Fast-tracking trauma: the phenomenology and the hauntology of cycling around the ghost town Varosha

Ibrahim Ince [LinkeIn] [Website]

Anthropology has been particularly keen on exploring the affective experiences of people on foot. However, what it feels like to encounter the world on bike has been a neglected area of exploration. This article compares the engagements with a ruined built environment on bike and on foot. The ethnographic comparison is located in the war-stricken ghost town Varosha, Cyprus, which has been controversially re-opened to the public in 2020. The visitors who choose to cycle in Varosha can afford some sense of an escapism from a confrontation with the trauma emanating from the buildings, through the light-hearted activity of pedalling. In contrast, the walker participants feel more ‘in touch’ with their surroundings and come face-to-face with the ‘spectres’ of the displaced Greek-speaking Cypriots. The bicycles, alongside the museum entrance, stanchions, street lights and roads, become a part of a brand new material culture in ‘homologous opposition’ to the ruins, in a process I call ‘heritage-violence’.

Anthropology and urban geography have both been interested in researching people’s experience of the built environment on car as well as on foot (Pink 2007; Ingold & Vergunst 2008; Miller 2001a; Robertson 2007; Edensor 2003). However, cycling, the in-between of walking and driving in terms of automobility, has not been a defined area of interest for social scientists (Horton, Cox & Paul Rosen 2007, 1). In this essay, I will assess what it feels like to experience an affective space on a bike as compared to walking.

The space to make this experiential comparison will be the infamous ghost town, Varosha in Cyprus. Varosha has had many lives since the second half of the 20th century; a remarkably touristic seaside city, a war-stricken city, a militarised city and now a ruined city open to public as a monumental site. By visiting Varosha with Cypriots, I will examine how this space acts on my participants’ cognition and corporeality; how the past haunts the present through the built environment; how mobility practices either enable or evade this hauntology. In order to prevent an ocularcentric focus, which have been the dominant case for mobility studies (Spinney 2007, 28), I will be taking a phenomenological and embodied approach to my ethnography (Brennan 2004; Merleau-Ponty 2014). Hence, I will actively participate with my participants in cycling and strolling, in experiencing and aching, to attempt to get their bodily ‘sense of space’ (Feld & Basso 1996). Through the lens of travelling around architectonic decay, I also aim to contribute to the proliferating literature around the affect of the built environment on people, especially that of ruined environments (Navaro 2012).

Entering The Ghost Town

There was a time when this setting of dust and decay was one of the most touristic cities in the world, dubbed the ‘jewel of the Mediterranean’ (France-Presse 2021). That was until it was turned into a ghost town overnight when all of its population, dominantly Greek-speaking Cypriots (henceforth referred to as GSC), was displaced out of it by the 1974 war in Cyprus. Parts of the city were bombed and the whole of it was militarised by the Turkish army, not to be set foot upon by anyone other than soldiers for decades. In 2020, it was controversially re-opened to the public by the de facto government, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, in disregard for UN and EU property laws. I will not be overtly dealing with the politics around the expropriation of Varosha. More so, I am interested in the undeniably emotional mobility experiences that are borne out of this partial reopening.

The administration only reopened Varosha as a place to sightsee. As of yet there are not any shops and civilian occupants, only dark tourists; it is not a living city per se. Hence, Caitlin DeSilvey’s ‘curated decay’, the idea that leaving sites to decay can be ‘more interesting to think with’ than their ‘saved state’ of being designated as heritage and subsequently stabilised and protected, fits perfectly with Varosha (Heritage Research 2017, 6:50-7:10). Such decay could have been and is to some extent, as will be discussed below, a productive contact zone to think and feel about the catastrophic impacts of war. However, there are certain elements to how this space is ‘curated’ that perhaps minimise the provocative value of its decay; cycling is the main component of this.

