Customer Reviews

Northern Cyprus: A Traveller's Guide

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If you are going to visit North Cyprus, this is an excellent guide for your visit...

Well, if you ARE going to visit `Northern Cyprus' I guess you should have a guide. In fact, you would do well to have one with you. Otherwise you might think you landed in the wrong place.

The problem arises when you start looking for those sights and sites your old History or Geography Professor spoke about in College. They seem not to be there. They are of course, but under another name. After Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 it `Ottoman-ised' all names in the territory it occupied. This is where this book offers sterling service: it diligently lists all annexed places by their new names but offers enough accompanying text to help one orient oneself.

You can still get confused at times, the more so as there are no Greeks around to help with the names you knew. The book does not mention that the locals have been expelled after Turkey annexed the island's North and christened it `Turkish republic of Northern Cyprus'; but you can hardly blame a Travel guide for not being a comprehensive History book. In the end you learn to get along when you realise that `Girne' is really the ancient town of KYRENIA you were looking for, `Gazi Magosa' is in truth FAMAGUSTA - and so forth.

Concerning the breadth of the book it is quite adequate: the authors have certainly travelled throughout the occupied territory of Cyprus and listed all sights worth seeing. Well, almost all. For some reason they have neglected the likeness of the runaway statelet's flag etched on the Southern face of the Pentadaktylos (old name) mountainside. This is a serious omission as this is truly a sight to behold, the artwork of upturned stones and deforested land runs for more than a MILE.

In the final analysis though the acid test of a Travel guide is not so much its listings as the information it provides on each place of interest. And this is where the authors go grossly wrong (as does Diana Darke in the only other `guide' of the island's occupied North): historical background is either distorted or downright fictitious.

But maybe this is to be expected: 'Northern' Cyprus is a blatant police state - how much should truth bother one who decides such a place is worth visiting? In the end, the very notion that an occupied territory deserves a guide would have been quaint - if it wasn't fascist.