When the teams are announced at Lansdowne Road this evening, just before Ireland's World Cup qualifying soccer match against Cyprus, few Irish fans will pay any attention to the roll-call of visiting players. "Petrides, Theodotou, Christodoulou, Constantinou. . ." Difficult names, hard-to-pronounce names, unfamiliar names. Greek names.
Well, naturally. Ask anyone who has been to Cyprus on holiday: Ayia Napa, Limassol, Larnaca. Greek names. But when I was invited on a fact-finding trip to Cyprus recently, I discovered a whole other batch of names. "Sight-seeing in Lefkosa", said my itinerary; "Nicosia," corrected the atlas. Briefings in "Girne". This the atlas called "Kyrenia". "Flight to Ercan", said the airline ticket. The atlas was silent.
12-hour journey
It began to seem like quite an adventure, this journey to a place that wasn't on the map; gradually, however, it revealed itself as more of a trek. Dublin to Heathrow. Terminal One to Terminal Three. Heathrow to Istanbul. Then, and only then, to the elusive Ercan: a total of well over 12 hours of travel. It felt like a voyage to the end of the earth - and it was odd, to say the least, to disembark and find that one had arrived, not in Australia, or maybe Borneo, but on a sleepy Mediterranean island, all palm trees and balmy evening breezes.
It was not heartening, either, to reflect that Irish tourists flying to Ayia Napa for a week of outdoor night-clubbing under the same balmy breezes could get there in a single, four-hour, charter-flight leap.
The difference between the two Cypruses is, of course, not geographical but political. You can't fly directly to northern Cyprus because, officially, it isn't there. You can't make direct phone calls either, or send emails or even snail-mails. As far as the world is concerned, Cyprus means the Greek-administered part of the island.
The north - the KKTC, aka the TRNC, aka the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus" - is regarded by outsiders as anything from an embarrassment to an abomination, a puppet state created and maintained by the Turkish government. To the people who live there, however, it's none of those things. It's home. They love it; they're proud of it. Not an easy thing, being proud of a place that doesn't even have a name.
The fact-finding trip was organised with dazzling efficiency. We spoke to politicians and tourism officials and civil servants. We drove to border crossings and peered disbelievingly into scenes straight out of the Cold War: no-man's-land, armed guards, barbed wire, UN patrols. It was all, we knew from background reading, bristling with behind-the-scenes surveillance equipment, everybody spying on everybody else.
Signs of Englishness
We were startled by signs of Englishness; driving on the left, three-pin plugs, shopkeepers with accents that were vintage BBC. We were appalled by evidence of all-too-recent ethnic violence of the most terrifying kind. We were charmed by simple gestures of hospitality.
Our guide insisted on bringing us home, unannounced, for tea one evening. Her family - father in shirt-sleeves, sister and children just arrived from London for a holiday - seemed to regard a bunch of sweaty hacks tramping across their verandah as a delight rather than a damn nuisance.
We met a poet who had tried - without, he admitted sadly, much success - to translate Seamus Heaney into Turkish. "Too many strange names," he said. "Too hard to find the right words." Was he Turkish, then? He grew visibly taller. "Turkish Cypriot," he corrected.
"Land of lemon trees"
He told us about the place where he was born; "a land of lemon trees and olives." What was its name? "Paphos," he said. He hadn't been back since it became a Greek city. Why? Because it was Greek? He looked shocked. No, no, that wasn't the problem; he worked for a Conflict Resolution Committee, visited the south often. "But now it has an airport, high-rise buildings. I prefer to remember it as it was."
We were uneasily aware that we were getting just one side of the Cyprus story - but that, after all, was the point of the trip. Turkish Cypriots feel they're being written out of the thing the world calls Cyprus. The names of the players who'll be on the pitch at Lansdowne Road tonight are no less Cypriot for that. But when the Lansdowne roar goes up, this particular Irish fan won't be able to help thinking of the "other" Cyprus.