People have lived on Cyprus for a very long time. Hunters were already arriving by sea around the 9th millennium BC, and around the 7th millennium BC Khirokitia flourished on the south coast: a Neolithic village of round stone houses (tholoi) packed inside a wall, home to a community of 300 to 600 people who farmed, hunted, raised livestock and buried their dead under the floors of their own houses, a sign of ancestor worship. Khirokitia is now a World Heritage Site and one of the oldest known cultures in the eastern Mediterranean.
But what would shape the island's destiny was a metal. Cyprus is rich in copper, and its name became tied to it forever: the Latin word for copper, cuprum, comes from the name of the island (aes cyprium, "metal of Cyprus"). From the Bronze Age onwards, that copper made Cyprus a trading hub sought after by all the great powers of the time, from Egypt to the Mycenaean civilisation of the Aegean.
No deity is as bound to a place as Aphrodite is to Cyprus. Greek mythology had the goddess of love born from the sea foam, and placed that birth off the coast between Paphos and Limassol, next to a rocky islet now called Petra tou Romiou. That is why the Greeks often called her "Cypris", the Cypriot one, or "Kypris".
The heart of her cult was not at the rock, though, but inland, at Palaepaphos (old Paphos, today's Kouklia), where a sanctuary served as a pilgrimage centre for more than a thousand years, from the Bronze Age well into Roman times. What people worshipped there was not a human statue but a conical stone, inherited from the cults of a fertility goddess much older than the Greeks. That continuity — from an ancient eastern goddess to the Hellenic Aphrodite — is one of the keys to understanding old Cyprus.
Towards the end of the Bronze Age (13th-11th centuries BC), Mycenaean and Achaean settlers from the Greek world established themselves on Cyprus and gave it its lasting Hellenic character: its language, its religion and a series of city-kingdoms that ruled the island for centuries. Tradition traced the founding of Salamis to the hero Teucer, a veteran of the Trojan War.
Alongside them came the Phoenicians, great seafarers from the Syrian-Lebanese coast, who founded or refounded Kition (today's Larnaca) and brought their own gods and their alphabet. That is how the patchwork of kingdoms that defined ancient Cyprus came about: Salamis, Kition, Amathus, Kourion, Paphos, Soli, and inland Tamassos, Ledra, Idalion and Chytroi. Greek and Phoenician lived side by side, and in the royal tombs of Salamis archaeologists have found thrones, chariots and grave goods that speak of a rich, warlike aristocracy in the style of the Homeric poems.
Because of their location and their copper, the Cypriot kingdoms fell one after another into the orbit of the great empires of the East, almost always keeping their local kings in exchange for tribute. At the end of the 8th century BC they came under Assyria: an inscription of King Esarhaddon, around 673-672 BC, lists ten subject Cypriot kings. After Assyria's decline came a short break, until the Egyptian pharaoh Amasis annexed the island around 560 BC.
Soon after, around 545 BC, Cyprus passed to the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Under the Persians, the Cypriot kings kept their thrones but had to pay tribute and supply ships to the imperial fleet. In 499 BC, when the Ionian Revolt broke out against Persia, most of the kings of Cyprus joined the rebellion under the leadership of Onesilus of Salamis; the Persians crushed it at the battle of Salamis. The pull between the Greek world and Persian power would shape the island until the arrival of Alexander.
The death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC set off a struggle among his generals for control of Cyprus. Ptolemaic Egypt came out on top and ruled the island from the late 4th century BC until 58 BC. The Ptolemies abolished the old city-kingdoms, united Cyprus under a governor and moved the centre of power to Nea Paphos. The island became fully part of the Greek-speaking Hellenistic world.
In 58 BC Rome annexed Cyprus and made it a province. Roman rule brought aqueducts, theatres and large public buildings — the Paphos mosaics and the Kourion theatre date from this period — but also devastating earthquakes, such as those of the 4th century AD. It was in Roman times, around AD 45, that the apostles Paul and Barnabas travelled across the island on the first Christian missionary journey; according to the Acts of the Apostles, in Paphos they converted the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus, which made Cyprus one of the first territories to have a Christian governor.
When the Roman Empire split, Cyprus ended up on the eastern side and became part of the Christian, Greek-speaking Byzantine world for almost eight centuries. Christianity became the official religion and the island filled with basilicas and churches.
