NICOSIA - "This coffee tastes a lot like Greek Cypriot coffee," said Harris Hadjipavlou, swirling the muddy grounds in the bottom of his cup.
We were sitting in a cafe in the capital, the last divided city in Europe. The cafe is set into the corner of the Büyük Han, or Great Inn, a 16th-century caravanserai where travelers rested and watered their animals, usually donkeys. The inn is the most spectacular of many preserved buildings in Nicosia. The menu read "Turkish Cypriot coffee."
It was fitting that my self-appointed host took me to the medieval hub of hostelry in his city. Travel brochures make much of the myth that Aphrodite washed ashore on Cypriot beaches. But the more relevant god may be Zeus, one of whose epithets is Xenios, "he who guards hospitality."
Three afternoons earlier I had walked, sweaty and disgruntled, into the bar/club/art gallery that Hadjipavlou, 34, runs on the Greek side of the city. The hotel next door where I had a reservation was boarded up. Hadjipavlou invited me to sit on the terrace, fragrant with oregano and basil plants, while he called the hotel owner.
After living in Berlin for the last year, curiosity about the divided city had brought me to Nicosia, although most tourists prefer Cypriot beaches to the country's barricaded capital. Outside of hotels geared toward business travelers, accommodations are hard to find.
"Yes, closed unexpectedly and forever," Hadjipavlou said cheerfully after talking on his cellphone. "Do you like dogs?" If so, I could stay with his friend Maria Pavli, 25, whose mutt had recently given birth to five puppies. I assumed he was suggesting a room-for-let deal of the type common on the Greek islands. But it turned out he was offering pure hospitality.
Pavli, a graphic designer, later said: "God brought you to Harris because he is so knowledgeable about politics and history." But I think if God, or Zeus, brought me to anyone it was to Pavli, who took me in, made me breakfast, and worried about my whereabouts when I came back late.
Nobody I spoke with in Cyprus found my serendipitous adoption strange. "It is the old way," Hadjipavlou said. "Even if your enemy comes you have to take him in."
Of course, the enemy is already here, according to nationalist Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The island's strategic location among three continents attracted the imperial attention of Venetians, Ottomans, and Britons, among others.
After gaining independence in 1960, violence between ethnic Turks and Greeks rocked the wheelbarrow-shaped island. Turkish forces invaded in 1974 to oppose a Greek Cypriot coup, which sought to unite the island with mainland Greece.
