I arrived in Cyprus’s divided capital of Nicosia by bus from Larnaca, on the south coast. I first spent a couple of days in the south of the city, the Greek-inhabited capital of the internationally recognised state, before crossing over to the north through the pedestrian Ledra Street crossing. The city is known in Greek by its older name, Lefkosia, and in Turkish as Lefkoşa, rather than the Frankish Nicosia.
The first crossing between the north and south of the island after the 1974 Turkish invasion was opened in 2003. Passing through the pedestrian Ledra Street crossing in the centre of the city is now a quick and painless affair. Very few people were crossing on the days that I passed to and from the north of the city, and I was through in minutes, with just cursory checks of my passport. On my first afternoon in the city, I saw a group of girls arriving in south Nicosia through the crossing, and being stopped by a Greek Cypriot policeman who asked, in English, where they were from? “Lefkoşa”, replied one of the girls. “You are Cyrpiot?” asked the policeman? “Yes”, they replied, and he waved them through without further fuss. An apparently normal occurrence, a group of Turkish Cypriot girls visiting the south of their city. Who knows what they planned to do? Perhaps some shopping. South Nicosia has the well-known western brands of clothes shops that are not found in the north.
Nicosia became the capital of Byzantine Cyprus in the 10th century, its relatively safe inland position preferred to coastal settlements such as the ancient city of Salamis, close to present-day Famagusta, which had been plagued by frequent Arab raids. The Frankish Lusignan dynasty, which ruled the island from the end of the 12th century, fortified the city, as well as building the gothic Cathedral of St Sophia and other Catholic churches and palaces. The impressive walls we see today, with their star shape and eleven bastions, were built by the Venetians, who ruled for nearly a hundred years from the late 15th century.
The Kyrenia Gate, then and now
As with Famagusta and Kyrenia, the Venetians substantially upgraded the city’s fortifications in preparation for an expected Ottoman attack. For the most part the walls are still intact, although in places they were breached in the 20th century to make way for modern roads into and out of the old city. The Kyrenia gate, in the north of the city, one of the three city gates built by the Venetians, now stands in a gap in the wall, with roads passing either side. A postcard from 1922 shows the walls linking up with the gate, with paths sloping up on to the walls on either side. The walls are better cared for in the south of the city. In the north they are overgrown with greenery and the ground level is higher, burying the lower part of the walls and diminishing their impressive bulk.The efforts the Venetians put into building the walls were to no avail. When the Ottoman force invaded Cyprus in June 1520, the Venetians withdrew to their fortified towns, Nicosia, Kyrenia and Famagusta. The siege of Nicosia began in July, and lasted only seven weeks. The victorious Ottomans set about massacring the inhabitants, sparing only the women and children, who were sold into slavery. The city was ransacked, and St Sophia’s and other Catholic churches were converted into mosques. Nicosia remained the administrative seat of the island under the Ottomans, but it was devastated by the conquest, its population reduced to not much more than 1,000 from the 21,000 it had been under the Venetians.
The city recovered under Ottoman rule, unlike the coastal city of Famagusta, whose walled old town has a somewhat ghostly appearance, many of the buildings from the Venetian and Lusignan periods left to crumble, the empty spaces left empty, and relatively little new Ottoman construction. In Nicosia, by contrast, the Ottomans left their mark. The notable Ottoman-era architecture is more to be found on the northern side of the city. Long before the division of the city into Greek and Turkish halves in the 1960s, Muslims settled in greater numbers in the north of the city, where the seat of the governor of the island, the Konak or Saray was situated. The Saray, which had earlier been the palace of the Lusignan kings and Venetian governors, was demolished during the period of British rule, and replaced by law courts. The square is still known to locals as Sarayonu square, despite being officially named after Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic. In its centre stands a column which had been brought to the city by the Venetians from the ancient city of Salamis. The fine-looking law courts are typical of civic buildings from the British period, bright and open, with shady colonnaded terraces, a style appropriate for the Mediterranean, quite unlike architecture of the period in Britain. There are other, more familiar mementoes of British rule, notably the post boxes with the initials of British monarchs, now painted yellow in the south of the island.