One episode shaped the character of the Cypriot Church: in 488, after the discovery of what was identified as the tomb of the apostle Barnabas — a Cypriot by birth — with a gospel on his chest, Emperor Zeno recognised the Church of Cyprus as autocephalous, meaning self-governing and not subject to the Patriarchate of Antioch. As a sign of that privilege, the Archbishop of Cyprus was granted exceptional imperial rights: to sign in red ink, carry a sceptre and wear a purple cloak. That church autonomy explains the huge political weight Cypriot archbishops would carry right up to the 20th century, when Makarios himself was both archbishop and president.
Between the 7th and 10th centuries, Cyprus was a no man's land contested between Byzantium and the Arab caliphate, with raids and an unusual joint rule, until Emperor Nikephoros Phokas fully recovered it for Byzantium in 965.
In 1191, on his way to the Third Crusade, King Richard I of England, known as the Lionheart, landed on Cyprus. The island was in the hands of a rebel Byzantine lord, Isaac Komnenos, who mistreated the shipwrecked English and Richard's fiancée. The king conquered the island in a few weeks and married Berengaria of Navarre in Limassol. Soon, however, he sold Cyprus: first to the Templars and finally to Guy de Lusignan, former King of Jerusalem, who had lost the Holy Land.
That was the birth of the Frankish Kingdom of Cyprus, ruled by the Lusignan dynasty from 1192 to 1489. It was a Western European-style feudal state, with a Catholic, French-speaking nobility at the top and a Greek Orthodox peasantry at the bottom, plus Italian merchants, Armenian refugees and other communities in between. The Lusignans built Gothic cathedrals — Saint Sophia in Nicosia, Saint Nicholas in Famagusta — and turned Famagusta into one of the richest ports in the Mediterranean. The Orthodox Church was made subordinate to the Latin one, a religious tension that would last for centuries.
Lusignan power gradually wore away as Genoa and Venice rose as trading powers. In 1489 the dynasty's last queen, the Venetian Caterina Cornaro, handed Cyprus over to the Republic of Venice, which was already running the island in practice. Venice ruled Cyprus from 1489 to 1571 with mainly military and economic goals: it squeezed the island's output and, above all, fortified it against the growing threat of the Ottoman Empire.
The most impressive defences in Cyprus date from that time: the enormous Venetian walls of Nicosia, with their star-shaped plan and eleven bastions, and those of Famagusta, among the most advanced of their day. They were not enough. In 1570-1571 the Ottomans landed with a huge army. Nicosia fell in September 1570 after a massacre; Famagusta held out for almost a year under a heroic siege, and when it finally surrendered, the Venetian commander Marcantonio Bragadin was flayed alive by the besiegers, an episode remembered with horror in Venice.
With the conquest of 1571, Cyprus passed to the Ottoman Empire and stayed there for three centuries, until 1878. The Ottomans brought in a deep change whose mark is still visible today: they settled Turkish Muslim colonists and soldiers on the island, laying the foundations of the Turkish Cypriot community. Cyprus stopped being a society of one community and became an island of two.
Oddly enough, the new masters improved the position of the Greek Orthodox compared with the Catholic period. They abolished the Latin feudal system and, under the Ottoman millet system, recognised the Orthodox Church as the representative and tax collector of the Christian community. The archbishop and bishops gained enormous political weight as the Greeks' representatives before Ottoman power. Greeks and Turks lived side by side, often mixed in the same villages, in a coexistence that was not equal but was not open war either. That duality — two communities, two religions, on one small island — is the key to everything that came next.
In 1878, an agreement between the United Kingdom and the Ottoman Empire placed Cyprus under British administration, though it nominally stayed Ottoman. When the Ottomans entered the First World War on Germany's side in 1914, Britain annexed the island, and in 1925 made it a Crown colony. The British modernised the administration, but soon clashed with a growing aspiration among Greek Cypriots: Enosis, union with Greece.
The demand hardened after the Second World War. In 1955 the underground organisation EOKA, led by Colonel Georgios Grivas and politically backed by Archbishop Makarios III, launched an armed campaign against British rule to achieve Enosis. London responded with a state of emergency, deported Makarios to the Seychelles and hanged EOKA fighters. But Enosis opened a chasm: Turkish Cypriots, afraid of becoming a minority inside Greece, answered with their own slogan, Taksim, or partition of the island. The anti-colonial struggle thus turned into a conflict between the two communities.
