Cyprus: It’s Not Greece, Just a Lot Like It and Not as Good
September 19-26, 2019
What exactly is the deal with Cyprus? It’s not part of Greece, but they speak Greek, eat traditionally Greek food, and were an instrumental location in Greek mythology. Ask a local though, and they’ll tell you they’re middle eastern, not Greek. The western half of the island is part of the EU; the east is owned by Turkey. An even smaller part in the south is still claimed by Britain. A short hop off the eastern coast and you’re in Syria or Lebanon. Cyprus is a fragmented and complicated place, and we spent literally zero time learning about its storied history before traveling there for a science conference. We just assumed it was warm, and probably a lot like Greece. We love Greece.
Things started off about as we expected, with an extended wait for a bus into Paphos from the airport, a strange-looking van eventually showing up, us asking the driver if it was the 612 and the man just sort of grunting in response, and then us realizing mid-trip that we were clearly on the wrong bus. When we finally arrived to meet our guide at the Airbnb some time later it was dark and we were hungry and feeling a bit salty. He sent us around the corner to a place called Hondros for what he said was the only legitimate local cuisine in the touristy waterfront area, where we got some squids and traditionally-Greek baked eggplant in tomato sauce and started to settle into the feeling that a “relaxing vacation” had begun.
Our Airbnb apartment was located within a hotel complex, so in addition to a nicely furnished one-bedroom apartment we also had access to the pool and exercise room. Better yet, it was located across the street from a massive grocery store, ensuring the fridge was always stocked with wine, olives, and feta. The waterfront was only a few blocks away, but didn’t seem to offer much more than souvenir shops and guys standing outside tourist trap restaurants trying to coax you inside to eat expensive westernized fare. The main attraction in this part of town was “Paphos Castle,” where we paid the €2.50 entrance fee to mill around inside and on top of the complex for about 10 minutes before moving on unimpressed.
Infinitely more impressive were the Tombs of the Kings, located an hour-or-so walk up the coastline from where we were staying. Here, for the same €2.50 entrance fee, you were set loose in a massive archeological dig site filled with uncovered burial plots dating back over 2000 years. Once inside, there was no one making sure you didn’t touch things or behave yourself - you were completely free to climb down into the tombs and explore to your heart’s content. This was undoubtedly one of the coolest historical areas we’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting, and we easily could have spent twice as long there if it weren’t for hunger and direct sun driving us away.
It didn’t take long in Paphos to realize that this place was decidedly different than the places we had visited in Greece. On first glance (and all subsequent glances), Paphos seemed to have broken its own cultural back catering to vacationing Brits, which wasn’t entirely surprising considering that the island was a British colony from 1925 until 1960. The towns we visited in Greece seemed to support tourism without obliterating their own working-class culture. Sure, there were tourist traps, but you could also find a cheap gyro on any given street corner. Looking for a place to eat lunch in Paphos on the way back to our apartment, the streets were filled with nothing but sit-down restaurants serving bland British cuisine; every menu was hamburgers, steaks, and jacket potatoes. When we finally did track down a gyro spot, the place was packed, as if getting a gyro were a destination meal instead of the status quo. The restaurants in the waterfront area seemed particularly egregious, so we avoided that zone as best we could, only passing through to buy beers that we could drink on old abandoned docks while the sun went down. Kirb soundtracked the idyllic sunset by playing “Careless Whisper” on his phone.
The hotel grounds we were staying on proved to be a microcosm of what we experienced on the rest of the island: Cyrpus was primarily the holiday destination of Brits and Russians, and as far as we could tell, not the posh Brits. The exercise room was littered with the dismembered limbs of unusable workout machines, floor stained brown with rusty free weights, the corners teeming with cobwebs and dead cockroaches. The pool was much more pleasant, and thanks to the grocery store across the street and a fridge in our room, it was cheap and easy to keep ourselves supplied with cold beer while Kirb read books and Mazz worked on science things by the poolside. We realized that there was absolutely nothing keeping anyone from just walking in and using the pool here, and while there wasn’t much of a reason for anyone to want to come and use this one in particular, there probably also wasn’t anything keeping us from pool squatting in a much nicer resort.
While making a dinner reservation for a popular ouzeri on the waterfront, we were warned that there were only seats available inside, and that we’d be seated next to the band that was playing that evening. What that meant in reality was that our table was simply under a roof outdoors, still with a full view of the ocean, and we had a perfect spot to enjoy the charming three-piece guitar, bass, and melodeon ensemble that was serenading the restaurant. The food was good, if expensive and forgettable. What we really enjoyed was the wine. After a few bad misses at the grocery store, we finally got to try a variety of Cypriot wines that were worth drinking that evening. We took pictures of the names on the menu for future reference, ordered another round, and enjoyed the entertainment as the sun went down over the water.
