The Little Lace Village

There are 2 places in Europe that still hand makes lace….Bruges, in Belgium and Lefkara (pronounced lef-ka-da) here in Cyprus.  This place was important to me because when we were in Belgium 2 years ago, we went to Bruges and bought some hand made lace.  I wanted to have some from both places.  When we arrived, it was like a ghost town…there was no one around.  This is not the busy season, so there aren’t many people here right now.  We found a little place to eat some lunch, then started walking to explore.  First building we came to was this:

I saw all of the lace and went crazy.  This is a typical Lefkara street.  Can you believe people drive through there??  I’ll give you my story on this later.  We walked to one of the stores and as we climbed up the couple of steps to get to the entrance, Dad accidentally missed a step and took a tumble!  Thankfully he was fine, but he cut his knee pretty good!  Once the excitement was over, we walked into a store full of gorgeous lace and the first thing the sales person showed us was this:

What you see here is 1 Lira (Cyprus’ former money before they joined the European Union) with a picture of Lefkara lace on it.  Under it is one of the true pieces of Lefkara lace.  Isn’t is gorgeous?  My Yiayia used to make lace, but not this type.  We made some purchases and headed back out to explore the town.  Here is a gorgeous door:

Look at those gorgeous examples of lace in the next picture!  There were stores everywhere with all different kinds.  I loved it!

We came across the Lefkara History Museum and wandered in to see what it was all about.  Wow!  This is the outside courtyard as soon as you walk through the gates:

Look at all of that gorgeous vegetation!  Pretty, right?  Well, check out the roof of the room below…real thatched roof!

Some great info on the lace merchants:

Some views of the inside rooms:

WOW!   Look at the height of this piece of furniture!

I know this is a little ‘soft focus’ but I wanted to be sure you saw the old olive oil vats:

What a beautiful place this is!

Examples of old lace:

We were done exploring the museum and headed down the street to see some beautiful things:

As we were walking, we came across this Yiayia making some lace:

So wonderful!  After that, we came across the village church:

While there, Mom & Thea started talking to a woman there and realized she was also from Asgata (their village)…and actually related to them!!  Nuts!  Here is the inside:

Beautiful!!  And the final picture of the day:

So, I promised I would tell you about our adventure down the streets of Lefkara…we tried to follow our GPS out of town, but of course, it took us down the wrong way and I had to try to maneuver my way around the streets.  Oh man…imagine a LARGE SUV/Van trying to get through the streets….yes, it was as crazy as you can imagine!  Keith had to get out of the van to guide me through because there was literally 4 inches of clearance on either side to get by!!!!  It took a while, but we finally got out of there.  What an experience!!!