The two most gifted comedians by far – each claiming a unique and inimitable style – are Bishop Nikiforos of Kykkos and the new Archbishop Chrysostomos II, formerly Bishop Chrysostomos of Paphos (hence the chummy nickname ‘O Paphitis’). Their fans so revere their comic routines that they stoop to kiss their hands and refer to them as “Your Arch-Holiness”. Their black robes and beards, which merge hippy mellowness, big city sophistication, and Arthurian wizardry, have taken the comedy fashion world by Orthodox storm.

But they are not without individual flair. The Kykkos Bishop plays on his short stature and facial malleability by going for the cartoon look. With a beard dyed white to enhance the effect, Kykkos Nikiforos will occasionally burst into spectacular tantrums of melodramatic hell-and-brimstone rants, a sidesplitting show of gaudy fury that reminds one of a cross between Elmer Fudd and the Tasmanian Devil. The taller Paphos Bishop, on the other hand, aims for the Casa Nostra look. Wearing sunglasses with semi-dark lenses and a closely cropped beard, the church father diplomatically delivers his comedy with the measured manner of the smooth mafia man assuring the jury he has committed no foul play, although his varicose cheeks and coy smiles warms him to the audience in a way no underworld man has ever managed to do.

To appreciate the humor of these men, or even to recognize it as humor, one must have a bleak undercurrent running through one’s soul, a sardonic ingrained sense of life’s perpetual hypocrisy, a capacity to chortle over corruption, lies, and double-dealings – especially when they are painted with a transparent veneer of Christian brotherly love and piety – and a rejection of, or at least resignation over, the belief that God can be found in the gold-coated altar of the Church. In short, you need to be able to chuckle over the following phrase (recently uttered by Kykkos Nikiforos about the Paphos Bishop and Limassol Bishop): “Now it’s my turn to fry the fish on the lips of my two holy brothers.” This direct translation from Cypriot into English does not convey the essence of the sentence, which can be better summed up as: ‘Now it’s my turn to give those two sons of bitches hell’.

Several years ago it became apparent that elections for a new Cyprus Archbishop would have to be held because the resident Archbishop was becoming increasingly incapacitated due to advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. That was when the comedy began. It is very amusing – assuming you have a dark sense of humor – to observe men, who are supposed to reflect brotherly love and humility and who are accustomed to having the backs of their right hand kissed dozens of times each day, practice treachery, character assassinations, slander, lying and cheating on a daily basis, all motivated out of naked ambition.

For centuries politicians have looked to Machiavelli’s The Prince to for practical ethics-free advice on how to win and maintain political power. After the latest electoral victory that landed the Bishop of Paphos in the Archbishop’s throne, clergymen seeking ecclesiastical glory would benefit from diligently studying his methods and tactics. Unfortunately, the Paphos Bishop has not yet summed up all that he “over so many years and with so much affliction and peril, ha[s] learned and understood” as Machiavelli noted in his letter to Lorenzo de Medici. But one need only review his unabashed rise to the throne to glean the tactical insights gained from a life tirelessly and unswervingly dedicated to the immoral pursuit of ecclesiastical power.

The turn of the millennium is a good place to start. In 2000, the Paphos Bishop was reported to have spearheaded a campaign to mar the growing reputation of Bishop Athanassios of Limassol – who had recently returned to Cyprus after years of monastic living in Greece’s Mt. Athos – by accusing him of homosexuality. The charges were dropped when court evidence demonstrated that two archimandrites had promised a car and cash to a key witness if he would testify that Bishop Athanassios was gay.

With his soft-spoken manner and commitment to the teachings of Orthodox Christianity, the Limassol Bishop stood in stark contrast to most of the other bishops, especially the man he had replaced – Limassol Bishop Chrysanthos – who had been forced to step down in 1998 after reports emerged that he had been involved in stealing more than £6 million from at least four groups of investors, including an Ecuadorian charity for underprivileged girls. In May 2004 Chrysanthos’ car was destroyed by a bomb blast, a common form of communication between underworld acquaintances.

To counter the rising popularity of the Limassol Bishop, the Paphos Bishop helped to promote Nikiforos – the Abbot of the Kykkos monastery – to the more powerful position of Bishop in early 2002, without forcing him to surrender his leadership at the wealthy and powerful monastery. But the divide and rule plan seemed to backfire on him when the Kykkos Bishop began using the vast sums of monastery money available to him to start garnering popular and political support. From then on until the Archbishopric elections, the Paphos Bishop and the Kykkos Bishop would become arch-nemeses, providing endless colorful material for the island’s church correspondents.

