Nicosia, Cyprus

Nicosia, with roughly 330,000 residents, is the capital of Cyprus and the world's last divided capital, where a United Nations buffer zone has separated the Greek-Cypriot south from the Turkish-Cypriot north since 1974. Sixteenth-century Venetian walls form a star-shaped ring about five kilometers around the old city. Inside them, the Cyprus Museum holds second-millennium-BC gold from the Bronze Age, and the Selimiye Mosque was originally the thirteenth-century Cathedral of Saint Sophia before its conversion. Crossing that UN buffer zone today still reveals how a single street can hold two governments, two currencies, and two time zones.