The Hala Sultan Tekke (Umm Haram), 5 kilometre southwest of Larnaca just past the airport, is guite possibly the first thing of note you will see as you touch down in Cyprus. According to the foundation legend, Muhammad’s paternal aunt, accompanying her husband on an Arab raid of Cyprus in 649, was attacked by Byzantine forces here , fell from her mule , broke her neck and was buried on the spot. A mosque grew up around the grave on the west shore of a salt lake , surrounded today by an odd mix of date palms, cypress and olive trees. Rainfall permitting a tank and a series of channels water the grove, adding to the oasis feeling of this peaceful, bird-filled place.
Tekke literally means a dervish convent, but this was always merely a marabout or saint’s tomb. Despite the events of 1974, heavy-gauge fencing and a nocturnal police guard against vandalism, it is still a popular excursion destination for Greek Cypriot and place of pilgrimage for both Cypriot and foreign Muslims, for Hala Sultan ranks as one of the holiest sites of Islam, after Mecca, Medina, Kairouan and Jerualem. The twin name is Turkish/Arabic: Hala Sultan means “ the Ruler’s paternal aunt”, while Umm Haram or “Sacred Mother” seems an echo of the old Aphrodite worship.
Having left your shoes at the door, you are ushered inside the present nineteenth-century mosque (daily: May-Sept 07.30am-sunset, Oct-April 09am-sunset; may close an hour earlier; donation) to the tomb recess at the rear, behind the mihrab. Beside the presumed sarcophagus of the Probhet’s aunt ,there’s a 1930 tomb of the Turkish wife of King Hussein of the Hejaz . Above shrouded in a green cloth, you will see three slabs of rock forming the dolmen that probably marked the grave until the mosque was built . the horizontal slab, a fifteen-ton meteorite chunk, is said to have been suspended miraculously in mid-air for centuries, before being forcibly lowered into its present position to avoid frightening those praying underneath.
Flamingos and other migratory birds stop over at the lake during winter and early spring , trough they have been absent in recent drought years. Like the Tekke, the lake has a foundation legend: the resuscitated Bishop Lazarus, passing by, asked a woman carrying some grapes for a bunch; open her rude refusal, he retaliated by turning her vineyard into the salty lagoon, now three metres below sea level. Post-resurrection Lazarus certainly comes across in legend as a rather grim figure; it is said that he never smiled while he was bishop, a result of what he’d seen during his brief sojourn in the realm of the dead.
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