On the mountainside are two flags, visible from quite a wide area in the village below. One is the Turkish flag, with white crescent and star on a red background. 🇹🇷 The other is the flag of the TRNC - Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. This is the same design with colours reversed, red on white.
Flags are just barely visible in the photo on the right, taken a couple of blocks downhill from us. Pretty well dead centre in the picture. We can see them quite well from our patio, though, and very useful they are for reasons completely unrelated to nationalism. As we attempt to predict weather they give a clear indication of which way the wind is blowing. It’s usually from the west, although J notes that when, as today, the wind is from the east we don’t normally get the stormy weather we’ve learned to expect. Today is hazy, but calm. We do get winds from the south. You can see the clouds being blown over the mountains from the south side. But the flags are too close to the steep mountain slope to show a south wind.
The most striking North Cypriot flag, though, is on the other side of the mountain range. It’s an enormous flag - 50 acres (426 metres wide) painted, or more accurately chemically dyed, onto the mountainside. It’s visible from Nicosia, as it is intended to be, and also, apparently from space. The largest flag in the world. A sign of the tragic history of Cyprus, it is provocation, bravado, and a memorial to those who died in one of the saddest episodes of mass execution in the time of conflict.
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