OLD buildings sometimes inspire more pity than anything human can. Like wounded animals, buildings left to die suffer dumbly. Functional in nature, their spaces are used and reused, patched and reshaped, by amnesiac hands. And so their grandeur, no matter how sublime, no matter how suggestive of something greater than the littleness that has begotten them, must in the end be registered on a mortal scale, the temporary delusions of men. If we sympathise with the urban landscapes that crumble around us, it is a self-pity.
The Ledra Palace, familiar sentry of a gun-turreted limbo, is no different. The Kyrenia range that frames its bullet-ridden ghost to the north grows nobler with the years, while the Palace lingers on, a pile of manmade stones that will collapse or be thrown down.
Standing in its shadow, looking up at the hollow black-stencilled letters that in their heyday in the 1950s announced the apogee of Middle Eastern luxury, I thought of Shelly’s Ozymandias – “Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair! Nothing besides remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.” – and despaired.
When the gate buzzed open, Captain Ellie Haywood was there to take me inside.
Stationed for barely a month at the maelstrom of 30 years’ apathy, she was cheerful and helpful, even as the rooms she and her fellow UN peacekeepers occupied lost power and water. When I was led immediately to the bar, I wondered if at 10am my thirst was so evident, but then remembered I had requested this, along with a tour of the northwest corner of the roof and a peek at the old guest registers.
The coffered ceilings above us, the chandeliers with their broken cups and the twisted iron sconces nailed to the peeling walls, felt wrong. The rest of the hotel had assumed, in its long season of decline, the air of a YMCA dormitory on the coldest night of the year.
As I pushed open the bar’s glass-panelled doors, seven glittering decades of memories I had appropriated over the past few months flooded back over the gloom I had just begun to record, and were quickly swallowed. Despite the rosettes and geometrical flourishes carved into the sombre walnut panelling, there was something of the hunting lodge about the bar, and fittingly. This was now the officers’ mess. A long dining table, separated from the bar by a screen, was already set for a three-course meal.
I tried to conjure up an Alexandrian financier and his mistress on a weekend tryst, or a charg? d’affaires trading secrets over a brandy sour, but couldn’t. Outside, the swimming pool, once one of two in Nicosia, was clean, but vacant. We trudged on to the ballroom, the epicentre of Nicosia’s faded beau monde.
The ballroom is perhaps the most tragic relic of the hotel’s fall from grace. Nothing of the glorious ‘marbled palace’ remained there; only peeling strips of boot-scuffed laminate and soiled walls. Even where the makeshift floor had split apart and gaped, there was no trace of the original oak parquet. The chandelierless fixtures imprisoned in their mint-green recesses looked like weeds scraped to the root.
In an adjoining room was the UN gym out of whose ceiling, a substantial portion of which had been removed and was now dripping a steady pitter-patter of mysterious, smelly liquid, a bewildered worker’s head popped and stared like a lemur for a moment, and vanished. It was raining sewage.
Captain Haywood was unruffled; she had seen worse and could show me a condemned room, if I liked. I felt that without seeing at least one my melancholy would have been incomplete.
We took the stairs up – the elevators, installed in 1949 at great expense, were down, God help them – and when we emerged at the first floor landing the hotel was no more. We passed more than a few uninhabitable rooms with signs on the doors indicating various stages of collapse. The worst of the lot had just been nailed shut.
Happily, we found the barber, Miltos, in. His studio was bright and cluttered. Miltos had been at the Ledra since 1982, one of a handful of Cypriot entrepreneurs holed up with the UN. Gregory the shoemaker, the jewellery man downstairs, an appliance merchant. And Mr. Pepis, Miltos said, find Pepis. He will tell you what you want to know.
Captain Haywood was still intent on finding us a horrid room. We poked into one with the wires hanging out of the ceiling and the shower facing the wrong way. Almost condemned, Captain Haywood said despondently, and we climbed up another flight of stairs.
Across from the UN library, we found a briefing room – what dignitary or socialite had spent a moonlit night within its now sagging walls? – where two soldiers were sitting before a three-dimensional map of the Dead Zone. As innocuous-looking as a sixth-grader’s reconstruction of an Aztec ziggurat, the map, I realised, was the key to a necropolis. Because Nicosia is not just a city divided in two; a third city, swallowed by barbed wire and sandbags, runs through it, a city amidst whose ruins ghosts and soldiers tramp side by side almost interchangeably.
