Nicosia (Lefkosia)

...obtain the best view of Nicosia (or Lefkoşa, as the Turks prefer to call it), so we paid our YTL4 (£1.50) each to go up to the rooftop terrace. Since this fee also entitles you to a drink at the bar, it's not bad value. And the view lived up to its billing, which perhaps only emphasises how few tall buildings there are on the northern, Turkish side of the city. On the Greek Cypriot side, quite a few were visible, if mostly located some way out ...
...five existing Ciao reviews of Nicosia have covered only the Greek Cypriot side, so at least this may go some way towards redressing the balance.

Cities grow as single inter-dependant entities; a divided city is a most unnatural thing. One is reminded again and again of pre-reunification Berlin and the Wall. I try to imagine what London - or Birmingham or Manchester - would be like if a line were suddenly drawn arbitrarily down the ... more

The Saray Hotel is rather unprepossessing from the outside. Clad in a dingy grey on which its name is emblazoned in orangey-red lettering, it might have looked trendy when it was built around 1960, but not since. Just eight storeys high, it doesn't even seem very tall.

Still, we had been told that it was the place from which to obtain the best view of Nicosia (or Lefkoşa, as the Turks prefer to call it), so we paid our YTL4 (£1.50) each to go up to the rooftop terrace. Since this fee also entitles you to a drink at the bar, it's not bad value. And the view lived up to its billing, which perhaps only emphasises how few tall buildings there are on the northern, Turkish side of the city. On the Greek Cypriot side, quite a few were visible, if mostly located some way out from the centre. The Turks claim that the Greeks have neglected their half of the old city in their eagerness to build new suburbs. Perhaps; having spent less than an hour south of the "Green Line" that divides Nicosia/Lefkoşa, I couldn't say for sure, but from above the older, nearer edifices on that side did seem a shade run down. Mind you, the Turkish side isn't all that spruce either.

Looking north, it is not so much the buildings that catch one's eye as the Kyrenian mountains in the distance, and in particular the twin emblems of the Turkish national and TRNC (Turkish Republic of North Cyprus) flags that have been coloured into the hillside, together with the slogan 'Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyebilene' - 'Happy is he who can call himself a Turk'. Patriotic pride may be all very well in its place, but I have to say I felt that this was overdoing it. To any dispossessed Greek Cypriot viewing the distant display from the south, it must feel like a perpetual provocation, and certainly not the stuff of which reconciliation is made.

There are two features of the city that one can't see clearly from the Saray rooftop. One is the circle of defensive walls, built by the Venetians, that surround the ancient centre; massive though they are, they all face outwards for obvious reasons, and are best viewed from the outside, as if one were a besieger contemplating an assault. The other is the Green Line itself. As you might expect, the line is in no meaningful sense green; apparently the term arose because it was drawn in green ink on the cease-fire map after the Turkish invasion in 1974. On the ground, within the city, its predominant colours are now metallic grey and rust-brown, from the corrugated iron closures, topped by barbed wire, that truncate the streets that used to be shared by the two sides. Sometimes oil-drums filled with concrete do the job instead, but whatever materials are used the result looks crude and ugly. Grim signs in red and black, depicting faceless soldiers with rifles at the ready, warn off anyone who might want to penetrate beyond the barriers.

These days, it isn't hard to cross the Green Line, provided you do so in the approved place. This is a pair of opposing checkpoints, about 100 yards apart, a distance across which one walks with an eerie sense of vulnerability, though there is now no threat of any kind. It is squeezed between the shadows of the Ledra Palace - originally a hotel, but now occupied by the UN Peace-Keeping Force - on the one hand, and a jutting bastion of the mediaeval fortifications on the other. The top of the bastion is on the Turkish side, and is now devoted to a public park with a café. As you emerge from the checkpoint into Greek Cypriot Nicosia, you are overlooked by people seated at the Turkish tables perched ten metres higher up behind the barbed wire atop the solid stone walls. On a warm Spring day, with blossom on the trees, the atmosphere is superficially peaceful, and the stern signs forbidding photography or trespass seem incongruous. Then you notice that the bricked-up houses adjacent to the crossing are scarred with gunfire, a reminder that the origins of the division are far from peaceful.

