There are few places more frozen in time than Nicosia’s UN-patrolled buffer zone. And in that space of barbed wire, sandbags and guard posts, there is no place that conjures division more than the Ledra Palace hotel.
What was once a magnet for Hollywood stars, the go-to establishment for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, famed as much for its ballroom as its invention of the brandy sour, has come to symbolise the failure of countless peace envoys, diplomats and politicians to reunite Europe’s last divided capital.
Its bullet and rocket-scarred facade, like its splintered chandeliers, are tokens of conflict, one so intractable that the island has remained split between Greeks and Turks since 1974.
Time has had its effect. The hotel that hosted Cyprus’s colonial-era rich – boasting luxurious en-suite bedrooms and a swimming pool whose opening became a high-society event – is now so structurally unsound that the UN peacekeepers garrisoned in the building for the past 45 years are having to call it a day.
This month the 4th Regiment Royal Artillery, the UK contingent currently supervising the ceasefire lines that bisect Nicosia, will move out, completing the year-long transfer to a new camp of container homes behind the hotel. It will be the end of an era for soldiers who have had to put up with broken pipes and blocked toilets in living facilities long deemed unsafe.
