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From Bodrum, we drove along a coastline dotted with Roman, Persian and Hellenistic ruins. I passed through the city of Ephesus, teeming with tourists in tank tops and T shirts, and later stopped at the Temple of Zeus at Euromos where there was no one but a dozing kiosk attendant and his moped. Morning light streamed through the olive trees and the only sound was birdsong. My driver, who had studied in Germany, resumed his effort to convince me that the great ideas usually associated with ancient Greece were, in fact, Turkish in origin: "European books are filled with accounts of Ephesus and Troy but never the fact that they are in Turkey." Turkish patriotism, which is formidable, is personified by Kemal Attaturk, the eagle-eyed founder of the Turkish nation, whose likeness pops up everywhere from crusader castles to a mountaintop in nearby Cyprus, where a 15-m steel statue of the founding father towers over the coast.
My onward flight took me eastward across a patch of Mediterranean to a country that does not exist. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which has been divided from the Greek-dominated Republic of Cyprus since a fratricidal civil war in 1974, has not been recognized by the larger world. One result is that the place is fairly close to economic collapse. Foreign airlines can't touch down, and tourism is limited to weekend gamblers from Istanbul. "I am glad to be Turkish," reads a quote from Attaturk inscribed in giant letters next to a Turkish Cypriot flag made from red and white stones. These days it reads like a joke.
I drove through Nicosia's sandy streets with Sua Saracoglu (see box), owner of a small window shade company. He pointed out the shuttered fronts of half a dozen banks that had gone belly up in the past six months, robbing nearly a third of local residents of their savings. Later we stood atop the old Saray Hotel, once the finest in this part of Cyprus. Below, the neglected stone buildings of old Nicosia on the Turkish side stand in stark contrast to the gleaming high-rises and thicket of construction cranes just a stone's throw away across the divide. Businessmen gather here to gaze in dismay at what the politicians have done. "They tell us that we shouldn't compare ourselves to the Greek side," said one. "But I can't ignore people who are 100 m away. I want us to be like them."
The biggest tourist attraction in Cyprus, apart from the beach, is the green line, a disjointed barrier of oil drums, razor wire, rusted cars and assorted junk that stretches from one side of Cyprus to the other. Manned permanently by Turkish troops on one side, Greek Cypriot troops on the other and U.N. peacekeepers in between, it is one of the most impenetrable boundaries on earth. Signs erected by nationalists and the Turkish military keep the memory of war alive. At the nearby Museum of Barbarism, gruesome black-and-white photographs of mutilated children and a bathtub marked with the 37-year-old blood and brain tissue of a young family murdered by Greek insurgents memorialize Greek terror.
One morning I tried to cross. In a low concrete building on the Turkish side, a polite young woman told me that I was free to go, "but the Greeks will turn you back." Then she launched into a catalog of Greek abuses from her childhood. When I asked whether Greeks ever crossed the other way, she bristled: "Why should we let them? We can exclude who we want!"
Retracing my steps to the airport, I took the only other route to southern Cyprus: I caught the Cyprus Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul, spent the night, drove back to the airport for the early morning Olympic Airlines flight to Athens and just barely made my connection to Larnaca, in southern Cyprus, where I hailed a cab back to the green line in Nicosia. "Turkish Cypriots are all right," my Greek driver said as we watched Turkish troops on patrol beyond the razor wire. "It's the military that's dodgy." Forty hours and 2,400 km later, I was 200 m from where I started. "How do people normally do this?" I asked Kutlay Erk, a businessman in northern Nicosia. "They don't," he replied.
The Greek side, it turns out, has its own version of events. At the main green line checkpoint in Nicosia, under the sardonic headline "Turkish Law and Order," a billboard shows Turkish police beating a protester to a bloody pulp. Otherwise, the contrast is overwhelming. Northern Cyprus attracts 50,000 visitors a year; the Greek side: 3 million. I spent the night in Agia Napa, which one guidebook describes as a village, but which is really a Las Vegas-style megadevelopment of hundreds of hotels, upscale boutiques and ethnic restaurants. Tourists can break from their partying to visit a rooftop cafeteria north of town, where for a few cents you can gaze through binoculars across the green line at the resort that Agia Napa replaced. Abandoned ahead of the Turkish invasion in 1974, it is now a ghost town.
When I left Cyprus, I turned back westward and picked up my journey in Istanbul. The logical route from there to Europe, I thought, mindful of the famous Orient Express that once ran between Paris and Turkey's commercial capital, was by rail. Unfortunately, the Orient Express stopped regular service years ago and its replacement, the Balkan Express, is decidedly less glamorous. About 10 cars creak out of Istanbul's Sirkeci station every night at five minutes to midnight, each bound for a different part of Eastern Europe.
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Wandering Borders
Squalor on the Balkan Express through lands where old atrocities linger in the memory but the borders are blurring
Photo Gallery
Check out the photos from this leg of TIME's Fast Forward Europe voyage
Crossing the Line
Joint efforts to find bone marrow donors for children with leukemia bring the two halves of Cyprus closer
Paper Curtain
East European countries moving toward E.U. membership are cut off from their neighbors
Points to Ponder
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Good Riddance
Slobodan Milosevic's home town was a private playground for his delinquent son — until recently
Looking Forward, Looking Back
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