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Cyprus Transportation
According to government statistics, the Turkish Cypriot
road
network in the mid-1980s consisted of 5,280 kilometers of
paved and
800 kilometers of unpaved roads. In an effort to support
farming,
the government constructed many service roads. The
Department of
Public Works was responsible for about 2,720 kilometers of
paved
roads, and the rest came under the jurisdiction of
municipal
administrations. After 1974, major highways were built
between
Nicosia and Morphou, Nicosia and Kyrenia, and Ercan
Airport.
Another highway to Geçitkale Airport was under
consideration in the
late 1980s.
The two major international airports in the "TRNC,"
Ercan and
Geçitkale, were both administered by the Department of
Civil
Aviation. Ercan Airport was equipped with navigational
aids and
equipment and was capable of handling all types of
aircraft
(including the DC-10 and Airbus 300). About 120,000
passengers
traveled through Ercan Airport each year. The national
airline of
the "TRNC," Turkish Cypriot Airlines, operated a small
fleet of
large, modern aircraft.
The major ports of the "TRNC" were Famagusta, Kyrenia,
and
Kalecik, located on the southwestern coast of the Karpas
Peninsula.
Famagusta was the main multipurpose port, capable of
receiving in
its inner harbor vessels up to 131 meters in length and
with a
draft of up to 6.7 meters. Part of Famagusta's outer
harbor was a
free port. Famagusta's port was equipped with tugboats,
mobile and
floating cranes, forklifts, warehouses, and a
quay-connected modern
silo with a storage capacity of 20,000 tons. In 1975, 608
ships
sailed into the port. In 1987 this number increased to
1,042. The
number of passengers increased from 65,403 to 91,986, and
the total
tonnage of goods entering the port from 72,755 to 290,736
tons.
The port of Kalecik consisted of two privately owned
sections.
One was equipped with a conveyor belt for bulk and/or
bagged cargo
and a pier 42 meters in length. The other section was a
tanker
terminal with submerged pipelines.
Kyrenia's small port had a maximum depth of 3.2 meters
and was
used mainly as a yacht harbor. Newer facilities to the
east of the
old port served as loading docks for ferries between the
island and
Turkey. The new port's total quay length in the mid-1980s
was 409
meters; the main quay was 150 meters long, with an average
depth of
8 meters. In 1987 more than 400 ships visited the port,
bringing
37,000 passengers and 1,500 vehicles.
Data as of January 1991
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