How is being in an unrecognized country different from being in an ordinary, recognized one? If one has an American passport, not very much. This morning, after a bus trip from Larnaca to Nicosia and a bit of a walk to the Lendra Street checkpoint, my mother and I showed our passports on one side, and in the evening when we returned from a trip around the Republic of Northern Cyprus, we showed our passports on the other side and were able to walk through to the south without any trouble whatsoever. If I did not have any wifi access anywhere I went, I was able to buy things in dollars, euros, with cash or credit, and had no troubles with the more than 20,000 troops who are still protecting the people of Northern Cyprus from the possibility of Greek Cypriot agression.

This does not mean that everything is fine for the people of Northern Cyprus themselves. The lack of recognition of their republic, and the fact that the world at large–outside of Turkey–pretends as if they are a part of a unified Cyprus, means that their transportation links are sketchy and their ability to trade with the outside world is limited, but it has not harmed them from receiving a lot of investment from Turkey and Russia, to give but two examples, as well as a fair bit of income from tourism as well as from students attracted by their fantastically cheap education, which was reported to me at around 1000 euros a year for a high-class university education, frequently in STEM fields, in one of the country’s numerous universities. The country has also received a lot of investment in expensive housing properties from other nations, which has driven up property values (a mixed blessing, obviously) as well as tourism income from their historical sites.

Yet there are some serious problems to be seen. One of these is the climate of Northern Cyprus, as an area that only decades ago was heavily forested is now filled with grasslands and a proliferation of succulents indicates a process that would be unjustly considered as desertification. The farming there that I could see was mostly round bales of hay in large pastures, which is not a particularly productive kind of agriculture, it must be admitted. The area is so short of water that it has to pump water from Turkey, which has made it even more dependent on Turkey for its basic survival. Traffic is a problem–we saw a horrible wreck in the course of our travels and also saw plenty of speeding ambulances while we were out and about. There is also a serious lack of progress in recognizing the stubborn facts on the ground that the people of Northern Cyprus and the nation of Turkey are not willing to let the Turkish Cypriots, which potentially number between 300,000 and 500,000 people right now, to be subject again to ethnic cleansing from the Greek Cypriot side. In addition to this, the absence of a relationship between the two republics on Cyprus has prevented the redevelopment of the ghost town of Famagusta or the further excavation of the archaeological ruins of Salamis.

In a way, it is somewhat interesting but also somewhat sad to see that Northern Cyprus and the southern part of the island have developed in similar ways but also largely independent of each other. Both areas have sought to preserve their agriculture in the face of a drying climate, both cater to tourists and foreign direct investment in real estate, but neither area seems to interact in a meaningful way with the other. One wonders what it would take to resolve the political impasse both on the island as well as within the international community, where the fate of the Northern Cypriots has not led to the same push for nationhood as happened with Bosnian Muslims or Kosovars. Clearly time has done nothing to improve matters.