Cyprus-The Bridge to the Middle East continued...

 

Among the vast excavations of the great Roman city of Kourion, west of Limassol, I wandered awestruck past majestic columns of the long-gone Temple of Apollo. Later from my stone seat in the Greco-Roman amphitheater of Paphos, I just sat gazing out to sea. Later still in Paphos (where the whole town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site), I forced myself into the eerie underground Tombs of the Kings. And for a special treat, I walked through one of the most beautiful relics of all—a series of Roman villas adorned with exquisite mosaics—the House of Dionysos, the House of Aion and the House of Theseus.

One of my last archeological stops went straight to my woman’s heart. When I first saw the five round stone buildings of Choirokitia, near Larnaka, I assumed they were ancient, but no, they are reproductions of structures from a village dating back to 7,000 B.C. Stone Age men had built houses like this without metal tools, just their own might and stone against stone. Archeologists have gone to the trouble to surround these houses with plants that might have grown in their time, and they’ve reproduced crude objects that they think were Stone Age furniture. Standing on the same spot where a Stone Age mother might have held and fed her child brought tears to my eyes. When I think back, it still does.

 

The cosmopolitan cities of Cyprus, with their rich cultural, historical and natural attractions, are often compared to the best of the French Riviera. And an increasing number of young villagers in search of careers and city life, are moving to town, thereby speeding the decline of the village. Cyprus has been looking for ways to save the villages, and that’s good news for tourists.

I stopped for dinner at a tastefully updated old house that is now a country inn and part of the plan for the rebirth of its village. In the courtyard, the lady of the house was checking the crusts of big round loaves in an outdoor brick oven, while lamb for souvlaki turned on a spit over a charcoal fire. Her two daughters were laying the long wooden table with crisp Cyprus wines, and down the middle, a lavish lineup of at least two dozen small dishes with all the familiar hot and cold savories of the traditional meze, which looked much like the Middle Eastern version. They had added a beloved Cypriot specialty, slabs of the local halloumi cheese, grilled and then spritzed with juice from their own lemons and topped with a sprig of mint.

While other villages fight to survive, the famous lace and embroidery village of Lefkara seems to endure forever. You can’t be there for five minutes without hearing that the great Leonardo da Vinci had bought an altar cloth in Lefkara as a gift for the Milan Cathedral back in the 15th century.

In fair weather, the women sit outside their shops showing off their needle skills to admiring tourists. A chic Italian bystander in a wide-brimmed sun hat and oversized sunglasses was loudly complaining that she forgot to bring the measurements of her mother’s dining room table and her sister’s windows. Her long-suffering husband shrugged and handed her his cell phone. Later I saw him pacing outside the shop where his wife was blithely unfolding one lavishly embroidered pale linen cloth after another from tables stacked with lace-trimmed sheets, linens, collars, napkins, curtains, antimacassars and doilies. Even Da Vinci couldn’t have taken that long to make his selection.

A young attorney I met over a small cup of dark Greek coffee at the local café, offered to show me the ancestral farmhouse where he grew up. Like so many of today’s professionals, Constantinos had gone to school in Britain and spoke fluent English. As he turned the key in the cantankerous lock of an old wooden door, a smile flickered across his face. I should have known! The living room was a page out of “House & Garden.” The kitchen was fit for a “Food Network” diva. He and his wife Eleni both worked in the city and their commute, in the yellow convertible parked outside, took less than half an hour. “It’s sure not like my grandfather’s endless stories about the good old days,” he said, “when all the kids worked in the fields, the goats and cows slept right in the house and a trip to town by donkey took a good part of the day.”

 

“The latest thing in real estate,” Constantinos informed me, is the faux village.” (I had noticed new houses clustered on hilltops along my way.) “Those handsome new ‘villages,’ he said, “Sell out as fast as they can build them.”

My village inn meze had been my first experience with this Cypriot feast, but it was not my last. City streets and waterfront promenades are chockablock with restaurants from haute cuisine temples to fish restaurants to pubs and dance-on-the-table tavernas. (Did I forget McDonalds?) The meze comes in all flavors and sizes, to be washed down with local wine, the favorite Keo Lager, the local grappa-like zivania or anything from the fully stocked restaurant bar. There’s fish meze, meat meze, vegetable meze, and if you’re with friends, you can order a dinner that begins with meze and ends with a succulent charcoal-grilled fish for sharing, or in the case of meat meze, a platter of grilled meats. Cypriots love to astonish their visiting friends and relatives with a meal at a well-known restaurant in Paphos. It boasts the world’s biggest meze, 24 courses.

From around 10 to midnight the clubs start heating up, with flashing lights, laser shows and bouzouki, R&B, Hip-Hop, Techno, you name it. One disco in the nightlife capital of Ayia Napa has been known for its clouds of pink bubbles cascading down onto the gyrating bodies. The beat goes on until the clubs stop serving—at 5 a.m.

These days, back home in L.A., whenever I can commandeer an audience for my travel pictures, I reward my friends with a taste of Cyprus—a slice of tangy grilled halloumi cheese from my neighborhood specialty grocer. And I pour them a taste of history—the sweet, heady Commandaria wine that was first produced in Limassol’s Kolossi Castle by knights in the Middle Ages. They say that Richard the Lion-Hearted toasted his bride at their wedding banquet with a goblet of this very wine.

 

 

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