In 2005 the Paphos Bishop said that the Kykkos Bishop was on a power trip and regretted backing him for the bishopric. He then said Nikiforos’ family had “bad DNA.” In response, the Kykkos Bishop said it was with “pain of heart” that he heard the “negative and offensive remarks by my beloved brother.”

“I am proud of my DNA and my Greek, Christian origin,” he said, and then, as if to prove just how Christian his DNA was, he added, “to the raised fist I extend a brotherly hand.”

The Paphos Bishop later insinuated that the Kykkos Bishop was schmoozing journalists and others to ensure their electoral support: “Every weekend 10 or 15 buses go to Kykkos monastery and they eat and drink for free.”

The Kykkos Bishop responded to the allegation in an October 27, 2005 statement from the “Press Office of the Honorable Kykkos Bishop,” stating that the Paphos Bishop was “continuing his favorite tactic of abusing and slinging mud at all of his brothers in Christ who do not agree with his arbitrariness and illegalities… [and of] abusing, undermining, defaming, and slinging mud at the Kykkos Bishop to lower his honor and esteem.”

In the same press release, the Kykkos Bishop accused the Paphos Bishop of denying allegations that he had recently paid £100,000 to a company to defame him and provoke an “ethical assassination,” adding that the man best suited to be Archbishop would “be decided soon by the people, whom you so fear and hold in contempt… Clear skies, Holy Paphos, are not afraid of lightning.”

In another instance, the Kykkos Bishop accused the Paphos Bishop of “hypocritical and pharisaic attitudes.”

The Paphos Bishop who had supported holding elections the previous summer, probably because he thought he had a good chance of winning, now opposed them, as he would likely be outvoted by both the wealthy and multi-party backed Kykkos Bishop as well as the popular Limassol Bishop.

The Kykkos Bishop, along with the Morphou and Trimithounta Bishops, then traveled to Istanbul to complain that the Synod had decided to not hold archbishopric elections so long as the incapacitated Archbishop was still alive. After their departure the Paphos Bishop told reporters that the three rebel bishops had not respected the majority of the Holy Synod – the decision-making body of the Church. The Paphos Bishop then paid a visit to the Patriarch in Istanbul in order to “hear what the other Bishops had told him” and to respond to their positions, “which were mistaken of course.”

In November the Kykkos Bishop again flew to Istanbul, this time with the Morphou Bishop, to deliver an epistle to the Patriarch regarding the elections. Reporters asked the Paphos Bishop, as he was heading into the Archbishopric to convene a Synod meeting, whether he would wait for the two bishops, who were still in transit at the time. “If they are coming, we will wait for them,” he replied, although when asked again while walking into the building, he added, “If they make it in time…”

It was finally decided, after a Greater Synod meeting in Geneva, to hold elections on September 24, 2006. With its cornucopia of funds, the Kykkos Bishopric conducted the most flamboyant campaigning. During one of his rallies, three jumbo screens flanked the stage, while a giant poster of a ridiculous majestic-looking Kykkos Bishop hung from the ceiling. “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome the next Archbishop of Cyprus!” the speaker urged, prompting cries of “Worthy is he!” from the audience.

“O Greek Cypriot nation,” boomed the Kykkos Bishop’s voice as he stepped up to the pedestal. “Tonight, I feel a captive of your immense love.” In another of his speeches he said that those who question the work of the Kykkos monastery and the Kykkos Bishop (he often refers to himself in the third person) are “deeply shrouded in darkness” and “parked in a basement of filthy mud.”

During a television interview someone asked the Kykkos Bishop whether it was true he had dyed his beard white. “Yes, it’s true,” he replied. “I dyed my beard. But what matters is what a person has inside him, not the exterior.”

The archbishopric elections in Cyprus are a complicated messy affair, involving several rounds of voting and two separate ballots, one of representatives elected by the population and the other of 33 ex officio clerics chosen by the Synod (the Paphos Bishop, who was the acting head of the Church, had the final say on who they were). To become Archbishop one must get an absolute majority (over 50 percent) in both ballots.

The Limassol Bishop reportedly won 48 percent of the popular vote, the Kykkos Bishop 42 percent, and the Paphos Bishop less than 6 percent. Despite garnering over 40 percent of the vote, this was a humiliating defeat for the Kykkos Bishop, whose liberal donations had won him the support of the best-supported football clubs, many TV stations, most newspapers and every major political party – including the biggest one in Cyprus, the pseudo-communist AKEL, which absurdly proclaims itself as Marxist-Leninist.

