooted in the violence that culminated in Turkey’s invasion in 1974 – is also viewed as paramount if wounds are to be fully healed. On either side of the island’s ethnic divide reports of elderly Cypriots feeling compelled to confess to crimes on their deathbeds have emerged.

“For our trauma to be dealt with fully we have to face the truth,” says the human rights lawyer Achilleas Demetriades, who contested the last presidential elections on a reunification ticket and has been pushing for the establishment of a truth commission on the missing.

“Closure will only happen when the truth is out, when people know what really happened to their relatives,” he says. “There are still too many loose ends because in Cyprus today the truth is in short supply. What we have been dealing with is mass, state-sanctioned impunity. It’s urgent that we uncover what really happened before the actors involved pass away. It’s the way to catharsis and ultimately reconciliation.”

• This article was amended on 20 July 2024. An earlier version misspelled the name of Ersin Tatar as “Tartar”.