ABSTRACT
Thirty-four years after the Greece-inspired coup and subsequent Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, Famagusta’s former Law Courts, burnt out during the fighting, are a stark reminder of events which bear ongoing consequences for the island today. About a kilometre further along the main road in which they stand, on the other side of a security fence, are several kilometres of the bombed out beachside precinct, comprising ruins of highrise apartments and hotels. Left to rot, they are held by the occupying power, Turkey, as a possible bargaining tool in any political solution to the Cyprus problem. Within the Venetian walls of the old city stand the medieval ruins of another, earlier invasion, when the Ottoman Turks finally overthrew the then outpost of the Venetian Republic in 1571. These have long received star billing as tourist attractions; only now is the same rating beginning to apply to the ruins of the last century. A pragmatic approach to heritage management in both the Turkishoccupied north and the Cyprus government-controlled south has been funded from the United States Aid Agency (USAID) and more recently from the European Union (EU) through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This has resulted in a focus on heritage conservation as a path to economic development through tourism, with many damaged buildings being conserved for new uses. However, a large number of churches and monasteries in the north have yet to be repaired, and there has been no willingness on the part of the Turkish authority in the north to deal with them. These places, regarded by Greek Cypriots as part of their cultural heritage, have become a human rights issue, with the decision by the Church of Cyprus to take the matter to the European Court of Human Rights (Stylianou 2008).
