The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  To Britain, Malta was an irritating mosquito, but Cyprus was a giant hornets’ nest. The Greek Cypriot demand for enôsis with Greece, and a growing divide between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, had a predictable result: the Turkish government insisted that a Greek-owned Cyprus was a strategic threat in the waters to the south of Turkey. Yet the focus of opposition was not simply the other community. The colonial power was targeted by violent Greek nationalists, who included increasingly radicalized high-school pupils. They imagined that they were reliving the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottomans, and a number joined the thousand-odd members of the Ethniki Organôsis Kypriôn Agonistôn (EOKA), the ‘National Organization of Cypriot Fighters’. Its youth wing required members to swear in the name of the Trinity that they would ‘work with all my power for the liberation of Cyprus from the British yoke, sacrificing for this even my life’.16 But this was no game. The EOKA commander, George Grivas, was a fanatical nationalist who gave no quarter. At the height of the emergency, the streets of Nicosia saw daily killings of British troops (over 100 in all) and of Turks, and the Greek and Turkish communities bunkered down in distinct areas, separated by barbed wire or guarded by armed irregulars.17

  Lawrence Durrell, who taught in a Greek high school in Nicosia and then became a British information officer in Cyprus, remembered the indecisiveness of the British colonial authorities as the troubles began:

  Should one for example behave as if the Greeks were Greeks? The Greek National Anthem – should it be played on Independence Day while Athens was broadcasting scurrilous and inflammatory material, inciting Greeks to rise? There seemed to be no clear line on this so I was forced to steer a course between vague amiabilities and reproaches for the time being.18

  The invocation of the Trinity in the EOKA oath underlined the role of Greek Orthodoxy in the struggle for enôsis, for the Greek Church, not a sense of being the heirs of Perikles, was the focus of Greek identity – the Turks were more casual about their attachment to Islam. Archbishop Makarios functioned as ‘Ethnarch’ at the head of the Greek community, though the British authorities shipped him out of the island in 1956, detaining him in the Seychelles for three years. He was a staunch advocate of decolonization, to be followed by enôsis, and the Turks countered with the argument that the only way to ease tensions between Turk and Greek was to divide the island. It was difficult to see how this could be done, since the Turks were scattered all over it. Moreover, the Greeks tended to occupy the commanding economic positions, and Turkish areas within mixed villages often remained poor.

  The republic of Cyprus came into existence in 1960, with Makarios as president, but required careful nurturing. Greece, Turkey and Great Britain were the guarantor powers, with the right to intervene if Cyprus was under threat. Britain retained two irregularly shaped bases at Dhekelia and Akrotiri, encompassing nearly 100 square miles (250 square kilometres), and constituting sovereign British territory; they became important Middle Eastern listening-stations for NATO. Under the Cypriot constitution the Turks provided a vice-president and had (the Greeks maintained) stronger political influence than their numbers warranted. But of course the intention of the constitution was to make sure that the Greeks did not haul the island into union with Greece. Although in 1960 Makarios had accepted that Cyprus would become a separate republic, enôsis remained on the Greek Cypriot agenda even after 1967, when a brutal, intensely nationalistic military regime seized power in Athens. Greek officers stationed in Cyprus became a source of trouble in summer 1974, and Makarios was overthrown in a coup. It seemed that the Greek colonels intended to achieve enôsis by force. The Turkish government intervened in late July, claiming the right to do so as a guarantor power; Turkey landed 30,000 troops on the island and occupied the northern third, while the junta in Athens, thoroughly discredited, fell from power. Within Cyprus, the human effects were predictable. As many as 190,000 Greek Cypriots fled south from Kyrenia, Famagusta and smaller towns and villages into the Greek-controlled areas, and tens of thousands of Turkish Cypriots hurried northwards to seek the protection of the Turkish army. The island was thus at last ethnically divided, but there were deep scars, physical and mental: close to the Turkish front line, the seashore of Famagusta, bristling with hotels built by Greeks to take advantage of the relative peace that had followed independence, became a deserted ghost town, complementing old Famagusta, a ghost town of ruined Gothic churches ever since it had been bombarded by the Turks 400 years earlier. Across the island, stretches of no-man’s-land under United Nations supervision separated the two sides. Nicosia had already become divided between Turks and Greeks in 1963, with barricaded areas inhabited by the Turks.19 The frontier between Turks and Greeks cut right through the middle of the old city. Only in April 2008 was a crossing-point opened within old Nicosia.

