Nicosia's museums, from first to last

Nicosia is the museum capital of Cyprus, which brings its own problem, as there isn’t time to see them all. Here I rank them by what I think they add to a first visit, with the opening hours the municipality publishes and what can’t be known. Everything else in the city is in Nicosia.

The three I wouldn’t skip

First is the Cyprus Museum, the island’s great archaeological museum. It runs from the Neolithic to the early Christian period, and its star exhibits, says the municipality, are the Aphrodite of Soloi, the gold jewellery and the finds from the royal tombs of Salamis. Second is the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia, at the archbishopric, with around 230 icons and the Kanakaria mosaics. The Nicosia Tourism Board’s museum guide gives €4.50 and Monday closing for the first, and €4 and Monday-to-Saturday opening for the second.

Third is the Leventis Museum in Nicosia, in Laiki Geitonia, which tells the city’s own story room by room from ancient times. It’s free, closed on Mondays and open the rest of the week from 10:00 until 16:30, and won the European museum of the year title in 1991. With a single day, I’d do these three in the order listed.

Art, from El Greco to the 20th century

The Leventis Gallery, opened in 2014, is Nicosia’s surprise. The municipality speaks of more than 800 Cypriot, Greek and European paintings, and among the collection’s European masters it mentions, for example, El Greco, Canaletto, Gainsborough and Monet. The Cypriot section centres on a huge 17.5-metre frieze by Adamantios Diamantis.

For contemporary art there’s NiMAC, the municipal arts centre in the old power station, which won a Europa Nostra award for its restoration, the State Gallery of Contemporary Art and CVAR, on Ermou Street, with the Severis collection.

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Houses, palaces and memory

The House of Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios is the Ottoman mansion of the island’s dragoman, now an ethnological museum, with odd hours that change by the day, listed in the table. The old Archbishop’s Palace, next to St John’s Cathedral in Nicosia, houses the Folk Art Museum, with over 5,000 items, and across the same square stands the National Struggle Museum, devoted to 1955-1959. Opposite are the museums of the Pancyprian Gymnasium, the island’s oldest secondary school.

The small ones, for a specific interest

There are a dozen more, and outside the city, at Dali, the local museum at Idalion is free. The George and Nefeli Giabra Pierides Collection gathers over 600 pieces with plenty of Mycenaean pottery, the Museum of the History of Cypriot Coinage runs from the 6th century BC to the Republic, and the classic motorcycle museum shows more than 150 bikes from 1914 to 1983 on Granikou Street, including British marques such as Norton, BSA and Triumph. The Shacolas Tower observatory is more viewpoint than museum, but it has photographs of old Nicosia.

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How I’d split them

On one day, the Cyprus Museum first thing, the Byzantine mid-morning and the Leventis after lunch. On a second, the Leventis Gallery and the Kornesios house. Watch out for Mondays, when the Cyprus Museum, the Leventis, the Kornesios house and the Leventis Gallery are shut; that day the Byzantine Museum, the National Struggle Museum, the Gymnasium museums and the motorcycle museum are open. Beyond the capital, there are the museums in Cyprus, from Larnaca to the mountain villages.

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