With newfound fame, halitzia season arrives in Tylliria

With summer in its final weeks, the season for preparing Tylliria’s local halitzia cheese has arrived.

The cheese, so named for its likeness to pebbles, which are also called “halitzia” in the Cypriot Greek dialect, is prepared with milk collected by shepherds during the summer months. Likewise, the cheese is known as “helik” in Turkish.

This is because the sheep which are milked to produce the cheese graze in fields where wheat has recently been harvested, as, as local cultural...