On Thursday Endy Zemenides, who heads the Hellenic American Leadership Council in Chicago, complained, as the same source relates, that the ride made light of a city emptied by Turkish troops in 1974: families had lived in those buildings before the invasion, and those who fled had never been allowed back; the deserted homes and hotels were not festival decorations. He added that other rides open with a short introduction, in which it could have been explained why nobody lives there, and he proposed other places on Cyprus: the Akamas Peninsula, the Troodos Mountains, Paphos. The company, as Lena Argiri, correspondent for ERT and Kathimerini, wrote, replied that it had been an oversight at odds with its values; it withdrew the ride, apologized, and promised to review more carefully in future what it puts out.

The whole season was sold under the words "Too good to ghost": twenty-one workouts were crammed into the last eleven days of October, and anyone who finished any one of them earned a badge. A second ride, too, thirty minutes long and narrated by Bradley Rose, set Varosha in the same round with Bran Castle in Romania, a cemetery in Savannah, the prison island of Goli Otok, a Colorado mine and a storm at sea. The source does not say that this one was withdrawn as well.

Let us, then, in the manner of the Calendar, look for causes. The first may be ignorance: nobody in the workshop knew why the city stood empty. The second is profit: ruins please, and hotels eaten by rust make a lovelier shudder than new ones. The third, which I hold to be the true one: they took an empty city for a dead city, and houses without masters for houses of ghosts.

But our Lemuria was founded otherwise. The ghost of Remus, as I told in the Fasti, appeared bloodied to Faustulus and Acca and demanded a day for himself; Romulus named it the Remuria, which was later called the Lemuria. The father of the house rises at midnight barefoot, washes his hands in spring water, throws black beans behind his back, says the words nine times, clashes bronze, and bids the ghosts of his fathers leave the roof. But that rite is owed to our dead, and it sends from the house those who have already ceased to live.

The owners of Varosha are not ghosts; they are exiles, and they are alive. I know this, banished to Tomis, better than any journalist: in Rome they counted me among the living while I bore cold winters among the Getae. A city without citizens is not haunted by ghosts; it waits. Whoever sets it among the spectres turns the Lemuria upside down: we drive ghosts out of the house with beans; these people banish living owners into the ranks of the ghosts. Meanwhile time, as I once sang, "Time, devourer of things, and you, envious age, / destroy all things," and the roofs of the hotels slowly fall.

Nor is the matter settled. The United Nations Security Council, as Breitbart reports, has passed two resolutions on it, 550 in 1984 and 789 in 1992, and has declared it inadmissible for the place to be settled by anyone but its former inhabitants. Nikos Christodoulides, President of Cyprus, wants the fenced zone handed to the United Nations, with the port of Famagusta opened to trade under the supervision of the European Union; Tufan Erhurman, the Turkish Cypriot leader, confirmed on October 21 that he had rejected that package as unbalanced, asking why the handover of Varosha should be made the price of something else; Christodoulides calls Erdogan the great obstacle. What the Turkish Cypriots think of that year the source does not say, beyond this refusal. The treaty I leave to the magistrates; this one thing I, a poet, hold: no place should be set in the calendar whose cause goes untold. A Calendar without causes is a game, and a game played with other people's tears is shameful.

Here, then, is the perfect image of our age: in the Americas citizens pedal on bicycles and go nowhere, and the exiles of Varosha have not taken a single step toward home in fifty-two years. Ghosts we drive out with beans; exiles we do not drive out, we call them home.