Cyprus, Nicosia, Mosque of the Standard-bearer
(Bairaktar Mosque)
The Bairaktar Mosque on the Constanza bastion contains the grave of the standard-bearer, who fell after hoisting the
Ottoman flag (final assualt by the Ottomans on Saturday, September 9, 1570).
This mosque has been one of the most
respected monuments in Cyprus, regular vissited by Turkish Cypriots on national and religious days during the last 400
years. The mosque contained handwrittenm original religious books and a very valuable old Koran, antiqye carpets and
other historic antiquities. This Mosque, in the Greek Cypriot quarter of Nicosia, has been dynamited and looted
several
times during the inter-communal strife during the 1950s and '60s.
