Having explored the Southern city’s ancient streets and visited the House of the Dragoman Hadjigeorgakis, I made my way up Ledra Street and crossed over the Green Line into the North. The visitor is immediately struck by the clearly much lower level of prosperity. Many of the buildings seem to be crumbling, the cars are old, the streets are dirty and the rubbish bins are overflowing. Songbirds hang in cages outside the coffee bars. It felt like being back in some of the Turkish towns I remember from a backpacking trip in the rural south in the early 1980s. European structural funds are being disbursed on both sides of the divide and these oases of restructuring stand out far more in the north (a refurbished indoor market, built in the 1930s, caught my eye). There are two major architectural sights which, a little like the grand museums of Museum Island in the old divided Berlin, underline why this city should not be divided. The first is the beautifully restored Büyük Han, an authentic caravanserai and the second, its minarettes visible in my picture (taken from Debenhams), is the Selimiye Mosque, which was built as a cathedral and converted into a mosque in 1570. It still feels a little like a cathedral, but its interior has been painted white and its carpeted floor (oriented towards Mecca) means that the vast interior doesn’t generate hushed echoes but, rather, absorbs sound, leaving the stockinged visitor alone with her or his thoughts.

I shall never forget the impression the divided Berlin made upon me when I visited it in 1985. Nicosia, visitors are reminded, is the last divided city, and there is more than an echo of the old Berlin about the atmosphere. Indeed, there is something dreadfully fascinating about the fortifications (in my picture, the UN defences at the Paphos Gate), the eerie wastelands of the buffer zone, the quiet menace of the sentries in their pill boxes (who mustn’t be approached), the sandbags and barbed wire and the ubiquitous blue-and-white (UN colours) painted oil cans, the occasional UN helicopters overhead, the Turkish soldiers in their jeeps in the north, and the very different cultural atmospheres and evidently different levels of prosperity in the two halves of the city. I raced around, seeing as much as I could (including grabbing a cup of tea in the sixth floor café of the Debenhams store on Ledra Street, which affords all-round views of the city), and crossing over to the north. This, like Berlin and Vienna in their day, is so obviously a single city and the visitor can only be saddened by the continued division.

The figure in this illustration is from the Middle Chalcolithic period (3,400-2,700 BC) and is one of the many delightful treasures on show in the Museum. The classics, not to be missed, include the extrordinary array of clay figurines from the Agia Irini sanctuary, the statue of Aphrodite frequently used in publicity about the island (and therefore vaguely familiar), a magnificent larger-than-life bronze statue of Septimius Severus, the first Roman emperor of African origin (and who died on campaign in Britain), and the group of three limestone lions and two sphinxes found in the Tamassos necropolis south of Nioosia in 1997. But there are lots of other beautiful things to see, from exquisite jewelry through to ancient forms of writing (I found the 6th century BC cypro-syllabic inscriptions particularly beautiful) and (my favourite) an 8th century BC throne made of wood and covered with ivory plaques found in the ruins of Salamis. Somebody should write a poem about the anonymous kings who once sat on that throne!

I got up early this morning and set off for the city, determined to see something of Nicosia before my flight back to Brussels. My first port of call was the Cyprus Museum, incongruously near to the Green Line and the impressively fortified Paphos Gate (about which more in another post). The Museum, erected ‘In Memory of Queen Victoria’, houses a fascinating and humbling collection of ancient human-crafted objects, some of them, like the Neolithic human face in my illustration, almost nine thousand years old. The stone face was part of a temporary exhibition, anThrOPOS, or ‘Faces of Cyprus through the ages’. The exhibition opens with a neat quotation; ‘It is people who make a place and a place that makes people.’ People have been making Cyprus and Cyprus has been making people for some ten thousand years.  The exhibition provided a wonderful race through not just representations of the human face but also beards and hairstyles, hats and headdresses, jewelry, clothes, tattoos and body painting. The representations included the at times stylistically sophisticated plank figures, an excellent example of mankind’s early ability to take abstraction to surrealistic lengths.

This evening I had dinner with EESC member Bryan Cassidy (Employers’ Group) and his wife, Gillian, at a wonderful fresh fish taverna. The address was a good tip – a table was booked for later the same evening for the referees in the Cyprus-Norway World Cup qualifying match that was under way in Nicosia as we ate. We had delicious grilled fresh squid and sea bass and a lovely conversation. I have known Bryan since the mid-1980s when, as a Member of the European Parliament, he served on the Parliamentary Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and Industrial Policy. At that time I was in the Secretariat General of the European Commission following the Parliament and the ‘EMAC’ Committee (as it was known) was my responsibility. Bryan did his national service on another Mediterranean island, Malta, and it was through a Maltese connection back home that he met Gillian. The two have been married for an extraordinary 52 years. They reminisced and I drank it all in. It was just a lovely evening.