Since neither Enosis nor Taksim could be imposed, the powers looked for a compromise. In 1959, in Zurich and London, the United Kingdom, Greece and Turkey agreed on a formula: neither union with Greece nor partition, but an independent state. On 16 August 1960 the Republic of Cyprus was born, with Makarios III as its first president and a Turkish Cypriot vice-president. The constitution was a complex piece of power-sharing engineering between the two communities, with veto rights for the Turkish minority, and the three powers remained as "guarantors". The United Kingdom kept two sovereign military bases.
The system proved almost ungovernable. In November 1963 Makarios proposed thirteen amendments to the constitution that cut back the Turkish Cypriot vetoes; Ankara and the Turkish community rejected them as a breach of the pact. In December intercommunal violence broke out — "Bloody Christmas" — with attacks on Turkish neighbourhoods of Nicosia. Thousands of Turkish Cypriots took refuge in enclaves, the UN sent a peacekeeping force (UNFICYP) in 1964 and a first "green line" was drawn in Nicosia. The coexistence of 1960 had lasted barely three years.
The breaking point came in 1974. On 15 July, the Cypriot National Guard, led by officers of the military dictatorship then ruling Greece, staged a coup against Makarios to force Enosis. Five days later, on 20 July, Turkey invaded the north of the island — Operation Attila — citing its role as a guarantor power and the protection of the Turkish Cypriots. In two waves, the Turkish army occupied about 37% of the territory.
The result was a divided island and an enormous human tragedy: thousands dead, missing people whose fate is still being investigated, and a forced exchange of population. Some 160.000 to 200.000 Greek Cypriots fled or were expelled to the south, and tens of thousands of Turkish Cypriots moved north. The ceasefire line of August 1974 froze into the Green Line, a UN-patrolled buffer zone that crosses the island from coast to coast and cuts Nicosia itself in two. In 1983 the north declared itself the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus", recognised to this day only by Turkey.
The Republic of Cyprus — the south, with a Greek Cypriot majority — joined the European Union on 1 May 2004 and adopted the euro in 2008. Shortly before, in April 2004, a reunification plan sponsored by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was approved in a referendum by the Turkish Cypriot majority but rejected by the Greek Cypriot majority, so the island entered the EU divided. Half a century after the invasion, the "Cyprus problem" remains unsolved: rounds of negotiations that open and close, a pedestrian crossing on Ledra Street in Nicosia and a border that neither side fully accepts as final.
The 4 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Nicosia — Lefkosia in Greek, Lefkoşa in Turkish — sits right in the centre of the island, on the Mesaoria plain, far from the sea. Its origins go back to Ledra, one of the small kingdoms of ancient Cyprus, already mentioned in the Assyrian lists of the 7th century BC. For centuries it was a minor town in the shadow of the great ports, until its central position made it the capital.
Under the Lusignans, Nicosia became the royal seat of the Frankish kingdom and filled with palaces and Gothic churches. The largest of them, the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, is still standing: after the Ottoman conquest of 1570 two minarets were added and it was turned into a mosque, today the Selimiye. That Gothic church turned mosque, its flying buttresses topped by minarets, sums up the city's layered history better than anything else.
The most recognisable feature of Nicosia's old town is its walled circuit, built by the Venetians. Around 1567, fearing the Ottoman offensive, Venice razed the city's medieval perimeter — including palaces and churches that stood in the line of fire — and put up a circular wall of earth and stone with eleven arrowhead bastions, designed according to the most modern military engineering of the time to withstand artillery.
They did little good: in 1570 the Ottomans took Nicosia after a short, bloody siege. But the layout survived intact and, seen from the air, still traces a perfect eleven-pointed star around the historic centre. Those walls are still the frame of the old city, crossed today by the line that divides the two communities.
Nicosia carries a unique title: it is the last divided capital in Europe and one of the few in the world split by a de facto border. The Green Line — the UN buffer zone drawn in 1964 and consolidated after 1974 — runs through the old town, sometimes shrinking to an alley a few metres wide with sandbags, rusty oil drums and buildings frozen in time since the war.