When you enter Varosha from its official police-guarded entrance, you are welcomed to rent a bicycle to roam around the ghost town. Although cycling is encouraged for pragmatic purposes, since the area is too expansive to fully discover by foot (5 square kilometers), my participants adamantly feel that the leisurely activity of cycling contextualises Varosha in an inappropriate fashion. To investigate how Varosha is contextualised by cycling in comparison walking, I cycled around it with a Turkish-speaking Cypriot (henceforth referred as TSC) as well as walked around with two GSC. I must be reflexively aware that, as a Cypriot myself, I am generationally impacted by the internal conflict of Cyprus. Nevertheless, I believe that this very personal connection will help me in empathy-making while doing domestic ethnography on such a sensitive space.

Cycling in Ruins

We roam around Varosha on a bicycle, feeling the cool breeze caressing us. My participant, a TSC acquaintance of mine in her twenties, points to neo-classical buildings with Greek columns and blocks of hotels as well as shops with disintegrating signs that once illuminated these streets half a century ago. Buildings’ colours appear faded by the sun that warms our faces; they are left in monochromatic hues of greys and beiges. Cycling tourists all appear jolly - you cannot quite see their expressions by the pace that we are going. The sound of the sea waves nearby is rhythmically punctuated by the sharp creaking noise that the bicycles make every time we turn the wheels. My participant utters ‘these bicycles might be as old as the city itself’ – it is almost as if, even though the rentable bicycles are supposed to be new, they adapted to their dilapidated environment.

As evident in the vignette above, spatial meaning on a bicycle seems to be ‘created moment by moment through a series of fleeting and solitary embodied encounters’ (Spinney 2007, 25). Sensorial stimuli were gathered in a more fragmented way as we would fleetingly pass by visuals and sounds, sunlight and shadow. We were not necessarily able to focus on the microscopic details, which walking might have allowed, but rather receive a more panoramic and macrocosmic view of Varosha through cycling. Thereby, my participant was able to more comprehensively realise the unimaginable scope of land that has been abandoned. A more fast-tracked, fleeting and filmic experience of the space is offered by the very fact that one moves more steadily and speedily on a bike. On that note, it is true that ‘different technologies open up different experiences of the ‘same’ landscape’ (ibid., 35). One might ‘zone out’ to the landscape in mobility technologies that do not require one’s own operation of it, such as buses (ibid., 33). Whereas, cycling does not afford the same zoning out, or more accurately zoning in, to the environment as one still needs to focus on muscular effort to keep the bike going. This effort that bikes require has been utilised by my informant, as well as other respondents who have previously visited the ghost town, in minimising their exposure to the emotional distress that the war ruination might cause. My informant mentioned that ‘you must focus on cycling only, on turning the pedals and the balancing act or else you get carried away’. Teresa Brennan perfectly questioned ‘[i]s there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and “felt the atmosphere”?’ (Brennan, 1). In alignment with her transmission of affect, the built environment of Varosha transmits a deeply felt affect on its visitor. The attempts to hinder it through concentrating on the activity of cycling render this melancholic affect visible.

Walking in Ruins

It has been evidenced in other ethnographies of violent aftermaths that in sites of ruination, ‘[s]ome sift slowly through the ruins as a way to come to terms with what has happened, and some rush to erase and rebuild’ (Navaro, Biner, Bieberstein & Altuğ 2021, 21). In comparison to cycling, one cannot afford the chance to not ‘get carried away’ by the affective built environment when on foot. ‘It is surely through our feet, in contact with the ground (albeit mediated by footwear), that we are more fundamentally and continually ‘‘in touch’’ with our surroundings’ (Ingold 2004, 330). Truly, while we were walking with my GSC participants (a mother and a daughter who I have known for almost a decade), we could not help but sift slowly and be fully immersed in the small details of our surroundings. As we were walking, we saw many houses with windows and doors left open (fig. 3 & 4); as if ‘their owners did not have enough time to shut them before walking away for good’, my GSC informant suspected. Her body and voice felt particularly tense when she mentioned ‘you expect the owners to look back at you, peep from the curtains, and shame you for being here to look at their houses’.

