Feature: High spirits at Cyprus Limassol's Wine Festival

he southern Cyprus city of Limassol kicked off its annual Wine Festival on Thursday night in high spirits.

The mayor of Limassol Andreas Christou told Xinhua that this is the 54th celebration of this event. It is very important to promote local varieties of wines and grapes, which are unique and received strong reputations recently, like Cypriot sweet wine Commandaria, which known as the oldest wine in the world.

"We are expecting about 80 thousand to 100 thousand people, Cypriots and foreign tourists, to attend the festival in the next 10 days, enjoy the best Cypriot wines, food, and a lot of other traditional cultural activities," said Christou.

With barrel upon barrel of wine distributed freely to the visitors it does not take long for outsiders to get in the spirit of the city.

The Limassol Wine Festival is a tradition since Cyprus became an independent state, held in the last week of August and the first week of September each year, just ahead of the grape picking season.

The four big wineries based in Limassol offer free wine to thousands of visitors, to go down with an assortment of local specialties sold at low prices by makeshift restaurants inside the city's sea-side Municipal Garden.

There is more than drinking and eating at the Wine Festival.

Visitors are being amused by dancing groups performing local dancing, singers some of whom come from Greece bouzouki music and sirtaki dancing, and amateur poets, known as "tsiatistes" (fitting together), who compete mostly in poignant rhymes sang in the Cypriot dialect, which is the closest language to Homer's Greek.

Visitors are welcomed at the site of the Festival by an oversized figure, the Vraka Man, dressed in the traditional Cypriot baggy trousers- the vraka- and his motto: "Drink wine for better life", meaning to be healthy and alive.

The Wine Festival is an island-wide event. The Cyprus Tourism Organisation provides free bus transportation for tourists and locals from other cities.

Its organizers advertise it as a wonderful hedonistic event to mark the end of the summer and the transition to autumn.

But it is also meant to draw attention to the history of wine production in Cyprus.

A wonderfully preserved mosaic at a Paphos archaeological site aged two thousand years back shows two men in a dazed condition, who had been offered wine by the God Dionysus. The inscription says: "Those who first drank wine".

Various historical references confirm that wine has been produced in Cyprus for over 4,000 years.

The choice of Limassol as the site of the Wine Festival is most appropriate. It is not only the site of the four big wineries of Cyprus but is also next to the vines from which the grapes come.

Next to the city of Limassol is the region of Commandaria, a de facto wine with an appellation of origin.

The vines from which this unique liqueur style sweet wine with an exquisite taste were first planted by the Nights of the Order of St. John who succeeded the Knights Templars as the masters of the region.

They had their seat at the powerful Colossi Castle, 14 kilometers west of Limassol, existing since 1210, where they started making Commandaria - the wine of the Commanderie - for their fair ladies.

However Limassol has an official title to the wine.

The conference of the International Office of the Vine and Wine held in 1987 in Marino, Italy declared it as the "City of Vine and Wine" and awarded to its Mayor a medal and diploma to prove it. Endit