Astromeritis was not on Pope Francis' visit to Cyprus.

The small town with a good 2300 inhabitants is located around thirty kilometers west of the capital Nicosia in a barren landscape.

In Astromeritis there is one of six passages between the Greek southern part and the Turkish north of the divided island.

The buffer zone along the 1974 armistice line has been secured and monitored by UN blue helmets for almost five decades.

The peacekeeping mission in Cyprus is one of the oldest and most "long-lived" of the UN.

Matthias Rüb

Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.

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In and around astromeritis there is a now eleven kilometer long interlocking made of double coils of barbed wire along the demarcation line.

There are barbed wire fences elsewhere along the 180 km long “green line”.

But these are mostly historical barbed wire, so to speak, which was installed year and day ago by Greek, Turkish or UN troops to secure the front and demarcation lines and which has long since corroded.

Much more migrants than last year

But the barbed wire of astromeritis glitters brightly in the sun. Because he's new. It does not serve to secure a ceasefire between Turkish and Greek troops, which has long since ceased to be unstable. Rather, it is supposed to prevent illegal migrants from crossing the actually open “green line”. Interior Minister Nicos Nouris justified the construction of the border fence with the continued influx of migrants. The Republic of Cyprus was in a state of emergency as a result.

Almost 11,000 migrants had arrived in the Greek part of the island by the end of October, a good 38 percent more than in the entire previous year. More than 9,000 of them came via the “green zone” from the Turkish-occupied third in the north of the divided island. The government in Nicosia was convinced that the migrants had come to Northern Cyprus from the Turkish mainland with the tolerance and knowledge of Ankara before they entered EU territory for the first time when crossing the "green line" to the Greek south of the island and applied for asylum there. De jure, all of Cyprus has been a member of the EU since 2004, but de facto it is only the southern part of Greece with around 850,000 inhabitants, 93 percent of whom belong to the autocephalous Cypriot Orthodox Church.

In the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus", which is only recognized by Ankara, there are around 320,000 native and immigrant Turks, most of them Sunni Muslims.

There are currently around 47,000 Turkish troops stationed in Northern Cyprus.

The migrants are not prevented from moving from the north to the south of Cyprus by either the Turkish troops or the UN soldiers.

Cyprus has the highest proportion of migrants in relation to the number of inhabitants of all EU countries.

In order to secure the “green line” along its entire length, according to press reports, the government in Nicosia has now commissioned an Israeli company to set up a surveillance system.

Until then, known escape routes from the north will be blocked with more kilometers of barbed wire rolls, assured Interior Minister Nouris.