Politics and Everyday Life in a Divided City: Nicosia, 1955-1970

This thesis is a qualitative study that encompasses the end of British colonial rule and the creation of an independent Republic of Cyprus in 1960 and the ensuing violence between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities within the walled city of Nicosia. British domination created favourable conditions of possibility for the development of the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot competing nationalisms, which took a specific form in the context of Nicosia (‘urban nationalism’) and, eventually, clashed. The consequent inter-ethnic violence caused tangible and intangible changes in the city’s urban form and everyday lives of its inhabitants. Each community experienced the division of Nicosia and its subsequent evolution into seemingly two different Nicosias – spatial, administrative, economic and social – differently. The study adds to the current knowledge of the Cyprus conflict by examining the urban and everyday dimension of the political conflict. It demonstrates how the natural tendency of Greek and Turkish Cypriots to live peacefully and physically intermingle and benefit from one another in the capital was shattered by political agendas, the (geo)political milieu and structures, shaping what became the divided capital of Cyprus between 1955 and 1970. By introducing the ‘political approach’ to the notion of the everyday, the thesis elaborates on the argument that the politics/political factor – and its offshoots, namely nationalism and violence – often ‘consumed’ the many other factors and forces that shaped everyday life in the city, as the macro-conflict was also happening in the micro-level of subjects and community, despite the sincere will of (a part of) people to remain neutral or apart from it.