The affect that is caused by architectural observations made on these walks is a hauntological one. Hauntology, developed in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, is ‘the effectivity or the presence of a specter’ as felt by people (Derrida 1994, 10); ‘A specter is a shadow from another time, whose time has gone, but yet manifests itself in this time’ (Maurer 2006, 23; italics in original). In hauntological ethnographies (Miller 2001b), as well as in popular cultural representations of hauntings, the spectre is the intruder haunting people’s daily activities and spaces. In contrast, my GSC participants are haunted by the feeling of intruding into a private space frozen in time by walking around abandoned houses and seeing into them through the windows and doors that were abruptly left open. The spectres who once lived in these houses do not ‘haunt’ my participants in the traditional sense of the term. In fact, GSC who abandoned these streets in 1974 might still be alive. More so, the participants are haunted by the idea that they themselves are intruding and haunting the space. These hauntings are experienced primarily through the body as my walking participants repetitively mentioned that they feel tense and stiff; ‘it feels hard to breathe not just because of the Covid mask’. In that sense, walking does not afford the same fleeting escapism that could be achieved in cycling through ‘riders consciously manipulat[ing] the kinaesthetic sensations in their own bodies to produce new meanings of space’ (Spinney 2007, 41). There is not an agentive technology, such as a bicycle, in between your body and the environment; you are painfully ‘in touch’ with the material environment. Maurice Merleau-Ponty beautifully articulated that ‘the things pass into us, as well as we into the things’ (2014, 123). Indeed, the things, the ruined buildings, pass into my walking participants as we pass through them. 

The empathy felt towards the spectres by being the haunted and the haunter at the same time perhaps also comes from the very act of walking. It is ingrained in the collective memory of Cypriots, through images and stories, that the displaced inhabitants of Varosha had to mostly walk away, or more accurately run away, rather than by any other means of transportation. I will not include such images due to ethical reasons as my intention is not to reopen the pain of the past but investigate how it manifests through buildings and mobilities. The contemplative act of walking in Varosha puts the visitors in the displaced inhabitants’ shoes as one walks from the pavements that they have escaped. Thus, locomotion allows for what Maxine Sheets Johnstone coined ‘thinking in movement’ (1999, 494); ‘mak[ing] one’s way through a world-in-formation, in movement that is both rhythmically resonant with the movements of the others around us’ (Ingold & Vergunst, 2). The ‘others arounds us’, in this case, are the spectral others whom my participants are ‘rhythmically resonant with’. Comparatively, cycling might not activate the same level of pathos as walking; it might even be suggested to obstruct such feelings. 

Decaying Things and Novel Signs

In memory and Holocaust studies, it is established that ‘people are not the only things to vanish. The material culture of former lives does too’ (Connerton 2006, 316). While one is grounded and ‘in touch’ by walking, the tourism of cycling in Varosha has been made possible through the vanishment of previous material cultures. In fact, new roads built for cycling has been blasphemously built on top of the roads of pre-1974 Varosha. Paul Rodaway proposed that mobilities like cycling could create an ‘extended touch’ (1994, 55); ‘transforming the noise of the tyres and the feel of the road through the frame of the bike to give an impression of the micro-geography of the terrain’ (Spinney 2007, 37). Riding through bumpy and rocky old roads could have helped in activating bumpy and rocky feelings towards the state of things. However, the past paths are cleansed with the smooth and sterile asphalt. The present touristscape of Varosha seems to be built by, literally and figuratively, bulldozing the collective memory of what it once was - an idea that I will return to. 

