Getting to the bottom of a missing lake

Athalassas Dam, all it's cracked up to be

Not far away from home, in south east Nicosia, is the Athalassas Park. It’s a large area of dry Mediterranean forest, walks and dams.

We’ve been a few times already, enjoying the combination of cultivated order and natural environment.

This time round we wanted to walk around the Athalassas Dam.  On the maps it’s a large blue shape, rather like a half-deflated balloon, complete with a bird hide.  It seems to be a wetland turned into a small reservoir by a dam on the Athalassas river. We thought we would spot this giant pond from the picnic site and children’s playground we stopped at last time, but didn’t – and now we know why.

The reason is, it completely dries up in the summer.  This time we walked to where we thought the dam would be, and suddenly found ourselves in a wild terrain of deeply-cracked, crumbly dried-out mud, through which stick-like reeds poked everywhere. The whole scene is draped in a strange, grey-white crust that looks uncannily like dried animal hide. It covers the ground, from which it can be picked off in huge scab-like chunks. It droops over the sticks and branches of the dried-out vegetation, like the clocks in Picasso’s paintings, with long oval holes turning each shape into an eerie cartoon ghost.

What lies beneath? A stick, poked through the cracks, comes out wet.

It’s a dried out mat of algae that covers the bottom of the wintertime lake, and which we presume springs back to life when it starts to get wet in the winter. This desiccated wilderness of pond-bottom crust is sprinkled with the hollowed-out remains of crayfish, which doubtless fell victim to birds as the water drained away in the summer. The detritus of dried lakes – an old tyre, a rusted steel drum, pieces of fence – make small landmarks for wandering visitors.

At one end of the dam there is a depth measuring tower, a 9m tall rusted iron structure marked off in half metres. We cannot believe the water ever reaches the topmost measure, 915cms from the bottom.  The tower seems to be set at the deepest part of the lake, and here the mud is still soft. You can feel it giving gently as you walk, right under the dried hide encrusting the lake bottom. There is a nerve-tingling sense that, as you walk on this parchment skin, you could break through and disappear into the muddy clutches of the dormant pond, to join whichever clever fish, crustaceans and insect life manage to sleep out the summer in the dwindling sub-surface mud.

We’re planning to be regular visitors when the winter comes, to see how this extraordinary scene changes as the waters come back.

Hand signals