Perhaps the loveliest building in Nicosia is the Buyuk Han, the Great Han, a caravanserai or inn built shortly after the Ottoman conquest. Its layout is fairly typical of caravanserais around the middle east and central Asia, a square two-story building around a large central courtyard, with colonnaded terraces off which there are rooms which on the ground floor were used for commerce and on the first floor as accommodation for travelling merchants. In the courtyard is a small mosque which was for the use of travellers. Under British rule the han was briefly a prison, and then reverted to its original purpose, as an inn and shops. For a while it served as accommodation for poor families. The building was beautifully restored in the 1990s, and now houses handicraft and souvenir shops, as well as cafes with terraces on the courtyard. It was particularly lovely in the late afternoons, when the January sunshine slanted on to the sandstone arches of the courtyard, while visitors sat and drank their tea or coffee.
Typically of Cyprus, many of the buildings of the Ottoman period were converted Lusignan churches. Nearby the Buyuk Han is the Buyuk Hammam, the Ottoman baths, which had previously been the Church of St George of the Latins. It appears lower than it would have been, as a result of the rising of the street level over time. Also nearby is the Selimiye Cami, Nicosia’s biggest mosque, once the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Sophia. Its conversion to a mosque involved the building of two minarets either side of its entrance. Strung between them today are the flags of Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), which is recognised only by Turkey. Like the converted Cathedral of St Nicholas in Famagusta, on the inside the gothic arches and vaulted ceiling of St Sophia’s have been whitewashed. The tombs of Lusignan kings lie beneath the carpeted floor whose lines point Muslims towards Mecca, its direction indicated by the ornate Mihrab on the side of the cathedral. In the southern, Greek part of the city is the Omeriye mosque, built on the site of the 14th century Church of St Mary, part of an Augustinian monastery. The church was badly damaged during the Ottoman siege, and was rebuilt as a mosque, with the addition of a minaret. However, the outline of the original church is clear to see, with its apse at the farthest end from the entrance, where the alter had once stood. On the outside, behind the minaret, a small rose window can be seen.
Next to the Selimiye Cami is a partially ruined building that has been re-purposed multiple times over the centuries, the Bedestan, or covered market. This started out in the Byzantine period as an Orthodox Church. The Gothic entrance across from the Selimiye Cami dates from the Lusignan period, when it may have served as a Catholic church for a time. Under Ottoman rule it became the Bedestan. When the British took over in Cyprus in the 1870s, they wanted to convert it back into a church, but were unable to do so due to the Islamic prohibition on having a shrine of another religion close to a mosque. Having been recently renovated, it is now a cultural centre.
The south of the city was and is predominantly Greek, and includes the Archbishop’s residence and the Orthodox cathedral, as well as the residence of the Dragoman, a senior Greek official who was the link between the Ottoman authorities and the Greek Orthodox population. The present-day archbishop’s palace, which was built in the 1950s, is large, with spacious grounds. Perhaps this reflects the importance of the Orthodox Church in Cyprus’s history. Archbishop Kyprianos, whose bust stands outside the palace, founded the Pancyprian Gymnasium, the island’s first secondary school, in 1812, and was among more than 400 Greek Cypriots who were executed by the Ottomans in 1821, in response to the wide support of the Greek community for Greece’s independence struggle. Archbishop Makarios III held a leading position in the Greek Cypriot community as it struggled for independence from Britain in the 1950s, and became the country’s first president following independence in 1960. The Cathedral of St John the Theologian, in contrast to the archbishop’s place, is a small, modest building. Built on the site of a Benedictine monastery, it had been turned over to the Orthodox Church in the 15th century, and the church was rebuilt in the 17th. Its modest exterior was required by the Ottoman authorities, but on the inside the cathedral is fabulously ornate.
