NICOSIA, Cyprus—A few days a week, Ahmet Ozgunle hops into his silver Toyota RAV4 to make the short drive to his barista job. It’s an almost boring commute. The most surprising fact about this routine is that for half his life, it was impossible.

Ozgunle lives in Nicosia, the world’s last divided capital, on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Since 1974, the island of 1.3 million people has lived in schism: The Republic of Cyprus, a member of the European Union, controls the southern two-thirds of the island; the other third is run by the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and is not recognized by any nation other than Turkey. The border is managed by the United Nations, which has maintained a peacekeeping role on the island since ethnic violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots erupted in the 1960s.

It was only in 2003, with the promise of unification ahead of the Republic of Cyprus’s accession to the EU, that casual border crossings were allowed. Since then, transients have passed through derelict dead zones of abandoned territory—as short as 100 feet in Nicosia, but miles long in the more rural areas of the 112-mile Green Line. In some places, this buffer zone is marked by a chain-link fence, and elsewhere, with barrels full of concrete or the occasional military post staffed with U.N. police.

Ozgunle remembers his first crossings, made when he was 24. “It was exciting,” he recalled when he spoke with Foreign Policy earlier this month. “We realized that if we didn’t speak Turkish, nobody would know who we were. We could be Spanish or Italian. Or Cypriot. It was almost playful. Both sides got to play as each other.”

Twenty years later, the thrill is gone. “It’s a normal thing to show my passport to get to work. It’s another country—kind of. But the same country. It’s all Cyprus,” Ozgunle said. “You forget about the division. It’s a chill place. … But people want their nationalism.”

Until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it was common to hear contemporary analysts describe war in Europe as “unimaginable.” But this summer marks 50 years that Cyprus—which is either a success disguised as a failure or a failure disguised as a success—has lingered in the limbo of a cease-fire without peace.

Left: An Ottoman home built in 1793 is now a museum in southern Nicosia. Right: The Buyuk Han (Big Inn) caravansary, built in 1572, is still an active marketplace in northern Nicosia in the Turkish Republic of Cyprus. They are reminders of the division’s shared heritage—and beauty.

But neither side can quit—each is too addicted to its own version of the story.

After Cyprus gained independence from Britain in 1960, religious and ethnic tensions inherited from the island’s days under Ottoman and British imperial rule worsened. Once Britain stepped aside as mediator, both Greece and Turkey waged a campaign to remake Cyprus in their own image.

Tensions exploded in 1974, culminating in what is often called the “Turkish invasion.” While that’s true, Turkey was within its rights under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee that established Cypriot independence. In response to a Greek-backed coup intending to absorb Cyprus into Greece, Turkey used its Article II discretion “to prohibit, so far as concerns them, any activity aimed at promoting, directly or indirectly … union of Cyprus with any other State.” Article IV further allows unilateral action “with the sole aim of re-establishing the state of affairs created by the present Treaty” if “common or concerted action may not prove possible.”

Turkey was an aggressor, sure. But more specifically, it was a counter-aggressor against Greek efforts to annex Cyprus, a policy euphemized as enosis, or “union.” Britain opted against intervention—in part to protect NATO stability against the Soviet Union—and instead deferred to U.N. policing. The United States was wrestling with President Richard Nixon’s resignation and needed Turkey as an anti-Soviet ally even after Rodger Davies, the U.S. ambassador to Cyprus, was killed by suspected Greek Cypriot snipers while seeking shelter in his embassy. Cyprus’s Overton window closed, and no door since has been opened.

A U.N. soldier warns tourists against photography from a guard tower along Nicosia’s Green Line in August 2023.

A graffiti-tagged corner is seen in the no man’s land of Nicosia’s buffer zone in August 2023. The Greek words read “The many” or “The masses.”

The geopolitical messiness was captured in a quip by the Hungarian-born British satirist George Mikes: “Cypriots know that they cannot become a world power; but they have succeeded in becoming a world nuisance, which is almost as good.”

In 1999, the Republic of Cyprus secured permission to waive reconciliation as a prerequisite for EU membership. When it was admitted to the EU as a fractured state, the bloc’s enlargement commissioner, Günter Verheugen, did not mince words. “I personally feel that I have been cheated by the government of the Republic of Cyprus,” he told members of European Parliament. He explained that the 1999 decision was made “on the understanding that the government of Cyprus would do everything in its power to resolve the problem.”

These days, Cyprus remains an island in “heavy limbo,” said Mete Hatay, a senior research consultant at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo’s Cyprus Centre. “It’s not supposed to be there,” he said. “It factors from its inception the fact that it will disappear. And yet everyday, life creates a routine and an expectation of normal days ahead.”

Consider the other Cypruses of the world: Hong Kong, Northern Ireland, Palestine, and Taiwan, among others. All of these places exist as temporary fixes—with existential crisis baked into their essence. Hong Kong faces crackdowns and restrictions on civil liberties despite—and because of—its semi-autonomous status. Northern Ireland teeters as a domino whose fall from the United Kingdom could take Scotland with it. Palestine languishes as an open-air Israeli prison camp. And Taiwan struggles for global recognition despite being seen by China as an illegitimate breakaway province. All are warnings that forgotten people have a way making themselves known.

Street art across southern Nicosia portrays the European Union as a saint, an angel’s heart in a cage, and a soldier, with the latter referencing both the martyrdom of St. Sebastian and Hamlet’s iconic “To be or not to be?” soliloquy.

These are places where purported peace is just a stretched-thin hope, used to paper over pain and build generational compliance with complacency. And yet, as time goes on, their liminal space becomes lived in. A distinct culture builds.