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We had gone to Lefkoşa primarily to experience the crossing, but I'm glad to say we stayed to take a look around the city, or at least the Turkish half of it. There is much to see, and the pleasure of seeing it is enhanced by the fact that Lefkoşa is an everyday working city, not a tourist trap.

There is a tourist information office, built into a turret at the Kyrenia Gate, the best place to enter the walls of the old city if coming from the north. Just inside to the left of this entrance, incidentally, is a little square where you can park your car free all day, in easy walking distance of the centre but without getting enmeshed in its maze of narrow streets. We had been told that the tourist office would prove a really helpful mine of information about what to see and look out for. When we turned up there at eleven o'clock on a weekday morning we found it closed. We were just about to abandon it when two women appeared carrying laden shopping-bags, unlocked the door, thrust a map into our hands and continued to talk among themselves.

No matter. The map at least proved a really helpful mine of information about what to see and look out for. It incorporated a recommended walking tour of the main sights, which, with a few ad hoc adaptations of our own, we broadly followed. However, since you don't have a copy of the map in front of you, I shall just mention some of the highlights in historical order, rather than exhaustively go through the sequence in which they are encountered on the ground:

~ The Bedestan, built as a church under Byzantine rule in the 12th Century, still bears some of its original ecclesiastical features, including a superb Gothic doorway, though it subsequently became an indoor market under Ottoman rule. It is currently closed for restoration, but will be a fine building again when this is complete.

~ The Selimiye Mosque next door, originally known as St Sophia Cathedral when constructed by the Lusignan Kings in 13th Century. Architecturally as well as religiously it is an anomaly, still sporting flying buttresses that would grace any mediaeval cathedral in western Europe (and which, from a more functional viewpoint, probably helped it survive several earthquakes over the centuries). In their shadow it seemed incongruous to hear, rather than bell-ringing, the Muslim call to prayer emitted from the two minarets that thrust up from the corners where one might expect to see spires or towers. Much of the original elegant stone-carving survives, but inside all of the Christian decoration has been stripped away, and Mecca-facing carpets for prayer have long since replaced the pews.

~ The Büyük Hamam, or Grand Turkish Bath, which was also originally a Lusignan-built church, but in contrast to the other two is a squat structure, its arched doorway sunk basement-like below the level of the pavement, so that one would have to stoop to descend the steps to enter it. Not wanting a Turkish bath, I didn't, though it is in fact still operational for those that do. It is, in any case, not to be confused with

~ The Büyük Han. A magnificent edifice, quite my favourite in old Lefkoşa and worth a visit to the city on its own. The Han is what is more familiarly known in the Middle East as a caravanserai, a centre for itinerant merchants to stay and set up shop. It is built in the form of an inward-facing courtyard around a central micro-mosque with water-fountains at its base. The surrounding structure consists of two storeys, the upper one fronted by a balcony enclosed by arches, which are matched below. The idea was that a merchant could hire a lower space to stable his animals and lay out his wares, while using the one above as lodgings. The spaces are now mainly art, antique and superior souvenir shops, and there is a café in one corner at which to relax, absorb the view and watch the passers-by.

~ A charming early (c1900) example of social housing known as the Samanbahçe area, consisting of neat white single storey dwellings with red tiles roofs, built in rows and opening onto narrow pedestrianised streets around a central water fountain. If only our municipal planners had come here for their inspiration, how much more liveable our council estates would have been.

~ Arasta Street, which as Lefkoşa's traditional street-bazaar probably predates all of the above, in time-honoured usage if not in the antiquity of its buildings. Nowadays, it is mostly given over to garments, fabrics and suchlike items - my wife found two splendidly-stocked sources of knitting yarn - while food-sellers have moved indoors in the adjacent Municipal Market. This is covered and cavernous, with all the colour, sounds and smells - aromatic and otherwise - associated with such places. There is a satisfying buzz to both markets, though neither could truly be said to be bustling on the day that we were there.

