Melancholy mountains: Driving through the high Troodos
If you need rousing after the excesses of the season, an atmospheric trip to the highest peaks of the island could be just the thing
I would give a month of loud days by the sea for a single solitary night in the mountains. On the clearest of days, the smallest stretch of water is a terrible mystery; God knows what it holds in its bosom. Mountains are not so duplicitous. They suffer our asinine whims to scale their peaks and measure our humanity against them; they allow us to burrow into their valleys and infest their plateaus. Even when they can take no more of us and burst into cataclysmic flames, they are known to provide hours of thrilling entertainment for bystanders for miles around.
The Troodos mountains have suffered much over time: disembowelled and felled bald, scarred with limping roads and scorched blacker than the sea that spawned them. Still, to the untrained eye, they stand as pristine as the day Julius Caesar left the island, and its despoiled copper reserves, to his lover, Cleopatra. Goats can testify to this; they have been there forever, relatively content. Juniper, cedar, pine and birch have clung to Troodos’ slopes for countless winters.
The only blight the region has known in recent years is the falling off of tourism. The remedy proposed by the Cyprus Tourism Organisation (CTO) – International Mountain Day – was my pretext for escaping the city, though my wife, Pisti, seemed to believe in it. I only wanted to breathe the mountain air and see the Berengaria Hotel, looted and burnt to a shell, in Prodromos. Besides, I was sure that this Mountain Day was a fake and that such a day couldn’t have existed, not even in Switzerland. We argued about this the whole way to Platres.
Opposite the coveted Minerva Hotel – closed for repairs – and next to the newly opened Semiramis, from whose register our reservation had mysteriously vanished as far as I could gather from the bellowing Mr. Akis, the Edelweiss was a homely but dependable third choice. Our room was well heated and clean and spacious enough (I see no reason why in a hotel you shouldn’t be able jump off the toilet onto the balcony) to have pleased a dormouse and his entire family. The proprietor, Mr. Giorgos, a local himself, admitted to knowing every square foot of forest within thirty kilometres of the hotel.
When I asked about the Berengaria, the hotelier was momentarily dazed and asked me if I was going to buy it. I wasn’t. Then probably what we wanted was a stroll in the woods, Mr. Giorgos decided, not a hotel of our own. I agreed. Or a morning shooting at speckled peafowl, he mused. We set off immediately for the bar at the Forest Park Hotel, a five-minute walk from the Edelweiss.
You can’t have any idea how immense the Forest Park is until you are standing under it. Though the rooms may have seen better days, the architecture remains as impressive as it must have been in 1935, when it opened its doors. The bar itself is a glorious relic; I fell in love with it instantly, chiefly with its dimness and emptiness, and felt right at home among the antique wooden chairs with their carved backs and puffy red cushions, the ancient village tapestries pinned to the walls, the walnut panels with their eagles and pheasants and idyllic curling flowers.
The waiters scurried about in pine-green livery with trays of zivania as Frank Sinatra serenaded us with Christmas favourites and filigreed cherubim hanging from the rafters blew their little golden trumpets. I ordered a brandy sour and tried to figure out where within our rustic surroundings King Farouk had been sitting when he had ordered his.
Pisti said he had probably sat outside, next to the swimming pool.
At six o’clock, when we emerged from the bar, the town might have been under a curfew, so silent were the streets. Each home seemed to be perfectly vacant but for a halo-sized orb of light burning dimly in a back room. The earth and the sky had merged into a gently breathing harmony, of which the mountains, black shadows limned in dark blue, were only an incidental part. At the bottom of a steep, winding lane, the town square was illumined by bright ranks of plastic icicles and lopsided stars stretched out on wires, and was, despite the missing human component, the picture of festivity.
We accompanied a treacherously old man to the International Mountain Day festivities. He was bundled up from head to foot in a puffy grey coat and sprang along at a dizzying clip. When we arrived at the future Platres Cultural Centre, he bade us farewell and dove for the zivania table, scattering local carousers young and old. Across from this table was another, laden with mountains of local ham, souvlakia and mushrooms, which knots of elderly village men were busily chewing their way through.
The koinotarchis – I cannot say for sure just what a koinotarchis does, though he seems to be a popular villager with all the executive entitlements of a bona fide mayor – spoke of traditions and tourism, the former everywhere in evidence, the latter sadly lacking. The villagers chewed and listened. Then a band struck up a lively zembekiko tune and there was dancing. On our way out, we ran into Mr. Akis’ father, who apologised profusely for our expulsion from the Semiramis, and I promised not to write anything about his villainous son.
The next morning, following a carefully rationed breakfast of Swiss cheese and toast, we set out for Fini. It was a pleasant drive, the roads torturous, but not outright deadly. One minute you are drenched in sunlight, the next you are chilled by a deep, brooding shade. At the turn for Fini you have the feeling that the road will peter out into a driveway with a barking dog at the end of it; then a whole secret scenery unfolds, tiled roofs sprout like wild mushrooms, and you are sure that you are skirting a valley that has never known the bane of civilisation.
Fini is something of a paradise, and winding down into its sleepy Sunday streets, I decided, as I often do when I am winding down into villages of its kind, that had I grown up there, a potter’s assistant or a substitute postman, my life would have been infinitely richer.
