---
title: "In Nicosia, the Last Divided Capital, a Sign Says ‘Forever’ and a Refugee Says Otherwise"
description: "Fifty-two years after the invasion, a guide born in Famagusta walks visitors across the Green Line while the UN’s reunification push stalls"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-16T12:01:41.202Z
modified: 2026-10-16T17:30:45Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/in-nicosia-the-last-divided-capital-a-sign-says-forever-and--52ef54
language: en
tags: ["cyprus", "history", "un", "tourism", "politics", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# In Nicosia, the Last Divided Capital, a Sign Says ‘Forever’ and a Refugee Says Otherwise

*Fifty-two years after the invasion, a guide born in Famagusta walks visitors across the Green Line while the UN’s reunification push stalls*

By Jan Sokol · October 16, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/in-nicosia-the-last-divided-capital-a-sign-says-forever-and--52ef54

## In brief

- Nicosia remains split by a UN buffer zone between the Republic of Cyprus and the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus
- The 1974 invasion followed a Greek junta-backed coup and displaced 150,000 Greek Cypriots and 50,000 Turkish Cypriots
- Guide Eleni Ellinas, displaced from Famagusta at age four, has run tours across the Green Line since 2019
- The Ledra Palace, a luxury hotel opened in 1949, still shows bullet holes from 1974 and housed UN peacekeepers until 2019
- Leaders agreed weekly meetings after Guterres’s July visit, but talks on new crossing points remain deadlocked

Some cities need a whole library to explain them. Nicosia can be explained by one line. It runs through the middle of Cyprus’s capital, fenced with chain-link and barbed wire, watched from towers, lined with buildings nobody has lived in for half a century. South of it lie the Republic of Cyprus and the European Union. North of it is the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a state recognised by exactly one government in the world, Turkey’s. Joe Baur, an American writer who has spent seven years living in what used to be East Berlin, [crossed that line for *BBC Travel*](https://bbc.com/travel/article/20261015-nicosia-inside-the-worlds-last-divided-capital), curious to see the last capital where a border of the Berlin kind still stands.

His crossing took a few moments. A guard in a pop-up tent glanced at the passports and waved the group through. Same city, same island, and suddenly outside the EU.

## The summer of 1974

The line has a date. In 1974 a military coup on Cyprus, backed by the junta then ruling Greece, brought a Turkish invasion of the north. About 150,000 Greek Cypriots and 50,000 Turkish Cypriots were driven from their homes across the island. In 1983 the Turkish Cypriots declared their own state unilaterally. Until 2003, nobody could cross.

Wars leave many monuments. Here one of them is an airport. Cyprus’s only international airport once stood in the heart of Nicosia, and for 52 years its remains have rusted inside the buffer zone the UN calls the Green Line. So visitors land in Paphos, on the south-west coast, and ride a bus for two hours to the capital.

![A rusting passenger airplane sits on a cracked, weed-covered airport apron behind barbed wire, with an abandoned terminal, mountains, and sea in the background.](https://rews.cc/img/d37379a4a57a6c890d324af87dcfd0b58473a43f.webp)

The buffer zone, as the [UN peacekeeping force describes it](https://unficyp.unmissions.org/en/about-buffer-zone), crosses the island for roughly 180 kilometres. In some places it is kilometres wide. In parts of old Nicosia it is a few metres.

## A girl from Famagusta

Eleni Ellinas was four years old when the fighting came. Her family lost their home in Famagusta, which the north now calls Gazimağusa, and ended up in a refugee camp on the south-eastern coast.

> “Life in the camp was harsh. My mother, sister, and I were ill. When my father came to check on us and saw the dire conditions we were living in, he knew he had to save his family. He managed to drive us to the RAF base in Akrotiri, and we were fortunate to be evacuated by British forces to the UK.”

