Büyük Han
The old caravanserai inside the walls: a stone courtyard with shade, coffee, and workshops. Go in the morning, before the groups.
Foto: Secret Travel Guide / Unsplash
Büyük Han — the Great Inn — was built in 1572, the year after the Ottomans took the city, as a caravanserai for travelling merchants: rooms upstairs around a square courtyard, stables and storerooms below, one gate that could be shut at night. It is the best-preserved building of its kind on the island and, after a long life as a prison and then a slum, it has been restored into exactly what it looks like it should be.
The courtyard is the point. Sixty-eight arched rooms on two floors look onto it, and in the middle stands a small octagonal mosque raised on columns over a fountain. The rooms are now workshops and small galleries — lacework, ceramics, a bookbinder — and the ground floor on one side is a café where the coffee comes in a copper pot and the shade moves around the courtyard through the day.
Getting here
It is in the northern half of the old city, a five-minute walk from the Ledra Street crossing: through the checkpoint with your passport, straight on, and left at the Bandabuliya covered market. Allow an hour here, then the Selimiye mosque two streets on, which was the cathedral of Santa Sophia and still has its Gothic doorway. Come back the same way; the crossing is open around the clock.
Perks in de buurt
Nog geen partner binnen 10 km. Partners sluiten zich door het jaar aan, en deze pagina wordt bijgewerkt zodra ze dat doen.
Nicosia: meer plekken
Alle plekken in Nicosia →
Cyprus MuseumThe island's oldest and largest archaeological museum, tracing 11,000 years of Cypriot history from Neolithic idols to Roman marble.
Famagusta Gate & Venetian WallsThe grandest of the three gates in Nicosia's 16th-century Venetian walls, now a cultural centre at the edge of the old town.
Shacolas Tower ObservatoryA museum and observation deck high above Ledra Street, with a 360-degree view across the divided capital and the Kyrenia mountains.