The southern boundary with Trypiotis Quarter, outside the walls, ran from salient of the Tripoli bastion to the circular road (Stassinou St.), thence north west to the square between the Cyprus Museum and the Nicosia General Hospital (Homer Ave./Byron St. junction), then followed the old Strovolos Road (now Gladstone St.) until it reached the river Pediaios and the municipal boundary.

[6] The present boundary is broadly similar (see recent Department of Lands and Surveys map of the Nicosia Quarters[7]).

Tophane means literally in Turkish the cannon’s house or the store for artillery ammunition, which is sited in the Neighbourhood.

It formerly adjoined the famous monastery and royal chateau of St. Domenico, the creation of King James I of Cyprus at the end of the 14th century, of which not a vestige now remains.

CYTA (Cyprus Telecommunications Authority) for many years had its headquarters at Electra House, a tall office block topped with a radio tower just outside Paphos Gate, in Egypt St.[11] The Nicosia municipal gardens were established outside of Paphos Gate on the site of the former Tannery, which was relocated in the 1880s.

[14] It was designed by the architect N. Balanos of the Archaeological Society of Athens and construction was supervised by George H. Everett Jeffery then curator of the museum.

[15] The portico is unusually for that period built in a classical style[8] As an institution, the Cyprus Museum was founded in 1882, following a petition which was delivered to the British administration by a delegation headed by the religious leaders of both the Christian and Muslim populations.

The most extensive of these had been carried out a few years earlier by the United States Consul, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, who had smuggled over 35,000 artefacts off the island, most of which were destroyed in transit.

Many of the surviving items ended up in the newly formed Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and are currently on display in their own galleries on the second floor.

It moved to its own premises in 1889 on Victoria Street within the medieval walls of the city and then to the current building shortly after 1908.

[15] Soon after its inception, the museum started receiving items from the numerous excavations on the island, mainly run by British and European expeditions.

[19] The collections of the museum were greatly augmented by the first large scale systematic excavations carried out by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition between 1927 and 1931 under the direction of professor Einar Gjerstad.

The general outline of the original design consisted of three blocks, arranged symmetrically, surrounding a courtyard where the entrance was provided by a small, but rusticated guardhouse.

Pilasters with Doric capitals on the ground floor the wide arch, yellow sandstone, rustication at the ground floor, passageways enriched with pointed arches, the wooden Iattice girders peculiar to the Cypriot colonial architecture and quoin at comer were among the architectural details.