Seeing Beyond the Walls: Maps, Power and Ideology in Nicosia

This article pursues a comparative analysis of the ways that colonialist and nationalist policies and politics have shaped the cartographic representations of the walled city of Nicosia. It examines the ways in which such successive policies reveal layers of juxtaposed power struggles which inform maps of the walled city, from colonial maps to those currently produced and used by Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. It traces the effects of these policies on the physical fabric of the walled city, as they operated through a perspective which privileged the ‘historical monumentalisation’ of the old town starting from the turn of last century. While intitially the representational and physical transformation of the walled city was conducted by and for the western colonial authorities, anticolonialism and ethnic disputes led, at later stages, to the implementation of different policies. Yet despite anticolonialist efforts and the rise of ethnic nationalism, both sides still construct western-centered descriptions of the city, adopting a focus on its ‘historic’ aspects in an effort to portray, construct, and impose a variety of historical interpretations onto the same urban space.

‘The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaniety: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and the determined inhabitants of space.’ (: 27)