In North Nicosia, I visited that rare architectural oddity, the Gothic Mosque. The Selimiye Mosque was originally a 13th c French Gothic Cathedral and after the 16th c Ottoman conquest was turned into a Mosque. It comes complete with flying buttresses, vaulted ceilings, an arc of tiny carved bishops over the entrance arch, and two minarets.

The converters had a bit of a problem with the interior, as the building has a West-East axis, but Mecca is roughly SE from here. So they’ve created lots of visual cues, including a particularly colorful Mihrab, SE aligned wooden platforms, carpets, etc, to try to keep the faithful pointed in the right direction, at an awkward 45 degrees across the main axis of the building.Two days later in Famagusta, I found another example. This was the 14th c St Nicholas, converted to a mosque by the Ottomans and now called Lala Mustafa Pasha Camisi. The tower tops are ruined, but the roof is intact and the façade and interior are fine. In this case the church axis ran WSW to ENE, and the Ottomans were willing to treat the SSE wall as sufficiently aligned towards Mecca. It was a very grand Gothic Church and it’s an impressively strange Mosque!