With nothing in the area even remotely resembling a bar that locals would patronize, we chose instead to visit a place called the Rose Pub, which looked like it had been transplanted directly from England. There was going to be a rock band playing that evening, and we learned from the bartender that the group was fronted by the establishment’s owner, a part-British/part-Cypriot guy who looked like Daniel Craig’s dodgy cousin, living out some sort of rock and roll dream performing at his own bar every Saturday night. Unsure of exactly what to expect, we decided to make a game out it. Which bands were we sure that a British cover band would play? What songs in particular were guaranteed to make the setlist? Before the band went on, the owner walked over to the stereo and hard cut away from the song that was playing to put on “Three Kings” by the Spin Doctors instead. An ominous start.
Kirb’s money was on Led Zeppelin and U2, both of which showed up by the end of the set. After a Jimmy Eat World song, Mazz guessed Blink 182 was coming, and sure enough the next song the band played was “All the Small Things.” The bar owner barked more than crooned, which made much more sense covering AC/DC than “Sex on Fire” by Kings of Leon. The clear favorites of the band were Green Day and the Foo Fighters, both of which had several hits represented. We recognized pretty much everything the band played, stumped only a few times by songs like “Dakota” by Stereophonics that had missed our radar completely.
In a break between sets, the singer/owner decided to come back over to the stereo to hard cut away from the Cure song that was playing to put on “Mr. Jones” by Counting Crows instead. When “Hey, Soul Sister” by Train started playing for a second consecutive time, Kirb - now several beers deep - started booing loudly from his barstool and heckling the stereo, jeering, “This song fucking sucks!” Ever conscious of the quality of music in his bar, the owner sprinted over to the stereo and hard cut to a new song. He played that one just long enough to make the next mid-track hard cut to the Red Hot Chili Peppers particularly harsh and noticeable.
Midway through the second set, Kirb was pretty into his music game and started saying things a little too loudly at the bar, drawing attention from the other patrons. “He’s doing it!” Kirb shouted in elation and disbelief when the band got to their Goo Goo Dolls cover. “He’s playing fucking ‘Iris!’” By the time the bar was mostly empty and the band was finishing up, we had found another unwitting couple to join us in chanting for the band to encore with “Under the Bridge,” the four of us loudly and belligerently blurring the line between sarcasm and sincerity in our demands. The band closed with “Smoke on the Water” instead.
We made our decision of where to stay in Limassol based on accessibility for Mazz’s conference. It was located quite a distance away from the main downtown area, so we picked a hotel further down the waterfront that would make it easier to get there and back every day. We quickly found that the conference was actually a significant distance from the city, and the hotel we had chosen was about 40 minutes from the city center on the bus, which came infrequently. We also found that what we thought was a proper hotel room was actually a rented-out timeshare condo, and the building it was housed in had no working employees, amenities, or seemingly, other guests. The room still had a full trash bin from the previous people who stayed there and no bags to replace it with; the kitchen light and two of the three bathroom lights were burned out. Everything inside the apartment looked like it was from the early 2000s, decorated by an oblivious frat boy and then left to age ungraciously. The building was dark and still. The “exercise room” was four machines pushed into the corner of a large, windowless basement with decorations that managed to be both wincingly cliché and grammatically incorrect. The area that surrounded the building was a dead zone - a barren tourist hellscape punctuated occasionally by British pubs and seafood restaurants that were simultaneously overpriced and seemingly unclean. We had made a terrible mistake. We did not like this place. Not at all.
That week Mazz went to her conference and Kirb worked in the terrible apartment. A random handyman appeared the second day with some lightbulbs. It took three days to get a trash bag, delivered by what appeared to be a 12-year-old girl. One afternoon Kirb decided he was going to walk along the arterial street that followed the waterfront until he found anything resembling a gyro. Thirty minutes or so down the road he saw a sign for a kebab house and followed it to a bar. The woman working there informed him that this was merely a mirage, and that the kebabs only came out at night, but they had lunch menu with things like hot dogs and hamburgers if he wanted to order from that. In the otherwise empty bar, four old British pensioners nursed their early afternoon beers and prattled about football. Hungry and isolated, Kirb begrudgingly ordered a hamburger. After eating it, he found this burger fitting for his general experience in Limassol. It wasn’t the single worst hamburger he’d ever eaten, but it was definitely in the conversation. At that point, being the outright worst might actually have been preferable. At least then there would have been something distinctive about its unpleasantness.