The Kykkos Bishop at once complained about voter irregularities and illegalities, claiming the voting results were invalid. But the Synod tossed all his complaints, prompting him to rage with classic Kykkotic poesy about the “consummation of a crime” and the “slaughter and rape of truth.”

Just before the vote, the Paphos Bishop urged people to cast their ballot “so that we may show, here and abroad, that we are a democratic nation and respect one another.” One might think, if he took his own words seriously, that he would have nobly bowed out of the race after having only secured less than six per cent of the public vote. But not only did he not bow out; he began to proclaim his impending victory. When asked over the radio who he thought would win the election, Bishop Chrysostomos of Paphos – the man who had received less than six percent of the public vote – replied, “the next Archbishop will be called Chrysostomos.”

The Paphos Bishop has always been a master at the art of diplomatic bullshit, capable of the most outrageous and brazen assertions (in the thick of the campaign mudslinging he said that the bishops’ relationship was “one of collaboration, teamwork and mutual respect), but he occasionally speaks with a frankness that reveals just how his astute Machiavellian mind works. Take for example his response when a reporter asked him to clarify what he meant after he asserted that in the end his rivals might back him “for the good of the Church.”

“I live in this country and know how Cypriot society works,” he said. “I wasn’t born yesterday, nor did I drop out of the sky.”

And the way Cypriot society works, as anyone who has lived in Cyprus for some time knows, is that it is often the least popular candidates who, through deals and alliances, catapult to the top. The current president of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos, is a prime example.

Ironically, because no one had an absolute majority in the two ballots, the Paphos Bishop was in a strong position. Both of his rivals needed his votes to knock the other out. So the night before the final day of voting, the Paphos Bishop struck a deal with the Limassol Bishop to “trade votes” in the two ballots to proceed to the final round of voting, knocking the Kykkos Bishop out of the election. And so it was.

The alliance, which a Kykkos spokesman referred to as a “dark conspiracy to oust the Kykkos bishopric,” prompted the outraged Kykkos Bishop to order his representatives to leave the Archbishopric, despite the fact that they were still supposed to remain and vote in the final round for either the Limassol Bishop or the Paphos Bishop.

With the Kykkos voters gone, the Limassol Bishop was guaranteed victory. Outside the Archbishopric hundreds of his supporters were already celebrating. But as acting head of the Church, the Paphos Bishop called an extraordinary session of the Holy Synod, where it was decided to postpone the election until 4pm the next day, despite the fact that the move violated the Church charter.

The news prompted an outcry among the gathered Limassol Bishop supporters outside, who accused the Paphos Bishop of hijacking the election by illegally postponing the vote to give him time to bribe the Kykkos Bishop for his support. The Paphos Bishop defending the postponement by claiming it would have been “unfair” to hold the vote without the participation of the Kykkos Bishop supporters, adding that he saw no harm in waiting another day.

Later that afternoon the eliminated Kykkos Bishop made his famous brotherly declaration that it was now his turn to “fry the fish on the lips of my two holy brothers” and said that they must now come to him and meet his demands if they desired his votes.

The Kykkos Bishop, who had staged a massive electoral campaign and had just hours ago stormed out of the Archbishopric in a fury, then made a statement that should go down as one of his all time memorable quotes: “However I state that I felt a relief that I did not pass to the third stage, because I will remain here at the Kykkos Monastery, which I consider the highest battlement from which I can continue my work towards my community and my country.”

The next morning the Paphos Bishop traveled to Kykkos monastery and signed an agreement with the Kykkos Bishop in which he promised to make certain changes in the Church (“for the good of the church” of course) in exchange for the votes of the Kykkos supporters.

The double-alliance – first with his one rival, then with the other one whom he had ousted – worked. During the vote later that day, all of the Kykkos supporters and clerics dutifully obeyed their command and the Bishop of Paphos, the man who had received less than six percent of the popular vote, became Archbishop Chrysostomos II.

I was at the Archbishopric at the time the news was announced. The bulk of the people outside were supporters of the Limassol Bishop, who has always drawn the most devoted following of any of the bishops. It was not a cheerful scene. The enthronement ceremony was postponed for a week for fear of public unrest.

