Famagusta Ghost City, Ammochostos is nowadays an abandoned area with no life at all. The once perceived as cosmopolitan town, full of energy and potential, has now turned into a dead zone. Four decades ago, time froze in the coastal Cypriot district of Varosha.
Eggs were still boiling on hot stovetops. Children's toys remained strewn across living-room floors. Clothes were left on their hangers inside brimming closets, a testament to the thousands of lives that were abandoned in an instant.
Greek Cypriots thought it was a temporary measure when the Turkish military ordered them out of their homes in Varosha, a district of the city of Famagusta, in the summer of 1974. But 42 years have since come and gone, and Varosha remains a ghost town - a hulking blight that towers over the Mediterranean seascape. Empty apartment windows gaze out over families playing beach volleyball, while barbed-wire fencing cuts a swath across the sand, patrolled by armed soldiers.
