BUSTLING with crowds of locals, immigrants and tourists, it might be difficult to believe that Ledra Street, now home to Starbucks, McDonalds and other global brands, was once known as ‘Murder Mile’ by British colonial rulers.
Before it was barricaded, Ledra Street was nearly a kilometre long, and reflecting the ethnic demographics, its partition left some 800 metres on the Greek Cypriot side and the remainder north of the dividing line.
But 50 years ago during the EOKA struggle against British rule, Ledra Street was one of the most dangerous places in Nicosia for a British soldier to walk along.
According to accounts from former soldiers, bombs would be randomly thrown into caf?s, and soldiers would be shot in the back while walking down the road, often by teenage schoolboys who would then run back to their classroom.
US army vets on one website described how they would have to wear garish American shirts and switch from pipes to cigarettes to avoid being mistaken for British soldiers.
Wikipedia mentions the violence of the summer and autumn in 1958. One victim was Sergeant Hammond, shot dead in Ledra Street while walking his two-year-old son.
Earlier accounts dating from 1956 wrote of three EOKA members who fired a volley of shots into the backs of three officers wearing plain clothes – Webb, Carter and Thorogood – “as they looked into shops on the corner of Ledra Street and Alexander the Great Street”.
Nicos Sampson, who later gained infamy as the eight-day President of the Athens-engineered coup in 1974, was in 1956 a 25-year-old photo-journalist and photographed many of the dead bodies on ‘Murder Mile’. It was he who was suspected of firing the fatal shots at the three soldiers.
It was in 1958 that Ledra Street was first barricaded by the British after fighting erupted between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. At the time it was only barbed wire, but an actual barricade reinforced with sandbags was erected in 1963 during the intercommunal hostilities.
In 1964, when the Green Line of division was drawn on a map of Nicosia, the Ledra Street barricade became part of it. In 1968 when then interlocuters Glafcos Clerides and Rauf Denktash were negotiating on the Cyprus issue, the barricade was opened, but only to allow Turkish Cypriots who worked in the Greek Cypriot areas to cross over. Greek Cypriots were not allowed through the barricade.
All that ended with the Turkish invasion in 1974, when the barricade was solidified and some 80 metres of Ledra Street ended up in no-man’s land until now.
Ledra Street faced a complete demise after 1974, and only the presence of the Iraklis ice-cream parlour, which is still there, kept the road alive for many years. Even in the 1980s, it remained a ghost of its former self. Although it was sometimes choked with traffic during the day, Ledra Street was really only somewhere people drove to for a quick purchase.
Come evening, the street was deserted.
It was only in the 1990s when it was pedestrianised that Ledra earned its place as a shopping street, now lined with caf?s, trendy boutiques and chain stores. A very long way indeed from ‘Murder Mile’.
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