The Sunrise (2 page)

Famagusta was once a thriving city of forty thousand people. In 1974, its entire population fled when Cyprus was invaded by Turkey. Forty years on Varosha, as the modern city is known, remains empty, sealed off behind the barbed wire put up by the Turkish army. It is a ghost town.

Famagusta, 15 August 1972

F
AMAGUSTA WAS GOLDEN.
The beach, the bodies of sunbathers and the lives of those who lived there were gilded by warmth and good fortune.

Fine, pale sand and a turquoise sea had together created the most perfect bay in the Mediterranean, and pleasure-seekers came from all around the world to soak up its warmth and to enjoy the sensual pleasure of the calm waters that gently lapped around them. Here was a glimpse of paradise.

The old fortified city with its strong medieval walls stood to the north of the beach resort, and trippers went on guided tours to learn about its origins, and to admire the vaulted ceilings, detailed carvings and buttresses of the magnificent building that had once been the cathedral of St Nicholas but was now a mosque. They saw the remnants of its fourteenth-century history, heard tales of the Crusades, the wealthy Lusignan kings and the arrival of the Ottomans. All of this information, given by a well-meaning guide in the heat of the midday sun, was soon forgotten when they returned to their hotels, dived into the pool and felt the sweat and dust of history wash away.

It was the twentieth-century development that people truly appreciated, and after their excursion into history they happily came back to its straight-walled modern comforts and its characteristically huge windows that looked outwards on the glorious view.

The arrow slits in the old walled city had been enough to give a sighting of the enemy, but let in almost no light, and while the design of the medieval stronghold was aimed at keeping invaders out, the new city aimed to bring people in. Its architecture opened outwards and upwards to the brilliant blues of sky and sea, not inwards; 1970s Famagusta was inviting, light and designed to welcome the visitor. The image of an invader needing to be repelled seemed something from another age.

It was one of the world’s finest resorts, purpose-built for pleasure, with little in its conception that did not have the comfort of the holidaymaker in mind. The tall buildings that hugged the coastline mostly comprised hotels with smart cafés and expensive shops beneath them. They were modern, sophisticated and reminiscent of Monaco and Cannes, and existed for leisure and pleasure, for a new international jet set ready to be seduced by the island’s charm. In daylight hours, tourists were more than content with sea and sand. When the sun went down, there were hundreds of places to eat, drink and be entertained.

As well as its allure for the tourist, Famagusta also possessed the deepest and most important port in Cyprus. People in faraway destinations could enjoy a taste of the island thanks to the crates of citrus fruit that left in ships each year.

Most days from May to September were broadly the same, with a few dramatic leaps in temperature when the sun seemed almost savage. The sky was consistently cloudless, the days long, the heat dry and the sea cooling but always kind. On the long stretch of fine sand, tanned holidaymakers lay stretched out on sunbeds sipping iced drinks beneath colourful umbrellas, while the more active frolicked in the shallows or showed off on waterskis, slaloming expertly across their own wake.

Famagusta thrived. Residents, workers and visitors alike enjoyed almost immeasurable contentment.

The row of ultra-modern hotels stretched all along the seafront, mostly a dozen or so storeys high. Towards the southern end of the beach was a new one. At fifteen storeys it was taller than the rest, twice as wide and so recently constructed it did not yet have a sign with its name.

From the beachfront it looked as minimalist as the others, blending into the necklace of hotels that lined the curve of the bay. The approach from the road, though, was grand, with imposing gates and high railings.

That hot summer’s day, the hotel was full of people. They were not in casual holiday wear but in overalls and worker’s dungarees. These were labourers, technicians and artisans, putting the finishing touches to a carefully conceived plan. Although the outside of the hotel seemed to conform to a standard scheme, the interior was very different from its rivals.

An impression of ‘grandeur’ was what the owners were aspiring to, and they considered the reception area one of the most important spaces in the hotel. It should be love at first sight for guests; unless it made an immediate impact, it had failed. There was no second chance.

The first thing that should impress was its size. A man would be reminded of a football pitch. A woman would think of a beautiful lake. Both would notice the impossible gleam of the marble floor and experience what it might be like to walk on water.

The person with this vision was Savvas Papacosta. He was thirty-three, though he looked older, with a few wisps of grey in his otherwise dark crinkly hair. He was clean-shaven and thickset, and today, as every day, he was wearing a grey suit (the best available air-conditioning system kept everyone cool) and an off-white shirt.

With one exception, everyone working in the reception area was male. The lone woman, dark-haired, immaculately dressed in a cream shift, was Papacosta’s wife. Today she was there to supervise the hanging of the drapes in the foyer and ballroom, but in previous months she had been overseeing the selection of fabrics and soft furnishings for the five hundred bedrooms. Aphroditi loved this role and had a great gift for it. The process of creating a scheme for each room, using a slightly different style for each floor, was similar to choosing clothes and finding accessories to match.

Aphroditi Papacosta’s taste would make the finished hotel beautiful, but without her it would never have been built. The investment had come from her father. Trifonas Markides owned numerous apartment blocks in Famagusta as well as a shipping business that dealt with the vast quantities of fruit and other exports shipped out of its port.

