By Heidi Trautmann

One of my favourite places is the area around Akdeniz with its long beach when I am in need of finding myself, the centre of myself, to balance out.

It is one of the longest stretches of an untouched sandy coast we find in Cyprus, you can walk there for hours, alone with the music of the sea and the wide sky. An area with lots of history behind the dunes, not just the garbage that the sea has spit out and carried up to them. We are here at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean, directly facing the West.

On the way here you come through Akdeniz Village, or Agia Eirini or Irini, as it used to be called. There are two dirt roads at the end of the village, the left one leads to the Caretta Restaurant on the beach, the other leads to the Kings Tombs and a military post on the beach which is now deserted by the military and open to the public.  We took this last road to the beach mid-February, it was a Sunday, mild with some cirrus clouds flying over the wide sky. Fortunately we did not meet any hunters with their season finishing this month. It is a fascinating landscape, the hinterland of this coast, small trees, rather bushy, bent by the western winds, the ground sandy with the typical coast macchia, towards the village the soil becomes more fertile, however, I am sure that the groundwater contains salt. There are no tarred roads, you have to drive slowly, and from afar you can see the wide surface of the sea with the sun bathing in it. I am asking myself why kings were buried here 500 AD in this lonely area, is it because they were supposed to face the setting sun? Or were there more settlements than we know? It is not an area where a harbour could be built, there is no shelter for boats, I also have never seen a sailing boat anchoring here during day time.

Now that the military post has been deserted people have started to come here onto the once fenced in hill where the military was stationed; around the house they build up their Sunday picnic tables and the smell of grilled meat reached us before we could see them. On one end there is a canon still positioned covering the entire beach; when in last years we came close to this post they always warned us off: do not enter! So, you know how it is, when something is forbidden you want to know what might be hidden there.

We went around the house and found some dugouts, what a lonely job, I thought, especially with strong winds and the waters coming up high and exchange the masses of rubbish for new ones. Once we discovered some 2 m fish skeletons along this beach and other funny findings, beach treasures. In early summer the turtles come up the beach at night and lay their eggs, that must be a sight, and a young soldier being there on duty was certainly well entertained by the nature traffic at moonlit sand beaches.

We will explore the beach that was closed for so long in early summer when it is a little warmer but this time we went towards south again, towards the Trodoos mountains, as far as the Caretta restaurant which has lots of room for visitors now, but you can see the power the sea winds exert over the coast and how they have battered the octagonal building;  we have passed there many a romantic late afternoon with the sun setting directly into the sea; for newcomers it is a sight they will never forget.

We return to find our car, all in all we have met three people in about two hours. We didn’t talk much, you don’t have to, the sea and the wind are doing the talking and once in a while some birds. That did us good.

The people of Akdeniz, the villagers have a long established history of their own; there was a book published by Erol Akcan with a rich collection of photos and biographies of this place. They have started to do some renovating seeing that now people have started to come regularly to enjoy a day at the beach.

Driving home via the newly built dam behind which Turkish waters will soon fill the valleys up to Hizarköy, we realized,  that our souls have caught up with us and finding us relaxed and smiling.