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Indeed, very little about Lefkoşa could be said to be bustling on the day that we were there. Even Kyrenia Street, by all accounts the main business thoroughfare, was rather quiet apart from a small demonstration march by fewer than a hundred people chanting and waving Turkish flags, with no one else paying them much attention. The lanes and back alleys were virtually somnolent, with hardly any traffic, just a few kids playing, women chatting and perhaps the occasional old man trundling a hand-pushed fruit barrow or nut stall.

This somnolence did, in a way, make the city all the more pleasant to wander round, but commercially and structurally it is probably in need of regeneration. There is a UN sponsored development programme that has already contributed to upgrading Samanbahçe, and to restoring the Bedestan, which was occupied by Italian architects and artisans when we tried to visit it. I am not clear whether the UN is also involved in regeneration work in Arabahmet - the old Arab quarter - where there are some lovely houses with enclosed balconies overhanging the street, often decorated with carved wood or wrought iron, but many of them still in need of repair.

The old city is generally attractive, although a little too rundown and dusty to be called quaint or charming, and lacking in greenery. There are a few shade-trees in squares and gardens, but only around the old walls, often in their shadow, are parks and playing-fields to be found. Beyond them again, the modern outskirts are nondescript: unexciting apartment blocks and shopping streets. Sitting, as it does, in the middle of a flat plain between Cyprus' two mountain ranges, there is little scenic charm in the city's location. It depends on antiquity, architecture and human activity for its appeal. Fortunately, in its centre it has plenty of all three.

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This is, I am conscious, only half of a review. I really only saw half the city, the Lefkoşa half. But the five existing Ciao reviews of Nicosia have covered only the Greek Cypriot side, so at least this may go some way towards redressing the balance.

Cities grow as single inter-dependant entities; a divided city is a most unnatural thing. One is reminded again and again of pre-reunification Berlin and the Wall. I try to imagine what London - or Birmingham or Manchester - would be like if a line were suddenly drawn arbitrarily down the middle and people on each side cut off from contact with the other. Presumably, like the citizens of Berlin and Nicosia/Lefkoşa, we would eventually learn to live with the division and go about our daily business again with little apparent thought for what was happening beyond the divide. But many would still nurture deep resentments about property lost, and feel nostalgia for old friends and neighbours now estranged. Meanwhile, to visitors not inured to it and accustomed to wander at will, it is weird to find street after street cut in two, the houses at one end unreachable from those at the other except via a long diversion through what amounts to an international frontier.

Since I was only there for the day, I cannot advise on places to stay in Lefkoşa. For eating, I can recommend the Ali Ustanin Yeri café with its attendant cat, adjacent to the Arasta street market. In any case, being a capital city, it has no shortage of places both to eat and to stay the night. Prices are generally cheaper than in the western Mediterranean, and cheaper than on the Cypriot coast.

Most potential visitors, I suspect, won't in any case want to stay the night. If you're on holiday in North Cyprus, the likelihood is that you'll be staying on the coast, and Lefkoşa can be reached in under an hour from either Girne or Gazimagusa. If you're in Nicosia during the course of a holiday in Southern Cyprus, I would definitely advise finding time to cross over to the North, even in midsummer when it will be very hot for sight-seeing. You'll need at least half a day to see the main sights, or a full day for preference.

The crossing on foot is no longer difficult. You just turn up at the Ledra Palace checkpoint and present your passport. On the northern side, the TRNC officials will thoughtfully give you a visa on a separate piece of paper, since a TRNC stamp might create difficulties on subsequent visits to the south. Once through, turn right at the next crossroads to enter through the mediaeval walls, and you will find a fascinating city to explore. Well, half a city anyway.

© torr 2007

Note: routine information about travel to and around North Cyprus, currency and prices, cuisine, language, etc. may be found in my general North Cyprus review, entitled “Going, going….” For the sake of brevity and the avoidance of repetition, I have not duplicated it here. 

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