I heard today of the death of the former French Foreign Minister and European Commission member, Claude Cheysson, at the ripe old age of 92 (there’s a good obituary here). He was François Mitterrand’s first choice to become President of the European Commission in 1984 but his candidature was vetoed by Margaret Thatcher and so Mitterrand’s second candidate (at the time the larger member states had two Commission members), Jacques Delors, got the job instead – and the rest, as they say, is history. Working in the Secretariat General of the Commission in that period, I knew just a little the post-1984 Cheysson (he was in charge of Mediterranean policy and north-south relations). In an illustrious career he had already been a European Commissioner several times, and he was, understandably, treated with kid gloves by the administration, which was empathetically aware of the difficult and strange situation in which he found himself (though he was absolutely loyal to Delors and the Monnet tradition of collegiality). One of our duties was to handle the organisation of oral questions to the Commission in the European Parliament’s plenary sessions. A special session would be organised in Strasbourg, generally late on the Wednesday night, and Commissioners, understandably, were not always able to be present to field questions that fell within their competences. Sometimes these absences were, because of events elsewhere, sudden. So it was that, late one Wednesday night, Claude Cheysson found himself suddenly fielding a question about milk quotas. Disaster! We had the background file but the speaking note had gone missing. Cheysson was a decorated war hero, noted, it was said, for his calmness under fire, and it showed. We told him what had happened and handed him the large background file that he couldn’t possibly even begin to read. The question was called and Cheysson got calmly to his feet. ‘Un quota laitier,‘ he began, looking slowly around the hemicycle, ‘qu’est-ce, un quota laitier?’ He went on to give a brilliant philosophical analysis of milk quotas until finally a breathless colleague was able to hand him the re-found speaking note, whereupon Cheysson brought his magisterial analysis to a close and then said ‘And now, to come to the specific question that has been asked…’ Ever after that episode – not a word of anger or reproach to the staff, a brilliant action to gain time – I regarded Cheysson with fond admiration. He was a true pro.

I took the flight out to Cyprus again last night. This morning the European Economic and Social Committee’s Bureau held a short extraordinary meeting (picture), followed by a conference on the theme of the role of civil society in restoring trust and confidence in Europe. Opened by EESC President Staffan Nilsson, the conference was addressed by a series of keynote speakers, including Cyprus Minister of Labour and Social Insurance, Sotiroula Charalambous and Heidi Lougheed (Employers’ Group, Ireland), who presented an exploratory opinion that had been requested by the minister on ‘strengthening participatory processes and the involvement of local authorities, NGOs and social partners in the implementation of Europe 2020.’  The conference was divided up into two sessions, the first hearing the views of civil society organisations in Cyprus, and the second considering ways in which the EU could/should help resolve the crisis. The chair of the afternoon session, Michael Smyth (Various Interests Group, United Kingdom), reformulated the question; how can organised civil society encourage and accelerate the apparent sea change from austerity to growth that seems to be getting under way?

To the Heysel stadium at midday today for the Brussels Ekiden marathon competition. The idea, Japanese in origin, is that a team of six run a marathon, divided up into runs of five, ten and 7.2 kilometres. There were some 1,200 teams running today. Fifty of them were from the EU institutions, including our EESC team. The rainy conditions were appalling but they couldn’t dampen the warm and positive spirits of the occasion. Committed to the Give EUR Hope charity, which was coordinating the EU’s participation, I had wanted to run myself but fell foul to a flare up of back injury and so had to watch.  Our team did itself really proud. In the picture, left to right: Captain: Martin Westlake (ahem!), Fausta Palombelli (Italian), Jakob Andersen (Danish), Alexis Vandersemissen (Belgian), Emily Westlake (English), Julia Manuel (French). Missing from the picture is Johannes Kind (German), who did a Forrest Gump and ran straight home afterwards. Our team was 218th (out of 1,223 teams) and ran the marathon in a respectable 3 hours 13 minutes and 46 seconds – not bad at all.

What, people ask, to make of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s decision today to award the 2012 prize to the European Union? I think a big part of the reason is bound up in the answer to the question ‘why now?’. Indeed, why this year of all years, when the EU is beset by crises and euroscepticism is on the rise? Another part of the reason is bound up in the answer to the question ‘why the EU?’. Can the EU legitimately argue that it alone has ‘overcome war and divisions … to jointly shape a continent of peace and prosperity’? (to quote Herman Van Rompuy and José Manuel Barroso’s joint statement). My interpretation of the award is that the Committee wanted to remind younger and forgetful Europeans about what came before and it wanted to underline its belief that the EU represents the best guarantee for a peaceful future. In other words, it is precisely because the EU is beset by crises that it has won this symbolic award, a prize awarded to every single citizen, and not just to the EU’s institutions, let alone to their leaders. I see it as a sort of encouragement to stay true to the faith, to a winning formula. It is also a deliberate message to the world: this is a model for you all – be inspired!

I accidentally came across the extraordinary figure of Ambrose Bierce through a cynical observation I happened to read in a magazine; ‘politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.’ I looked him up and out and have since been dipping into his The Devil’s Dictionary (for example, his definition of ‘dictionary’ = ‘A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.’). But it is his short stories above all that have caught my attention. I started with his extraordinary An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge and am now firmly hooked. There is more than a little of the Edgar Allan Poe about Bierce (military service included), but the mysteries of Poe’s death in New York are surely bettered by the mystery of Bierce’s disappearance in Mexico – if, that is, that was where he disappeared…