I have lived in Nicosia for 23 years now, and every single time I walk through the old city — every time I park in the Politis newspaper's bullet-scarred car park, or pass the sandbags slouching against some checkpoint — I'm reminded of the unbearable weight this city carries on its back. And then I step outside the walls, and I forget. Just like that.
We tend to forget things in general—perhaps out of necessity, as a form of defense—a coping mechanism for dealing with today’s relentless reality without the demons of the past howling in our ears. But when we forget, we are inevitably doomed to repeat our mistakes. And this place has learned that the hard way.
About a year ago, Margarita Kounnafi, the public relations and communications officer at the Leventis Municipal Museum of Nicosia, tipped me off about an exhibition called Sector 2: Nicosia — a multimedia retrospective on the capital's turbulent modern history. I didn’t manage to go. I can't remember why. And then I forgot about it, assuming it had concluded, and filed it away in that sprawling mental pile of important things that slip through the cracks of the everyday.
Then, a few days ago, a chance exchange with Margarita revealed that the exhibition was still running — and that her invitation for the grand tour still stood. As you'll have gathered by now, I didn't make the same mistake twice.
Sector 2 achieves something that historical retrospectives almost never manage: it makes you feel your own city as a vaguely familiar stranger — someone you're trying to meet again, to reassess, to see clearly for the first time. The title is no accident. "Sector 2" is the UN's coldly bureaucratic designation for the area, but the exhibition's real subject is the way history seeps into daily life, transforming pain into lived experience. Strip it of its sentimental and clinically historical content and Nicosia becomes, on paper, a nameless UN jurisdiction — a military status that is also, at its core, a deeply human one. The space itself is designed to echo the labyrinthine lanes and dead ends of the old city, and within it you come face to face with the cracks that six decades have carved into its skin.
The museological journey unfolds in four sections, each unwinding the thread of estrangement a little further. It begins with the initially harmonious coexistence that started to buckle under the weight of competing nationalisms, moving through the dark spiral of violence in 1956 and 1958. Here you discover that the wound opened early: the first partition, the first barbed wire, was put up by British forces in May 1956, separating the Greek from the Turkish sector and restricting free movement. That first demarcation — called the Mason-Dixon Line (yes, the very term associated with the divide between the American North and South before the Civil War was used here too), or the Clemens Line — was the direct forerunner of the Green Line drawn seven years later. In one corner, a piece of original barbed wire from that barrier (next to it, a gap left for a future addition; a piece from the Nouris fence). I must admit I didn't know that. It was a bit shocking but also revealing, as if a sign that division had always been etched into our destiny.
Then comes the rupture of December 1963, when the dividing line was formally sealed on the 30th of that month, creating two parallel worlds within the same city. And then 1974 — the final, traumatic scar that sealed the fate of Europe's last divided capital, leaving behind closed doors and suspended memories. It's a striking detail that Nicosia, initially classified under Sector 3 and Canadian supervision, ended up in Sector 2 under British responsibility in 1993 — the designation that lent the exhibition its name. This is not an exhibition that wants to lecture you, or wring tears from you through melodrama. It is an attempt to understand how we learned to live with trauma without surrendering hope. The voices of ordinary people, the objects of ordinary life, the artistic interventions woven throughout — together they assemble the puzzle of our collective memory, insisting that peace is not a given but a continuous, daily choice.
The exhibition was born from the research of Museum Curator Chrysostomos Sakallis, and given flesh and form through the directorial vision of Magdalena Zira and the set design of Elena Katsouri. It is precisely that theatricality of the staging and the installations that elevates Sector 2 from a history exhibition into an experience of memory. The show has recently travelled to Athens, where it was reimagined within the Hellenic Parliament's Kapnergostasio to introduce Greek audiences to the historical weight of the Green Line, serving as a cultural bridge within the framework of Cyprus's Presidency of the EU Council.
The exhibition “Sector 2: Nicosia” runs at the Leventis Municipal Museum of Nicosia until 17 June, Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00–16:30. The exhibition is overseen by museum director Tzeni Lymperopoulou Savvidou and Maria Patsalosavvi, with academic contributions from Petros Papapolyvíou and Antigone Heraclidou. In Athens, the presentation continues at the Kapnergostasio of the Hellenic Parliament until 24 May, with a self-guided audio tour available via the Smartify app.
If, like me, you’ve neglected it until now, don’t miss this exhibition—an invitation to witness the fears of ordinary citizens amid the turmoil and chaos, and to seek out the resistance to division that keeps hope alive. Go to the Leventis Museum and listen to the city whisper to you everything you’ve been avoiding remembering.
* With thanks to Tzeni Lymperopoulou Savvidou, director of the Leventis Municipal Museum of Nicosia, and Margarita Kounnafi, public relations and communications officer, for a remarkable tour and their generous hospitality.