For decades it was impossible to cross from one side to the other. The first crossings opened in 2003, and in 2008 the Ledra Street pedestrian crossing opened right in the commercial heart of the city: today anyone can walk from Greek Cypriot Nicosia to Turkish Cypriot Nicosia by showing their ID. That crossing, both ordinary and extraordinary, is one of the most vivid symbols of the unresolved Cyprus problem.
South-west of the central plain rise the Troodos Mountains, the island's main range, topped by Mount Olympus (1.952 m). For thousands of years its slopes supplied the copper that gave Cyprus its name and its wealth; ancient galleries and slag heaps can still be seen in the area. The cool pine forests of Troodos were always a refuge from the heat of the lowlands.
These mountains were also home to the great Orthodox monasteries, which during the Latin and Ottoman occupations served as strongholds of Greek faith and culture. The most famous is Kykkos Monastery, founded at the end of the 11th century and home to an icon of the Virgin that tradition attributes to Luke the Evangelist. One detail shows how attached the island is to these mountains: Archbishop and President Makarios III, born in a Troodos village, asked to be buried on the summit of Throni, next to Kykkos.
Hidden in the Troodos valleys is a one-of-a-kind treasure: a group of small Byzantine and post-Byzantine churches and monasteries, modest-looking from the outside — many with pitched wooden roofs to cope with the snow — but covered inside with dazzling frescoes painted between the 11th and 15th centuries. Ten of these churches are on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Their isolation in the mountains saved them. While in the cities the Latin occupation imposed the Catholic Church and later the Ottomans turned churches into mosques, here Orthodox painting kept flourishing almost without interruption, with influences ranging from Constantinople to Western art. In practice they are a living museum of a thousand years of Byzantine art on the walls.
Near Famagusta, by the sea, lie the ruins of Salamis, for centuries the most important city in Cyprus. Tradition credited its founding to Teucer, a Greek hero of the Trojan War, and in classical times it was the most powerful kingdom on the island. It was home to Onesilus, the king who led the Cypriots in revolt against Persia in 499 BC, and to Evagoras I, who in the early 4th century BC tried to unite the island under Greek rule.
The site, now in the north of the island, preserves a gymnasium with colonnades, baths, a theatre for thousands of spectators, cisterns and a basilica, all among dunes and eucalyptus trees. An earthquake and the Arab raids of the 7th century finished off the city. Its inhabitants moved to nearby Arsinoe, the seed of the future Famagusta.
Very close to Salamis stands the Monastery of Saint Barnabas, tied to one of the founding episodes of the Cypriot Church. Barnabas, an apostle and companion of Paul, was a Cypriot and, according to tradition, was martyred in Salamis. In 488, Archbishop Anthemios found what was identified as his tomb, with a copy of the Gospel of Matthew on his chest. He used the discovery to win recognition from Emperor Zeno for the Church of Cyprus as autocephalous.
That privilege made the Cypriot archbishop an almost sovereign figure, with the right to sign in red ink and wear the imperial mantle. So the monastery that keeps the apostle's memory alive today, with its church and his tomb, is much more than a place of worship. It is the symbol of the independence of the island's Orthodox Church, the basis of its huge political weight in later centuries.
Under the Lusignans, Famagusta was one of the richest cities in the Mediterranean and an essential stopover on the way to the Holy Land. Its merchants were said to be so wealthy that they competed to build churches. At one point there were dozens of them inside the walls, and today the walled city still has a striking ensemble of Gothic architecture in golden stone, unusual this far east.
The largest, the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas, where the kings of Cyprus were crowned, was turned into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest. Today it is the Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque, its Gothic façade flanked by a minaret. That conquest came in 1571, when the Ottomans took Famagusta after a siege of almost a year. The Venetian commander Marcantonio Bragadin, who had surrendered under guarantees, was flayed alive. On the walls also stands the so-called Othello's Tower, which legend linked to Shakespeare's play set "in a seaport in Cyprus".
On the north coast, at the foot of a steep mountain range, Kyrenia (Girne) has one of the loveliest harbours in the eastern Mediterranean. It is horseshoe-shaped and overlooked by a large castle. The fortress has Byzantine roots and was enlarged by the Lusignans and the Venetians, and over the centuries it served as both refuge and prison.
