Omodos

The village grew up around the Timios Stavros monastery, the Monastery of the Holy Cross. By tradition, villagers followed strange fires in the bushes to a small cave holding a cross, and Saint Helena is said to have left a fragment of the Holy Rope, the cord used to bind Christ to the cross, when she passed through Cyprus around 327 AD. The monastery still shows the relic today; how much is history and how much is lore is left to the visitor. Everything else in Omodos runs on the vine. It is one of the Krasochoria, the wine villages on the south Troodos slopes, and the cobbled square below the monastery has been where the harvest is pressed, poured and sold for generations. The small museums around it, the wine museum and the old winemaker's house, are the village explaining its own trade. The other Omodos craft is pipilla, a needle lace knotted stitch by stitch that the village has made for well over a century, with a dedicated centre in the village working to keep the technique alive. Between the relic, the wine and the lace, the square is rarely just a square.