A new chapter, an old divide

Opinion cultureeuropeNicosia A new chapter, an old divide Ecoc Relevant News A new chapter, an old divide 14 September 2026 Two young men seriously hurt in violent Limassol attack, five arrested 14 September 2026 Cyprus industrial zones cost €89m, minister tells parliament 14 September 2026 Yiorgos Savvinidis 14 September 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber Europe is widening the frame on its Cultural Capitals. Does Nicosia fit in the shot? Last Thursday, the European Commission signed off on a shake-up of the European Capitals of Culture scheme, one that will run from 2034 to 2047. The pitch is a refreshed, beefed-up framework, and the ambition, at least on paper, is for something more than a lick of paint. This is meant to be a real shift, not just a rebrand. The title lost its shine a while back. There was a time when a city won it and the whole of Europe glanced its way, however briefly. These days, outside the small world of culture professionals, EU policy wonks and urban planners, “Cultural Capital” mostly registers as yet another Brussels title cities scrap over, complete with the usual promises of global exposure, tourism, investment and prestige, all of which tend to deflate pretty fast once the baton’s been passed on. The Commission’s pitch: the scheme needs to be simpler, more inclusive, and far more focused on what actually survives the year itself. The stated goals: sharpen the European dimension (still mostly rhetorical), widen participation, push sustainable and inclusive urban development, strengthen cultural and creative ecosystems, and put real weight behind what happens after the title year ends. Here’s the first thing worth noting: quite a bit of what’s being sold as new direction has already been tried. The “what happens after” question, cities from outside the EU taking part, even groups of cities bidding together, including “cross-border partnerships”, none of this is exactly new. The existing rules already let in EFTA/EEA countries, candidates and potential candidates, in specific years. That’s how Novi Sad (Serbia, 2022), Bodø (Norway, 2024) and Skopje (North Macedonia, 2028) got their titles, and in 2030, Nikšić from Montenegro will share the honour with Larnaca and Leuven. There isn’t much of a pool left beyond that; some of those countries will also be tied into the EU’s next round of culture funding. Don’t rule out Turkey turning up on the list either. So the Commission isn’t exactly unveiling some brand-new possibility here. It’s repackaging and reorganising something that already exists. The same goes for cities working together. That’s not some theoretical exercise dreamed up in a Brussels meeting room. In 2025 we watched it happen for real, when Slovenian Nova Gorica and Italian Gorizia, split by nothing more than a single street, jointly held the title. It’s become the go-to case study for officially binding one title to two cities in two different countries. And tellingly, the whole thing wasn’t billed as “cross-border” but as “borderless”, arguably the most striking example yet of what a European dimension can actually mean once it stops being about international cooperation and starts trying to be the foundation of a shared project in its own right. It’s a genuinely interesting, ambitious experiment, and one worth lingering on (for reasons that should be obvious). This wasn’t just about staging a few joint events on either side of a line on a map. The goal was to use culture to build a different way of understanding a shared space that history, for its own reasons, had carved in two. A year on, a cross-border Citizens’ Assembly is still meeting, bringing together residents of Gorizia (Italy), Nova Gorica and Šempeter-Vrtojba (Slovenia) to talk about exactly one thing: the region’s future in the shadow of what 2025 left behind. The people who worked on the project readily admit it’s drawn international interest, but they’re just as quick to admit that being noticed abroad isn’t the same as being fully understood, or fully put to use, at home. And there’s a useful lesson buried in that. A city can become Europe’s model case for anyone looking in from outside the fishbowl. That doesn’t mean it’s convinced the people actually living inside it what to do with what the title leaves behind. It also showed where the real test really lies: not in the year itself, but in what’s left once it’s over. Who keeps showing up? Which partnerships actually survive? Which infrastructure gets used rather than mothballed? What shared understanding, if any, genuinely took root? That, more than anything, is probably what any “new chapter” worth opening actually needs to be about. For this scheme to mean anything, it has to answer two questions at once: what do we want to change about a city, and what do we actually have to say to Europe? Fail to answer either, and no matter how dazzling the year, how packed the programme, how visible the logo, what’s left afterwards is mostly just fond memories. All of which obviously matters for Paphos, which has already had its turn, for Larnaca, which is about to have its, and for whichever Cypriot cities line up to chase the 2044 title. I know, that sounds laughably far off. But it’s worth having a conversation specifically about Nicosia, a city that history, with its usual cruelty, has also carved in two. What would it actually mean, fifteen-odd years from now, for a European cultural bid to come out of Nicosia? Not as a city-branding stunt, but as a genuine provocation, aimed squarely at something Europe already knows all too well: places carrying division, multiple identities, memory, borders and barricades. We haven’t forgotten. We keep pushing, and we keep hoping that by then the divide will finally have dropped away like rotten fruit off the branch. If it hasn’t, though, it will still be hard to picture a genuinely ambitious bid that doesn’t reckon head-on with the city’s particular, unresolved condition, and turn that into a serious cultural question for the whole of Europe to sit with. And since we’re clearly not short on imagination around here: this not-quite-revolutionary new chapter about to open for the European Capitals of Culture could, under the right conditions, bring the frame into sharp, almost photographic focus, with a divided capital sitting right in the middle of the shot. 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