Ledra Palace Hotel: a Short History

In the summer of 1946 three businessmen, George Skyrianides, owner of the Forest Park Hotel in Platres, George Poulias, Vice Mayor of Nicosia, and Dimitris Zerbinis, a Greek businessman in Egypt, agreed on the establishment of a luxury hotel in Nicosia. The gap of first-class accommodation facilities in the city became apparent after the establishment of the Nicosia airport which contributed to an increased inflow of businessmen and tourists.   The cost of the hotel, including the land and the interior decoration amounted to more than £250,000, a great amount for the time. The hotel began its operation in October 1949 and immediately became the pride of Nicosia. It was designed by the German-Jewish architect Benjamin Günsberg, who oversaw the construction of several buildings in Cyprus. Local artists and craftsmen were commissioned for its furnishing and interior decoration. Initially the two-floors hotel had 93 rooms each of them with a private bathroom, phone and air conditioning. The hotel had spacious lounges, dining and events rooms as well as many novel amenities, like a barber shop and a hair salon, shops, a petrol station and of course, beautiful gardens, a tennis court and as of 1964, a swimming pool.  In the following decades, the hotel was to be extended with the addition of three more floors raising the number of rooms to 240. 

The Ledra Palace hotel retains a significant place in the modern history of Cyprus, not least because of its touristic and economic value as the first hotel in its category. In fact, it became widely known as a place with political significance, for it provided the background to many important events that shaped the modern history of the island. For example, during the EOKA revolt (1955-59), the hotel was caught in the heat of the struggle when Governor Harding marginally escaped an attempted assassination by a bomb placed underneath his seat in the hotel’s Ballroom. In the following years, the Ledra Palace Hotel hosted a series of significant events linked to the island’s new status as an independent state such as the meetings of the ad hoc constitutional committee, the erection of sandbags in the hotel’s yard following intercommunal strife in 1964, as well as bi-communal negotiations on the Cyprus problem, as well as international events such as the Conference of Asian and African countries in 1963, a United Nations Human Rights seminar in 1969 and the 5th International Conference of the Balkan Medical Union in 1970. At the same time, the Ledra Palace hotel epitomised the cosmopolitan side of Cyprus. Until it stopped operating as a hotel, it hosted a plethora of social events, like carnival parties, charity events, general assemblies, fashion shows and beauty pageants, as well as more than 80 art exhibitions.

In 1969 the hotel’s ownership changed when, after Zerbinis passed away, his family decided to sell his share which was eventually bought by the Archbishopric of Cyprus.  Today, the hotel belongs to a company called Ledra Hotels Ltd with approximately 300 small shareholders along with the Archbishopric.  In the summer of 1974, Ledra Palace stopped operating as a hotel when it was occupied by the Canadian detachment of the United Nations in Cyprus to avoid bombardment, as it was then said, by the Turkish occupation troops.  Since then, and despite efforts made for the re-opening of the place as a hotel, the Ledra Palace has been used for accommodation for the United Nations forces with the government’s consent and as a venue for high-level meetings for the solution of the Cyprus problem, as well as for civil society bicommunal meetings.

Currently, the hotel is deteriorating and is in need for major renovations. The UNFICYP only uses the ground floor and the gardens of the hotel since its rooms were deemed unsafe and unsuitable for use.

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