  The Turks went on to enact the policy they had been advocating in response to enôsis. In 1983 the ‘Turkish Republic of North Cyprus’ was created, unrecognized internationally except by Turkey, which maintained large forces there and encouraged tens of thousands of Anatolian Turks to find a new life in Turkish Cyprus. The political changes in Cyprus can be measured in changes to place-names, in the abandonment of disused places of worship and, of course, in the presence of flags everywhere – in northern Cyprus the Turkish flag fluttering alongside its variant, the northern Cypriot flag, white with a red crescent; in the south the Greek flag alongside that of the Republic of Cyprus. De facto, Cyprus falls under four separate authorities: the Greek Cypriot republic, the Turkish Cypriot republic, Great Britain and the United Nations. The adhesion of Greek Cyprus to the European Union in 2004 was accompanied by attempts to bring the sides together, and, since the EU regards the Greek republic as the government of all Cyprus, EU investment has also benefited projects in Turkish Nicosia, Kyrenia and other parts of northern Cyprus. The admission of Cyprus to the Union was, not surprisingly, fervently urged by Greece, which saw this as a chance to gain a second Hellenic voice at the EU table, to involve the EU more deeply in Graeco-Turkish rivalries, and to bring the issue of a divided Cyprus into the international arena.20 While the Turkish population is generally ready to accept plans for a united federal Cyprus, the Greek Cypriots have refused to countenance the loss of their properties in the north, and hopes that the problem would or could be resolved around the time Cyprus joined the EU were over-optimistic. The most important factor pressing North Cyprus towards a resolution has been the difficult economic position of an unrecognized state that depends so heavily on Turkish economic, not to mention military, support.21

  The third and smallest British territory in the Mediterranean had no chance of decolonization – nor any wish to be decolonized. Britain still saw Gibraltar as a vital naval base immediately after the Second World War, though its importance faded as British commitments in the Mediterranean declined, and the Americans had no use for it once they had contracted with Franco for the use of bases in southern Spain. Franco imagined that he could have Gibraltar if he made enough noise. But around 1950 Britain was not very interested in developing ties with the Spanish government, which was badly tarnished by its record of oppression; nor could Spain make its voice heard at the UN, which it was not permitted to join until 1955.22 One year before that, the new queen, Elizabeth, visited Gibraltar at the end of her six-month world tour, which gave Franco the excuse to mobilize crowds on the streets of Madrid. Spain argued that it had a right to every inch of its national territory, and that many of the Gibraltarians were as alien as the British, claiming that the true Gibraltar lived on among the inhabitants of San Roque, the Spanish town nearby which had been settled by the original inhabitants of the rock in 1704.23 Unlike other decolonization arguments, the issue was not the right of the inhabitants to govern themselves, but a more traditional one about natural frontiers (how this applied to Moroccan claims to the Spanish outposts at Ceuta and Melilla was not clearly explained). Following the royal visit, Franco imposed increasingly severe restrictions on movement between S
pain and the rock. A former pilot in the USAF writes:

  I flew into Gibraltar from Naples and Sicily on several occasions in the late 70s and early 80s. It was one of the most difficult approaches I was required to make because Spanish Air Traffic Control imposed extremely tight approach corridors on aircraft landing to the east.24

  Britain wavered over the issue, seeing less use for Gibraltar than in the glory days of the Royal Navy, but impressed by the constantly stated loyalty of the Gibraltarians to Britain.25

