Shopping in North Cyprus

There are two types of shopping in my book, shopping for pleasure and practical shopping! The former includes shopping for gifts and keepsakes, clothes and books, knick knacks and stuff you just don’t need! The latter includes everything else - from the weekly food shop to shopping for DIY materials!

This mini-guide to shopping in North Cyprus covers both angles!

Shopping for pleasure in North Cyprus.

If you’re on holiday and what to treat yourself or your family and friends back home there are plenty of gift items to choose from, especially in Kyrenia and some of the tourist hotspots like Bellapais.

You can choose from very attractively priced gold and jewellery items for sale in Kyrenia and where you can actually get your own designs for jewellery made up or buy excellent copies of some designer items for way beneath the normal designer prices. You can also get a lot of what I call ‘genuine fake’ items of jewellery, clothing and accessories. From Louis Vuitton bags to Rolex watches, it’s all available at the ‘right price’ in North Cyprus.

You get what you pay for, the cheaper end tend to be fakes the more expensive are either amazing copies or actually the real thing...you decide!

For smaller gift items there are an abundance of shops selling all sorts of North Cyprus branded ‘things’ from Turkish Delight to donkeys from pottery to t-shirts. There’s also a souvenir shop on the road out of Kyrenia towards Bellapais and it sells an abundance of traditional items as keepsakes. Heading out of town the other way there’s a large pottery shop where you can buy every conceivable and beautifully hand made and decorated pottery item...from a small olive oil jug right up to a giant planter...though how you’d get that on the plane to take home with you I don’t know!

Lefkosia (Nicosia) has a large outdoor market area where you can pick up fashionable clothing, lace and beautiful textiles for next to nothing. And in some areas of the town and again in Kyrenia you can have clothing made to measure for a fair price.

If you’re living in North Cyprus you’ll soon find you can get most things, though you may have to hunt around a little harder than you would’ve back home where all the main shops are to be found on every high street in every major town! And on the odd occasion where you can’t find that must have CD, book or pair of shoes it’s simple enough to cross the green line and enjoy shopping on the south side.

There’s a customs allowance of how much you can bring back across without the payment of duty, but as this allowance fluctuates and isn’t harshly enforced if you just go over to purchase salt and vinegar crisps and some new shoes it isn’t worth worrying about.

Fair enough though, the Turkish Cypriots will ask for duty to be paid on any significant purchases you make in the south and import to the north...like a car!

Practical shopping in North Cyprus

For your weekly supermarket shop there are three main supermarket chains to choose from - Lemar, Tempo and Astro. As all sell similar products for similar prices there’s not a lot to differentiate apart from personal preference, though sometimes one supermarket will be right out of a series of items you need while another one will still have plenty of stock! It seems deliveries get stuck somewhere on the mainland meaning you’ll sometimes have a month without your favourite toothpaste for no known reason! It’s just one of the small idiosyncrasies that makes North Cyprus cool!

There are a million mini-markets selling just about every item you might need from toilet paper to cigarettes, from fresh fruit and veg to Efes beer and these shops are often open all day and half the night seven days a week.

Imported goods tend to be quite steeply priced - bottles of wine, non-local spirits, branded cosmetics...all the things you don’t really need! Whereas local produce and items sourced from Turkey are often unbelievably cheap. During the citrus season you can buy a bag of oranges, lemons and clementines for pennies for example. There’s a shortage of fresh milk on the island and for this reason Coffee Mate and long life milk are the order of the day when it comes to tea and coffee.

Despite the fact the island has had embargoes against it for some thirty years you can get almost everything you could possibly want and far more besides. Electrical items, designer kitchens, hand built kitchens, furniture built to your design, the latest fashion in tiles and bathroom suites, every make of car (including Ferraris and Chevrolet Corvettes...yes, it’s true I’ve seen both with Turkish Cypriot number plates), hand tools, power tools, teeth whitening gel, marmite, the latest films on DVD before they even come out in the cinema in the UK...every single item you could possibly want is available for sale in North Cyprus. You just have to know where to go to get what it is you want!

If you go into a shop and they don’t have what you’re after, chances are they’ll point you to another shop that sells what it is you need or who can order it from the mainland for delivery in a matter of days. Also, check out Cyprus Today newspaper and Essential Cyprus and North Cyprus magazines for many shops and businesses who advertise their wares.

When it comes to getting things made, from furniture to curtains, from kitchens to wrought iron, again there is always a man (or woman) who can and who will for a fair price. In fact the only two things my husband and I have struggled to buy are printer ink cartridges for a Lexmark printer and Bombay Mix.

Shopping in North Cyprus may not be quite what you’re used to but it is rewarding when you finally find exactly the one elusive item you’ve been after, and when you discover you can purchase it for about 30% of what it would cost you ‘back home’!