Inside the castle is an exceptional archaeological treasure: the remains of the "Kyrenia ship", a Greek merchant vessel that sank around the 4th century BC and was recovered from the seabed. It is one of the best-preserved ancient ships known, complete with its cargo of wine amphorae and almonds. Kyrenia, now in the Turkish Cypriot part of the island, was for centuries the gateway for invaders arriving from Anatolia, barely a hundred kilometres from the Turkish coast.
Few places embody the tragedy of Cyprus's division like Varosha, the seaside quarter of Famagusta. In the early 1970s it was one of the most glamorous holiday destinations in the world, with high-rise hotels along a golden-sand beach that drew film stars. It all ended in August 1974. As the Turkish army advanced on Famagusta, the Greek Cypriot population fled en masse, some with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
The army fenced off the quarter with barbed wire and kept it empty for decades. Half-built hotel towers, shops with 1970s mannequins and rusting cars were frozen in time and overrun by vegetation. Varosha became the ultimate symbol of the divided island, raised again and again in peace talks. In 2020 its partial reopening to the public reignited international tension, because it touches one of the most sensitive wounds of the Cyprus problem.
The south-eastern tip of the island, by contrast, stayed on the Greek Cypriot side and took a very different path: tourism. Ayia Napa takes its name from a 16th-century Venetian monastery dedicated to the Virgin "of the sacred forest". For centuries it was the only notable building in a sparsely populated area of fishermen.
After 1974, with Famagusta and Varosha lost, the Republic of Cyprus turned its tourism industry towards these south-eastern shores. Ayia Napa became an international hub of white-sand beaches and nightlife. Quieter Protaras next door, with family-friendly coves such as Fig Tree Bay, focused on family holidays. The contrast between this booming coastline and the frozen ruins of Varosha, a few kilometres north beyond the Green Line, sums up the two faces of Cyprus today.
Larnaca stands on one of the oldest cities on the island: Kition (Citium), founded in the Bronze Age and refounded by the Phoenicians, who made it their main stronghold in Cyprus, with temples to Astarte and Melqart. Remains of Cyclopean walls and sanctuaries survive from that city-kingdom.
Its most famous son was born around 334 or 333 BC: Zeno of Citium, the philosopher who founded the Stoic school in Athens. Stoicism, which taught people to live in line with reason and nature and to stay calm in the face of what is beyond our control, became one of the most influential schools of thought in the Hellenistic and Roman world. Its followers were as different as the slave Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. That one of the founding philosophies of the West came from a Cypriot of Phoenician origin says a lot about the island's mixed character.
Larnaca keeps one of the most endearing Christian traditions in Cyprus. According to local legend, Lazarus of Bethany, whom the Gospels describe as raised from the dead by Jesus, fled Judea and settled in Kition. There he is said to have been its first bishop, and there he died a second time. Around the year 900, the Byzantine emperor Leo VI the Wise had the church of Agios Lazaros built over his supposed tomb, and it is one of the most remarkable Byzantine churches on the island.
Rebuilt and enlarged over the centuries, the church is still the spiritual heart of the city, with a carved gilded iconostasis and a sarcophagus venerated as the saint's. Every spring, the procession of Saint Lazarus winds through the streets of Larnaca in one of the oldest religious traditions in Cyprus.
Just outside Larnaca lies a salt lake that for centuries was one of the city's sources of wealth. Salt was harvested from its waters and shipped out through the port as a valuable commodity. In winter the lake fills with thousands of pink flamingos stopping over on their migration, a natural spectacle that contrasts with the city next door.
On its shore stands one of the most revered shrines in Islam: the Hala Sultan Tekke mosque, built in 1816 around the tomb of Umm Haram. Tradition holds that she was a relative of the Prophet Muhammad who died there during a 7th-century Arab raid. With its dome and minaret reflected in the lake among palm trees, the complex is a reminder of the deep Muslim mark on the island's history.
In ancient times the stretch of coast around Limassol was flanked by two great city-kingdoms. To the east was Amathus, home to one of the oldest sanctuaries of Aphrodite and said to be one of the few cities that kept a native "Eteocypriot" population from before the Greeks arrived. To the west was Kourion, perched on a spectacular clifftop above the sea.