In the most violent incident, a group encircled a black Mercedes transporting the Morphou Bishop and began pounding upon the hood and roof, furious at what they saw as a clerical betrayal of the Limassol Bishop. On emerging from his car, the shaken Morphou Bishop told reporters: “They may be faithful towards one person, but they are not faithful to the Church or to Christ.” But to the crowd, it was the clerics and the representatives who had been unfaithful to the popular will. As the churchmen nervously shuffled away out of the backdoor entrance, the crowd booed them to cries of “unworthy, unworthy” and “shame on you… you have put the Church up for sale!” Relatives had to hold back one young man who was openly weeping, his fists clenched, yelling at one of the clerics that he would bury him alive.

But most of the Limassol Bishop’s supporters were more subdued. Some even went so far as to consider the Paphos Bishop’s victory as God’s punishment of their beloved elder, who though the most spiritual of all the candidates, proved in the end he too was not beyond forming alliances and horse trading votes, which he had claimed he would not do (but in fairness to him, he did not betray the public that had voted for him, because it was his clerical votes, not his Elector votes (popular votes) that he traded).

In his usual serene manner, the Limassol Bishop accepted the results without protest. Several weeks before the election he told me him during an interview that he personally did not desire to become Archbishop, but if that was what the people wanted, then he would become Archbishop. All church candidates say that, of course, but he is the only one who may have even partially meant it. When you are not so wolfish yourself, and you find yourself in pack of wolves, it is better to remain where you are rather than become the pack leader.

After being elected, the new Archbishop thanked his “Holy brothers, especially the Kykkos Bishop and the Limassol Bishop because… I was elected with their votes.” He later claimed that the document he signed at the Kykkos monastery was non-binding and merely consisted of “suggestions”. And he managed to hold a straight face upon saying “the people have the last word in the church elections.”

I was recently granted a half hour interview with ‘His Beatitude’ (when you are Bishop you are His Arch-Holiness, when Archbishop you are upgraded to the blissful rank of Beatitude) in his office at the Archbishopric. He told me that all the recent strife and confrontations amongst the bishops were an unfortunate result of the pre-election climate. “But now nothing divides us; all unites us.”

I asked him if he would step down in five years, a claim he made after his meeting with the Kykkos Bishop at the monastery. He skirted the issue with what should go down as one of his all time memorable sentences: “I had absolutely no ambition to become Archbishop.”

“I am purely interested in bringing about changes in the Cyprus church, which it’s my responsibility to serve, he continued. “And I believed it would be difficult for any of the other candidates to make those changes.”

It was the perfect response. By that line of logic, all the shrewd maneuverings, the manipulation, the alliances and betrayals… it could all be justified as the regrettable but necessary means through which he could become Archbishop and bring about those important changes that only he was capable of doing*.

Journalists are generally fond of Chrysostomos II because of his availability to the press (when Bishop he always answered his cell phone) and his readiness to answer questions that other more self-important bishops might find insulting or disrespectable.

The Archbishop was unfazed when I asked him about an incident that took place years ago in his Paphos district in which a lorry driver, allegedly acting under his direct orders, was caught stealing sand from a turtle nesting ground to transport to a golf course on former church property.

“Yes, they accused me that I had taken the sand.” He started to laugh. “And I enjoyed [the accusation] and said, ‘Yes, I took it, and anytime I want to I’ll go and take it’. But I had absolutely no involvement, that’s why I enjoyed saying I did.”

Corruption is an ugly thing when it wears a serious face, but when it chuckles and delights over itself, it can be almost charming. “Tell me Your Beatitude,” I asked, “what specific agreement did you make with the Limassol Bishop in the second round of voting when you both eliminated the Kykkos Bishop and advanced to the final round?”

Chrysostomos II paused, and then, with a coy smile said, “We agreed to leave it to God.”

*One of the first actions Archbishop Chrysostomos II took upon assuming his office was to bury the heart of Archbishop Makarios, which had been sitting preserved in a jar of formaldehyde on display in the Archbishopric since 1977. Not a bad start.

Constantine Markides

Kaminaria Departure

AFTER FILLING in my name and place of employment, the young policeman behind the desk looked at me quizzically, apparently confounded by the next piece of information requested on the incident form.  “And you were doing this why?” he said finally. “Hobby?”

The perplexity couched in his question had been more bluntly expressed that same morning by an elderly monk at Kykkos monastery after my cousin Christos had explained the two of us were on a five-day trek from a village in the Troodos mountains to the Akamas peninsula: “And why, my son?”