They came back in 1980 and settled in Nicosia, a city that, in her words, “embraced our broken pieces.” When the crossings opened in 2003 she walked north as an adult for the first time. “Stepping across was like walking straight into a dream,” she recalled, adding that it felt like a step back into the 1970s. In 2019 she began leading tours, Walk Talk Cyprus, because she felt outsiders “oversimplified or misunderstood” the place.

## The hotel and the hillside

Her walks begin at the Ledra Palace checkpoint, the first crossing Turkish Cypriot authorities opened inside the Green Line in 2003. The Ledra Palace opened in 1949 and was once the island’s most famous hotel, a place where Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Sophia Loren stayed. In 1974 it became a battlefield. The bullet holes are still in its walls, which UN peacekeepers have closed off with barbed wire. After the ceasefire the peacekeepers made it their headquarters and barracks, and stayed until 2019.

![A weathered yellow villa with arched verandas, shuttered doors, and a wicker chair stands behind an iron fence tangled with barbed wire.](https://rews.cc/img/204cae8cdaae38f989915bd95fbd91eb6d6f855a.webp)

At the other end of the road, the northern checkpoint carries the state’s name and, beneath it in large red capitals, the word “FOREVER”. On a hillside north of the city a giant flag is painted with the words “How happy is he who says I am a Turk”, and it can be seen from the Greek Cypriot side.

A reflection, no more: a state that has to promise its own permanence in red paint is telling you how sure it really is.

Ellinas says the slogans disappoint her. “While some \[Cypriots\] remain stuck in the past, there is an overwhelming longing for unity felt by many,” she said, pointing to the restored streets around Ermou, the shopping district before the war, where art and young people are filling places that had been left empty.

## The other side of the wire

On the southern side, Baur writes, the Green Line was lined with abandoned buildings. In the north he found busier streets, the smell of kebabs, the 16th-century Büyük Han caravanserai and the Samanbahçe houses, a social housing estate of geometric mud-brick units. He also found the Rüstem Kitabevi, a bookshop founded in 1937, when Cyprus was still a British colony, as it was from 1878 to 1960.

Ali Rüstem, whose father started the business in his grandfather’s house, was born in 1971. He hardly remembers the city whole. He has good friends among Greek Cypriots, he says, but for his generation a segregated Nicosia is simply normal. “Of course, things could always be better,” he said, asking for more “common sense” and “logic” from the two administrations.

![Books and an open volume fill a teal bookstore window reflecting a sunlit Mediterranean village street, with stone buildings, flowering vines, and distant mountains.](https://rews.cc/img/2c24a24c464f231ce519526020ab2f749964d42d.webp)

## The men at the table

The administrations have been trying, slowly. In October 2025 Turkish Cypriots elected Tufan Erhürman, a supporter of reunification, over the Ankara-backed Ersin Tatar. In late July the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, [went to the island](https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/07/28/guterres-says-he-will-continue-efforts-to-restart-cyprus-talks), the first UN chief to visit since 2010, and pressed for a wider conference that would include Greece, Turkey and Britain, the island’s guarantor powers. Ankara has for years demanded recognition of two sovereign states instead. In August the two leaders [agreed to meet once a week](https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/08/27/rival-leaders-of-divided-cyprus-agree-to-meet-weekly-after-un-chiefs-visit).

Even something as modest as a new gate in the fence has stuck. Negotiations on four new crossing points were, by the end of July, [deadlocked](https://cyprus-mail.com/2026/07/31/crossing-point-talks-deadlocked-over-whether-to-break-up-package-of-four) over whether the four could be separated and opened one at a time. In New York in September, according to President Nikos Christodoulides, the Turkish Cypriot side [turned down a three-way meeting](https://greekreporter.com/2026/09/26/cyprus-trilateral-meeting-rejected/) with Guterres. Guterres leaves office at the end of this year.

The traveller, meanwhile, needs a passport, or an ID card for EU citizens, and two currencies: euros on one side of the wire, Turkish lira on the other. “You cannot truly understand a divided capital by looking at it through a single window,” Ellinas tells the people she guides. “You have to feel both perspectives.”