Machairas
The eastern outlier of the Troodos range — pine and golden oak around Kionia's 1,423-metre cone, with a twelfth-century imperial monastery at the boundary and the EOKA war's most storied hideout below it.
The Εθνικό Δασικό Πάρκο Μαχαιρά holds the eastern end of the Troodos system, where the range makes one last stand at Kionia — 1,423 metres — before dropping to the Mesaoria plain and the capital. Declared in 2004 over 4,523 hectares of state forest, it is the second-largest of the mountain parks: Calabrian pine over golden oak, the endemic shrub-oak of these mountains, with the springs of the Pedieos — the island's longest river — rising under the summit ridge. From Kionia's top the view runs to Nicosia spread over the plain and on a clear day across the Green Line to the Pentadaktylos range; the summit itself carries the aerials and radar domes that such a viewpoint inevitably attracts.
The park's name comes from the monastery at its edge, and the monastery's name from a knife. The founding legend has two twelfth-century hermits led to a hidden icon of the Virgin — attributed, as such icons are, to Luke himself — with a knife (machaira) lying beside it; the community they founded won a charter and annual grant from the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos in 1172. Panagia tou Machaira has burned and been rebuilt twice, and its fortress-like courts still govern the mountain's southern approach. The boundary politely excludes it: the monastery grounds sit in a notch of the park line, church land rather than state forest, a couple of hundred metres outside a park that is named for them.
Modern Cypriot memory attaches harder to a cave below the monastery. Grigoris Afxentiou, second-in-command of EOKA in the 1955–59 uprising against British rule, was cornered in his hideout there on 3 March 1957; he sent his companions out, refused surrender, and died alone when the surrounded dugout was burned. The krysfygeto is now a shrine, a place of school visits and March pilgrimages, and the reason half the island knows the name Machairas at all. Just off the park's northern flank, the preserved medieval village of Fikardou — a national monument of stone and half-timber houses — completes an unusually dense cultural rim for a forest park.
What's worth knowing before you go
The park is under an hour from Nicosia, which makes it the capital's serious mountain: the loop road through Lazanias and the monastery, with the Fikardou detour, is the standard day. Trails radiate from the Kionia ridge and the Machairas picnic sites; spring, when the golden oak flushes and the asphodels come up through the burnt patches, and autumn are the seasons — July bakes even at this height. The monastery keeps pilgrim hours and a dress code; the Afxentiou hideout below it is open ground, marked by a giant bronze of the man. The connoisseur's detail is botanical: watch the roadsides for golden oak acorns in their moss-cup — the tree exists nowhere outside these mountains, and here at its eastern limit it grows in its densest pure stands.