Nicosia is the capital city of Cyprus, an island country in the eastern Mediterranean. The city is old. Around it you can still see walls and buildings from the 1400s and 1500s, when Venice ruled there. People there have long made leather goods, pottery, and cloth. Though actually the city has been split for a long time, with a Greek side and a Turkish side, so the tidy postcard picture is not the whole truth. Greek speakers call the same city Lefkosia. The English name Nicosia came through medieval Latin and French from that Greek name. Scholars have tied the Greek name to words for white or for the poplar tree, plus a word for land — but the place is older still, and the earliest names look like Ledra. So the neat story is only part of the story.