  Britain insisted that what mattered was not territorial integrity but the wishes of the Gibraltarians. In May 1969, the British government made it plain that ‘Her Majesty’s Government will never enter into arrangements under which the people of Gibraltar would pass under the sovereignty of another state against their freely and democratically expressed wishes.’26 Frustrated and outraged, Franco, who had never lost his capacity to bully, completely closed the border between Spain and Gibraltar. It remained so for thirteen years, well into the era of democratic Spain, and was fully opened only when Spain joined the European Community in 1986. During that time, Spanish workers with jobs in Gibraltar were cut off from their place of work, and Gibraltarians were able to visit Spain only by a roundabout route through Tangier. Spanish sensitivity reached extraordinary levels: in 1965 Spain threatened to boycott the Miss World contest if Miss Gibraltar were allowed to compete; but any temptation in the Foreign Office to let Spain have its way has been consistently blocked by the refusal of nearly all the inhabitants to dissolve the tie to Great Britain.27 With its mixed population of British, Spanish, Genoese, Maltese, Jewish, Hindu and latterly Muslim inhabitants, Gibraltar can be seen as one of the last survivors of a once widespread phenomenon, the Mediterranean port city.

  7

  The Last Mediterranean,

  1950–2010

  I

  The late twentieth century was one of the great periods of Mediterranean migration. Migrations out of North Africa and into and out of Israel have been discussed in the previous chapter. The history of migration out of Sicily and southern Italy began as far back as the late nineteenth century, and it was largely directed towards North and South America. In the 1950s and 60s it was redirected towards the towns of northern Italy. Southern Italian agriculture, already suffering from neglect and lack of investment, declined still further as villages were abandoned. Elsewhere, colonial connections were important; for example, British rule over Cyprus brought substantial Greek and Turkish communities to north London. Along with these migrants, their cuisines arrived: pizza became familiar in London in the 1970s, while Greek restaurants in Britain had a Cypriot flavour. Not surprisingly, the food of the south of Italy took a strong lead among Italian émigrés: the sublime creation of Genoese cooks, trenette al pesto, was little known outside Italy, or indeed Liguria, before the 1970s. But the first stirrings of north European fascination with Mediterranean food could be felt in 1950, when Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food appeared.1 It drew on her often hair-raising travels around the Mediterranean, keeping just ahead of the enemy during the Second World War. Initially, the book evoked aspirations rather than achievements: Great Britain was still subject to post-war food rationing, and even olive oil was hard to find. With increasing prosperity in northern Europe, the market for unfamiliar, Mediterranean produce expanded and finally, in 1965, Mrs David found the confidence to open her own food shop. By 1970 it was not too difficult to find aubergines and avocados in the groceries of Britain, Germany or Holland; and by 2000 the idea that a Mediterranean diet rich in fish, olive oil and vegetables is far healthier than traditional north European diets often based on pork and lard took hold. Interest in regional Mediterranean cuisines expanded all over Europe and North America – not just Italian food but Roman food, not just Roman food but the food of the Roman Jews, and so on.2 Interest also grew in Mediterranean wines from as far south as Apulia and Alicante, under the influence of sophisticated Californian viticulture, with constant talk of promising new areas along the Croatian coast or in Turkey, not to mention vineyards old and new in the Bekaa Valley and the Golan Heights. Bland northern European menus (France and Belgium apart) became a distant memory. These changes in diet are of far more than anecdotal significance: old ethnic identities have been broken down as the cuisine of the Mediterranean has become globalized.