Most generalizations about nations or peoples are founded more upon prejudice and ignorance than fact, but one can make one irrefutable assertion about Cypriots: they do not trek. The only creature on the island that traverses distances with a load on its back is the donkey, and even that beast of burden has become a rarity. Of course Cypriots have never been much for walking. In his account of his 600-mile trek through Cyprus in the spring and summer of 1972 Colin Thubron writes:

“In eastern Mediterranean lands nobody goes on foot unless he must. To walk out of pleasure or curiosity is unimaginable. A man walks only because he is poor. The fishermen watched me, puzzled, and a shepherd on an inland ridge turned among his flock to shade his eyes. There was no hostility, and no understanding.”

There may be fewer shepherds and more Mercedes on the island since then, but Cypriot aversion towards walking has remained as unswerving as the Cyprus problem. Why walk for five days what you can drive in five hours, including coffee breaks and a taverna lunch?

On the morning of Monday, April 3 my cousin and I drove to the mountain village of Kaminaria, and with the permission of the village priest who was clutching a black iron key as long as his upper arm, abandoned our car in the church parking lot and set off on a trail winding up past the church.

After an initial few brutal kilometers of steep uphill the trail leveled off and then dipped into the Platys river valley past some vineyards the Kaminaria priest owned. While resting at a picnic site by the Pyknopytia brook we met some of the foresters who had marked out the trail—the European long distance path E4.

In their tendency to shirk walking, Cypriots may be more Middle Eastern than European; but the government nonetheless decided to include Cyprus in the European long distance path (the trail starts in Gibraltar and crosses Europe) by establishing a 539 km E4 trail that traverses the central and southern parts of the island. There were no illusions about who would be hiking it; the Forestry Department’s main partner in creating the trail was the Cyprus Tourism Organisation.

“So it must be only foreigners who hike the trail,” I said to one of the foresters as he offered me an apple wedge.

“Oh no, we saw four or five Cypriots walking by here,” he said. I asked him when. “Last June.”

We soon came to a sign saying there were 9km left to Kykkos monastery, our day’s destination. The heaviness of our packs and our unpreparedness (me without hiking boots, Christos without a hip strap on his pack) had taxed our increasingly sore bodies and the single-digit number brought new vigor into our stride. But our jocularity quickly subsided into morose silence once it became apparent the entire way would be a steep uphill.

Roughly halfway between the monastery and us was Myllikouri, a 1200m high horseshoe-shaped village known for rose water production. After a brief exchange with a local it was clear that our lunchtime hopes for a taverna were a mirage. Only a coffee shop was open. Instead we shed our footwear and elevated our sore feet at a shaded picnic table overlooking the valley at the mouth of the village.

A man soon approached us as we were gnawing at a loaf of bread along with some cucumbers and a hard cheese called Kefalotyri. The man declined an invitation to join us in our meager lunch but did sit at the wooden bench table beside ours.

“We were hoping to find a taverna here but we were told there’s nothing open now,” my cousin told the man, whom we soon found out was the mukhtar, the community leader. “So instead this is lunch.”

“The villages are dying,” the mukhtar said matter-of-factly. “We’re all pensioners here.” I asked him when the decline began. “Ten or fifteen years ago. The young men leave for the army and don’t return so the fathers take their daughters away. What else are they going to do, hump ‘em themselves?”

Not a vehicle passed us as we trudged the last five winding kilometers along a paved uphill to Kykkos monastery. At around five we came in view of the slogan “Makarios is alive” – painted on the side of the mountain upon which Makarios’ tomb rests – and soon after arrived at Kykkos, the gilded seat of power and wealth in the Cyprus church.

After a few inquiries and some rigmarole, we managed to score a guest room. An older monk outside the office had tried to redirect us elsewhere when we asked for the key, presumably because guestrooms were not his monastic duty, prompting a younger monk nearby to chastise him in ancient Greek about responsibility and irresponsibility while ushering us into the office.

The monk, who later said he was 30, seemed eager for conversation. “It is hard to be a monk anywhere, but here at Kykkos it is even more challenging. With so many tourists, you lack the peace and isolation the monastic path requires. Nor do they help in the struggle against lust.” It was a subject he returned to several times. The monk invited us for lentil soup, so after dropping off our packs in a spacious guestroom that could have passed in a budget hotel had it been furnished with a television, we returned to the monastery.

The lentil soup turned out to be an ample feast, accompanied as it was by fresh bread, tomatoes, garlic chives, cucumbers, hot peppers, olives and halvah slabs. Christos and I had only eaten peanuts and sunflower seeds since breakfast so we grubbed in silence as he lectured on ‘Anglo-American-Zionist’ involvement in Cyprus, on his vision of a Greater Byzantium in the Mediterranean, and of course on the carnal challenges a Kykkos monk faces.

