Cicadas: The Sound of Cypriot Summer

Stand under a pine tree in Cyprus at midday in July and you’ll hear it before you see anything: a bright, continuous, vibrating Ziiiiiiii that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere. Most first-time visitors assume it’s electrical. It isn’t.

The Sound Nobody Can Quite Place

It’s cicadas — and once someone points it out, you can’t unhear it. They’re loudest at midday, exactly when the sun is highest, the pine resin is thickest in the air, and even the cats have gone looking for shade. You’ll hear it in the Troodos pine forests, in olive groves, in hotel gardens, on café terraces, sometimes even through a closed window. Several species live on the island, and the best-known, the Mannas cicada, is one of the most common in the whole Mediterranean.

What makes them stranger still is how rarely you actually see one. Cicadas are so well camouflaged against bark and branches that you can stand directly beside a tree, look straight at the sound, and still miss the insect making it. You’re left following a noise with no visible source — which might explain why cultures across the Mediterranean and beyond have spent thousands of years telling stories about them instead of just shrugging and moving on.

The Myth of the Man Who Forgot to Stay Young

The best of those stories belongs to ancient Greece, and it happens to involve the goddess this company is named after. Eos, goddess of the dawn, fell for a mortal Trojan prince named Tithonus and wanted to keep him forever. She went to Zeus and asked for one thing: immortality for her lover. Zeus granted it.

What she forgot to ask for was eternal youth.

Tithonus lived on, and on, and on — but he kept aging. His body withered, his limbs grew weak, and eventually all he could do was babble endlessly, unable to move and unable to die. In the oldest version of the story, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Eos finally shuts him away in a room, where his voice goes on forever behind a closed door. In later versions, she does something gentler: she turns him into a cicada. Immortal still, but light enough now to simply sing from the trees instead of suffering in a bed — his endless voice given somewhere to go.

It’s a myth about wanting to hold onto someone so tightly that the holding on becomes its own kind of loss — and it’s also, conveniently, a decent explanation for why the Mediterranean is full of a sound that never quite stops.

Years Underground for a Few Weeks of Song

Here’s the part that makes the myth land even harder: cicadas really do spend most of their lives in near-total silence before that voice ever appears. After hatching, the young nymph drops to the ground, burrows in, and spends years underground feeding quietly on sap from tree roots — most Mediterranean species stay below the surface for somewhere between two and several years, growing slowly in the dark with no song at all. Only at the very end does it climb up into the light, shed its old shell, and finally sing — and even then, the adult only lives for about four to six weeks above ground.

Years of silence underground, for one brief, loud summer. It’s hard not to hear an echo of Tithonus in that.

Why They’re Loudest When the Heat Is

There’s a real, unromantic reason cicadas peak at midday rather than dawn or dusk: heat itself powers the sound. Male cicadas vibrate membranes called tymbals to produce their call, and warmth makes the muscles behind that sound more efficient — so the hotter it gets, the more energy they can put into it. Their song isn’t decoration; it’s a mating call, and on a Mediterranean island in July, conditions rarely get more favorable for singing loudly and often.

They’re also, reassuringly, completely harmless — no bite, no sting, nothing to worry about beyond the volume.

Part of the Island, Whether You Notice or Not

Ask anyone who grew up spending summers in Cyprus what the season sounds like, and cicadas usually come up before almost anything else — before waves, before traffic, before music from a taverna terrace. It’s the kind of ambient detail that’s easy to filter out entirely on a first visit and impossible to un-notice once someone’s pointed it out over a coffee in the shade.

So if you’re on one of our tours this summer and you catch that steady electric hum rising from a pine grove or an old olive tree, you’ll know what it is now — and maybe, if the mood strikes, why it’s still singing after nearly three thousand years of people trying to explain it.