The history of Cyprus offers a reflection of larger world history. Coveted by a succession of foreign powers, it has been repeatedly occupied: the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, crusaders, Venetians, Genoese, Ottomans, and British have all left their mark on this Mediterranean island. Alongside the Roman and early Byzantine ruins of Salamis, other impressive monuments date from the Frankish and Venetian times, including the Abbey of Bellapais; the fortified harbor of Kyrenia; the magnificent cathedrals of Nicosia; and Famagusta, the setting for Shakespeare’s Othello.

In The Geckos of Bellapais, Joachim Sartorius shares the cultures and legends, colors and lights of the Levant. He explores the island’s history—including its division after the Turkish invasion of 1974 and the difficulties that followed. A revealing exploration of Cyprus after the Turkish partition and an evocative account of one poet’s life on one of the most beautiful islands in the Mediterranean, this book belongs among the world’s best travel writing.

The Make-Believe Space is a book of ethnographic and theoretical meditation on the phantasmatic entanglement of materialities in the aftermath of war, displacement, and expropriation. "Northern Cyprus," carved out as a separate space and defined as a distinct (de facto) polity since its invasion by Turkey in 1974, is the subject of this ethnography about postwar politics and social relations. Turkish-Cypriots' sociality in a reforged geography, rid of its former Greek-Cypriot inhabitants after the partition of Cyprus, forms the centerpiece of Yael Navaro-Yashin's conceptual exploration of subjectivity in the context of "ruination" and "abjection." The unrecognized state in Northern Cyprus unfolds through the analytical devices that she develops as she explores this polity's administration and raison d'être via affect theory. Challenging the boundaries between competing theoretical orientations, Navaro-Yashin crafts a methodology for the study of subjectivity and affect, and materiality and the phantasmatic, in tandem. In the process, she creates a subtle and nuanced ethnography of life in the long-term aftermath of war.

As ambassador to Turkey during the Cyprus crisis (1965–1968), Parker T. Hart provides an insider’s view of the management of that crisis in NATO and Greek-Turkish relations. Greece and most Greek Cypriots favored enosis (union with Greece), but Turkey and the Turk Cypriots were prepared to go to war to prevent such an annexation. A massacre of Turk Cypriot villagers in November 1967 focused the anger of Turkey, which was prepared to send troops to Cyprus to equalize the preponderance of forces led by General George Grivas. The determined mediation of special presidential envoy Cyrus R. Vance prevented the initiation of all-out hostilities. Vance engineered a withdrawal of mainland Greek forces in excess of existing treaty levels in exchange for a standdown of Turkish forces. The Vance mission diffused the crisis and salvaged the integrity of NATO, and a Greek-Turkish agreement to sponsor and encourage intercommunal negotiations followed.
Hart has relied on his own papers from the period, as well as on United Nations sources from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, and on the papers of the other key participants in the Crisis, Ambassador to Greece Phillips Talbot, Ambassador to Cyprus Taylor G. Belcher, and Cyrus Vance, to provide a rare play-by-play analysis of the crisis and its resolution.