March 23, 2003 — Mudeif Productions

We heard the church bells ringing - gone are the now familiar calls to prayer, gone since the Turkish invasion in 1974, which divided the island politically and also demographically, with virtually all Christian-Greek-speaking people in the south and the Muslim-Turkish-speaking in the north.

Amid the ringing of bells, we made our way to St. George's Greek Orthodox Church. The church was large and fully packed. We wandered up to the balcony where Marthame was the only male present. The church itself was stark, whitewashed walls and plain stain glass windows contrasted with the brilliant golds of the icons and the burnished brown wood of the iconostasis. The liturgy was elegant, though noticeable for its comparative lack of congregational participation. Zababdeh's Orthodox church may not have the tonal quality of this place, but it does have significant lay involvement.

We have also decided to rent a car for a couple of days. The company dropped it off this morning at the hotel after church and we headed West, driving on the left side of the road, from the right side of the car. We realized that other drivers might not understand that the movement of the windshield wipers meant that a turn was immanent, so Marthame made adjustments.

Our first stop was the ancient Crusader castle in Kolossi, which afforded amazing panoramas of the surrounding fields. Next was the old Greco-Roman amphitheater and Byzantine basilica in Episkopi, where battered columns and mosaics struck an impressive form against the brilliant blue sky and deep blue waves.

We eventually made it to the port town of Paphos, now a touristy waterfront area where Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird" cut through the chilly seaside winds - or perhaps amplified them. Tucked back away from the water were some magnificent ancient treasures. Several old (really old - we think we recall one being from the 1st century BC. Maybe. Or later. Or earlier. Some were older than others. Greek. Roman. You know - old.) houses had been discovered as recently as the 1960s with brilliant mosaic floors. The scenes were of various Greek and Roman gods and myths - Theseus, Aphrodite, Dionysius, Scylla - remarkably well-preserved. Their colors were still quite evident in some cases. Others seemed to be renderings of the family members who commissioned them. One reminded us of the icons we've seen of John the Baptist, with hair just a bit too wild. It's easy to see, looking at this place, how the tradition of icons could grow to be so central and strong in the Greek church - replacing Apollo with Elijah and giving a new theological framework could easily do the trick. We fantasized about our next house and its own central mosaic floor, a map of the world with all the great cities, rivers, and mountain ranges marked out.

We made the drive back to Limassol, hugging the left side of the road, impressed by what we saw today and weary from the fullness of it all. We also realized an important math error we've been making - instead of the 2:1 currency exchange ratio, we discovered it was actually 1:2. And not in our favor. Our $6 hotel became a $24 hotel instantaneously. Still relatively cheap, but not as cheap as we had been thinking. It could've been worse: we could've commissioned that mosaic floor...