Petra tou Romiou is a limestone sea stack standing in the surf off the south coast of Cyprus, between Paphos and Limassol. Hesiod put Aphrodite here, coming ashore out of the foam. The rock is older than the island it stands against. It is reef limestone from a vanished ocean, carried here as rubble when two plates met, while most of Cyprus is sea floor lifted much later. The cliffs behind the beach show the wreckage: pale blocks scrambled in reddish-brown mudstone, like rubble set in old concrete. Nothing here was laid down in order. There is no sand either, only fist-sized white stones that the backwash keeps dragging at. You wade in over them, and a few strokes out the water turns deep, cold and clear under you.
The custom is to swim three times round the stack. It is said to bring beauty, love or lasting youth, and the island has never agreed whether it counts at midnight or under a full moon. On the shingle people hunt for a heart-shaped stone, which is supposed to lead you to the person you are after. The headland is protected, so it is photographed and put back. Nothing shelters this coast. The beach shelves away steeply a few metres out, the pull round the stacks is strong, and from late autumn the swell beats the sea into the white foam of the legend. The pavilion on the road above gives you the view the beach cannot: the stacks against open sea, the white shingle, the chalk badlands folding away east. A signed trail climbs from there into juniper scrub, where anemones and orchids come up from late February. Aphrodite does not own the name. Petra tou Romiou means the Rock of the Greek, after Digenis Akritas, a Byzantine frontier hero said to have torn the block out of the Troodos mountains and thrown it at raiders coming ashore. The stack beside it is called the Saracen Rock, so the story kept both halves.