Cyprus · Nicosia District · Nicosia
Haydar Pasha, Nicosia, Nicosia — Area Guide & Where to Stay
A rose window and a minaret mark the middle of Haydar Pasha, a quarter inside the walls of Nicosia named for an Ottoman general of the 1570 conquest.
About Haydar Pasha, Nicosia
Where to stay in Haydar Pasha, Nicosia
Where you base yourself shapes the visit — here's the character of each area.
Haydar Pasha keeps almost no beds of its own, a handful of blocks of stone houses rather than a hotel quarter. It runs barely three hundred metres across. Most visitors sleep elsewhere in the walled city of Nicosia and walk in.
The quarter suits you if you want the old city quiet once the day trippers have gone, with the shops of Selimiye Mahallesi immediately west. Come in from that side, because the east ends of Haydar Paşa Sokak and Karababa Sokak are closed where they meet the military zone.
About Haydar Pasha, Nicosia
What are the main landmarks in Haydar Pasha, Nicosia?
Haydar Pasha Mosque stands on Kirlizade Sokak, a Latin church built for St Catherine late in the fourteenth century. A carved Catherine wheel crowns the door. Ottoman builders raised the minaret beside it, among the tallest in the old city.
Selimiye Mosque, the grander of the two, sits outside the quarter in Selimiye Mahallesi to the west. Just south, the Lapidary Museum fills a fifteenth-century house of early Venetian Renaissance work and keeps the arched window from the Lusignan royal palace that stood in Sarayönü Square until 1904. North on Yenicami Sokak, the Lusignan House sets the royal arms of Cyprus over a Gothic doorway.
What is the history of Haydar Pasha, Nicosia?
Haydar Pasha was one of the twelve quarters into which Nicosia was divided at the Ottoman conquest of 1570, each named after the general posted to it. Its mosque had already stood for two centuries as the Latin church of St Catherine. Only the minaret and low windows changed.
Later reckonings count the quarter among the twenty-four historic quarters inside the walls, and it stayed mixed well into the twentieth century, with a Turkish Cypriot majority and a Greek Cypriot minority in 1946. The tomb of Adam of Antioch, Marshal of Cyprus, came here after it was uncovered during the rebuilding of the church at Pallouriotissa.
Where is Haydar Pasha, Nicosia?
Haydar Pasha fills a few blocks of the walled city of Nicosia, with Yenicami Mahallesi north, Kafesli Mahallesi east, and the buffer zone at its south-east corner.
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Updated September 2026