Paidagogiki Akadimia

The Εθνικό Δασικό Πάρκο Παιδαγωγικής Ακαδημίας is forty-five hectares of planted pine and cypress in Aglantzia, on the northeastern shoulder of Nicosia, and it holds a quiet distinction: declared on 27 December 1983, it is the oldest national forest park in the Republic — the first use of the category that Troodos and Akamas would later make famous, spent not on a mountain but on a suburban wood. The name is a fossil of the island's educational history. The wood adjoined the campus of the Pedagogical Academy, the teacher-training college of the young Republic, whose grounds passed in 1992 to the newly founded University of Cyprus — the Academy's buildings were the university's first home, and the student body still uses the forest as its default running route.

What the park lacks in size it makes up in position. Its northern edge runs hard against the United Nations buffer zone: the last row of pines looks across the dead ground of the Green Line toward the Pentadaktylos range on the occupied side, and the contrast between a wood full of joggers and the sealed landscape beyond it is Nicosia's division made walkable. The atlas's map data records the same fact in its own way — Natural Earth's simplified trace of the line cuts through Aglantzia a kilometre south of reality, so on the country plate this park straddles the silhouette's edge. On the ground there is no ambiguity: the whole forest is inside Republic-administered Nicosia.

As a habitat it is what an urban plantation forty years protected becomes: mature Calabrian pine and cypress with a floor of anemones and Bermuda buttercup in late winter, resident jays and hoopoes, chameleons in the shrubs — the small change of Cypriot nature, banked where the most people live. With Athalassa two kilometres south, Nicosia's east side holds two of the category's eleven parks, and the pairing is the point: the 1983 and 1985 declarations were the state ring-fencing the capital's green edge before the capital could eat it.

What's worth knowing before you go

This is a neighbourhood park with a statute, and the honest advice is to treat it as one: come for an hour's walk on the pine loops if you are staying in Nicosia, ideally combined with Athalassa or the university district. Access is simplest from Aglantzia; paths are unwaymarked but the wood is too small to get lost in. Late winter and spring, when the understory flowers, are the best of it. The connoisseur's detail is the view north from the upper paths — the clearest casual sight of the buffer zone's abandoned fields a visitor can get in the capital without a checkpoint, with Pentadaktylos's limestone teeth on the horizon marking the island's other half.