River · Cyprus
Pedieos
The Pedieos is the longest river in Cyprus. It begins high in the Troodos Mountains, runs past the capital Nicosia and ends in the Mediterranean Sea at the Bay of Famagusta.
Picture credit: Peter in s (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Fry72, Karel Frydrýšek (CC BY-SA 4.0) · ppupos (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is the Pedieos?
The river starts here: Troodos Mountains in the middle of Cyprus.
It ends in the Mediterranean Sea, Bay of Famagusta.
Countries on the river: Cyprus.
The story behind it
For much of the year the Pedieos is a river you can walk through in your shoes, because the summer sun dries long stretches of its bed to bare gravel. Then the winter rains arrive, water rushes down from the mountains, and the same channel can turn into a fast brown torrent. Old chronicles tell of terrible floods that once swept through Nicosia, so people later built walls and a dam to hold the water back. Today part of the bed inside the capital has become a long green park where families cycle and jog under eucalyptus trees. Frogs, terrapins and small birds live among the reeds, and in spring oleander bushes flower pink along the banks. Farmers in the flat Mesaoria plain use the stored water for their fields of barley and potatoes.
Questions children ask
How long is the Pedieos?
The Pedieos is about 98 km long. On an island as small as Cyprus that is enough to make it the longest river of all.
Which country does the Pedieos flow through?
The Pedieos flows across the island of Cyprus. It crosses the wide Mesaoria plain from the mountains in the west to the coast in the east.
Where does the Pedieos flow into the sea?
It reaches the Mediterranean Sea in the Bay of Famagusta. In hot summers the last stretch is often dry, so hardly any water arrives.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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