By Michalis Michaelides
Fifty-two years after leaving his birthplace in the hills of Paphos, he has finally come home. And this time, he says, he feels so complete that nothing could make him leave again.
I first heard about a new café in the village of Kato Arodes, tucked away in the Paphos countryside. It’s called Old School Café, a fitting name since it’s housed inside the village’s former school building. When I called to learn more, the voice that answered came with the sound of a Dimitris Mitropanos song playing softly in the background.
The man on the line spoke in thick Cypriot dialect, switching easily between Greek and English. What followed was an honest, heartfelt conversation that reminded me of something simple but powerful: a place is always its people.
The café belongs to Mehmet Kamil, a Turkish Cypriot who was born in Kato Arodes, a village that was almost entirely Turkish Cypriot before the 1974 invasion of Cyprus.
For more than four decades he lived abroad, but he always carried the same dream: not just to return to Cyprus, but to return specifically to his village.
Kamil left when he was just 14. He went on to study in England and later moved to Canada, where he built a career as a marketing professional for a major car manufacturer. By most standards, life abroad was comfortable.
Still, something was missing.
He missed the quiet of the countryside. The smell of the early morning air. The feeling of waking up surrounded by hills and fields. Some of his most vivid memories are from childhood mornings spent with his shepherd grandfather, taking the animals out across the rolling hills.
When crossing points on the island opened in 2003, he was finally able to return to the village for the first time. Years later, just before turning 60, he came back again, this time thinking more seriously about staying.
His family home is now lived in by Greek Cypriots, he says, people who were themselves displaced from elsewhere after 1974. So instead of reclaiming the past, he began looking for a new place to call home. Eventually he found it in nearby Pano Arodes, where he has lived for the past three years.
At first he worked at a small local winery in the area, Rodena, easing back into village life. But recently, an opportunity appeared that felt almost poetic: the old primary school building in Kato Arodes became available.
He turned it into a café.
Every morning at 7 a.m., Mehmet unlocks the large green wooden door of the old school and opens the café to the public, stepping into a life he had been imagining for decades.
His customers are a mix of locals, tourists, foreign residents living in Cyprus, and young people who drive up to the wild, rugged hills of Paphos on weekend road trips.
The menu is simple, exactly what you’d expect from a village café. There are coffees of all kinds, beer, local wine, homemade bourekia and kattimeria, and his personal specialty: ekmek kadaifi. Around lunchtime you can even order meatballs, while the kitchen also prepares surprisingly good vegan and vegetarian dishes.
But for Mehmet, the café is about much more than food or business.
He’s deeply happy with this new chapter in the village where he was born, partly because people have embraced the idea and partly because the local community has welcomed him with open arms.
Yet the thing that excites him the most is something far simpler.
“The smell of the morning,” he says, “reminds me of my childhood.”
Info:
Old School Café
Kato Arodes, Paphos district
Tel: 96044420
Hours:
Mon 09:00–20:00
Wed, Thu, Sun 07:00–20:00
Fri, Sat 07:00–22:00