Another monk came in briefly and seemed about to sit with us but our host shooed him out of the room with a furtive but violent expression. The young monk had been educated in Greece at a theological seminary and had a facility with the ancient ecclesiastical tongue, so it seemed some of the older monks held him in awe, thereby enabling him to get away with more authoritarianism than his years would have otherwise allowed him.

As is true of many young men who hold stations considered by society to be respectable and lofty, he took himself very seriously. Not only did he have a habit of raising a forefinger when he disagreed with you, which was frequent enough, and of didactic turns of phrases (“Let me tell you one thing”) but he also spoke in painstakingly precise grammar, which he would pepper with Ancient Greek proverbs as if to impart extra weight and sagely solemnity to his every statement.

But I was grateful refueling on the cornucopia set before me. I only interrupted his pontifications to thank him for the meal while ladling myself another bowl of soup. “Don’t thank me. Thank the Virgin Mary,” he replied in proper saintly fashion.

We abandoned our plates in the kitchen to a large woman in apron who was busy spraying down dishes amidst rising mists of diabolical steam, as if relegated by the monks to this infernal task for some misdeed of hers, perhaps for being born a woman. Our dinner host then gathered his black robes about him and motioned us to follow him. At the main monastery entrance we wished him good night.

The monk raised a forefinger. “No, not good night, good paradise.” We stood there, dumb with exhaustion, as he expounded upon why monks wish each other good paradise.

“So is that what the monks say to each other here—Good Paradise?” Christos finally asked.

Our gregarious host fell into an uncharacteristic silence. “Yes,” he said finally, although lacking his former conviction. So we wished him Good Paradise and shambled off for sleep.

After scarfing down an overpriced English breakfast at the cafeteria by the monastery, we set off under overcast skies to make the 26km hike to the Stavros Tis Psokas forest station, a 9-12 hour hike according to the sign. It was 10am, a late start. But Christos proposed cunningly that we ask any driver heading for Stavros Tis Psokas to transport our packs and drop them off for us there. I approved. My unpadded hip strap was cutting into my side and blisters were forming on the soles of my feet despite efforts to thwart them with moleskin. There is nothing pleasant about walking under a heavy weight; Atlas bears the globe on his shoulders as punishment, not recreation.

But the paved path soon developed into a dirt road and then into a rutted rocky path that snaked along the steep mountainsides of the uninhabited Paphos Forest. Only someone with a pickup or jeep would dare navigate it. Our packs were no doubt ours for the day, but my cousin would not relinquish hope, that carrot-stick of the desperate. Every stirring in the forest or buzz of an airplane overhead became a reason to pause and perk ears in hope that some fool on route to the forest station had decided to impress his girlfriend with his manly love of wilderness by driving her through the boondocks.

To our surprise a vehicle did eventually appear—a forestry department pickup—but coming from the opposite direction.

“Are you going back by any chance?” Christos asked the foresters, the carrot now dangling tantalizingly close to his mind’s eye. No, they were not. Their expressions clouded over with doubt when we said we were heading to Stavros Tis Psokas.

“That’s far, real far. You’ve got to go all the way down to the stream, and then all the way up again and then…”

There was nothing to do for us but keep walking. Below us a moufflon—a wild sheep—bounded off down a mountainside splashed white and golden in spring bloom. It was early afternoon, but we were in no hurry. Steep as the mountainside was, the path frequently widened to grant enough space for an unobtrusive tent. We paused under a grove of pines and heated ourselves some water for instant coffee, which we nursed contentedly in the shade of the pines, leaning against their trunks.

The coffee helped boost our pace of descent. A few hours later we had crossed the brook over a wooden bridge and were climbing towards Cedar Valley. We came upon a heartening sign: ‘Stavros Tis Psokas 10km’. Almost in the single-digits! But the memory of yesterday’s uphill grind tempered our enthusiasm, so we maintained a degree of humility and trudged on upwards without self-applause.

It began to sprinkle. For some time now I had sensed new hotspots on the undersides of the leftmost two toes on my left foot but the moleskin was in the depths of Christos’ pack and I had forgotten to ask for it during our coffee break when he emptied his pack to retrieve the buried camp stove. Now it was also starting to rain, which made stopping less desirable, so I disregarded the hotspots, a move which, as I suspected, I would later regret.