Not far from the cathedral and the archbishop’s palace is the residence of Cyprus’s most noted dragoman, Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios, who held office in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The term dragoman literally means interpreter, but his duties were much more extensive, including collecting taxes from the Christian population on behalf of the Ottoman authorities. He was a powerful figure, and the opportunity to cream off his share of the taxes enabled him to accumulate great wealth. His fine house, now a museum, attests to that wealth, and is a fascinating insight into how a powerful Christian figure in Ottoman Cyprus could live. The reception room, with its ornate wood carvings and low divans around the walls, indicates that the Greek Cypriot elite in many ways lived in much the same style as their Turkish overlords. However, Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios’s power and the heavy taxes he collected were resented. He was executed in Istanbul in 1809.
Wandering the streets of Nicosia, there are many beautiful districts where the traditional buildings from the Ottoman period, with their covered balconies, have been preserved, and in many cases sensitively restored. This is particularly the case in the north of the city, perhaps because the relative economic stagnation of north Cyprus meant there was less new development in the old city than was the case in the south. The Arabahmet quarter, in the east of the city, close to the city walls just north of the green line, is particularly attractive. Many of the inhabitants of the district had been Armenian, clustered around their church. There had been an Armenian community in Cyprus for centuries, but during intercommunal violence in 1963-64, when the city was divided between its Turkish north and Greek south, the Armenian quarter found itself in the Turkish north, and the Armenians themselves were expelled. In subsequent decades much of the Abrahmet district and the Armenian church fell into decay and dereliction. More recently the quarter is gradually being renovated, the old houses beautifully restored. While the Armenians are gone, their church has been restored by the UN. It was open when I visited, but without its flock, its community, it was an empty and rather forlorn place.
Close by the Armenian church, right on the green line, next to the Paphos gate, and just beyond the barbed-wire-topped barrier, is a Roman Catholic Church. A little further south is the Maronite church. The Maronite community has existed for centuries in Cyprus, although their numbers have dwindled since the middle ages. They had mainly lived in a few villages in the north of the island, but following the Turkish invasion almost all of them moved to the south.
On the two sides of the city are museums which attest to the different versions of the history of this bitterly divided island. In the south of the city, close to the Orthodox Cathedral, is the National Struggle Museum, dedicated to the struggle against British rule from 1955-1959. It is uncomfortable viewing for a British visitor. The armed struggle had as its aim unification, Enosis, with Greece. It was led by Georgios Grivas, a Cypriot who had served for many years as an officer in Greece’s army, and who founded the EOKA guerrilla organisation. As well as weapons and other possessions of the EOKA fighters, the museum contains photos of killed EOKA members, some of them tortured or executed by the British. Some historians assert that claims of torture by the British were exaggerated and inflated by EOKA for propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, in 2012 the British Foreign Office released documents alleging torture and other abuses by British soldiers. In 2019 the British government agreed to pay £ 1 million to 33 Greek Cypriots who claimed they had been tortured, although without admitting liability.
It is not clear to me why the British government of the time felt it necessary to fight an ultimately unsuccessful four-year war to maintain its rule in Cyprus. De-colonisation was already well under way. A number of former British colonies had already become independent, and several more would follow over the next few years. It was surely clear that the era of colonialism had passed. Shortly before the start of the Cyprus insurgency Britain had announced its intention to move its military command in the eastern Mediterranean from Egypt to Cyprus. No doubt Cyprus appeared to be strategically vital. But Britain could surely have reached agreement with a newly independent Cyprus to retain its military bases, as indeed happened after independence in 1960. Yet at the time the British government maintained that decolonisation should not apply to Cyprus.
The war in Cyprus was a senseless waste, and worse than that, it had long-term damaging consequences, especially in exacerbating intercommunal tensions between the island’s Greeks and Turks. The island’s Turks vehemently opposed Enosis, and thousands of them were recruited by the British as auxiliary police in the struggle against EOKA. This inevitably inflamed tensions between the two communities, as Turks responded to Greek demands for Enosis with their own demand for Taksim, partition of the island. For its part, EOKA extended its attacks against the British to the Turkish community.
