First trip to Cyprus — what surprised me in 2018

Everything I thought I knew about Cyprus was wrong

I went to Cyprus in September 2018 expecting something between Greece and Turkey — a sun-bleached holiday island with good beaches and an uncomplicated atmosphere. What I found was considerably stranger, more layered and more interesting than that.

We flew into Larnaca on a Tuesday afternoon. The light was different from the moment we stepped off the plane: harder, more horizontal, the kind of afternoon sun that turns limestone white and throws shadows with knife edges. I had been to Greece, Turkey, Malta and southern Italy, but this light was its own thing. Cyprus sits further east than you expect when you look at a map — at the same latitude as Beirut and Tel Aviv — and in late September it still carries the heat of summer without its oppression.

The first surprise was the airport itself. Larnaca International Airport has an air of cheerful impermanence: a mid-sized terminal that feels perpetually about to be replaced by something bigger, surrounded by palm trees and a smell of warm tarmac. We picked up a hire car (driving on the left — British legacy, completely unexpected for a continental European) and drove along the seafront.

The sea and what was beneath it

We were not beach travellers, primarily. But on the second morning we drove to Paphos and the coastline along the B6 was startling: volcanic sea cliffs, shallow turquoise water, the occasional beach hidden below the road. Aphrodite’s Rock appeared suddenly — a sea stack rising from the Mediterranean with a kind of theatrical confidence.

I had not really engaged with the mythological dimension of Cyprus before going. Aphrodite was born here, according to the legend, emerging from the sea foam off this very stretch of coast. The Romans took the story seriously enough to make Paphos the administrative centre of the island and put a magnificent temple to Aphrodite at Kouklia (the ancient site of Palaipafos, inland from the modern city). Standing at the rock — not a grand monument, just a chunk of limestone in the sea — with the appropriate context, I felt something of what the ancient geographers must have felt when they named this as a sacred place. It is beautiful in an unsettling way, the beauty of something at the edge of the world.

Mosaics and the problem of description

The Paphos Archaeological Park was where Cyprus really grabbed me. I had read about the Roman mosaics before going — I thought I was prepared. I was not.

The scale is the first thing. The House of Dionysos covers 556 square metres of mosaic floor, preserved in situ under protective steel sheds open on the sides. You walk above them on raised walkways and look down at scenes from Greek mythology laid out in tesserae the size of dice, in colours that have not faded in 1,800 years. The craftsmen who made these floors were probably Greek or Syrian itinerants — specialists travelling the empire, selling their skills to wealthy provincial families who wanted the same wall-to-floor opulence as the villas outside Rome.

Paphos: Half-Day City Tour with Tombs of the Kings Entry — I recommend this guided tour without hesitation; on my first visit I did it without a guide and understood perhaps half of what I was looking at.

The Tombs of the Kings nearby are different in character but equally striking. No kings are buried there — the name is aspirational, reflecting the grandeur of the rock-cut chambers rather than royal occupancy. You walk into the low-ceilinged tombs and your eyes adjust and you realise the scale of what you are inside: a Macedonian-style peristyle burial chamber carved from solid limestone, 2,300 years old, cold and dark as a wine cellar. It is not frightening exactly. It is humbling.

Food that made me question everything I had eaten before

We ate badly for the first day. This was entirely our fault: we ate at the harbour restaurants in Paphos, which are the island’s most famous tourist trap. Overpriced, predictable, competently mediocre. The mezze at a taverne on the harbour front was perfectly serviceable and cost twice what the same food cost inland.

Then we found Sto Ellas on one of the side streets in Ktima (the upper old town district of Paphos), sat down without knowing what we were ordering, and spent three hours eating. Cypriot mezze is not a single dish but a procession — seventeen, eighteen, twenty small plates arriving over the course of an evening. Taramosalata, tzatziki, olives, pickled vegetables, then grilled halloumi, then loukanika sausages, then grilled lamb chops, then koupepia (stuffed vine leaves in egg-lemon broth), then kleftiko slow-cooked lamb falling off the bone, then loukoumades with honey. All for €16 per person.

I want to be careful about overclaiming. Cyprus is not a revolutionary food destination — it is not northern Spain or Japan. But within its own tradition, Cypriot food is quietly excellent in a way that the island’s reputation as a beach holiday does not prepare you for. The combination of Greek, Middle Eastern and Ottoman influences has produced a cuisine that is specifically Cypriot: the loukanika are spiced differently from Greek sausages, the kleftiko is cooked differently from Greek stifado, the halloumi is a protected designation of origin for a reason.

The strangeness of a divided island

On Day 4 we drove to Nicosia, intending to spend the morning at the Cyprus Museum and then drive back south. We had not planned to cross.

Standing at the Ledra Street crossing — a gap in the UN buffer zone in the middle of the pedestrian shopping street — we looked north. On the other side: a street that looked the same but felt different. Different signage, different language, different flags. The buffer zone itself, a strip 150 metres wide in the city centre, contained abandoned buildings visible through wire fences: a hotel, a row of shops, vegetation growing through the tarmac of a road that has not been driven on since 1974.

We crossed. The procedure took eight minutes — passport shown, slip of paper given, walk through. On the other side, Büyük Han (the Ottoman caravanserai) was full of local craft shops and a café where we drank Turkish coffee and ate börek. The Selimiye Mosque across the square (formerly the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, a French Gothic cathedral of extraordinary quality built in the 14th century) had its minarets and its carpets and its quiet worshippers. The streets were quieter than the south side, the buildings less renovated, the atmosphere more slow-paced.

Nicosia: Last Divided City, Tour combining South & North — we did not have a guide for this crossing and I wish we had. The history of Nicosia and Cyprus’s partition is complex; a guide makes the geography and the politics comprehensible.

We walked for two hours in North Nicosia and crossed back. I have thought about that afternoon many times since. The island’s division — formally, Northern Cyprus is administered by Turkey, recognized only by Turkey; the United Nations considers it occupied territory — is a political and human tragedy. But the experience of crossing was not as dark as I had expected. It felt instead like a gap in time: stepping into a version of the city that had been preserved, partly by accident, from the pressures of development that had changed the south.

What I understood about Cyprus by the end

Cyprus is not a simple island. It is not “Greece” (there are significant cultural differences, and Cypriots are quick to point them out). It is not “Turkey-with-beaches” (completely different). It is not a generic Mediterranean resort despite the efforts of a large part of its tourist industry to present it as one.

It is a specific place: the easternmost European country, the third-largest Mediterranean island, a society that has been at the crossroads of Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, Venetian, Ottoman and British empires and carries marks from all of them. The Troodos mountains have painted Byzantine churches from the 11th century. The Akamas peninsula has endemic plants and turtle-nesting beaches. The Limassol marina is full of super-yachts. All of this is Cyprus, simultaneously.

We came back six months later. We have kept coming back. This site is, in part, a consequence of that first September week in 2018.

If you are planning a first trip, start with Paphos for three days and let the island complicate your assumptions. It will.