A giant step across the dividing line

Cyprus: 'Where," Yannis Papadakis asks near the end of Echoes from the Dead Zone, "could one stand to make sense of Cyprus?"

It's a good question: and Papadakis - a Greek Cypriot anthropologist who studied at Cambridge and has written widely on the topic of ethnic conflict - clearly realises that in order to answer it, he can't actually stand anywhere. Instead, he must wander off on what his publisher calls a "voyage of discovery".

This turns out to be a series of bunjee jumps across borders which - for author and reader alike - is something of a bumpy ride. In Cyprus, pretty much everything is a border; you can't go far without running into a brick wall or a checkpoint or an awkward silence. Even the weather forecast has been politicised, with one side giving temperatures for towns in the northern part of the island only, while the other does the opposite. Maps, too, are less a matter of geographical information than of political interpretation, the standard official practice on both sides being to show the outline of the whole island, with details filled in on one side as appropriate - and the other side left blank.

Papadakis makes his first leap into this unknown "other" when he arrives in Istanbul, the city he has been conditioned since childhood to think of as "Constantinople". He enrols in a Turkish language course, settles into a hostel and makes friends with Turkish students. When they feel comfortable enough to talk politics, they ask him about the history he learned at school. He tells it exactly as he has learned it: "How the Turks had attacked our glorious, civilised, tolerant and cosmopolitan Byzantine Empire, reducing it to the current small Greek state. How historically they were always the aggressors and we the victims. How they had always been expansionist against us . . ."

His friends are shocked. He asks them what they learned at school. "They told me all about their cosmopolitan, tolerant Ottoman Empire; how the Greeks had a privileged role there and how, instead of showing appreciation, they stabbed the Turks in the back by being the first to revolt; of the atrocities the Turks had suffered at the hands of the Greeks; how the Greeks were the first to grow at their Empire's expense, reducing it to the current small state of Turkey . . ."

The double-take will prove to be something of a leitmotif as Papadakis moves back and forth from one set of propaganda, mistaken assumptions and outright lies to the other.

From his inescapably politicised starting point he moves out to explore all facets of cultural identity: language, food, music, religion, the military. He realises that words he has always thought of as Greek are, in fact, of Turkish origin - and vice versa. He discovers that his own family has not always told him the truth (or, at least, not the whole truth). He talks to refugees on both sides, and to people who - for one unhappy reason or another - are living on the "wrong" side. He has a hilarious encounter with the Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash, and unpicks the myth of Aphrodite. Goddess of love? Yeah, right - if you believe the tourism posters.

As Papadakis himself is only too aware, his is a perilous undertaking. In Cyprus, there is no neutral. So entrenched have the two sides been in recent decades that to attempt to write about both is, in itself, regarded as a political statement; the closest one can get to neutral is to enrage everybody. (Sure enough, he is quickly dubbed "Yiannis the Turk" by his own side, while the Turks cheerfully describe him him as "Yiannaki, our famous secret local spy".) So complex are the constant shifts of perspective in the book, however, that by the end of it - unless you're either Greek, Turkish, Greek Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot - you'll probably have given up trying to figure out which "side" he's really on. Which, presumably, is what he intended all along.

Echoes from the Dead Zone - the title refers to the UN-operated buffer zone which runs through the middle of the island's capital, but also to an island where "the dead are said to speak louder than the living" - is packed with historical information. It also contains moving personal testimonies from the kind of ordinary people whose voices are not usually heard above the drum-beating din of history.

What makes it really memorable, though, is its wry humour. As Papadakis points out, past tragedies have ensured that Cyprus is generally discussed in a manner which ranges from hysterical to tearful. He has deliberately taken a different tack. He doesn't ignore the horror of the past, but he does bring a keen sense of the ridiculous to bear on the present situation in his native island.

Critics may well accuse him of making light of it. But as Cyprus, courtesy of its new and rapidly evolving relationship with the European Union, hurtles towards the future, he can also be seen as shedding new light on old wounds - and doing his compatriots an enormous (and enormously healing) favour in the process.

Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist

Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide by Yannis Papadakis IB Tauris, 257pp. £18.95