The Oddness Of It All | Monomad Challenge

At the edge of Paramytha, right next to the road that leads you in and out of the village, stands an old building with a medium-sized fenced parking lot in front, and a huge garden behind it. Above its entrance hangs a large wooden sign, and a logo with Greek letters is carved into it. This place, which used to be a local tavern, is now known as the only co-living community space in Cyprus, where digital nomads stay and work together to create something unique. The building itself consists of a large kitchen and a working space glued together, a shared laundry area, a few storage rooms filled with all kinds of forgotten equipment, and then two floors with three cabin-like bedrooms in either side.

The garden at the back is something like 4 or 5 times the size of the building. It has a large dining area with a bunch of long empty wooden tables, a campfire site with a few handcrafted chairs made from rafts and a hanging punching bag next to them, an abandoned vegetable garden mostly overrun with wild grass, a few lemon and clementine trees scattered here and there, an open field with a dozen or so olive trees standing guard, and ever more, beyond its borders, on somebody else's property, a hundred, maybe a thousand more, sunbathing the same way.

It's a junk heaven out there. Every corner has its own collection of stuff. Exploring the garden almost feels like a tourist attraction, where with every new step, these things being revealed to you get older and older. A museum devoted specifically to rust and abandonment in the most magical and picturesque way. Crates filled with years-old empty beer bottles; retired gardening and fruit picking equipment; a lost and found clothing table, displaying itself as if wanting to be located in a shopping mall; a non-functioning fountain filled with last week's rain, and wooden and plastic chairs scattered everywhere, patiently waiting for a tavern re-opening option to be relevant again.

Except for the cars driving by the adjacent road from time to time, it's very quiet here - as long as it's not a Sunday, because Sundays are hunting days, where every few minutes or so, a rifle shot would pop and scare some locals to death. Their untrained, useless ears aren't able to recognize the distance, though it usually sounds pretty close, as if echoed from a few meters away from them, where a rabbit just took his last breath.

Later that day, some lady might complain about the hunters to the police, but their response would usually be hysterical. "Yes, you should duck your head around these parts", they'd say, and though there are many "hunting is prohibited" signs scattered throughout the island, the locals have grown used to them meaning very little over the years. A nice decoration at best. The hunters hold the upper hand here in Cyprus, even though their aim is always terrible, or so the local rumor suggestes. Today, unfortunately, hunting accidents have become a known phenomenon.

And when the hunters aren't hunting, it's up to Pistachio, the co-living owner's golden retriever, to roleplay their part instead. When he's here, sometimes during the week, you'll probably find him doing one of three things : shamelessly snore in his sleep, lose his breath while playing fetch with one of the guests, or most notably, bark obsessively up at the ceiling for hours on end. In your first few days here, you might fearfully start believing this place is haunted, not only because of its classic mansion-in-the-middle-of-nowhere vibes, but also because Pistachio's barks don't seem to be targeting anything specific, almost as if the dog is seeing something that your eyes would rather dismiss.

And then eventually you'll hear them - the rats. Up above, on the old roof of this place, right beneath the cracked tiles, a family of huge rats fights together for their survival every day. All the windows here, in every single room, are shut tight, and not just because of the cold. And though their exact population size is unknown - sometimes, when they run away from Pistachio's barking, all together in sync, you can hear what sounds like hundreds of tiny feet softly hitting the broken tiles in terrified rhythm. On sunny days, you can even hear them play above you. You'll see their tails flash briefly and then disappear, as they chase each other across the iron beams, or fight-club their way to their version of family reputation.

But when winter finds its way, and the cold really settles in, and all the rats go back to their secret shelter, just as you did, right next to fire place in the common room, and the true silence of this place reappears - only then can you really feel the weight of history that it holds, right beneath your feet. Something important took place here. Something ancient. A philosophical gathering of sorts. Men with wine glasses sat here, right next to the fire, debating one another. They lived here, and dined, and studied, and fought, and died, and were buried peacefully, right here, beneath this old building, at the edge of Paramytha, right next to the road that leads you in and out of the village.