Rainbow Rhythms in the press: Politis retraces Nicosia's hidden queer history with Walk a Mile in My Shoes 

Standfirst: The cultural walk presented by Citizens in Power on 30/07/2026 has been featured in the English edition of Politis, which followed the route stop by stop through old Nicosia. 

 On 02/09/2026, Politis published a feature by culture journalist Peggy Spineli on Walk a Mile in My Shoes, the walking route through old Nicosia that Citizens in Power (CIP) presented on 30/07/2026 as part of the Rainbow Rhythms Final Dissemination Event. The article retraces the route in full and situates each stop within the wider history of the city. You can read it here: Citizens in Power Retraces Nicosia’s Hidden Queer History in New Walk. 

Two Erasmus+ projects, one route 

The walk was developed jointly under two Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnerships in which CIP is involved. Rainbow Rhythms promotes inclusive Emotional, Relationship and Sexuality Education (ERSE) for young people through queer arts and artivism. ARCHTECH explores European architectural heritage through digital tools, including the Buildings Alert! mobile application. For one afternoon, the two approaches met in the streets of the old town: its walls, gardens and civic buildings became the physical anchor for stories that rarely appear in official archives, and the walk became a shared space for engagement, reflection and participation across both projects’ themes. 

Seven stops through the old town 

Curated by researcher Maria Efstathiou, the route opened at Famagusta Gate with a framing of Cyprus’s successive administrations – Lusignan, Venetian, Ottoman and British – and the divisions they left on the city, from the Venetian walls to the Green Line. Nicosia has no monument to its queer history; what it has instead are fragments, and the walk set out to read them. From the Gate, the route moved through: 

  • Ithaki Bar – once a private home, later a venue remembered as inclusive across every period of its operation, and part of a largely unrecorded history of women running bars and kafenia in the quarter since the 1990s. 
  • Koraï Project Space, NiMAC and Pentadaktylou Street – an artist-run space and a municipal arts centre that between them have held the zines, oral histories and private collections formal institutions overlook, in a neighbourhood whose past also carries histories of sex work, poverty and political violence that the walk chose not to leave unspoken. 
  • Faneromeni School and the bust of Ourania Kokkinou – a memorial to Cyprus’s first female theologian, used by the walk not to make claims about her private life but to ask what a public monument necessarily leaves out. 
  • Cy Checkpoint – the AIDS Solidarity Movement’s community-based HIV and STI testing centre, and the place to recall that homosexuality remained a criminal offence in Cyprus until 1998, when Parliament repealed Section 171 of the Criminal Code following Modinos v Cyprus at the European Court of Human Rights. 
  • Eleftheria Square and the Nicosia Municipal Gardens – the starting point and closing venue of Cyprus’s first Pride march on 31/05/2014, organised by our partner ACCEPT-LGBTI Cyprus, and since then the fixed anchor of Pride in the capital. 

The Gardens closed the route by turning from hidden histories towards deliberate, collective visibility: a “political and emotional landscape” of celebration, protest, memory and care. 

Why heritage matters for ERSE 

For Rainbow Rhythms, the walk demonstrated something the project has argued from the outset: the city itself is an educational resource. Placing queer and marginalised histories in the streets where they happened gives young people and youth workers a way to talk about identity, belonging, rights and care through concrete places rather than abstractions. It also complements the project’s other results – the Inclusive Guidebook for Empowering Queer Youth through ERSE and Artivism, the ERSE Training Programme and the Digital Exhibition Database – all of which are freely available on this website. 

The Final Dissemination Event, which combined the walk with a closing session at Impact Hub Nicosia, brought together 53 participants from youth work, education, culture and civil society. 

British English. Article: https://en.politis.com.cy/culture/1029987/citizens-in-power-retraces-nicosias-hidden-queer-history-in-new-walk 

 

Read, explore, share 

  • Read the Politis feature: [link above] 
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