Exploring the rosier side of life in Cyprus
After a week in Cyprus, I came back smelling of roses. My clothes, my shoes, even my books were gently infused with the scent as a result of a bottle of rosewater breaking in my luggage. Still, it could have been worse: had I been in Cyprus a week earlier, I might have come back smelling like a donkey.
As a single traveller, I often plan my holidays around festivals. The weekend before I arrived in Cyprus, there had been a donkey festival in a village outside Limassol. Donkeys still roam wild on a peninsula in the northeast of the island, but in the south they have largely been replaced by machines for farm work.
One farmer, though, has accumulated 172 long-eared, pale nosed beauties. Mares are used for milking, and he makes products under the inevitable brand name of Cleopatra.
The blurb says that the milk is an anti-ageing agent, so had I gone to the festival I would have no doubt filled my suitcase with donkey soap and moisturisers.
I stopped at the donkey farm on my way up to a mountain village. The arrival of spring, known as Anthestiria, is celebrated across the island. Some large resorts have big parades, but I headed for Agros, where a century ago a local teacher set up the Pupils Association for the Dissemination of the Rose Bush, with the aim of starting up rosewater production.
The result today is that 25 acres near the village are covered with a blush of deep pink Damask roses. But the scent is very short-lived, and to make rosewater the plants have to be picked at dawn. So visitors are invited to get up a 5am and join the pickers.
In truth, I didn’t make it up the mountain until after dawn, but when I got there, the village street was full of people demonstrating the various uses for rose petals. One woman stirred a great vat of rose and honey soup, thickened with flour, which was surprisingly delicious, while a man showed how rosewater is distilled. I bought a large bottle and it was this that broke in my luggage.
I went to Cyprus because a cousin had said how wonderful the wildflowers were. Even under the burning sun of early summer, wild cistus grew among the abandoned vineyards.
I stayed halfway between Larnaca and Limassol at a delightful hotel called The Library. On my first day I drove to Kourion, the greatest Greco-Roman site on the island, built on a cliff beside the Mediterranean. There is evidence of Neolithic man having lived here, but it is the Roman remains that are so stunning – ochre pillars and walls that once enclosed numerous rooms and a bath complex.
On another occasion I explored Byzantine churches, and the monastery at Stavrovouni, the highest in Cyprus.
After all this driving I could have had a massage at my hotel, as The Library is billed as ‘a wellness retreat’, but I settled for relaxing in the spa pool instead. If I had been staying longer, I would have probably moved on to the remote Lara Bay, reputedly one of the most beautiful in Cyprus, where turtles come to lay their eggs. As it was I returned satisfied that I had seen a very different side of Cyprus – and I had the scent to prove it.