Paphos
"I knelt to look at a Roman floor and felt embarrassed by the quality of attention I had never paid to anything alive."
The mosaics caught me completely off guard. I had gone to Paphos Archaeological Park expecting the dutiful satisfaction of a UNESCO site — roped-off ruins, plastic signs, the vague guilt of not caring enough. What I found instead were floors. Floors so dense with color and narrative that I spent forty minutes on my knees over a single panel showing Dionysus offering wine to Ikarios, the first human to receive the gift. The tesserae are smaller than my thumbnail. The shadows under the figures are rendered with a gradation of color that would take a contemporary illustrator all day. They were made in the second or third century, and they are just lying there under a corrugated roof, in the open air, on the edge of the Mediterranean.
The site covers several Roman villas — the House of Dionysus, the House of Theseus, the House of Aion — each with floors that tell different stories from Greek mythology. The labyrinth panel in the House of Theseus stopped me cold: Theseus and the Minotaur at the center, the maze rendered in a deep ochre that has not faded in eighteen centuries. A family walked past taking selfies. I could not blame them for not stopping. I could not stop myself.
The old town of Kato Paphos down at the waterfront is a different register entirely — tavernas spilling onto cobblestones, a Byzantine castle converted to a Lusignan fort converted to an Ottoman prison now sitting at the harbor mouth, fishing boats bobbing next to pleasure cruisers. The produce market on Saturday mornings is the place to buy the dried figs that come threaded on string and the loukoumi — Cyprus’s version of Turkish delight — that comes in rose water, mastic, and almond flavors, each wrapped in powdered sugar. I bought too much and ate it walking along the harbor, watching the pelicans negotiate for scraps from the fish stalls.
What I had not expected was how directly connected Paphos feels to Aphrodite, whose mythological birthplace lies a few kilometers up the coast at Petra tou Romiou — the Rock of the Aphrodite. A column of limestone rising from the sea, unremarkable in itself, extraordinary in the light it attracts at sunset: amber and copper and a deep red that makes the water look like something has just happened there. I sat on the pebble beach below for an hour. Couples came and went. One man threw a stone into the sea and stood watching the rings expand. I think he was also waiting for something, though neither of us could have said what.
The town itself is manageable, slightly scruffy around the edges, not trying to be beautiful — which makes it easier to love than the resort zones further east. There is a fish restaurant near the harbor run by a family who have been on the same corner for three generations. The sea bream arrives split and grilled, with lemon and olive oil and fresh bread, and the bill comes as a surprise because it is lower than you expect. This is the Cyprus that gets buried under the package holiday brochures. It takes about twenty minutes of walking away from the main drag to find it.
When to go: March through May is ideal — the archaeological park is walkable before the heat peaks, the wildflowers are still on the headlands, and the Petra tou Romiou beach is quiet enough to have to yourself. October is equally good. July and August are busy and very hot; bring water and start the archaeological park early if you visit then.