Abandoned Villages of the Diarizos valley: 3
Gerovasa/ Yerovasi - Reclaimed
They built me here in the valley’s crook,
Where the stream bends like a silver hook.
My hearth is cold, the roof gives way,
And saplings grow where beds once lay.
I held their warmth, I heard their songs,
Their firelit tales, their evening throngs.
Now roots curl through my broken floor,
And silence hums behind my door.
Years unlived, names unsaid,
In this dim vale where all have fled.
The sun forgets to touch us here,
Too deep, too small, too far, all year.
Trees have come with quiet feet,
To pull the stone, to lift the street.
They mean no harm—they do not know,
The weight of loss, the hush of woe.
But I—I feel it. I recall.
I watched them leave. I watched it all.
A hollow frame, a shell of pain—
But I remember. I remain.
I am an old house—my bones limestone, brittle with age, my skin a patchwork of peeling shutters and flaking plaster.
Time has not been kind. The wind sighs through my hollow ribs, stirring dust where voices once lived. Sunlight, when it finds me, only serves to illuminate my ruin—to spotlight the slow unravelling of what I once was. But I remain, forgotten but not gone, buried in the hushed heart of a village abandoned to time.
There was a time—yes, there was a time—when warmth flickered inside me. Children’s feet echoed across my tiles. The courtyard pulsed with life, with voices and firelight and old songs hummed late into the evening. Life lived here—in every corner, in every echo. The village breathed in rhythm with its people, pulsing with stories passed from one generation to the next.
Then came the silence.
It crept in slowly, coiled in whispers, first as rumours, soft and uncertain. One by one the young slipped away, followed by the elders, last to leave, who seemed to know something they wouldn’t say.
Perhaps – certainly they did not wait for the cataclysm that divided our island to separate them from their homes. And when they were gone, it was only the crows who remained on sagging eaves, crying warnings to no one.
My Yerovasi now lies buried in the narrow folds of the Troodos mountains, hidden beneath cliffs. Fed by a thin thread of water from Trozena above, home once to our Greek neighbours. Now they are gone too, ethereal descendants left to ring the bells of the church of St George as if to mock our silence below.
Despite its name, Paradise Falls, gushing from Trozena’s bowls, offers no sanctuary—its ceaseless torrents nourish only the choking greenery that devours the ruins of drowned buildings below.
Down here, the sun is a reluctant guest. It rises late, leaves early. Darkness lingers longer, thick and still, pressing in from the trees. The road that once brought life here now curls through the valley like a scar, a path to nowhere. The glimpses of sunshine that do break through lay bare the decay behind green veils like truth exposed. You would have to look hard or you would miss those moments.
Nature is patient. It creeps, it waits. Ivy slithers up my spine, tightening, claiming, in an intimate embrace. Moss seeps into every crack. The rain pries at me, bleeds into my joints, softening me from the inside out. Around me, others have already fallen—once homes, now sunken shells swallowed by the earth without protest. I feel my own walls beginning to shift.
Still, I endure, for now.
I wait.
For the return of breath and song. For life……
……When does a village die? Will nature define its end or will man’s memories?
Until then, I speak only to the wind, my stories carried like faint murmurs through the trees.
There are no ghosts here. Not in the way you think
Gerovasa/ Yerovasi Population Census
Source: PRIO - Cyprus
