Day 22: Surprise wine Festival

Trip

Greece+Cyprus 2025

Location

Limassol 🇨🇾

Date

October 4, 2025

We’re moving to Limassol today. The first step was to pack our bags, checkout of the Airbnb, and drop them off at the car. We then proceeded to breakfast. We choose to go back to 📍Lazaris. It’s the best compromise between quality of food and coffee (the best coffee being at Tamp & Steam).

Now, we’re not just going to drive between cities and call it a day. We’ve planned stops to explore the archeology of the place. Also, this time, we made sure they were open. Some Excel file downloads might even have been involved (go back to day 19 if you don’t get the reference).

First on our list is the 📍Noelithic Settlement of Choirokoitia. It is one of the most significant and best-preserved prehistoric sites in the eastern Mediterranean (Cyprus, part of Turkey, some of Greece, Syria, Lebanon, …). It offers a vivid look at early human society on Cyprus between 7000 and 5200 BCE or thereabouts. The excavations show a highly organized society that put a concerted effort in its fortifications with walls around the city and a strategically placed entrance. One practice of theirs was to bury their dead in pits beneath the house floors. You have to be tough to live over a decomposing corpse. Not sure how they managed that one. One particularity of the site is, instead of “reconstructing” based on their imagination like some British lord we won’t name (see day 12), they worked outside of the excavation and tried to recreate the houses based on the materials and techniques they would have had access to and what was observed. We were able to see the fruits of their labour as we entered and provided much needed reference for the rest of the visit. A top notch site!

We continued our adventure, overshooting our destination a little to visit the 📍Archeological Site of Kourion. While our previous site left us around 5200 BCE, this one spans from the late Classical and Hellenistic periods through the Roman and into the early Byzantine (Early Christian) era. So roughly from the 2nd century BCE to the 6th–7th century CE. It regroups multiple ruins from different times; all of them well worth the walk. The whole site is on a cliff overlooking the sea that afforded us gorgeous views so even if you’re not into old stones or are over your quota of old stones, the views make up for it. It‘s nice of the ancient people to have left their best ruins on such a gorgeous site.

Filled we history we drove to our Airbnb and checked in. We unpacked and researched what we were going to do until our 21:00 dinners reservation. During that research, Karine stumbled uppon the Limassol wine festival. While I was driving, Karine noticed a poster about a wine festival that was happening. Further research revealed the festival is going from Friday to Sunday in a park (the 📍Limassol Municipal Garden) about 20 minutes walk from us. It’s Saturday so we finished unpacking and went straight there.

Entrance was 5€ per person and once inside we had to pay an extra 1.50€ for a small glass. We could have gotten a wine glass for 2.50€ (or a plastic carafe for 1,50 but we thought that was exaggerating) but as we cannot bring it back with us (see day 1 for the size and how full our bags are), we opted for the cheaper option. We got there around 19:00 and the wine sampling started around 19:30 for most places but the Commandaria stand. Not sure if the place serving wine with its roots dating back over 28 centuries wait for anybody OR, the team said there’s a crowd, we have bottles to sell, why not start the tasting early. Either way we started with a sample of dessert wine before finding our way to one of the many kiosks serving the wine offered by the city. You’ve read that right, the city pays for multiple kiosks that deliver free water glass, wine glass or carafe-sized portions of dry white or dry red wine. No more details were provided. We first got a glass of dry white—the other option being dry red. If you want sweet go buy a bottle of that at one of the tasting stations.

Wine in hand, Karine ambled at pretty much random following her whim. She walked by multiple kiosks offering delicious smelling charcuterie, cheese, sweets, prepared meals (cooked meat with some stuff on the side). It was unclear to us which accepted card payment which were cash only (most didn’t seem to have payment machines but direct to phone tap and pay is a thing). Still, if we wanted more wine sampling we needed something in our stomach. Karine found a cheese place that definitely took the card. We had some then headed back for more wine sampling. We tried a white and a rosé before needing to sit down and relax a little. Sitting afforded us the chance to notice: there’s a surprisingly large number of kids for a wine festival that has essentially unlimited free wine, security is also very present—probably there to make sure the kids and parents survive the drunken party.

We did a last round of finding food (sweets this time). The guy had setup a money transfer QR code that turned out not to work with Apple Pay. We were ready to walk away but were offered our sweets on the house. We were obviously incredibly grateful for what turned out to be sweet dough with extra sweet on it (honey maybe?). I worked some more at the money transfer and managed to send them their 6€.

We had to be careful. We had a 21:00 reservation for a mezé restaurant (called 📍Mezé Taverna). We knew it was going a big meal so we could not eat too much. If we didn’t eat, we didn’t have anything in our stomach to slow the absorption of alcohol. Pacing wine intake was key. We had to conclude our festive adventure with a glass of semi sweet red and waited for our time to have dinner. The abundance of food made us consider having dinner there and then but held to our reservation.

Time came and we left the festival for dinner at the taverna. It was a lot of food. Most of it delicious, some of it OK. We enjoyed ourselves but skipped the wine we have ok account that we already had plenty.

Tomorrow we’re heading to hike mount Olympus. A small 10km with little elevation gain for what is the tallest peak on the island, at nearly 2000m. The fact that there’s a road leading up to the summit probably has something to do with that.