Private Tale of a Divided City Tour (Nicosia)

Your bus will head inland to Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus since the 11th Century. Although it remains a divided city since the 1974 Turkish occupation of the North of the island, Nicosia manages to combine its medieval and contemporary heritage.

Visit the Cyprus Archaeological Museum and admire the important collection of Cypriot antiquities and art treasures spanning 5,000 years. Here, the exhibits and displays tell the fascinating story of the island’s history from Neolithic to Byzantine times.

The tour continues into the older part of the city by crossing the Venetian Wall fortifications that still encircle it. The Venetians had engaged the military engineers Ascanio Savorgnano and Francesco Barbaro to design the ramparts between 1567 and 1570, and though Nicosia failed to withstand the Ottoman siege of 1570, the walls still remain.

A guided walking tour takes you through a maze of old town streets known as “Laiki Geitonia”. This 19th Century folk neighborhood is full of traditional houses, shops, restaurants, and galleries, all lovingly restored as examples of Cypriot urban architecture of a bygone age. Now an attractive pedestrian area, the main street is known as Ledra Street – and from here you can safely view the no-man’s land that has divided the city into North and South since 1974.

With your passport or ID, you can choose to cross the Green Line into the Turkish sector, or simply spend more time browsing the many interesting shops before returning to port at Limassol.