Arrival of Euro Boosts Cyprus Peace Hopes

In its relatively short life, the euro has been called many things. Peacemaker has not been one of them. Now that may change as Europe's increasingly strong common currency reaches this fractured corner of the Levant.

The island's arrival in the eurozone yesterday, less than four years after it joined the EU, is being heralded as more than just a milestone amid predictions that it will pull off what countless mediators have failed to achieve so far, and help to reunify Greek and Turkish Cypriots.

"It's a golden opportunity for both communities to overcome one of their major disparities," said Ali Erel, who heads the European Union Association in the island's Turkish-run north. "The transition will push us to cooperate more and that, ultimately, could lead to economic reintegration," he told the Guardian.

Although EU laws and regulations are not applied in the breakaway enclave, where enthusiasm for Europe has also waned considerably, the euro is being used increasingly by the rump territory as it tries to shake off its pariah status.

Northern Cyprus's booming property market is linked almost exclusively to the currency, while billboards exhort tourists not to cross into the internationally recognized Greek-run south with more than €135 (£99) worth of goods.

Three times closer to Baghdad than to Brussels, Cyprus signs up to the euro with Malta, exactly nine years after the currency's birth. The home of the EU's only partitioned capital has been the bane of peacemakers since the Turkish army invaded, seizing its northern third, in response to an Athens-inspired coup in 1974.

The new euro coins have been designed with care: the 1, 2 and 5 cent coins will, for example, depict the moufflon, the wild sheep endemic to the island for whom dividing "green lines" mean little.