Before it became a battlefield, the Ledra Palace was the most fashionable address on the island. In its 1949 heyday it had a legendary barman, a swimming pool that drew Hollywood, and rooms full of journalists, diplomats, and tourists who had come to Nicosia to be charmed. By the morning of 20 July 1974 the bar was empty, the rooms were sandbagged, and a 50mm machine gun had been mounted on the roof. Turkish paratroopers were descending out of the sky into a divided city, and the hotel - white, ornate, sitting squarely on the Green Line - had become the most important building in Cyprus.
Ledra Palace stood about 2.6 km north of the Presidential Palace, on the line that already separated Greek and Turkish Cypriot quarters of Nicosia after the intercommunal violence of the previous decade. From its upper floors a soldier could look across most of the old city. If the Turkish military took the building during their landings, the Republic of Cyprus would lose its capital almost before the invasion had begun. So in the days before 20 July, the Reserve Officers Company of the National Guard was quietly moved into position, and on the morning the paratroopers came, the 1st Company of the 211th Infantry Battalion was ordered onto the roof.
The men with the rooftop machine gun watched the Turkish paratroopers come down and opened fire. By 8 a.m. the hotel was being hit with rifle fire, mortar shells, and artillery, and the bombardment continued through the day. UNFICYP officers - the United Nations peacekeepers who had operated in Cyprus since 1964 - moved between the lines carrying messages, including a Turkish threat that if the National Guard did not withdraw, the building would be hit with napalm. The young Greek Cypriot soldiers on the roof did not leave. By nightfall, some of them were dead. They were the first National Guardsmen killed in the invasion, and what they had defended was, for that day, still standing.
The second morning brought a stranger kind of fighting. The Turkish soldiers had occupied houses around the hotel and now exchanged fire from the windows. According to the National Guard's account, a Greek Cypriot soldier shot down the Turkish flag on a nearby mast and the falling banner momentarily convinced Turkish commanders that the position had been overrun, prompting reinforcements that walked into prepared fire. There were also feints in the other direction, with Turkish soldiers pretending to surrender to draw advancing guardsmen into ambushes. The threat of napalm was repeated through UN channels. Again the answer was no. When their own government later asked them to withdraw so the situation could be defused, the men inside refused unless UNFICYP took over the building - they were not willing to hand it to the Turkish army.
A negotiated handover to the United Nations was the outcome no one had planned and almost everyone could live with. Turkey did not press for the hotel itself. UNFICYP took control, and Ledra Palace has remained in UN hands ever since - a building whose rooms saw debutante balls in the 1950s and now host inter-communal talks, working group meetings, and the slow patient diplomacy of a divided island. The chairs in the once-famous bar are still there. So is the line. The men who died on the roof on 20 July were teenagers and young soldiers from a country that had been independent for fourteen years. The wider Battle of Cyprus that summer would kill thousands more, displace tens of thousands of Greek and Turkish Cypriots from their homes, and produce a partition that, fifty years on, is still in place.
Walking past the building today, you cross the Green Line itself. The facade is faded; the windows on the upper floors have been bricked up; sandbags from older eras have been replaced with newer, equally weathered defenses. A visitor who knows the history can still pick out the rooftop where the machine gun stood. UN vehicles park in the drive. The Ledra Palace has not been a hotel since the summer of 1974. What it became instead was a witness - to a battle that lasted two days, to a partition that has lasted decades, and to the kind of choice ordinary soldiers sometimes face when the building behind them is more than just a building.
Ledra Palace stands at 35.18N, 33.35E in central Nicosia, just inside the UN Buffer Zone that bisects the city. Larnaca International (LCLK) is roughly 40 km southeast and the closest civilian airport in the Republic of Cyprus; Paphos (LCPH) lies to the southwest. From cruise the divided capital is easy to read - the old city is encircled by a star-shaped Venetian wall, and the Green Line cuts across it as a lighter band of low or vacant buildings. Best viewing altitude 6,000-12,000 ft on a clear day; the building itself is a long white structure on the western edge of the wall.