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The UN Buffer Zone in Cyprus (Green Line)
The UN-patrolled strip that has divided Cyprus and its capital, Nicosia, since 1974
In the old center of Nicosia, a shopping street simply stops at a checkpoint. Beyond it lies a strip of shuttered houses, sandbags, and weeds, and then the other half of the city. This is the Green Line, the United Nations buffer zone that has run across Cyprus for half a century, separating the Republic of Cyprus in the south from the Turkish Cypriot-administered north. It makes Nicosia the last divided capital in Europe. The zone is not a border in the legal sense, since the Republic of Cyprus, the EU, and the UN regard the whole island as one state, yet in daily life it works as one, with passport checks at the crossings.
The buffer zone runs about 180 kilometers from Kato Pyrgos in the northwest to near Famagusta in the east and covers around 346 square kilometers, about 3 percent of the island. It is only a few meters wide in parts of old Nicosia and more than 7 kilometers wide in the countryside. Though largely empty, it includes farmland and villages, among them Pyla, one of the few places where Greek and Turkish Cypriots still live side by side, and some 10,000 people live or farm within it. The UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, UNFICYP, patrols it. Nine official crossing points, including Ledra Street and Ledra Palace in Nicosia, let people pass between the two sides.
The name comes from December 1963, when a British officer, Major General Peter Young, drew a ceasefire line across a map of Nicosia in green pencil after intercommunal fighting. UNFICYP arrived in 1964. After a Greek-backed coup and Turkey's military intervention in 1974, which Turkey describes as a peace operation, the ceasefire lines were fixed across the island and the zone took its present shape. The first crossings opened in 2003. A UN reunification plan was approved by Turkish Cypriots and rejected by Greek Cypriots in 2004, and talks collapsed again in 2017. After Tufan Erhürman became Turkish Cypriot leader in October 2025, he and President Nikos Christodoulides resumed regular meetings in 2026, though talks on opening new crossings remained deadlocked.