As previously mentioned, there is an undeniable affect that is discharged from such ruinous landscapes, which Yael Navaro (2012) also locally explored in Northern Cyprus. Navaro questioned whether this affect is created through the ruins themselves or through the knowledge that one has about the history of these ruins (2009, 8). It seems that the former prevails in my participants’ experience of Varosha as they would often refer to this space along the lines of having its own ‘energy’, ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’. I would like demonstrate our entrance to Varosha which felt particularly full of ‘energies’. As we were in line to enter, my participants’ eyes were fixed on the horizon of endless ruins - only to be disrupted by the turnstile gates reminding that of a museum threshold. Just after we entered, there were piles of rentable bicycles and a digital billboard showing other ‘touristic attractions’ in Northern Cyprus. Both my GSC participants commented on how anachronistic it feels to have these among the ruins. As we would walk step-by-step into the depths of ruination, they could not help but gasp in shock at, not only the sheer number of abandoned houses, but also the seemingly new clean-cut street lights and signs showing us where to go, and the stanchions showing us where not to go. The past felt staged by the present through these theatrical materialities. It appeared that the bicycle was not the only materiality of potential escapism but the whole staging of Varosha is made to take the visitor out of the gravitas of Varosha’s history. The affect and ‘energy’ that could have been intensified by the knowledge of the past is reduced to some capacity through these new material additions.

Leaving things to decay and allowing ‘processes of change and creative transformation may actually help maintain a connection to the past’ (DeSilvey 2017, 5). However, this intellectually, emotionally and corporeally provoking state of decaying Varosha is counteracted by forcing a brand new material culture of museum entrances, signs, stanchions as well as roads and bicycles. These materials do not share the same gravity of decay as the buildings. Framing devices used to articulate and experience spaces could either aid or prevent affectivity. In Varosha, they prevent, or at least delay, affective responses; my participants’ first shock was in reaction to the anachronism of these materials rather than to the ruination. In his study of the Kabyle house, Pierre Bourdieu suggested that meaning is established through ‘a set of homologous oppositions: fire: water; cooked: raw; high: low; light: shadow; day: night; male: female’ and so on (1977, 90). It is unanimously emphasised by semiologists that the meaning of something is defined in relation to other things; ‘everything depends on relations’ (Saussure 1916 (1983), 121). However, Varosha’s meaning is not defined, but obstructed in relation to other things. The binaries of old and new materialities do not necessarily work together to make meaning, but rather are in conflict with each other within the perimeters of Varosha. The stanchions made out of freshly cut wood and brightly coloured signs backgrounded by devastated houses (fig. 5) disturb my walking participants, since the pains of displaced GSC are seemingly obstructed into a day-trip through such semiotic practices. On top of the presence of these signs, the absence of any descriptive devices to inform visitors about the history of Varosha also contributes to this very obstruction. Moreover, such shock-provoking encounters were mainly made during walking or at momentary instances where we would stop cycling to be more ‘in touch’. When we were cycling with my TSC participant, we could not afford scrutinising the semiotics of the direction sign because we had a shorter decision-making process in which we had to accept the sign as a sign and move on along its direction.

Heritage-Violence

There are a series of associations that come with cycling such as positivity, health, swiftness and from-A-to-B transportation, which are usually promoted when integrating cycling into urban regeneration schemes (Horton, Cox & Paul Rosen, 6; Spinney 2009, 818). Hence, these associations might impact how one perceives when cycling. This is felt when one of my walking participants was baffled at overhearing a GSC cyclist, who was displaced from Varosha, mention to her company ‘I will show you the house I was born in’, in almost a light-hearted way. She appeared jolly or you would think that she was. One way of approaching her seeming behaviour might be that the bicycle acts on her mood and appearance because of its positively-charged associations. It is important to note that when you are a cyclist, you not only follow the signs but you are also a sign yourself; a sign of light-hearted pedalling in homologous opposition to the environment, which continuously confused my walking participants. Such signs contributed to their overarching feeling that Varosha was being turned into an ‘open air museum’, a ‘monument’, a ‘spectacle’, a ‘lunapark’ or even a ‘zoo’ that people could freely wander around. What all of what these definitions share in common is that they are public spaces. However, what is made public in Varosha is the private homes of people which they had to run away from. ‘To lose a home is to lose a private museum of memory, identity and creative appropriation’ (Hecht 2001, 123). This lost museum of memory, that is essentially private, is turned into public memory in present-day Varosha. Drawing from Derrida’s concept of ‘archival-violence’, which develops a more nuanced understanding of what violence can be within an archival context (Derrida & Prenowitz 1995, 12), the construction of Varosha into a day-trip through the technologies of signs and bicycles is an undeniable form of heritage-violence. Heritage violence would usually be defined as the destruction of sites valuable for cultural heritage and memory (UNESCO, 2014). However, in Varosha’s case, the present-day violence comes from not only its destruction but also from how what was destructed is being displayed and experienced. Henceforth, the presence of the cyclist becomes a reflection of this heritage-violence which is felt by the people who take the modest mode of mobility of the violated and displaced inhabitants - the visitors who choose to walk.

