Architects map the 19 khans that survive inside the walls of Nicosia

Nineteen khans, courtyard inns where merchants and villagers slept, stored goods and stabled animals, survive inside the Venetian walls of Nicosia, according to Despina Athanasiou and Maria Philokyprou of the Department of Architecture at the University of Cyprus. Their paper in Built Heritage (16 July 2026) gives each a datasheet from archives, old maps and photographs and fieldwork. The authors call it the first study of the khans of Cyprus as a whole.

The northern part of the walled city has been illegally occupied by Turkey since the 1974 invasion. Many khans have been demolished or stand in the closed UN buffer zone, so few could be examined on site.

Most have two storeys, shops below and rooms above. The two oldest, Büyük Khan and Kumarcilar Khan, face each other in the occupied north of the city [1, 2] and keep the square plan of Anatolian caravanserais. Most earlier writers, among them Rupert Gunnis and George Jeffery, name these two and no others. Nine wrap an irregular polygon round the courtyard; eight have rooms on only two or three sides, in Γ-shaped, Π-shaped or two-wing layouts. Six cover less than 1,000 square metres, seven between 1,000 and 1,500, and six more than that. Their courtyards and porches also suited the climate, as in many of the island's houses.

Many lined Ermou and Paphos Streets, a trading corridor on the old bed of the Pedieos, diverted when the Venetians replaced the medieval fortifications in 1567.