This paper examines the fit between orthodox ideas about intercultural language education and situations of acute insecurity. It describes the teaching of Turkish to Greek-Cypriots, instituted in 2003 by the Republic of Cyprus as part of a de-securitization policy. Albeit these classes were optional, many students considered Turks as enemies, and after documenting hostility itself as one motive for learning Turkish, this paper describes three teaching strategies employed to handle the powerful emotions that Turkish elicited: (i) centering on the language as a code, shorn of any cultural association; (ii) handling it as a local language; and (iii) proposing it as a modern international language in a cosmopolitan ambience that potentially transcended the island-specific conflict. In this way, the Cypriot case calls mainstream language teaching assumptions into question: exclusively grammar-centered pedagogies show acute cultural sensitivity, and images of language in a globalized world look radical and innovative. For intercultural language education more generally, it is the combination of institutionalised language learning as a distinct cultural activity with the ideological plasticity of language itself that appears particularly valuable.