APHRODITE'S ROCK

Called Petra tou Romiou (Πέτρα του Ρωμιού) in Greek, this rock is the place where, according to legend, the Greek goddess Aphrodite was born emerging from the sea. Constantly photographed by tourists, the site is very beautiful, especially at sunset: five large rocks on the edge of a pebble beach, beneath a cliff, below the A6 freeway and the B6 national road between Limassol and Paphos. It's also well equipped, with a freeway exit nearby, a parking lot with a souvenir store, a tunnel to cross under the roadway away from traffic and even showers if you want to swim on the beach known as Aphrodite. Then there are several questions. First, which of these rocks is Aphrodite's? The first thing to do is to locate the most imposing of them all, some one hundred meters high, right on the edge of the beach. Well, the goddess's rock stands opposite, in the water, some forty metres away. Some twenty metres high, it's surrounded by smaller outcrops of rock on which the sea breaks to produce foam. Geologists will tell you that these rocks are "stacks": spurs born of marine erosion that have broken away from the cliff. They're made of a white limestone called "breccia": a conglomerate of dislocated rocks formed 210 million years ago.

Scum and Saracens. Second essential question: how was Aphrodite born? This is where Greek mythology places the episode of the fight between Cronus and his father Ouranos: with a sickle, the son cuts off the sex of the divinity of Heaven. Ouranos' sperm spills into the sea, forming the white foam that encircles the rocks. And it's from the foam (ἀφρός/aphros) that Aphrodite is born. That's one version of the goddess's birth. For there are plenty of others. For example, the same story with Ouranos' sperm spilling off the Greek island of Cythera. Or Homer's version, in The Iliad, with no violence, with Aphrodite born of the union between Zeus and the mother goddess Dioné. Finally, a subsidiary question: why is the site called Petra tou Romiou ? The name means "rock of the Greek". The term Romiou comes from the Middle Ages, when the Greeks referred to themselves as... Romans. For the Eastern Roman Empire, known as Byzantium, was the direct successor to Rome. As it happens, the site is associated with another medieval legend, when the Greek hero Digenis Akritas repelled a Saracen attack here.