NICOSIA Nicosia International Airport has stood disused since Cyprus was divided in 1974, but for a few hours on Thursday the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra brought the abandoned airstrip back to life.

For the first time, the orchestra performed at the abandoned airport inside the UN-patrolled buffer zone that separates the island, to show, in the words of the 33-year-old conductor Yiannis Hadjiloizou, “how culture, music, arts in general can bring people together”.

The 50-strong orchestra comprised dozens of nationalities, including 15 Greek Cypriots and one Turkish Cypriot, and played the works of Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Brahms to mark International Peace Day, which falls on Sept 21.

They played to an audience of UN officials, diplomats, and Cypriots from both sides of the island, on the tarmac in front of the terminal building's ghostly facade.

“War is not between people,” said Hadjiloizou, a Greek Cypriot who grew up in the south.

The young conductor was delighted with the idea that his music was wafting over the Turkish ceasefire line, just a few hundred metres from the airport.

But Lisa Buttenheim, the head of the UN mission in Cyprus, sounded a more sombre note.

“The setting for this evening's concert is a sad reminder of a situation whose resolution is long overdue,” she said, speaking before the concert. “The last passenger jets took off from here in 1974 on this very tarmac where we stand. Thirty-six years later the airport remains frozen in time.” On July 23, 1974, the airport found itself at the centre of the conflict between Greek and Turkish troops, three days after the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus that followed a Greek Cypriot coup seeking to unite the country with Greece.

It was subsequently designated a “zone protected by the United Nations,” within the boundaries of the buffer zone. But the terminal building has since lapsed into a state of dereliction, with peeling posters on the walls advertising holidays from the 1970s and pigeons nesting in the ceiling.

On the tarmac, parched and cracked after 36 hot summers, the shell of a Cyprus Airways “Trident Sun Jet”, its nose and doors missing, its sides dotted with bullet holes, bears witness to the violence.

The Cypriot conductor Hadjiloizou comes from a family of musicians and has no time for the partisan politics that have perpetuated the so-called Cyprus problem.

“In this part of the world political views are very strong... We have to compromise,” he said.

“The house of my mother is in the (Turkish-held) north. Imagine, you go there and it's occupied by some Turkish Cypriot. What can you do? Another war?” The latest round of UN-led peace negotiations began in September 2008 and property remains one of the trickiest issues in the talks. It was the focus of the two intensive meetings last week between Cyprus President Demetris Christofias and Turkish Cypriot leader Dervis Eroglu.

Hadjiloizou believes cultural activities are the best way to help people forget the “no” vote in the 2004 referendum - when Greek Cypriots rejected the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's reunification blueprint, shortly before Cyprus joined the European Union.

“You cannot change the past,” Hadjiloizou said. “But you can prepare the future.”—AFP