Until this point, the E4 had been well posted. But as the sprinkling picked up we encountered a perplexing trio of signs, with the E4 now pointing in three different directions. One metal E4 sign pointed as expected down the path we came from. Another E4 sign that was large as a placard and additionally said “Panagia 10 km,” indicated we should continue in the direction we were walking. And a final E4 sign directed us up a narrower trail that branched off to the right in a steep uphill; this sidetrail was also postmarked with a red ‘Do Not Enter’ sign.

I remembered that the last sign, which had stated that Stavros Tis Psokas was 10km away, had also listed Panagia as around 15km away. This suggested Panagia was five kilometers beyond our destination of Stavros Tis Psokas, which meant we had only five kilometers left. So agreeable was my kindergarten calculation that I swallowed it without bothering to even consult the right map. I did glance at the Western Troodos Area map in my pocket, but the western boundary of the map cut off before Stavros or Panagia. The Paphos map was in my rucksack. Had I fished it out I would have seen that not only are Panagia and Stavros tens of kilometers apart but the E4 does not pass even remotely close to Panagia.

Storm clouds were developing. We agreed it was most logical to stay on the wider path that had so far characterized the E4. In the worst scenario, we would arrive in Panagia in 10km, surely in the vicinity of the E4. So raindrops pattering on our hoods we continued in the direction the big ‘E4 Panagia’ sign pointed us.

The young pine and cedar along the trail were too small to provide adequate shelter from the rain, which had by now developed into steady showers, so we slogged on without stopping. Christos was the first to break our sodden silence: “Have you noticed we haven’t passed any E4 signs?” It was true. But the other E4 sidetrail was now several kilometers behind us.

My jacket was not waterproof so I had by now drenched through. My khakis were stuck to my legs and there was a mudpie caked under each of my waterlogged sneakers, rendering them heavy as hiking boots but without the support. An entourage of dirt bikers raced by us, which I later learned were participating in a weeklong GPS treasure hunt around the island.

It was not until the path came to a T at a dirt road that we realized how naïve we were to expect trail signs in Cyprus to reflect distances any more accurately than do road signs, whose distances often impossibly increase the farther you drive towards your destination. We had hiked three or four kilometres since the last E4 sign, which had read that Panagia was 10km away. Now we stood numbly in front of a green sign that read: Panagia 11km.

In a vehicle we might have shrugged off the mistake as another humorous and even charming instance of Cypriot disregard for Anglo-Saxon fastidiousness. But we were on foot, soaked, fatigued and, with dusk just hours away, astray in the Paphos Forest on a desolate forest road, groaning under rucksacks whose contents were drenched because we had not bothered pack them in black plastic bags.

Near the sign was a rusted emergency Forest Service phone that may as well have been in an antique shop. The directions read that you had to wind the crank three times before raising the receiver. While Christos was trying to place the call a dirt biker rounded the corner towards us. I flagged him down and asked if he knew where the various roads led. But he was as lost as us and as eager to get to shelter. It was an absurd sight: Christos cranking away on the phone like he was placing a call in the early 1900s and me asking directions of a Brit on a dirt bike who had only arrived in Cyprus two days ago. Finally the biker and I gave up trying to establish where we were located on his ultra-detailed map. We wished each other luck and I enviously watched him speed off.

Christos slammed the receiver down and retrieved his cell phone from a pocket. I had been opposed from the start to his bringing a cell on the hike but he was married with two sons and so familial duty provided him with the needed justification. But because he had been abusing his privileges with non-emergency calls, I had grumbled several times since the start of our hike.

“You see why it was a good idea for me to bring this?” he said, grinning triumphantly. But once he brought the mobile up to his face he cursed. For the first time on the trip there was no reception.

As usual there was nothing for us to do but keep walking down the dirt road towards Panagia, although we both dreaded chancing upon another Sisyphusean sign that would read something like ‘Panagia 12km.’ Our pace had fallen to a gritty stagger. Our packs, which were soaked through, seemed to have doubled in weight. It was as if we had removed our clothes and sleeping bags from a washing machine and stuffed them in our packs without bothering with the drying.

We had only hiked three kilometers or so when we came to a curve in the road where two side roads branched off, both marked with red ‘Do Not Enter’ signs. There were no other signs. It made sense we should just stay on the main dirt road, but after our last misadventure with the postings, Christos doubted this logical choice. Dusk was a little over an hour away. He checked his mobile. There was reception.

We dropped our packs and I fell back against a rock ledge while Christos dialed. I was so soaked it was irrelevant whether I was under shelter or not.

