today i was at the UNFICYP base in Nicosia for 1 hour, photographing the disused airport.

I took 6 rolls with my 2 hasselblads using 40mm distagon lens and 80mm lens (no snapshots this time!)…the site is huge and it is the kind of place where I could spend days and days taking photos. So one hour was very little and very rushed but it still was a fantastic experience.
The site is desolated and of a melancholic raw beauty.

It’s interesting to see how nature is taking over the abandoned site: buildings are crumbling (unfortunatly I was not allowed inside as the buildings are not only dangerous as they may fall down but also there is plenty of absetos) and grass and trees are growing inside them.

A bit thank you goes to the UNFICYP, in particular to Capt. Michal Harnadek, public information officer, of the Slovakian contingent as well as Mr  Michel Bordanneaux who helped me to organise the visit. Capt Harnadek was a great source of interesting information.

It has also been a good opportunity for me to reflect on my project and how to develop it: my interest is in human geography and how people relate to a territory. I feel that to really portray the borderlands of Europe I will need an enormous amount of time and that, rather than visit individual places, I should really walk the whole lenght of Europe’s borders. Only by phisically walking the borders I can establish  a connection with the landscape and people who inhabit it.
So i am thinking to return to Cyprus in winter, when the mild weather will allow me to walk along the buffer zone. Not so much photographing the buffer zone itself (arid land, crumbling buildings and military positions) but the people who live along it.
The buffer zone is a weird place, as it is not an official border but a “de-fact border”.
Through my research I am reading a lot on the subject of borders, and my favorite definition is that borders are “time written in space, sociological facts that take spatial form”. The buffer zone is a clear example of this: time and history are occupying a physical space.