“Those in power can call Cyprus ‘unsustainable,’ but their behavior reveals the opposite: that this ‘unsustainable’ way of life is also a modus operandi for Cyprus and the places like it,” said Erol Kaymak, an international relations professor at Eastern Mediterranean University, a public institution in Northern Cyprus.

Journalist Andrea Pitzer, an expert on concentration camps, echoed this sentiment. “In sites of indefinite detention, fenced-off ghettos, or no man’s land—places where time has been frozen or artificially suspended—people make use of what they have to shape a world,” she said. “Sometimes it’s outright defiance of captors, sometimes it’s a way to live in denial of what’s happening outside, and sometimes it’s the simple need to live, to find a way to go on.”

Cyprus is far from a war zone. It has fewer riots than, say, Britain, France, or the United States. It is an ancient Mediterranean getaway that is home to some of the world’s best bars and beachfront nightclubs. Cypriots have, however, turned to nervous laughter and biting humor as a coping mechanism. In southern Nicosia, there is a restaurant themed around Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous focal point between West and East Berlin.

A kebab house along the Green Line in southern Nicosia, seen in August 2023, is themed around the Berlin Wall’s notorious Checkpoint Charlie. The dark humor is amplified by the fact that Turks today are the largest ethnic minority in Germany.

“It’s a therapy that we can keep things beautiful,” Ozgunle said. “Even crisis has moments of beauty or harmony.”

Since Swiss-based peace talks collapsed in 2017, Cyprus has been in the longest period of its existence without a push for peace. In January, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres appointed a personal envoy to Cyprus: María Angela Holguín Cuéllar, a former Colombian foreign affairs minister, who was a delegate in her country’s peace talks in Havana in 2015-16. Talk of a U.N.-brokered peace summit in New York this month quickly fizzled.

The diplomatic dynamics have shifted since the Republic of Cyprus joined the EU in 2004. Back then, Turkey was considered a prospective EU member; today, accession talks have stalled, and Ankara sees international recognition of its claim to Northern Cyprus—an extremely unlikely prospect—as a prerequisite for peace talks.

In the end, peace may come not from bureaucratic or diplomatic efforts, but from a distinctly 21st-century factor: migration.

Over the past decade, Northern Cyprus has embarked on a campaign to build universities and host more international students. The effort has been successful, albeit perhaps too successful. Hatay estimates that foreigners now make up two-thirds of the north’s population. Informal reports suggest that the northern population may have grown by 40 percent since the last census in 2011.

Drivers heading north are greeted by a sign affirming that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus will remain “forever” at a vehicular crossing in Nicosia in August 2023.

Last year, for the first time, university students from Turkey were outnumbered in Northern Cyprus by those from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia; many of these students—particularly from African nations—are stranded in the territory, even as they face widespread discrimination. The Kremlin has also begun mobile consular services in the north to accommodate a boom in Russian migrants and tourists.

Migrants often find themselves in a limbo within a limbo. Some are trapped in exploitative labor schemes. Others are stuck in a bureaucratic no man’s land; this month, the U.N. refugee agency pressed the Republic of Cyprus to stop populating the buffer zone with asylum-seeking migrants from Northern Cyprus whom the government refuses to process.

Ahmed Mustafa Zahra, who is from the Syrian city of Latakia, now works in a halal restaurant on the EU side of Nicosia. “I came to Cyprus because I could not go to Europe,” he said. He has languished in Cypriot apathy for more than two years. “I have not received asylum or papers even though I am Syrian and there is war,” he said. “I cannot travel, drive, or anything.”

What becomes of an ethnic conflict when the ethnic landscape transforms?

“You could see unification against migrants,” Hatay said. Already, anti-immigrant sentiment has soared. Last September, 20 protesters were arrested after an anti-immigrant march curdled into violence; Asian delivery drivers were assaulted, and immigrant-owned shops were vandalized.

Birds fly over the ruins of a 13th-century abbey in the village of Bellapais in the Kyrenia district along the northern coast of the Turkish Republic of Cyprus in August 2023.

Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, famously described intractable crises as “hot peace,” an uncomfortable counterpoint to the Cold War. That sentiment was echoed by a policy brief that Hatay wrote last year titled “Heated Transformation of a Frozen Conflict,” in which he outlined the hazards of ignoring the crisis in Cyprus as regional tensions threaten to ignite.

In June, Hezbollah threatened to attack the Republic of Cyprus over its military cooperation with Israel, which has included a training simulation of a war with Lebanon in 2022 and an air force deployment practicing retaliation against Iran earlier this year. In response, Konstantinos Letymbiotis, a government spokesperson, accidentally revealed the depth of Cypriot delusion. “Cyprus is not involved, and will not be involved, in any war or conflicts,” he told the public broadcaster CyBC.

The precarity of Cyprus’s peace amid regional tensions is a reflection of the reality that even 64 years after independence, the island is still subject to the whims of greater powers.

On a wall in southern Nicosia in August 2023, a Greek message of “I forget” joins a protest image common across the Republic of Cyprus in which the island’s Turkish-run northern territory is soaked in blood.

Meanwhile, many Cypriots hold out hope that they will one day be able to determine their future. “The people who live here will make change. It will be more of an island of voice and choice,” said Ozgunle, the artist in Nicosia whose days and nights are split by the schism.

In the meantime, he often considers a tattoo he got in 2015 on his left forearm, which depicts a turquoise popsicle with a melting red top. It was inked in the north, and the gooey red top is a reference to a common protest image showing the northern third of the island drenched in blood.

“It will all melt and disappear eventually,” he said. “It gives me power to go on. There’s almost a sarcasm to it. You have to simplify the crisis so it doesn’t take over your life.”