Originally, we had planned to go to the Republic of Georgia this weekend, but we were a bit tired of traveling after Amsterdam and Severin has a big trip home at the end of the month, plus we are going to Greece for a week shortly thereafter, so it just didn’t seem to make sense…especially when we realized that we really wanted to be based in Tbilisi, and the flight from Cyprus lands in Kutaisi, a full three-hour drive away.
So we turned our focus to our Cyprus bucket list, which is my list of all the places and things we haven’t seen yet but need to see before we leave (sidebar: it is surprising the list is as long as it is, given how small this island is and the fact we’ve been here for two years…we need to get on it!) The very first thing on the list was to visit the Karpaz peninsula, which is the sword like appendage that juts off Cyprus’ northeast coast. The peninsula is a large nature preserve and home to a few small Greek Cypriot enclaves and a lot of mainland Turks who arrived after 1974.
Leaving from Nicosia, it was about a three hour drive to Apostolos Andreas. As the story goes, a ship carrying St. Andrew crashed during a journey to the Holy Land. St. Andrew struck the rocks with his staff and a spring gushed forth, the water of which cured the ship’s captain of his blindness. The monastery that stands there now is relatively (in Cyprus terms) new and unremarkable, but it is an important place for Greek Cypriot pilgrims. It was inaccessible from 1974 until the checkpoints opened in 2003; last year a bicommunal restoration project (partially funded by the U.S. government!) was completed and now the monastery is in tip-top shape. When we visited there were several busloads of Greek Cypriot pilgrims there; given that it is still a political taboo for many Greek Cypriots to cross to the north I was surprised at the number of GC-plated cars and buses we saw.
We walked into the anteroom of the church, where pilgrims were lighting candles and kissed two icons on they way into the main church. When you first walk into the church, there was an icon stand with an icon of whichever saints name day is that day. Then the pilgrims kissed each of the icons on the iconostasis, which is a big wall at the front of the church, usually embellished with gold or brass. We only stopped at the door to look in, because I was wearing shorts and a very skimpy top with a bathing suit under it, and I didn’t want the priest to call me out. There also just wasn’t THAT much to see, as Apostolos Andreas doesn’t have the amazing frescoes that many other old Cypriot churches do.
The real attraction for tourists in this neck of the woods are the wild donkeys of Karpaz:
These donkeys are the descendants of old donkeys that had been turned loose by farmers and now live permanently in this remote tip of Karpaz. Though they are wild, you can see they are completely unafraid of humans and cars, since people feed them non-stop. We brought watermelon rinds and carrots for our visit; the locals were feeding them pitas and bread (!!!!) If you roll your window down, they will stick their heads in the car and bug you for food. You have to push their heads out if you want to roll the window up and drive on (cue Severin retelling how I “punched a donkey”–but I’ve pushed enough nosy horses away to know how to get them out.)
In retrospect, watermelon rinds were an economical treat but not a logistically smart one. The donkeys drooled watermelon juice all over the inside and outside of my car door. Finally I rolled the window up but they hadn’t left yet:
Donkey mob scene:
I wanted a picture with the donkeys but they actually get pretty aggressive, in most of the pictures Severin snapped my eyes are directed at what is going on around my hands, since some of them were pretty nippy. Eventually I gave up hand feeding them and just threw all my watermelons on the ground and let them fight it out.
I have a soft spot for big ears…