The names given to the abandoned buildings by peacekeeping contingents years ago brought back memories of Pompeii, the more readily identifiable structures like the Spring Factory and the Olympus Hotel yielding, when names or origins were lost, to the hypothetical and grandiose – the Magic Mansion (once a magic store that sold guns, one of the soldiers explained), the Friesenburg House, the Beaver Lodge. Somewhere within that labyrinth a Toyota showroom still stands with 31 undriven Toyotas frozen in time behind its window. But the Dead Zone’s Villa of Mysteries is the Booby-Trapped House, which evoked unsurprisingly blended images of minelaying phantoms and haunted mess halls.
Outside, we had news. A truly revolting room had been found. We set off at a clip. Neglecting the CONDEMNED sign, we stepped tentatively inside and were greeted by a disintegrating carpet covered with a wild explosion of pigeon droppings. Inured at that point, I agreed with Captain Haywood that the room wasn’t that bad. With a new coat of paint and a functioning thermostat, Richard Burton, one of the Ledra’s legendary guests, would have felt right at home. Mr. Pepis was, unfortunately, nowhere to be found.
Captain Haywood was kind enough to oblige me a final request – an inspection of the roof, where thirty years before, days after Makarios was ousted by the Athens-backed junta, war-thirsty journalists had rushed up the same spiral staircase in the shadows of .50 Browning machine guns to witness a decade’s civil violence erupt into an international conflict. Negotiating our way over a maze of cracking, rain-dulled two-by-fours, we found the northwest corner, facing Pentadactylos. The Turkish flag, proud banner of a self-doubting occupation, was mirrored, or fortified, by Attat?rk’s famous words: How happy I am to be a Turk!
Stripped of its mystery from our vantage point, the Dead Zone curled east and west like a dry riverbed. Briefly, a heavy rain of Turkish paratroopers darkened the late-morning sky, the clamour of air-sirens, the cries of mortified Greek and relieved Turkish Cypriots. Today, only the craters left by artillery shells bear witness to those days of havoc, but if you press your ear to the lesions that pockmark the sandstone walls and close your eyes, you can almost hear the final bar of a waltz still ringing in the air, waiting for this thirty-year-old intermission to end.
Across the Green Line, a three-storey building might have been a TNT sniper nest; an ochre-coloured structure in its shadow was eaten through with the enemy’s riposte. After ten minutes of gazing, and puzzling over trajectories and positions, we descended.
The best news of the morning was presently relayed by courier. A room surpassing all possible expectations of decrepitude
, that is to say, a festering pigsty condemned thrice over by multiple UN taskforces, had been located in a wing that, due to its unfathomably hideous state of disrepair, could only be accessed via a window. But were we up to the challenge? Captain Haywood took off at a trot.
I was whispering pedantic observations into my recorder when I was advised to watch my head, and then found myself outside, standing in a puddle on a strip of pavement as narrow as a catwalk. On the other side of a railing, a landslide of baked tiles had slipped onto a lower roof.
Peeking through a shattered windowpane, I observed an overturned refrigerator mottled with a horrible, lichenous growth. There was no paint to speak of on the walls and the room itself was obviously unfit for an incontinent pigeon to grace with its turds.
On our way back down we passed an elderly Cypriot gentleman with a pencil-moustache and a proprietary air.
“Mr. Pepis?” I asked.
He looked puzzled.
“I am Pepis.”
We followed Mr. Pepis back to his current headquarters, the UN Shop. Like Miltos, the barber, Pepis had been there since 1982. His shop was well-stocked, apparently selling everything short of parachutes. On a wall behind the counter was a group of black-and-white photographs – a much younger, debonair Mr. Pepis and the Duchess of Gloucester, a smiling Mr. Pepis and the Duchess of Kent. Those, Mr. Pepis explained, were from his days as the manager of the Sovereign Club at the Episkopi base.
When I asked him about the Ledra’s glory days, Mr. Pepis’ moustache twitched.
“It was the best hotel in the Middle East,” he said. “We had permanent bands from Italy, oak floors, luncheons on Sundays. Now it’s a ghost.”
Like the hotel, memories of its better days would vanish in time. Mr. Pepis was an old man and his resignation might have been in deference to old age as much as to the nostalgia I had provoked in him. My own nostalgia seemed suddenly irrelevant and somehow grotesque.
We left Mr. Pepis alone with his memories, and checked on the guest registers downstairs. The registers were nowhere to be found.
NEXT WEEK: GHOSTS OF THE LEDRA PALACE
