After Bellapais, the fortified town of Kyrenia seemed a bustling place. In the little port, a huddle of colorful gulets indicated a style of fishing activity that survived alongside the shaded cafés and small old-fashioned hotels. From there, the road followed a seashore—free of development except for the occasional simple hotel—past the little Pente Mili Beach. Children were swimming where the Turkish army first landed in 1974. We passed through citrus groves, once exploited by Greek Cypriot owners, that went on for miles, until we entered the market town of Morphou and hurried from there to the church of Ayios Mamas. It is an oddly lovely mix of Byzantine construction with Gothic appendages, its richly gilded array of icons complimented by a surprising group of Venetian chandeliers.

The nearby Soli archaeological site did not make us regret giving it just a quick look. The Roman amphitheater was clumsily restored by the British in the 1930s, long after the original stone benches were sent to line the Suez Canal. There are some Byzantine mosaics among the ruins, where Saint Mark is said to have been baptized, but the most memorable image of Soli is the view down to the sea, past palm groves, to where a forlorn pier leads from the water to a copper mine abandoned by the British. A perversely beautiful scene in sunlight.

We were moving fast so as not to miss our appointment in northern Nicosia with Sener Levent, the newspaper publisher who is the gadfly of the regime. Twice jailed, the object of about a hundred lawsuits—according to his tally—as well as threats against his life and a printing press bombing, Levent is a Turkish Cypriot who wants the Turks out. The former title of his newspaper, Avrupa (Turkish for "Europe"), incited, he said, numerous fines that caused him to reinvent the paper using the ironic name Afrika.

Levent felt more confident conducting his interview in Russian than in English, in itself a detail indicative of the complicated history of Cyprus. He'd studied in Moscow when Archbishop Makarios ruled the briefly independent island. The Soviet capital was a destination of choice for the old archbishop, who courted relations with the USSR to keep Cyprus nonaligned in the Cold War. For strategists such as Henry Kissinger, Makarios seemed too left-wing for anybody's good. In Cyprus, a common interpretation of the events of 1974 had Kissinger goading the right-wing minions of the colonels ruling Greece to try to annex Cyprus, knowing that the stronger Turks would move in and establish a pro-American stronghold on the island. It was a no-lose situation for Kissinger, but now Turkey is governed by an Islamic party that's less than pro-American.

Levent did not challenge this analysis, although he added that an upsurge of radical Islamism on the island did not seem likely among either the endemic population or the Anatolians who had moved in. The December elections confirmed his pessimism that a quick reunification of Cyprus, in the form of a democratic federation, was unlikely.