NICOSIA, Cyprus — As the meandering streets tighten between the bastions of Old Nicosia’s crumbling Venetian walls, the alleyways of Cyprus’s ancient capital reveal a jumble of half-forgotten histories.

There, hidden away against the barricades and barbed wire of the United Nations-patrolled buffer zone — the ceasefire line that has divided the city between a Greek Cypriot south and a Turkish Cypriot north since the early 1960s — shuttered Ottoman mansions stand creaking next to classical Greek gymnasiums.

Farther on, the empty offices of a vanished British colonial administrator vie with the tattered opulence of a deserted Armenian merchant’s house. And nearby, the tomb of a revered old dervish lies overgrown in the shadows of a Turkish mosque and a Lebanese Maronite church.

In its dusty corners, Nicosia Old Town reflects all of the empires, peoples, religions and cultures that have left their mark on Cyprus over the past few thousand years. Yet despite its historic importance, because of years of ethnic conflict and underinvestment, the Old Town has also been one of the most neglected neighborhoods on this Eastern Mediterranean island.