Nicosia: route 2

The Pallas Theatre is in Nicosia’s old town, and it’s a modern building made of concrete. It was designed by an architect named Totis Stavrinides. The building has a curved shape with big windows on its walls and looks really fancy.

Starting in 1950, people would visit the theatre to watch movies and plays from all over the world. Many people say that the years between 1950-1974 were considered to be the “golden age” of the Pallas Theatre because many famous events took place there. Later on, in the late 1990s, the government of Cyprus bought the building and used money from Europe to repair it between 2005 and 2009.

Nowadays, the Pallas Theatre is a very important place for culture and music in Cyprus. The Cyprus Symphony Orchestra even calls it their home! All kinds of different groups can use it for events, too.

This big stone building is an old passage into the old Nicosia town. It was surrounded by the big Venetian walls that were built in 1567 by a famous engineer named Giulio Savorgnano. The gate has a fancy roof made of stone in the shape of a big arch and looks like a big barrel.

A long time ago, when the British took over Cyprus in 1878, they destroyed part of the wall near the gate to make a new opening. As soon as you pass through the gate, there is a tall,  wooden door that was used to keep the city safe.

Many years later, during the Turkish occupation, the gate was used as a place to keep the weapons of the Greek army fighting in the war.

The Stelios Philanthropic Foundation’s main office is a special building that used to have a different function. It used to be a very big and fancy house. At the front of the building, there are four tall columns of a special architectural style called ‘ionic’. These columns hold the front porch of the building, which has the shape of a semicircle. There is a beautiful garden with lots of plants and trees around the building, and you need to walk up a big staircase to get to the front door. The building looks really grand and important! Imagine if you could live in this house just like how  the people in the past did.

This building was built a long time ago, in 1936, when Cyprus was ruled by the British. It used to be a good example of the architecture used during that time in Cyprus. However, the Cyprus government decided to demolish the building in 2010, a decision which made many people unhappy. Now there are only a few smaller buildings left in this area, which are used for parking.

The General Hospital of Nicosia was first opened in 1939 by the British ruler of Cyprus. It used to be a really important building where lots of sick and injured people came to be cured, including many British and Cypriot soldiers during World War II.

People wanted to build a special place to keep all the important things they found. They thought of building a museum in Nicosia back in 1882. It was finally built in 1924, while the British still ruled Cyprus.

The building looks very fancy and is a good example of neoclassical architecture. It has big ionic columns made of marble that hold the front porch with a pediment and walls made of stone. Inside, there are fourteen rooms around a big open space, where there are offices, a library, and places where they keep and study old objects.

The museum has some very old objects from 9,000 years ago to the early Byzantine period. They put them in different rooms based on when they were made and their use.