Büyük Han

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.