The open barrier: a month later

The people of Cyprus have had just over a month to adjust to the opening of the green line between the Greek and Turkish communities in the island. Here is an article from the Boston Globe: "Open-door policy seeks to mend Cyprus." From the article:

In the month since the Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash, ordered the barricades to come down, about 267,000 Greek Cypriots and 111,000 Turkish Cypriots have crossed the cease-fire line, according to the republic's Interior Ministry. The volume of the exchange -- at least 5,000 people cross, in either direction on most days -- and the good climate have taken everyone by surprise.

''No one expected it,'' Cyprus's former president, George Vasilliou, said in a recent interview. ''The hunger for friendship and cooperation disproves, beyond any doubt, all that silly talk about the two communities not being able to coexist.''

Yet while many have likened the collapse of the dead zone to the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is far from the solution that mediators have spent years trying to forge. The US State Department's coordinator for Cyprus, Thomas Weston, said that while the incident-free movement of Greeks and Turks was ''good news,'' some basic -- and prickly -- issues still divide them: property, security, and governance.

Then there's this article from The Guardian's Observer magazine: "Home sweet homeland," about the exiled residents of the northern Cypriot town of Morphou, including its former mayor, Charlambos Pittas. It ends on a melancholy note:

One day Mayor Pittas and some of his people will go back to Morphou not just as tourists but as residents. Maybe he, and some fellow Greek- Cypriots, will be there in the spring to smell the orange blossom in the streets. As they walk through those streets some of the houses, some of the buildings, will be familiar. But it will never be the return they have dreamed of. The war of 1974 and their exile has changed them for ever. They will not be going home but returning as foreigners to another country.