At Aphrodite’s Beach, Everyone’s a Believer
The scene: a warm July day on the coast of Paphos, Cyprus.
You don’t come to Aphrodite’s Beach to fall in love. You come for a swim, a snack, and a little light blasphemy. The plan is always simple: dip in, dry off, maybe have a life-altering thought in the shade of a rock that allegedly witnessed the birth of the goddess of love from sea foam, take a few photos for Instagram, and drive home.
The sun is merciless; the sea, indecently blue. Families and tourists alike assemble camp like they’re preparing for a minor war, umbrellas, towels, parchment-wrapped sandwiches that rustle with every gust of wind. A German toddler in water wings shrieks with the conviction of a prophet. Somewhere, a Bluetooth speaker decides we all need Pitbull at 11:17 a.m.
Legend says Aphrodite rose from this shore, fully formed, skin dewy with seafoam, hair like a Treseme commercial. I do not resemble her. I resemble a person who did not get enough sleep. Still, I brought my swimsuit and a suspiciously earnest openness to miracles, because Cyprus does that to me. You step out of the car and the air is warm, mineraly, perfumed with roadside thyme that tells you, quietly, to pay attention.
The water is shockingly cold, rocky, and entirely alive. I wade in until the waves decide I’m either brave or foolish and knock into me like an affectionate dog. Behind me, two aunties are negotiating sunscreen with a teenage boy who would rather burn than be mothered in public. In front of me, a man with a hairy chest and the energy of a different century swims like a porpoise and comes up laughing.
There are rules here, rumors, rituals. Pick a smooth stone and keep it — it will bring you luck. Swim out and touch the big rock, and you’ll be granted eternal beauty. Don’t talk about love or it won’t show up. (I made that last one up, but it feels right.) A couple in their seventies hold hands and walk in until the water lifts them, two corks bobbing in a myth they do not care to explain.
I swim out to touch the big rock, half-joking, half-sincere. It’s impossible to be fully ironic in a place like this. The beach is messy and earnest, and the water keeps rearranging the hours like it has better ideas. A wave slaps me square in the chest so hard I swallow the Aegean — and probably a small piece of history. I come up sputtering and laughing, which feels like the correct posture for meeting any goddess: humbled, wet, and a little ridiculous.
Upstairs, the gift shop owner is advertising his cold drinks, his cooler a shrine to practicality.
“Frappé?” he asks, and I nod like he’s offered me salvation. He whisks instant coffee with sugar and water into a foam the color of 3 p.m., pours it over ice, and hands it to me with a paper straw that will not survive the fifteen minutes it takes to drink it. I take a sip and remember every summer here I ever had at once. The shop owner watches me take my first sips, and I offer him a smile of satisfaction and a “poli kala, efcharistó.” To this, he responds not with words but with a kourabiede (a perfectly powdered-sugar crescent cookie) pressed into the palm of my hand. If Aphrodite didn’t rise here, then she must have at least stopped by for this.
Back down at the rocks near the shore, people are arranging little cairns — stacks of stones like tiny altars. Some are precise and balanced; some are cheerfully doomed. I build a small tower and then, superstitious, disassemble it. Love should not be something you force into a shape. It should wobble a little. It should know wind.
The beach cats arrive, as they do along the Cypriot coast, with their practiced air of feline judgment. One rubs against my leg; I am chosen and therefore obligated to offer a pet. A little girl in a polka-dot swimsuit points at the horizon and declares, in the pan-language of children on holiday, “Princess water.” No one corrects her. We all nod. She is correct.
There is a moment — these always creep up when you’re busy being unserious — when the light shifts. Afternoon slides in from the left, gold and kind. The Bluetooth speaker dies (praise be). The wind loosens. The aunties read. The teenager sleeps face-down, a peace treaty with the sun. The sea keeps moving, of course, but more softly now, as if whispering, Rest.
It looks, suddenly, exactly like every painting of a myth I’ve ever seen — not because anything dramatic is happening, but because it isn’t. The sacred snuck in disguised as ordinary.
On my way back up the slope, I pick up a stone and then another, rejecting them for reasons I can’t explain: too gray, too smooth, too eager. Finally, there it is — a small, ugly-beautiful thing with a pinkish stripe through the center like a heartbeat. I slip it into my pocket. The car is an oven. I am sun-baked and salty and perfect.
At Aphrodite’s Beach, everyone’s a believer in something — in gods, in waves, in the long odds of finding exactly what you didn’t know you were looking for on a Thursday. I came for a swim, a snack, a story to bring home. I left carrying a single stone and the faint, impossible feeling that something ancient had noticed me.
Maybe that’s all kefi really is — not the euphoria itself, but the noticing.
Evidence that you were there, awake to the moment.
And that for one flicker of an afternoon, the world looked back.