In the end, the Greek Cypriots did not achieve the desired Enosis with Greece, and had to settle for an independent state, under an agreement guaranteed by Britain, Greece and Turkey. Most Greek Cypriots were not satisfied, and continued to strive for Enosis, with disastrous consequences, as the coup in 1974 in the name of Enosis provoked the Turkish invasion of the island. On one of the bastions of the city wall is the Liberty Monument, which commemorates the release of EOKA fighters in 1959, prior to independence the following year, one of many monuments to EOKA men in southern Cyprus. But the aftermath of the violence that brought independence left a bitter hangover.
The independence war, with the intercommunal violence that it involved, soured the already strained relations between Greeks and Turks on the island. The baleful influence of both Greece and Turkey made matters worse. Greece’s military junta was behind the coup in favour of Enosis in July 1974 that prompted the Turkish invasion. The Turkish Cypriot minority looked upon the prospect of Enosis with terror, having seen the fate of the Cretan Muslim population who had been forced to leave Crete in 1923 as part of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey.
In the north of Nicosia, Cyprus’s Turks have their own National Struggle Museum. It tells a very different story to that of its counterpart a few hundred yards away in the south. In its telling, EOKA was a terrorist organisation aiming not only to drive out the British and achieve Enosis, but at the elimination of the Turkish community. The 1974 Turkish invasion is presented as a “peace operation” to provide “a peaceful environment for both communities.” The museum contains a memorial to those who died in “the struggle to preserve the Turkish existence in Cyprus.”
The Turkish Cypriot position is related even more vividly at the Museum of Barbarism, in the house of Dr Nihat Ilhan in the suburbs north of the old city. Intercommunal tension and violence had continued after independence in 1960, involving the displacement of Turkish Cypriots into enclaves. This reached a peak at the end of 1963. On the night of 24 December that year, while Dr Ilhan was on duty with Turkish Cypriot paramilitaries, Greek Cypriot irregulars came to his home and murdered his wife and three children, as well as a neighbour. Harrowing photographs in the house show the three children and their mother dead in the bath. There are also photographs depicting other atrocities against the Turkish community. The violence led to the deaths of 364 Turkish Cypriots and 174 Greek Cypriots, as well as the displacement of some 25,000 Turkish Cypriots.
Following the December 1963 violence, a British general commanding a joint peacekeeping force with Greece and Turkey (a precursor of the UN peacekeeping force) drew an agreed line in green along a map demarking a Turkish North and Greek south of the city. As a consequence of the Turkish invasion in 1974 this green line was extended across the whole island. The green line remains a scar across the city, of abandoned streets and derelict buildings, in what was once its bustling heart. It is easier to approach the line in the Turkish north than in the Greek south, where soldiers keep watch from guard posts painted in the blue and white stripes of Greece’s flag, warning people not to take photos. On the northern side, while there are signs warning that it is a forbidden zone, it is possible to peer into the ghostly dilapidated streets. To someone not used to it, it seems quite bizarre. Just a few yards from narrow old-city streets with bars and shops, you come upon walls topped with barbed wire, beyond them the abandoned ruins of the green line, and just a short distance further the Greek south of the city.
The best place to get a view over Nicosia is from the top floor viewing point of the Shacolas Tower, in the south of the city. From that vantage point, one gets perhaps the best view of the Selimiye Cami. Surrounded by the narrow streets of the old city, it is hard to get a proper view from close up. Looking east towards the Abrahmet district, you can see the Maronite church and the nearby Catholic Church on the green line. Just to the north is the Ledra Palace Hotel, once Nicosia’s finest. Now stranded on the green line, after 1974 it had for decades served as the headquarters of the UN mission. But in 2019 it was vacated due to inadequate health and safety measures. On a mountainside north of the city a vast, provocative TRNC flag has been painted. Alongside, on a painted flag of Turkey, is the famous quote from Ataturk, in Turkish, “How Happy is the One Who Says I am a Turk.” Many Cypriots still live in hope that such provocations, and the bad memories of strife and violence, could one day be put behind. That Cypriots from both communities now travel back and forth and have renewed mutual contacts may give cause for that hope. Younger Cypriots are perhaps less burdened by the tragedies of the past. The incentives to reunite are strong, especially for the north, internationally isolated and unable to fulfil its potential. But the persistent failure to find a solution indicates that the obstacles remain great.
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