Nicosia: Inside the world's last divided capital

Decades after the Berlin Wall fell, Cyprus's capital remains cleaved in two and separated by watchtowers, barbed wire and a UN buffer zone.

Moments after passing Nicosia's weathered Venetian walls, I followed a series of chain-link fences topped with barbed wire into a no-man's land. Here, at the checkpoint, I was suddenly surrounded by watchtowers and crumbling buildings in the heart of the United Nations buffer zone – a geopolitical scar cutting directly through Cyprus's capital.

A guard inside a pop-up tent eyed our passports before waving us through to the other side. Even though I was in the same city on the same Mediterranean island, I had just left the Republic of Cyprus and the European Union. Now, I was standing in self-declared state of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), in the middle of the world's last divided capital.

In 1974, Turkish forces invaded northern Cyprus in response to a military coup backed by the junta ruling Greece, leading to the displacement of 150,000 Greek Cypriots and 50,000 Turkish Cypriots across the island. Ever since, Cyprus, and its capital of Nicosia, has been cleaved in two, with one side ruled by the island's Greek Cypriot majority, and the other run by its Turkish minority.

Today, visiting this divided Mediterranean city offers travellers a rare glimpse at a place where residents have been separated from their neighbours for more than 50 years.

For the past seven years, I've lived in arguably the world's most famous formerly divided city, Berlin. The scars of the Berlin Wall are a short walk from my home in the former East, and I regularly move across both sides. After learning how the city's decades of division have shaped the place I now call home, I was curious to see the last capital where such a border still remains.

Before the war, Cyprus's only international airport was in the heart of Nicosia, but for the last 52 years, its rusting remains have sat abandoned in the middle of the UN buffer zone (known as the Green Line). So I flew into Paphos, a coastal city in south-west Cyprus, and took a two-hour bus ride to Nicosia, where I signed up for the Walk Talk Cyprus tour led by local Greek Cypriot Eleni Ellinas.

"I started this journey because I felt that Cyprus, and Nicosia in particular, is often oversimplified or misunderstood by outsiders," she said. "People read about the conflict in history books or news headlines, but they rarely get to feel the living, breathing soul of the city or understand what daily life actually looks like along a crossing."

Ellinas was just four years old when years of ethnic and nationalist tensions between Greek and Turkish Cypriots led Turkish forces to invade northern Cyprus. The fighting forced her family out of their home in Famagusta (modern-day Gazimağusa, in the TRNC) and into a refugee camp on the island's south-eastern coast. 

"Life in the camp was harsh," she recalled. "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." 

Their hearts never left........

© BBC