Video: War in Paradise. The ghost town of Varosha - exclusion zone in Cyprus
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Everyone in our country knows about Pripyat - a city abandoned by people after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. But only a few are aware that such dead settlement exists not only in the forests in the North of Ukraine, but also on the island of Cyprus … It's about the area Varosha - the once fashionable Mediterranean resort, which in a matter of days turned into a ghost.
The fact is that on the small island of Cyprus, two states are now forced to exist in parallel - the Greek and the Turkish. They were not a single country for long, in the period from 1960 to 1974, after gaining independence from Great Britain and before the outbreak of the Civil War.
The latter was caused by the growth of nationalist sentiments of the Greek Cypriots, which led to a military coup and the announcement by the junta of the annexation of Cyprus to Greece. Turkey, one of the guarantors of the country's independence, did not fail to send its troops to protect the Turkish population of the island.
During the unfolding war, the ghost town of Varosha appeared. Before the conflict, it was one of the most popular and luxurious resorts in the region, which attracted wealthy people from all over the world, including music and film stars. However, in 1974, the area found itself in the line of fire, and the authorities were forced to evacuate the local population, consisting mainly of Greeks.
People left their homes thinking that it was only for a few days until the conflict was resolved. But history had other plans for that. For almost 40 years, Varosha has been standing empty, surrounded on all sides by a fence guarded by Turkish troops and UN peacekeepers.
Once luxury hotels and villas are empty and crumbling, they stand without windows, without doors and without furniture inside. Vegetation makes its way through the asphalt and turns Varosha into a dense forest with separate military roads cleared by hands for patrol cars.
And, most interestingly, in the immediate vicinity of the abandoned quarters, there are quite inhabited areas of the city of Famagusta (Turkish part of Cyprus), including several coastal hotels. And the beach of one of them bites its appendix into a ghost town, fenced from it by a fence of black matter. At the same time, the border passes only a few tens of meters from sun loungers and umbrellas.
Recommended:
What secrets are kept by the ancient Armenian ghost town of 1000 and one church, which today is located in Turkey
Ani is a majestic ancient Armenian city in Turkey, located on the banks of the Akhuryan River. It was first mentioned in historical texts in the 5th century. Ani is worthy of the title of one of the wonders of the world, on a par with the Egyptian pyramids, or, say, Petra, Pompeii, because he was insanely beautiful. In the old days it was called the city of crafts and arts. Ani was famous for its magnificent beautiful palaces and stately churches. Contemporaries christened it "the city of a thousand and one churches." What is the main secret and
What secrets were discovered by the ancient Roman ghost town of Timgad, which was buried in the sands of Africa for over 1000 years
On the edge of the famous Sahara Desert, there is a lost city that has been hidden by the sands for over a thousand years. The first person to stumble upon this ghost town was a Scottish explorer back in the 18th century. Nobody believed him when he told about it. Timgad was completely excavated in the 1950s. What has revealed to archaeologists the most impressive city of the remains of the great Roman Empire?
The place where the gods lived: The secret of the ancient "ghost town" Teotihuacan is revealed
Mysterious Teotihuacan, which is more than two thousand years old, rivals such great cities of its time as Rome, Athens and Alexandria. He was the heart of a great empire. The ancient abandoned city was discovered by the Aztecs in the XIV century. They believed that the city was built by giants, it was so majestic. The Aztecs named it Teotihuacan - the place where the gods touched the earth. Who and when laid the first stone, and why, at the peak of its heyday, was it abandoned by all its inhabitants?
Caucasian Pripyat Akarmara: How a paradise village turned into a ghost town in a year
Caucasian Pripyat, a ghost town - whatever they call this strange place, located in the subtropics of Abkhazia. Here, just like in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, trees sprout through the windows and roofs, and in the apartments old things are slowly decaying, abandoned by the owners in a great hurry and with the unfulfilled hope of an early return. Feral piglets, cows and sad dogs roam the streets. So what happened here? Akarmara's fate is very sad and instructive
English town Thames Town in the heart of the Middle Kingdom
If people could teleport, traveling would become simple and familiar, and most importantly, instantaneous. True, if you happened to be in the small English town of Thames Town, without leaving Shanghai and without crossing the border of the Celestial Empire, you would most likely seriously think about the reality of what is happening. The answer is simple - in 2006, the Chinese built a typical British town, which today surprises not only the inhabitants of this country, but also the tourists who come here