Today Kourion is one of the most impressive archaeological sites on the island. Its restored Greco-Roman theatre still hosts performances, with the Mediterranean as a backdrop, and the site also has villas with mosaics, baths and an Early Christian basilica. The city was scarred by earthquakes, especially the catastrophic one of AD 365, which buried entire houses. Archaeologists even found the remains of a family caught by the quake. Between Amathus and Kourion, Limassol was born and grew into the great centre of the south coast.
Limassol entered the history books in 1191, when Richard the Lionheart landed here on his way to the Crusade. In the city he married Berengaria of Navarre, the only queen of England who never set foot on English soil. Tradition says the wedding took place in Limassol Castle. Legend has it that at the banquet the king tasted the local sweet wine and called it "the wine of kings and the king of wines".
That wine is Commandaria. It has been made on the slopes north of Limassol since ancient times from sun-dried grapes, and it is considered the oldest named wine in the world still in production. Its name comes from La Grande Commanderie, the estate that the Knights Templar, and later the Knights Hospitaller of Saint John, held at nearby Kolossi Castle. This ashlar fortress still towers over the vineyards. An English king, crusading military orders and an age-old wine all come together in this corner of the coast.
Above all, western Cyprus was Aphrodite's land. At Palaepaphos ("old Paphos", today's Kouklia), the goddess's main sanctuary operated from the Bronze Age onwards. For more than a thousand years it was one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Mediterranean. The object of worship there was not a human figure but a black conical stone, inherited from a fertility cult far older than the Greeks.
The sanctuary was so famous that pilgrims came from all over the ancient world, and the kings of Paphos also served as the goddess's priests. Nearby, just off the coast, the rock of Petra tou Romiou marked the spot where mythology placed Aphrodite's birth from the sea foam. This link with the goddess of love and beauty is still the defining feature of the whole region.
Towards the end of the 4th century BC, Nea Paphos was founded by the sea. Under the Ptolemies and then under Rome it became the capital of the whole island. That grandeur left behind one of the richest archaeological ensembles in the eastern Mediterranean: the Roman villas of Paphos, with their remarkably well-preserved mosaic floors.
In the Houses of Dionysus, Theseus, Aion and Orpheus, entire floors show mythological scenes in astonishing detail and colour. They bear witness to the wealth of the local aristocracy between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD. Because of this heritage (the mosaics, the remains of the ancient city and the surrounding monuments), the whole Paphos archaeological area has been on UNESCO's World Heritage List since 1980.
On the outskirts of Paphos lies a vast necropolis carved into the bedrock, which popular tradition named the Tombs of the Kings. In fact no kings were buried there. The tombs held the upper aristocracy and senior officials of Hellenistic and Roman Paphos, between the 3rd century BC and the 3rd century AD.
What makes them striking is their architecture. Underground chambers are surrounded by courtyards with Doric columns cut into the rock itself, imitating the houses of the living in a style reminiscent of the monumental tombs of Alexandria. The name "of the Kings" came precisely from the grandeur of the place. It is one of the visits that best conveys the opulence of the ancient capital, and today it is part of the World Heritage Site.
Paphos holds a special place in the history of Christianity. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul and Barnabas reached the city around AD 45 on their first missionary journey. There they preached before the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus and converted him, which made Cyprus one of the first places in the Empire with a Christian ruler.
Local tradition even remembers the apostle's punishment. In the grounds of the church of Agia Kyriaki Chrysopolitissa stands the so-called "Saint Paul's Pillar", where, according to legend, Paul was tied up and flogged before he preached. Here history and devotion blend as in few other places on the island.
Beyond Paphos, to the north-west, the coast turns wild on the Akamas peninsula, one of the last undeveloped corners of the island. It is a nature reserve of hidden coves, gorges, Mediterranean scrub and the famous Blue Lagoon. It is also one of the few places in the Mediterranean where green and loggerhead sea turtles still nest.
The name recalls the hero Akamas, son of Theseus, and mythology scattered references to Aphrodite across the area, such as the Baths of Aphrodite, a spring among the greenery where the goddess is said to have bathed. Few people live here, partly because for decades much of the peninsula was a military firing range. That kept intact a landscape that shows what Cyprus was like before mass tourism.
Hardly anything that happened to Cyprus happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