We surely would have had a much nicer time staying in the proper center of Limassol instead of the fringes where we dwelled. Once you got closer to town, there was a proper promenade along the waterfront lined with palm trees that led you to the city center that was quite nice. There wasn’t a wealth of things to do in town, but Kirb did find a shop called Proedrikon that made him the first and only gyro he ate in Cyprus that was of the same quality he’d come to love and expect traveling through Greece. Though it was easy to get bummed out by our disappointing lodging, we found it was still pretty easy to focus on the positives and enjoy those instead. It was warm. We were by the water. You could walk across the street, buy a drink, and sip it while you read a book on the beach. If you can’t enjoy that, that’s on you.
Still, Cyprus seemed to keep finding ways to underwhelm when we tried to cut loose and really enjoy ourselves. We got reservations at a highly-rated seafood restaurant on the water and sat down just as the sky was at its most beautiful. We ordered all our favorite dishes from the region - cuttlefish ink pasta, squids stuffed with feta and tomato, and fresh raw oysters. And it was...merely fine. Again, trying to treat ourselves and dropping €100 on a nice dinner resulted in a feeling of, “Why wasn’t that better?” It wasn’t bad, but somehow it just wasn’t quite as good as it could - or should - have been. Had we been unreasonably spoiled in Greece? Clearly, Cyprus was proving again and again that it simply was not Greece, and we were fooling ourselves expecting otherwise. That said, no points were deducted for Cypriot sunsets. Those were always spectacular.
All of the best things we experienced in Cyprus happened on the last day, and somewhat on accident. In waiting for the cross-island bus that would take us back to Paphos, we stumbled upon a wine shop with some time to kill. We got to talking with the owner Pambos about what we had drank and enjoyed on the island, and he let us try different types of the same wine varietals from different elevations and vintages. We chatted happily for an hour, tasting different local wines, and at one point he called up the winemaker of Tsiakkas winery, one that made a particularly excellent Sauvignon Blanc, to ask the man directly if he shipped to Berlin. He didn’t, but he was one of the only winemakers in Cyprus experimenting with making natural orange wine, so we bought a bottle of that to enjoy later in the evening after our bus trip. Our hour in Corks Wine Shop was probably the most enjoyable hour we spent in all of Cyprus.
There was a supposedly great restaurant in Paphos called Koutourou Ouzeri that we had been unable to get reservations at in the beginning of our trip, so we made sure to get a table there for our final night in town. This was the sort of simple, delicious cooking we’d been looking for and missing the whole week in Cyprus. Koutourou changes their menu daily based on the best ingredients available, and everything we ordered was delicious. We had giant shrimp, peppers in vinegar, fava bean puree, baked olives, and carrots with yoghurt and spices. But the single best thing we ate on the trip - and one of the most immensely pleasurable things we ate all year - was a hunk of halloumi cheese baked golden brown with garlic infused olive oil and honey. We chilled our bottle of orange wine in the ice bucket with the rosé we had ordered, and at the end of the meal we asked our waiter if anyone in Paphos actually used a local app called Bolt to call cabs. He replied, “Oh, I can just call you a cab if you like.” “Is he going to rip us off?” we asked. He looked us over and thought about it. “Probably.” We used the app and got a fixed price for the ride across town. In the car, still buzzing from dinner, we asked the cabbie if he had ever eaten at Koutourou. “Of course,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s the best restaurant in town.”
That night we rented a cheap room in a rundown apartment from a guy named Ralph. Ralph wasn’t home, and he’d rented the other bedroom to a traveling professor from Jordan. We didn’t realize we’d be sharing the place with someone else, but we didn’t mind. We all sat on the balcony together, poured the guy a glass of orange wine, and he smoked his pipe while we chatted. His line of work wasn’t so far removed from Mazz’s, and they had plenty in common. We didn’t have much desire to hang out inside of Ralph’s place; it was kind of a dump. But outside, in the warm night air, drinking new wine and meeting new people, there was plenty to soak in and enjoy.
It would be raining for the foreseeable future back in Berlin, and the garbage pile across the street from our apartment had grown significantly in the week we were gone. Cyprus wasn’t what we’d expected, or necessarily hoped. At some points, it seemed downright unenjoyable. Then we came home to the trash, shivered in the cold and rain, and wondered, “What was I complaining about again?”