A split Capital City

Originally, on my schedule, we had planned to go to the Trodos Mountains on this day, but because of the horrible car we have and the very twisty roads to get there, everyone decided to choose Nicosia instead.  Nicosia is the capital city of Cyprus and the last capital city in Europe to be split in half.  This is where you can see first hand the wall that separates the Greek side from the Turkish occupied side of the country.  It was quite strange to see the wall as you drove through the city…and also hear the Muslim call to prayer from the other side of the wall.  Mom and Thea were NOT happy, as you can imagine and were explaining to us the experiences of some of their family during the Turkish attack.  It’s understandable why they are upset…some of their cousins lived on the north side of the Island and when the attack happened they had to run for their lives with nothing except the clothes on their backs.  Their houses were taken and they could never go back to them.  It was a horrible time….but war is never nice.  Now, the Greek side is a bustling city with the University, lots of shops and normal big city stuff….but Greek style….meaning chaos and very loose parking rules.  As usual, our GPS failed AGAIN to get us to our destination….and then to find parking once we found it was another bucket of crazy.  There has not been a day yet that we haven’t had to turn around at least once!  Heck, I even had to go around a roundabout TWICE!  The locals were laughing at us.  🙂   We finally found a place to park and this was the first thing we saw:

Not sure what building it is, but then, next door to it, you can see some remnants of the war:

Wow.  It was just so interesting to see things like this.  As we progressed down the street to our destination (Nicosia History Museum) here are a few more things we saw:

Typical homes….and then this:

Yes, you see that right….the DMZ (de-millitarized zone) with the Turkish side just beyond the barbed wire and fence.  There were snipers stationed in a couple of those towers with guns in hand at the ready.  It was crazy!!!  We walked for a bit and finally got to the museum:

That only took an hour to find!  The signage here is really bad.  You can see 3 of the museum workers just standing around doing nothing….that’s how you see a lot of people here….I keep asking, does anyone work here!?!?!?!  We got our tickets and headed inside.  My cold is in full blown mode and I feel horrible, but still pressing on.  I’m hiding it well don’t you think?:

We saw some really cool stuff in there….VERY old stuff….like before Christ stuff!  WOW!  Here are just a couple of examples:

It’s amazing to me to see how they had the ‘technology’ to create things like this so long ago.  Just boggles my mind at times.  After the museum, we walked to the older part of town to explore a little and get something to eat.  Very small streets and lots of people but what else could I expect here?  I’m just glad I wasn’t trying to drive through this:

This was an interesting sign from ‘Ria Money Transfers’…which was a store:

Here are a couple of other things we saw in Old Town Nicosia:

Interesting juxtaposition, I think.  As we walked back to the car, we realized we parked right next to the checkpoint that goes to the North side of Cyprus.  Alex and Keith wanted to go see what it was all about, so we got our passports and walked through the DMZ to the Turkish side.  Mom & Thea had never in their lifetime thought they would step foot over there again, but they now have the passport stamps to prove it! Here is the checkpoint on the Turkish side:

As we walked through the streets, there was a definite difference…not only with the language (because everything was in Turkish), but just the way the buildings were kept, how the streets were and just everything.  Trying to find our way around by the map was not easy.  We just started walking in hopes to figure it out as we went…Mom’s back was hurting pretty bad, so we didn’t want to go too far.  We found a map posted:

You can still see some damage on the walls of the buildings from the war.  It was crazy!  But, we can say we all went to the North….

I’m not sure if this is in Turkish, or if that’s in English…either way, it’s funny:

Now that we’re safely back on the Greek side, we headed back home to relax…here is one more shot at the Greek checkpoint:

The poster behind them is an explanation about a Greek man who tried to take the Turkish flag down in the DMZ, but was shot and killed because of it.  A grim reminder of that horrible time in Cyprus history.