The architecture of memory. Bridging the divided city of Nicosia

The urban settlement of Nicosia (former Ledra) started in Bronze Age on the two sides of the river Pedieos (Kanlı Dere), along the intersection of the valley route following that river, and the cross-valley route connecting the Pentadaktylos ridge and the Troodos ridge, and developed as an exchange point between the two sides of the river. Only in Byzantine times, the city became the capital of the island and was surrounded by a wall. During the Venetian rule, in 1567, new walls, designed by the Venetian engineers Giulio Savorgnano and Franscesco Barbaro, replaced the medieval ones. The construction of the new walls included the infi lling of the river within the city so to move its waters into a new moat surrounding the city. A new urban tissue gradually replaced the riverbed, fl anked by the sinuous streets that followed its former course inside the ancient city. In Nicosia the three existing bridges, where crossroads connected the two sides of the city, maintained their polar role after the river infi lling. The Venetians might have not completed their transformation, hence the Ottoman siege of the city in 1570, but in continuity with the fi rst Venetian urban transformation the general restructuration of the city in Ottoman times, used the areas above the infi lled riverbed. Since then, this area become the city centre. It is not a coincidence, according to Saverio Muratori’s theory of territorial cycles, that after the 1974 civil war, the UN divided the city in two parts following exactly the same track of the former river Pedeios. According to Muratori, urban settlements, as organisms, follow cycles that are connected to a larger territorial organism. The transition from a river (border/dividing axis) to central urban tissue (centre/accentration axis) and its further transformation into the buffer zone (again a border/dividing axis) continues the very same cycle. From these simple historical and morphological considerations, it is possible to infer the future of the buffer zone. Following the new phase of bilateral talks recently started in Cyprus, at some point, we cannot predict exactly when, this area will again become the city centre, an accentration axis. In this future phase, the value of the land will rise exponentially therein, and the speculative appetites will try to build as much as possible. We have to be very careful so to facilitate this process of reunifi cation, safeguarding the urban tissues and the historical buildings of the buffer zone: we should restore and reactivate the urban tissues to keep the memory of the recent past, but not delete them to leave place for a new downtown with skyscrapers. It is therefore a confi rmation of Saverio Muratori’s theory that the existing Ledra street checkpoint, connecting the two sides of the walled city, is on the site of the old bridge.