Büyük Han

The loveliest building in old Nicosia and the best pit-stop inside the walls: the largest Ottoman caravanserai on Cyprus, built in 1572, the year after the Ottomans took the island from Venice. Two galleried storeys of little arched rooms wrap around a courtyard with a tiny domed mosque and fountain at its centre — once stables and lodgings for travelling traders, later the island's first prison under the British, and now craft workshops, a couple of cafés and blessed shade. Order a coffee under the arches and watch the courtyard do its slow thing. Wandering in is free.