In a wide-ranging interview with the Sunday Mail last week, Nicosia Mayor Eleni Mavrou presented the most controversial change to the capital in recent years in a glowingly positive light.
She described plans by the globally celebrated Iraqi-born ‘starchitect’, Zaha Hadid, for Eleftheria Square as a crucial part of our capital’s vital general transformation. The location is the main entry point separating the concrete tower blocks of greater Nicosia and the historic heart of Nicosia within its Venetian-era, sandstone walls.
The idea, she said, is to meld, sensitively and symbolically, the new and the old.
She is right, but only in part.
Nicosia is indeed a city undergoing transformation, seemingly in one fell swoop. She convincingly explained why our capital is a hot and dusty building site. Quite simply, crucial, long-delayed infrastructural plans all came to fruition at once. Roads had to be widened, drains laid and pavements made. It’s inconvenient, she conceded, but absolutely had to be done.
No one whose week-day mornings are disrupted by gridlock on roads far too narrow for the volume of traffic, or whose homes have been flooded by poor public drainage, is likely to quibble too much with that.
Mavrou was equally convincing on the value of the now nearly completed main bus terminal at Solomou Square. The expanded island-wide bus system is one project which the Christofias government can truly be proud of — especially if the wider public ever starts using them — and the existing bus terminal in Nicosia was in desperate need of an overhaul.
She was right, too, that improvements to Nicosia’s drab, run down central square are years overdue. The moat area is at present one of the most depressing areas of the city and quite rightly avoided by most.
But her defence of Hadid’s plans made for depressing reading. The trendy architect’s plans, with their stark and sweeping concrete walkways, bridge and underpaths, will swamp this section of the walled city. They are not the answer. Rather than sensitively blending history and modernity, there’s barely a nod to the architectural or historical significance of the honey-coloured sandstone walls that have been Nicosia’s trademark since the 1500s. So much so that the walls are the symbol for the municipality and depicted on many souvenirs bought by tourists. And the much-heralded changes to the original plans after buried sections of the walls were discovered have brought few significant alterations. Sections of the walls will be on show but encased in concrete. The symbolism is quite clear: the old is an inconvenience, not a treasure.
As capitals in the region go, Nicosia is remarkably green. We have plenty of trees. Many have inevitably been lost (and only some replanted) in the road widening schemes. More recently, many more have been felled in the Eleftheria Square moat as the municipality prepares for what is to come. Whatever plans were adopted for the area, some trees would have had to go. But there is little scope for replanting greenery in Hadid’s mass of concrete in which earth is in shockingly short supply.
The plan is that the moat will be home to cafes and thus a place to visit. It is hard indeed to see the attraction of sitting under a grey bridge of concrete in the August heat. Far more likely is that it will become the haunt of disgruntled teenagers who, hidden from view, can add some much-needed colour from spray cans.
The Cyprus Mail’s photo archive for Nicosia has a folder called ‘grandiose plans’, and that is where we have filed the various reincarnations of Hadid’s visions for Eleftheria Square. But grandiose, with its connotations of overblown and ostentatious, is only part of what is about to go wrong with our capital’s focal point.
The island is littered with projects that show we have become far too eager to embrace a flash, incongruous European-lite modernity at the expense of our rich history. Eleftheria Square deserves far better.