Here is one thing I liked about Fini. The koinotarchis’ office is the village’s most populous caf?. Then there are the handsome gnarled roots sprouting from the winding lanes and stretching so elegantly up to grape-stitched espaliers or drainage pipes – anywhere they can gain purchase really – that you don’t know where the manmade ends and the natural begins. Dazzling blue-purple marapelas, strung across winter branches like Christmas lights, defy the seasons. Fiery persimmons and squashed little mandarins the size of golf balls make a joyous Eden out of a dumpy dirt road.
I had never paid much attention to birches, but in Fini these local kavajas are as white as peeled almonds, utterly leafless and usually appear in groups of three. They are well-behaved trees. They keep their distance and stand to attention like dependable old soldiers, though I began to suspect, as they followed us from one dwelling to the next, that there were probably only three of them and that as soon as we turned our heads they were racing ahead and hunkering down again just to make our view more attractive.
We walked the entire length of the village entranced by these wonderful things, passing many unbelievably wizened ladies stationed along the road as evenly as electricity poles. As we stopped to chat with these ladies, a very strange thing happened. Pisti’s accent gradually thickened and rusticated until she sounded like one of them.
By noon we had located Sophronia Theodorou, Fini’s legendary potter. While the path to her studio is well marked – FAMOUS WOMAN POTTER 150 METERS! . . . THIS WAY TO PRIMITIVE CLAY WORKER!, etc. – it is at the top of a steep hill. Whenever you think you have found it, ther
e is another sign and more hill to climb.
Eventually the path debouched at a garden rampant with creeping greenery. We stood for a moment before it, puffing and bewildered, and watched an old man chopping wood. At one point, the man put down his axe and bellowed and the potter shot out of her tiny, dark home like a cuckoo.
Sophronia’s workshop was a drafty little cave. There was a potter’s wheel by the door and some shelves lined with items for sale – casseroles, platters and jugs with dovelings flitting about on their handles – all fired but unglazed, the picture of primitivity.
Though Sophronia generally hibernates in the winter – she is 87 and needs her rest – she was gracious enough to demonstrate her art. Watching her spin the wheel with her tiny socked foot in her mud-floored studio filled me with sadness. When we moved outside, she posed before a flowerpot.
I asked her if life in Fini had changed much since her childhood.
It was a delicate moment. As Sophronia gazed into the mists of time for the words to express the depth of her nostalgia, her eyes moistened and she retired to a mouldering chair in the shade. Then she bent into my recorder and cursed the EU with all her might, along with gas and food prices, unemployment, taxes, local government, etc.
In the late autumn, the road from Fini to Prodromos starts a leaf-strewn bower. You brush dead leaves, drive through dead leaves, over dead leaves; you are consumed by dead leaves. The melancholy is exquisite. The road quickly degrades to an asphalted mule track, however, which finally yields to something narrower and pine-strewn.
Prodromos is easy to pass entirely. In fact, we did pass it and stopped to ask directions from a dapper octogenarian in a wool vest and striped tie. He was standing next to a pristine automobile of unascertainable vintage.
“Berengaria?”
“The hhhotel,” Pisti explained.
It was amazing how faithfully she could duplicate these accents.
The old man pointed up, at a hill in the distance. He chuckled and said, “You’re going to buy it?”
We weren’t, not that I knew of.
“Only £500,000,” he said as if he had once considered buying it himself.
Still unsure whether we had reached Prodromos, we stopped at the Overlook Caf? for a coffee and there had our first contact with the youth of Troodos. Ten sixty-five-year-old men were engaged in a furious session of tavli, two playing, seven coaching, and one who just watched us malevolently. The Berengaria was up at the top of the hill, the owner said at a break in the play, and asked us if we were going to buy it.
A ruinous hotel is the perfect end to a melancholy, leaf-strewn day. At the top of a gradual dirt path, framed by a crisp blue sky, the Berengaria stood like an embattled feudal lord before an abandoned fiefdom. The walls were a jigsaw puzzle of heavy, cold, dun-coloured mountain stone and must have been several feet thick. Had some innovative guide told me the Berengaria had once been a Cathar stronghold, I would have believed him. Ignoring the sign at the base of the path that suggested that the entire edifice might tumble down and bury us alive should we so much as breathe on it, we breached what was left of the entrance.
Stripped of everything but charred, echoing stone, the cyclopean vestibule was a vision of Mycenae. A rusted chain that once held a chandelier hung eerily still at the base of a drafty flight of stone steps; in the adjoining rooms, searing pinpoints of daylight burned through bullet-shaped chinks in the boarded-up windows. We said nothing and stepped carefully. It was my conviction that should the hotel collapse, they would eventually stumble upon us, reassemble our bones like pottery sherds and puzzle over the unusual circumstances of our deaths for centuries to come.
There is not much more to report about the Berengaria. It is a haunted mansion; Macbeth would have felt right at home. I wished we could have spent the night. Out back there is a swimming pool where a foot of stagnant, rust-coloured rainwater would linger on until the spring. Upstairs, the bare, desecrated chambers on either side of the staircase could only have sheltered a savage king.
I have since heard that the Berengaria, now a holding of Salamis Tours, may be converted into a casino. I can only hope that the residents of Platres and Prodromos are true to their International Mountain Day and the mountains they love, and leave them the way Julius Caesar and countless other ephemeral masters have left them, without slot machines, roulette wheels or croupiers.