The first time he met Savvas Papacosta was at a meeting of a local trade and commerce association. Markides had recognised his hunger and been reminded of his own younger self. It took him some time to convince his wife that a man who was running a small hotel at the less fashionable end of the beach had a promising future.

‘She’s twenty-one now,’ he said. ‘We need to start thinking about her marriage.’

Artemis considered Savvas to be socially beneath her beautiful and well-educated daughter, a little ‘rough’, even. It was not merely the fact that his parents worked on the land, but that their acreage was so small. Trifonas, however, saw this potential son-in-law as a financial investment. They had discussed his plans to build a second hotel several times.

‘
Agapi mou
, his ambitions are immense,’ Trifonas reassured Artemis. ‘That’s what matters. I can tell he is going to go far. There is fire in his eyes. I can talk business with him. Man to man.’

When Trifonas Markides invited Savvas Papacosta to dinner in Nicosia for the first time, Aphroditi knew what her father was hoping for. There was no
coup de foudre
, but she had not been out with many young men and did not really know what she was meant to feel. What was unsaid by any of them, though Savvas himself might have noticed it if he had studied the photograph given pride of place on the wall, was his resemblance to the Markides’ late son, Aphroditi’s only sibling. He was muscular, just as Dimitris had been, with wavy hair and a broad mouth. They would even have been the same age.

Dimitris Markides had been twenty-five when he was killed during the troubles that erupted between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in Nicosia in early 1964. He had died less than a mile from home, and his mother believed that he was just a bystander accidentally caught in crossfire.

Dimitris’ ‘innocence’ made his death all the more tragic for Artemis Markides, but both his father and sister knew that it had not been a simple matter of bad luck. Aphroditi and Dimitris had shared everything. She had covered up for him when he sneaked out of the house, told lies to protect him, once even hidden a gun in her room, knowing that no one would come looking there.

The Markides children had enjoyed a privileged upbringing in Nicosia, with idyllic summers in Famagusta. Their father had a magic touch with investments and had already poured much of his wealth into the property boom that was taking place in the seaside resort.

When Dimitris died, everything changed. Artemis Markides could not and would not emerge from her grief. An emotional and physical darkness descended on all of their lives and did not lift. Trifonas Markides buried himself in his work, but Aphroditi spent much of her time trapped in the stifling atmosphere of a silent house where shutters were often kept closed throughout the day. She yearned to get away, but the only escape would be marriage, and when she met Savvas, she realised this could be her opportunity.

In spite of the lack of spark she felt with him, she was aware that life would be easier if she married someone of whom her father approved. She could also see that there might be a role for her in his hotel plans, and this appealed to her.

Within eighteen months of her first meeting with Savvas, her parents laid on the grandest wedding that had taken place in Cyprus in a decade. The service was conducted by the President, His Beatitude Archbishop Makarios, and there were over one thousand guests (who drank as many bottles of French champagne). The value of the bride’s dowry in jewellery alone was estimated at more than fifteen thousand pounds. On the day of her wedding, her father gave her a necklace of rare blue diamonds.

Within weeks, Artemis Markides began to make it clear that she wanted to move to England. Her husband was still benefiting from the burgeoning growth of Famagusta, and his business was thriving, but she could no longer bear to live in Cyprus. Five years had passed since Dimitris’ death, but memories of that awful day remained vivid.

‘We need a fresh start somewhere,’ she nagged. ‘Whatever we do here, wherever we live, this place can’t be the same for us now.’

With huge reservations, Trifonas Markides agreed. Now that his daughter was married, he felt her future was secure and he would still have a part of his life on home soil.

Savvas had not been a disappointment. He had proved to his father-in-law that he could convert bare soil into profit. He had spent his childhood watching his mother and father alike toil on the land, producing just about enough to live on. When he was fourteen, he had helped his father build an extra room on to their house. He enjoyed the task itself, but more importantly, he realised that things could be done with the land other than scratching the top layer, and planting a few seeds. He despised the endless cycle of this process. It seemed utterly futile to him.

When he had seen the very first high-rise hotel going up in Famagusta, he had, in a quick mental calculation, worked out how much more profit could be made per acre of land by building upwards than by digging down to plant seeds or trees that needed tireless and repeated tending. His only problem had been how to buy the land so he could put his plan into action. Eventually, getting a few jobs, working round the clock and finding a bank loan (the manager recognised naked ambition when he saw it), he scraped together enough to purchase a small, undeveloped plot and built his first hotel, The Paradise Beach. Since then, he had watched the resort of Famagusta expand, and his own aspirations grew with it.

Trifonas Markides was a major investor in his new hotel project and they had drawn up a business plan together. Savvas aimed to build up a chain that would one day be an international brand name, as recognisable as ‘Hilton’.

Now the first stage was about to be realised. Construction of the largest and most luxurious hotel in Famagusta was complete. The Sunrise was almost ready to open.

Savvas Papacosta was kept busy by a constant flow of people asking him to inspect and approve their work. He knew that the final picture was made up of a thousand details and he took a close interest in them all.

Chandeliers were being hoisted into position, and their crystals created a kaleidoscope of colours and patterns that danced on the ceiling and were reflected in the floor. Not quite satisfied with the result, Savvas had each one lowered by just two links of the chain. It seemed to double the radius of the pattern.