“The police are coming,” Christos said jubilantly, after hanging up a few minutes later. “Now that’s what I call innovation. Maybe they’ll even have a jail cell to lock us up in for the night!”

I did not protest. At that moment the prospect of being locked into a dry room with beds seemed a luxury. Never before had I ever wanted to be in jail so badly. Christos had told them we would keep walking, but with the knowledge a vehicle was on its way our bodies resigned. We were moving like stooped old men. My pack seemed grotesquely heavy, but with the cold settling upon us, we could not afford to stop.

We toiled through the muddy road for 45 minutes. As the rain tapered to a drizzle, mist-haloed mountains unfolded themselves in seemingly unending ranges, reminding me more of the Chiapan jungles of Mexico than a Mediterranean forest. It was among the most awesome vistas I have encountered in Cyprus, but I was too miserable with cold to enjoy it.

Christos called the police station again. I heard him again explain where we were, as if they had no idea who he was. “No, we don’t have a car,” I heard him say with exasperation. “We’re walking…. Yes, on foot! Why? Because we’re on a trek!”

After several more phone calls, in which he reiterated that we were walking, it was clear we could not rely on the police to find us. The policeman allegedly on his way not only decided not to enter the woods, but also felt there was no need to call to inform us of his change of mind.

It was dusk and the cold by now had pierced us to the core. It took me a minute of repeated and focused efforts just to unbutton my jeans to urinate. Buttoning up again afterwards proved impossible. I had to content myself with succeeding in at least zipping up my fly.

We ditched our excruciating packs on the side of the trail and decided to tramp for Panagia. But as the dark closed in, and as every turn on the unmarked road only seemed to reveal more looming shadowy mountains, Christos began to fear we were only trekking deeper into the forest.

“Let’s go back and pitch our tents,” he suggested. I disagreed, convinced that the contents of our packs were drenched and that camping would be the surest way towards hypothermia. I estimated we had at most three hours of limping left before Panagia.

Christos’ cell phone battery was almost depleted. I ran ahead in the hope that a few more bends in the road might reveal the end of the mountain range. But there was only rock face after rock face.

When I returned, Christos was on the phone showering blessings on someone. “A forester is on his way,” he said after he hung up. It was not long after we had returned to our abandoned packs that we saw the headlights of a pickup round a distant bend.

It turned out that the police for some mysterious reason had been sitting for hours in a warm Landrover at the entrance to the woods, waiting where the paved road downgraded into the dirt road on which we were shivering several kilometers farther down in the forest.

After filling out our incidents at the Panagia police station – which regrettably lacked a jail cell – the police served us some tea and then dropped us off at the only hotel open at that hour: ‘The Dream.’ As we were in need of thawing, the hotel with its steaming shower actually lived up to its name, although at £38 for two beds it was, at least for hikers on a budget, an overpriced dream.

In Cyprus, as in most Mediterranean countries, you can find administrative bungling of the most spectacular form, and it was no surprise that the authorities made a mistake in posting the signs. But it remained a mystery how they had actually requested a sign to be manufactured that read ‘Panagia E4’ when the E4 passed nowhere near Panagia.

It was not until the next day while Christos and I were taking turns drying our clothes with the hairdryer of the proprietress’ daughter when the mystery revealed itself. I was flipping through the handsome glossy booklet of the E4 when I came upon one of the trail maps of the Troodos region. And there on the map of the Eastern foothills of the Troodos – the opposite end of the range from where we were – I saw that the dotted red line of the E4 passed by a little black dot labeled ‘Panagia.’

A number of churches, monasteries, nunneries and even sites like bridges in Cyprus are named after Panagia—one of the titles of Mary, mother of Jesus. As I flipped through the pages, I saw there were plenty of “Panagia” sites along the E4. It seemed that one of the trail makers, who apparently had no trail map on hand, mixed up one of these Panagia sites with the village of Pano Panagia, tens of mountainous kilometers south of the E4.

Of course, how they managed to unquestioningly post that schizophrenic trio of signs still remained an enigma, hinting at a curious logic beyond my comprehension. But that is part of the charm of Cyprus: anything is possible. A walk can impossibly blossom into an absurd odyssey. You can wake up in the morning at a monastery, hike through a flower-studded mountain range in a rainstorm, and end the day in a town called ‘Virgin Mary’ drinking tea amicably in a police station with the same policemen whom just two hours earlier you had been cursing to damnation.

Constantine Markides