Although the cyclist might internalise the positive associations of cycling, the act of cycling is not so optimistic for the walkers by virtue of these associations. Under the sleek steel and wheels lies a sense of ‘violence continuum’(Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois 2003, 21); ‘the endurance of violence in its endless distribution through space and time or its transmogrification and re-apparition in unexpected, nonhuman guises’ (Navaro, Biner, Bieberstein & Altuğ, 3). One of the displaced elderly, who appeared on a Youtube documentary visiting his old house, utilises the metaphor of a lost bicycle to articulate his feelings:

‘You buy a bike and somebody steals it. How would you feel for your bike? You are 10 years old. How would you feel? You are crying and you are saying ‘I want my bike back, I want the bike back’. I am crying but who is going to give it to me?’ (Yes Theory 2021, 12:58-13.25).

It is safe to assume that this poignant metaphor was, to some extent, stimulated by witnessing cycling visitors who nonchalantly roam around the streets. Hence, the monumentalisation of the ruins, through the introduction of a new material culture, becomes a wound to the displaced’s collective hope that one day they would be able to take their ‘bike [house] back’ since the turning of an object or a space into heritage often means the loss of its original function (Buchli 2002, 12). In Ruins, Rebecca Solnit mentioned that ‘a city - any city, every city - is the eradication, even the ruin, of the landscape from which it rose’ (2007 (2011), 150). In a similar vein, Walter Benjamin argued that virtually any culture is built on top of the destruction and the ruins of what came before it (Benjamin 1999, 470). Varosha is a space that demonstrates the consequences of such reconstruction through and on destruction. The recontextualisation of Varosha as a day-trip is built on top of the ruins of what it once was and is the ruination of what it could have been. This ruination is felt through the clash between my participants’ internal haunting that they should not be exploring the spectres’ private spaces and the external cues framing them as public and encouraging exploration. Thus, the bicycle, among other materialities, is a pessimistic signifier for my participants and other respondents that people are moving on, through moving along on wheels, from the previous social life of Varosha as an alive city into a fabricated heritage ghost city (Appadurai 1986).

The Difference in Mobility Practices

The experience of Varosha on a bike is a fast-tracked and macrocosmic one which allows the cyclist to grasp just how massive the ruined land is. Cycling might allow some sense of an escapism from this painful confrontation through the cathexis on the act of cycling, the smooth roads preventing an ‘extended touch’ and the positive associations of cycling. In analogy, walking enables a more ‘in touch’ foundation to the transmission of Varosha’s affect to Cypriots, partially due to it allowing a more detailed observation of the city but also due to its historical relation to the displaced. Truly, the walker is eye-to-eye with the spectres who peep from the curtains. Walking and cycling visitors intermingle in the streets of Varosha and, subsequently, cyclists become a sign for the contemplative walker who reads it as tonally dissonant from the trauma of Varosha. The bicycle is not an isolated sign but works with other newly introduced material-semiotics, such as the museum entrance, stanchions, street lights and roads, which all catch the attention for not being ruined in the midst of ruins. Whereas, the cyclist might not be as affected and violated by these material additions for he/she is actively and speedily participating in their system of signs when cycling. Whether on bike or on foot, Varosha is currently a contested site of undeniable hauntology and heritage-violation. Truly, the different mobility practices evoke varying bodily and emotional reactions to its haunting and violence.

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