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The Jasmine Scent of Nicosia: Of Returns, Revolutions, and the Longing for Forbidden Pasts
- Journal of Modern Greek Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 26, Number 2, October 2008
- pp. 423-449
- 10.1353/mgs.0.0032
- Article
- Additional Information
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In the past decade in Cyprus, the jasmine flower has become the symbol of Nicosia, the island’s divided capital, and subsequently of a revolution within the Turkish-Cypriot community. As symbol of Nicosia, the jasmine flower evoked a purer time when the city had not yet been “tainted” by an influx of poor workers from Turkey into areas of the walled city that had been abandoned by Turkish-Cypriots. As such, the flower also came to stand for Turkey’s purported colonization of the island and Turkish-Cypriots’ rebellion against it. And because the jasmine came to represent a city that had once been multicultural and a call for a re-valuing of the local, it was easy enough for the Jasmine Revolution to be translated into a semblance of bicommunalism. But as we show here, rather than a multicultural nostalgia, the nostalgia expressed by the symbol of the jasmine is for a period when Turkish-Cypriots lived in enclaves, a period of deprivation but also of solidarity.