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Sanctuaries on the Other Side of a Line

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Sanctuaries on the Other Side of a Line

The division of Cyprus in 1974 moved populations but not buildings, and the result is that each community's religious heritage is substantially located where the other community now lives.

Greek Orthodox Cypriots were displaced from the north, leaving behind hundreds of churches, chapels and monasteries, including the monastery of Apostolos Andreas at the far tip of the Karpas peninsula, one of the most important pilgrimage sites on the island. Turkish Cypriots were displaced from the south, leaving mosques, cemeteries and tekkes, including the Hala Sultan Tekke near Larnaca.

What happened to those buildings has been a continuing grievance on both sides, and the accounting is genuinely disputed. Churches in the north were converted to other uses, left to decay or stripped, and there has been a documented international trade in looted Cypriot icons, mosaics and frescoes, including the celebrated case of the Kanakaria mosaics, recovered through litigation in a United States court. Mosques and Muslim cemeteries in the south have suffered neglect and vandalism, less prominently reported outside the island.

There is also a repair effort that gets less attention than the destruction. A bicommunal Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage, working with international funding, has conserved churches in the north and mosques in the south, choosing projects in pairs so that neither community's heritage is restored without the other's. Apostolos Andreas was conserved under that framework and pilgrimages to it resumed.

Access for worship is negotiated occasion by occasion rather than guaranteed, which is why a liturgy or a prayer at a site across the line is reported as news when it happens.

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