Paphos, Paphos, Cyprus
We decided to hire a car for 3 days from a local company, Easy Rent-a
Car Ltd so we could do trips at our leisure. George the owner picked us up from
the hotel by, took to the office to do the paperwork & off we went - €26.50
a day for a Mazda Demio (like a Toyota Yaris). It’s an automatic & in Cyprus
you drive on the left so it was just like being at home.
We headed north into the Troodos Mountains & climbed gradually through
forests of pine & juniper - there was very little traffic once we'd left the suburbs of Paphos, and I think we saw 2 other vehicles in half an
hour. The rock is like orange shale & many parts of the road had small rock
falls - NOT a climber’s paradise! It is very green as there are trees
everywhere, clinging to the steepest slopes or just anchored in the ground;
there is an area called Cedar Valley, full of……cedars!
Kykkos Monastery was our first stop - recommended in the guide book & an amazing place. It is FULL of glorious mosaics & almost every inch of wall and ceiling is painted with biblical scenes, some over a hundred years old but some much later. The chapel is dedicated to the Virgin Mary & is packed full of gold & silver religious artefacts from the 16th century plus gold chandeliers. The mosaics & pictures are much more modern though, as the monastery was attacked & burned down several times by invading Turks.
Every wall/corridor/room/space was filled with mosaics and paintings – Bible
scenes from both the Old and the New Testaments, but some from history too,
such as the targeting of Jews by the Moslems, and the expulsion of Moslems by
the Jews. Ceilings were also painted in many places, but the ones that really took
the eye were the mosaics, many with gold tesserae (small tiles) which glinted
in the sunlight.
Kykkos being a religious house meant we had to cover up - even my knee length shorts were deemed unsuitable so we had to don very fetching (not!!) purple gowns. It was quite busy with the inevitable coach parties, but not the usual Japanese this time - I think every single other person in the place was Russian. They seem to be EVERYwhere on Cyprus.
Onward through the mountains with great vistas to Kalapanoyiotis for lunch - an
enormous “village salad” of lettuce, rocket, tomatoes, cucumber & feta
cheese was €3 & a drink of rose cordial was €1 - it tasted just like
Turkish Delight, but our waiter was astonished that we didn’t have it in
England (not in the NW anyway!)
As we drove on there were more vistas of villages tumbling down the hillsides & endless pine trees backed by grey layered hills. Our next stop was the church of Archangel Michael at Pedoulas - a wonderful UNESCO heritage church in a village back street. It’s very small & quite unpreposessing from the outside, but the interior.....wonderful frescoes from the 14th century all over the walls. They are in remarkable condition & absolutely beautiful.
Onward to the coast heading for home, but we did have a brief stop at Aphrodite’s Rock - Cyprus was apparently her birthplace & of course lots of places are named after her (we have yet to see her temple, bath and hills!) It’s in a lovely setting though & worth the stop.
Tonight’s entertainment was billed as a Fire & Fakir evening, so we strolled down to have a look. It was slightly underwhelming, with a fire eater & fireball twirler who then had guests standing on him while he lay on a bed of nails/walked on broken glass – I couldn’t watch that bit! The Blue Lagoon cocktail was pretty good though, and soothed my anxieties.
2025-05-22