This book argues that two conflicting styles of nationalist imagination led to the violent rending of Cyprus in 1974 and sustained that division over decades. Based on research in both southern and northern Cyprus, the work demonstrates how the conflict emerged through Cypriots' encounters with modernity under British colonialism, and through a consequent reimagining of the body politic in a new world in which Cypriots were defined as part of a European periphery. Few accounts have considered both communities with the depth and balance that Rebecca Bryant brings to her study. The book describes how Muslims and Christians in Cyprus were transformed into Turks and Greeks, and what it meant epistemologically, ontologically and politically when they were.