The Centres in The Margins: The No Man's Land as Public Place in Cyprus.

How does a land intended to keep out the public become a public place? The border in Cyprus - the island with the last divided capital in the world - offers a unique field site that simultaneously brings together notions of border-ness and publicness, margins and centres, division and unification. The border, between the Turkish Cypriot-run north and the Greek Cypriot-run south, remains distinct as one of the few in the world with a demilitarised no man's land and with a unique social liveliness. Social and cultural activities, varying from intercommunal performing arts festivals to guided tours of a war-stricken ghost town, can be observed in this borderland. It is used as a centre for culture, challenging the previous anthropological theories of borders as territorial margins. In the pursuit of advancing anthropological frameworks of what constitutes borders and public spaces, this project will ask how the margins can become cultural centres? I intend to conduct research in the two most culturally active areas of the no man's land - Ledra Palace and Varosha. The UN-managed Ledra Palace area has been paradoxically employed for division and contact where Cypriots from both sides have been meeting to produce exhibitions and festivals as well as small encounters, such as language lessons and coffee-drinking with friends. Varosha was a tourist resort town that was inhabited mostly by Greek Cypriots before the 1974 war when they were forcibly displaced. It was subsequently militarised by the Turkish Cypriot administration and relegated to the infamous status of a 'Ghost Town'. Much to a major global disapproval, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus controversially re-opened the ghost town to the public for sightseeing in 2020. Tourists can roam and cycle around, or even swim on a beach next to the ruined/ruining built environment, and these activities remain unexplored due to the newly-opened status of Varosha. Gathering ethnographic data through longitudinal participant observation and interviews, I will focus on the cultural workers and participate in their in-border cultural activities, such as curating exhibitions with artists and shadowing tour guides giving tours of war abandonment. Through comparing the cultural activities facilitated in these promising sites, I aim to explore the political, material and social implications borne from the revitalisation of the borderland into the public sphere.