  In a sense, then, the Mediterranean has become everyone’s cultural possession. But population movements that originated far beyond its shores have also had a significant political and social impact. New, non-Mediterranean populations became temporarily or permanently installed in its cities or employed as cheap labour in the countryside. Many of the African or Asian migrants who reached the Mediterranean in the years either side of 2000 aimed only to set foot on European soil, and then to head northwards, to France, Germany or England, though the big Italian cities have also been a magnet; but it is the Mediterranean members of the European Union who have had to deal with the influx first of all, as numbers swelled. As well as Ceuta, the small islands between Sicily and North Africa – Lampedusa, Pantelleria, Malta – have become favoured entry points. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, berated Italy in May 2009 for sending boatloads of refugees back to Libya. In 2008 36,900 asylum-seekers arrived in Italy, 75 per cent more than in 2007; in 2008 2,775 reached Malta, equivalent to one migrant for every 148 Maltese; but this was the peak in the nine-year period from 2002 to 2010. Indeed, in 2010 the number fell sharply, because Malta benefited from an asylum agreement between Libya and Italy, the intended destination of many migrants, and perhaps because Europe itself seemed less attractive once it was in the grip of an economic crisis.3 The issue is not simply one for the western Mediterranean states: the Dodecanese islands have become a favourite entry point for migrants arriving from Asia by way of Turkey.

  One striking feature of this new migration has been the predominance of Muslims, leading to arguments about the construction of mosques – old sensitivities, or indeed prejudices, are still powerful in Andalucía and Sicily, not helped by occasional extremist calls for all formerly Islamic lands, including al-Andalus, to be recovered for a revived caliphate. Against this, there is the old reality of migration: as living standards have improved in western Europe, menial tasks have been offloaded on to the migrants, who can find employment in hotels as chambermaids, waiters or cleaners, or as construction workers building these very hotels. For the one area in which the economy of the Mediterranean has experienced an unprecedented boom during the post-war period is tourism, along with the opportunities it has created for employment.

  II

  In the second half of the twentieth century the Mediterranean, no longer a vital seat of commercial or naval power, found a new vocation: mass tourism.4 Mass tourism first took off in the Mediterranean, and it now attracts over 230 million visitors each year.5 The temporary migration of millions of northern Europeans, Americans and Japanese in search of sun, or culture, or both, has taken place alongside the more permanent immigration of retired Germans, Britons and Scandinavians who hope to spend their last days in apartments and villas along the Spanish coast or in Majorca, Malta and Cyprus, forming distinctive communities with their own clubs, pubs and beer cellars – even, in Majorca, a political party for Germans.6 Unlicensed building and, in the case of northern Cyprus, contested title deeds have not always made retirement to the Mediterranean a happy experience, especially when houses have been summarily demolished by irate Spanish authorities. This southward migration has had serious environmental consequences, placing heavy demands on limited water and energy supplies (notably in Cyprus), and replacing sweeping vistas of coasts and hillsides with poorly designed, monotonous blocks of white concrete houses (notably in Spain).

  To understand how the tourist industry took off in the Mediterranean it is necessary to look back at developments well before the Second World War. The age of the Grand Tour, which took English or German travellers to the Bay of Naples and other Mediterranean sites (and sights)
met the needs of a small elite. The Mediterranean became more accessible once railways crossed France and once Queen Victoria made Menton and Hyères into fashionable winter resorts in the late nineteenth century. Monumental hotels were built along the promenades at Nice and Cannes, and a small part of the Mediterranean shores, the Côte d’Azur, became a playground for the rich in summer as well as winter, though the rise to prominence of Monte Carlo took longer and followed the creation by the prince of Monaco of a Société des Bains de Mer that was rather more concerned with gambling than with bathing, which the British promoted for its health-giving properties.7 Italian spas began to develop inland at Montecatini, Abano and on the coast at Rimini, serving an Italian clientèle in the main – streams of English tourists, chronicled in the novels of E. M. Forster, arrived in Florence, taking up residence in pensioni for months at a time, but the sea had not yet become a significant attraction for them.8 What changed dramatically in the late twentieth century was the number and aims of the visitors, and the ease with which they could reach most corners of the Mediterranean. Tourists replaced travellers.