Access road ‘has not reduced journey time from Akıncılar village’
A NEW access road has not done enough to reduce journey times for residents of Akıncılar village, who live only metres away from the border with South Cyprus, in the TRNC’s most southerly community, according to the mayor, Hasan Barbaros.
A fanfare of publicity heralded the official opening of the road linking Akıncılar with Ercan airport via a tunnel in May last year, enabling residents to enter and leave the village without having to show identity cards or passports at a military checkpoint, as they had been required to do for many years. It also threw the village open to non-citizens wishing to visit, who had previously needed special permission.
However, Mr Barbaros said villagers still faced long journeys even to nearby locations, and commented: “It remains a challenge to get to many other places in the North or South.”
As an example, he said a resident working in the South Cyprus village of Dali, which is just 500 metres from Akıncılar as the crow flies, had to drive first to the Metehan border crossing — a did any villager retired from work in South Cyprus but receiving regular medical treatment there.
“Instead of travelling 500 metres, they have to drive for miles just to return to virtually where they started, so we are asking for a new border crossing point to be created here,” he said. Mr Barbaros said the previous government had prepared a project to build a second road to Akıncılar that would link it to Haspolat, east of Lefkoşa.
“I understand that the project is again under discussion,” he said. “If it is built, then Akıncılar residents will only have to drive 20km instead of 50km [to the capital], but we don’t have clear information that it will be.
“The road that was opened last year is helping visitors to come to our village but more problems need to be solved.”