Having explored the Southern city’s ancient streets and visited the House of the Dragoman Hadjigeorgakis, I made my way up Ledra Street and crossed over the Green Line into the North. The visitor is immediately struck by the clearly much lower level of prosperity. Many of the buildings seem to be crumbling, the cars are old, the streets are dirty and the rubbish bins are overflowing. Songbirds hang in cages outside the coffee bars. It felt like being back in some of the Turkish towns I remember from a backpacking trip in the rural south in the early 1980s. European structural funds are being disbursed on both sides of the divide and these oases of restructuring stand out far more in the north (a refurbished indoor market, built in the 1930s, caught my eye). There are two major architectural sights which, a little like the grand museums of Museum Island in the old divided Berlin, underline why this city should not be divided. The first is the beautifully restored Büyük Han, an authentic caravanserai and the second, its minarettes visible in my picture (taken from Debenhams), is the Selimiye Mosque, which was built as a cathedral and converted into a mosque in 1570. It still feels a little like a cathedral, but its interior has been painted white and its carpeted floor (oriented towards Mecca) means that the vast interior doesn’t generate hushed echoes but, rather, absorbs sound, leaving the stockinged visitor alone with her or his thoughts.