Agros Rose Festival

Poor Cyprus has been conspicuously absent from this blog. It’s not that Cyprus doesn’t have cool stuff to see, it’s just that when we’re home we’re busy living here and so our weekends are full of grocery shopping, laundry, hanging out at the barn, and tinkering at home doing all of the things we don’t have energy to do during the workweek. At the beginning of the year I had resolved to be more aggressive about carving out time each weekend to check things off our Cyprus bucket list and make sure we truly suck the marrow out of life. Lo and behold it’s May and we haven’t really done that– between returning from R&R, trips to Vienna, Beirut, and Rome, multiple bouts of sickness (first a wicked upper respiratory infection, then vertigo, etc), time just kind of got away from us. Long way of saying, it’s the second week of May and I’ve checked off two new restaurants, and abandoned village, and a village festival. And I am actually posting these photos the DAY I took them. Hopefully next weekend will be equally productive.

Cyprus seems to have a new village festival every weekend– a tulip festival, a lavender festival, an orange festival, an almond festival…and so on. We’ve never really gone, but I saw an advertisement (written entirely in Greek, with no English translation) for the Agros Rose Festival. I figured why the heck not, it sounded random enough to be fun, and it ended up being a good way to see a village we would have otherwise just driven right past.

Agros is about an hour’s drive from Nicosia in the Troodos mountains. The Troodos are famous for a set of 11 churches that are hundreds of years old which appear non-description on the outside but have spectacular frescoes inside. Severin and I have tried visiting the churches on at least three occasions and every time we go, they are closed. The last time we tried, on President’s Day, we tried to hit two of them and both were closed on Mondays. I found a church that was right on the way to Agros, and I was super amped that I would finally get to see a church. But when we got there, I realized it was the church we tried to visit shortly after we arrived on Cyprus…and this one was closed on Saturdays and Sundays. ARGH!!!!

We jumped back in the car, defeated, and set off for LUNCH!

Eating in villages in Cyprus is very hit or miss. Most tavernas offer the same selection of mezedes and usually overcooked meat or very heavy Cypriot dishes like kleftiko. There is exactly one English-language restaurant blog in Cyprus called Cypriot and Proud, which we depend on heavily for food recommendations and staying informed about new openings. That was how I found Mpakaliko tou Hapsi in the village we were going to. It was a super cute and folks-y (think vintage Greek advertisements, a freshly-painted old mail delivery bike from the colonial period, etc) kafeneion converted into a brunch place. Unfortunately my food shot ended up totally blurry, but I had a delicious brunch plate with a fancy “egg in the hole,” toast, halloumi fried in pomegranate sauce, anari cheese, apple slices, cucumber, and tomato. It may sound crazy, but the real highlight was this “Hapsi’s Lemonade”– it was made with sparkly water, with fresh mint and demerera sugar on the bottom. It was the perfect level of sweetness (a real rarity in Cyprus, Cypriots seem to love cloyingly sweet lemonade), and SO BOSS.

After brunch, we went through a few 180-degree switchbacks and the roads got really narrow. When confronted with a road where only one car will fit through, Cypriots tend to take the “chicken” approach and hit the accelerator on the belief that whoever gets through first wins. However, the mountain air must have made people more civilized because people waited patiently and took turns sneaking through the wind-y village roads. We got extraordinarily lucky with parking (because parallel parking from the wrong side of the road in a crowded, hilly, and narrow road was not gonna happen!)

We followed the bazuki music to the festival and passed this tidy hedge (it says “AGROS” in Greek):

Before we even made it the rose festival, WE FOUND ROSES. So many roses:

 

The local church:

Cyprus has a smoked ham called lountza. I’ve tried it a few times (including at the brunch place), and it is so overwhelmingly smoky I’m not a huge fan. And I like smoke. But here’s a store selling it:

Then we “entered” the festival which was just a street blocked off. Small vendors were scattered all the way down the steep road. At the top of the road, they’d put this old still out which is distilling rose water. (Fact:  We left the Rose Festival without buying anything with rose in it. If you have not tried rose water before, 100% of Americans surveyed agree that it is an acquired taste that none of us care to acquire. It smelled good though.)

 

The first vendor we came across was selling a variety of hammered copper ware. I contemplated getting one of these sheep/goat bells for Popeye, but Severin already can’t stand the jingling of his collar, so just imagine if he had a bell! I did buy one of the new copper sheep bells you see in center of the photo; I intend to attach a string to it and hang it on our Christmas tree as a Cyprus-themed ornament! It is a frequent occurrence to see a shepherd with his mixed flock of sheep and goats out, often with bells ringing. I probably see them at least 2-3x a week at Lapatsa, and surprisingly often elsewhere. It’s one of my favorite things about Cyprus, so I think it’s a perfect memory for our eclectic mix.

