Hope in the Ruins of Home: Narrative Meaning-Making of Forced Displacement, Place Attachment, and Deferred Future Resettlement in Varosha

Abstract In 1974, the Cyprus War turned the seaside resort of Varosha into a derelict and decaying town, captured by the Turkish army and held for subsequent decades as a political bargaining chip in the peace negotiations of the unresolved reconflict. In 2020, the city partially opened to public visits, allowing its former residents to tour a landscape of ruination. This paper explores the contested narratives of the city’s future revival that have emerged in the wake of this opening. In particular, the paper describes forcibly displaced Varoshians’ narratives as discursive practices that reclaim the lost ‘homeplace’ and insist on the right to return. These narratives, the paper shows, become a mnemonic means of communicative meaning-making, with four main themes: loss, threshold, transformation, and the future. The paper uses these themes to show how such narratives may enable refugees to maintain hope even in the ruins of hoped-for futures. The thematic analysis also shows how place attachment narratives transmitting memories of home may transform with a vibrant present-ness related to people’s imaginations of a future Varosha. Speaking to the possibilities of return, this study calls for further explorations towards the narrative of restitution beyond legal property and political territory.