I also ended up buying a beautiful hammered copper bowl, which I think it will look beautiful hanging in the kitchen or added to our collection of Middle Eastern coffee/tea equipment, which is in our curio cabinet. The man who sold it to me didn’t speak the greatest English, but the friend he had watching his shop spoke English after living in Chicago for 12 years right after the war. The owner said his dad (long-dead) made it and it was an antique. I asked him why he was selling it, and he said he had enough of his dad’s stuff as it was. I made some joke about it being made in China, so he showed me a piece he just started. Being a cynic, my first thought was, “Likely story!” But whatever, it was beautiful, the souvenir pickings in Cyprus are scant, so I splurged.

Some views of Agros:

 

 

I had to take a picture of the food tent signage because it’s SOOOOO Cyprus. Souvla is the national dish and is just skewered grilled meat, usually pork. Kleftiko is a very traditional lamb dish, and “nuggets” is Cypriot English for…chicken nuggets. We weren’t planning to eat anything since we had just eaten, but then I saw a tent that said “Koupes” and I was thinking, sweet, dessert! The proprietors were quiet friendly but as I wasn’t hungry, I asked if they would sell me a bottle of water. Unfortunately, the festival wouldn’t let them sell both FOOD and DRINKS (this is where I remind you the Communist party is the second-largest party in parliament), so they could only give me water for free. I accepted their water, but then I felt guilty so I bought a koupe. A koupe is very similar to Middle Eastern kibbeh. It’s basically a cylinder about six inches long; the inside is stuffed with ground meat– this one had spinach too– and the outside is a bulgur wheat encasement which is then fried. They had heaps of lemon quarters next to the koupe, and instructed me to take a bite, squeeze the lemon into it, take a bite, squeeze the lemon, and so on, until it was gone. It was delicious. The guys we ended up buying from were nice too, one had lived in New York for a while and the other in New Jersey.

We found the bazuki player! He was smoking and bazuki playing at the same time, but unfortunately I couldn’t capture it on photo. I was trying to be discreet since I had to take the picture on three separate occasions due to people walking in front of my lens and lighting issues.

The next stop was a small shop selling traditional edible products. Unfortunately, it was totally packed and someone in there had “forgotten” to wear deodorant on a 90+ degree day, so it was pretty unbearable.

We did find these inside:

Since you’ll never guess what they are, I’ll just tell you. In Cyprus (and Greece, as I understand it), it is very common to preserve various fruits and vegetables in a sweet syrup. They are called “spoon sweets,” (glyko karydaki) and I find most of them to be utterly repulsive…but some versions are actually pretty interesting and tasty. What you see above are whole walnuts, picked while green, and preserved in the sweet syrup. They’re drained and chopped in quarters in the photo above. They look like mushrooms or something. I’d have to eat a few more pieces to be able to even attempt to describe what they taste like, because they taste like nothing I’ve ever eaten. Here is a watermelon rind variety– they also had pumpkin, tomato, cactus fruit, and cherry, among other flavors–

 

This is a cooler full of rose water. We tried a sip and that was all we needed.

Speaking of Cypriot delicacies, these are “soutzoukkos”– also quite ubiquitous. They are strings of almonds that are dipped repeatedly in hot grape jelly and allowed to cool. You’ll see them hanging to dry sometimes, or sold in logs as below. I have to admit I’ve never actually tried it, there is something about the color and the shape I just find really off-putting. If you look at the second photo down you can see them hanging in the glass box on the patio.

Carob also grows everywhere in Cyprus. We have three or four trees at the barn and when we take the horses for a trail ride, sometimes we will park them under a tree and pull off as many carob pods as our hands will carry. They are super sweet so the horses absolutely love them. I wouldn’t have even known what they were if one of the kids hadn’t shown me the ropes!

Ok, BACK TO ROSES! I didn’t realize roses liked hot weather, but apparently they do because it was in the high 80s today and they were everywhere. Down in the plains of Nicosia there is not a shoot of green left as far as the eye can see, so it was amazing to see brushes of lavender and roses everywhere. I’m afraid those too will very soon succumb to the Cypriot summer.

The village had to protect its precious flowers with strategically placed signs in Greek, English, and Russian:

At the bottom of the hill, we found the “Rosenhaus.” I don’t know why it is in German, that was not clear to me. But look at all those glorious red roses all over the place! It smelled so good!

I’m not sure if these roses were strewn all over the ground for a purpose (such as drying them out) or if this place was just trying to rub in that they had so many roses they could literally afford to make a blanket of them on the floor. The shop was selling these hot pink rose-shaped candles. I didn’t buy any because they were kind of an eyesore, but in retrospect I wish I had because they had a super-intense but not fake rose scent. I just couldn’t get over the color though.

Here are some old rosewater bottles from the 1940s:

In summary, we* went to the Agros Rose Festival. There were ROSES EVERYWHERE. 

*Notably, Severin opted not to attend because apparently going to a Rose Festival did not appeal to him. So I went with Tori, a friend from work.

 

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