The Cyprus Donkey: A Beloved Island Symbol

Cyprus’s official national animal is the mouflon, a wild mountain sheep most visitors will never actually see. The donkey never got the title — and somehow doesn’t need it. Ask anyone on the island which animal actually feels like Cyprus, and this is the one they’ll picture.

Four Thousand Years of Company

Donkeys arrived on Cyprus a very long time ago — most estimates put their domestication and spread across the island back to around 4,000 BC, with some accounts describing them reaching Cyprus with settlers from Anatolia, Egypt, or Phoenicia. By the time an Orthodox archimandrite named Kyprianos was writing about the island in 1788, he was already recording feral donkeys roaming the mountains of Akamas and Karpasia — meaning some had been living wild for who knows how long before anyone bothered to write it down.

There are two distinct types on the island: a larger, dark-coated breed with a pale belly, likely of European origin, and a smaller grey type descended from African stock, which today makes up roughly a fifth of the island’s donkey population. For most of Cypriot history, that distinction mattered less than what they had in common: they plowed fields, hauled water through the alakatin (a donkey-powered device for raising water from wells), turned mills, and carried nearly everything a village needed carried, all on a diet that asked for very little in return.

The Donkey Who Outsmarted Himself

Every culture that’s spent centuries alongside donkeys seems to end up telling stories about them, and Cyprus is no exception. One of the best-known local fables goes something like this: a donkey and a cow, owned by the same easygoing farmer, worked side by side — except the donkey, cunning as ever, spent his days lazing in the fields while the cow did all the plowing. One evening, the cow finally complained about the unfairness of it. The donkey, sympathetic, offered a plan: pretend to be sick tonight, and tomorrow the farmer will let you rest instead of working.

The cow took the advice, refused her food, and the next morning was left in the stable — while the donkey was harnessed to the plow in her place and worked himself to exhaustion by sunset. That evening, still smarting, the donkey told the cow one more thing: he’d overheard the farmer saying that if she stayed “sick” much longer, he’d have her slaughtered for meat. The cow, thoroughly cured, ate everything in sight and was back on her feet the next morning — leaving the donkey to keep plowing the fields himself, outwitted by his own trick.

It’s the kind of story that’s less about donkeys specifically than about cleverness that backfires, which might be exactly why it’s stuck around long enough to still be told today.

A Herd That Survived a War

The most striking modern chapter in the Cyprus donkey’s story belongs to the north. When Greek Cypriot farmers fled the Karpas Peninsula during the Turkish invasion of 1974, many left their donkeys behind. Mechanization had already been pushing donkeys out of agricultural work through the 1970s, so the abandoned animals simply went feral, forming wild herds across the peninsula’s grasslands and dunes.

They weren’t automatically safe for it. In 2008, after ten donkeys were found shot dead, Greek and Turkish Cypriots — divided by nearly everything else on the island — organized together specifically to protect the herd from extinction. Today, the Karpas donkeys live within the protected Karpaz National Park, alongside wild tulips, orchids, and the Cyprus mouflon that holds the official title the donkey never got. It’s hard to think of a more fitting home for an animal so thoroughly woven into both halves of the island’s history: still here, still wild, protected by people on both sides of a line that divides almost everything else.

Where You’ll Still See Them

Mechanization has mostly retired the working donkey from daily Cypriot life, but the animal hasn’t disappeared — it’s simply changed roles. In the Troodos mountain villages, a handful of families still keep donkeys the old way, more out of attachment than necessity. Elsewhere, small farms have shifted toward donkey milk, prized in cosmetics and valued by people with cow’s milk intolerances, alongside a growing niche of eco-tourism farms where visitors can meet rescued and retired donkeys up close.

Keep an eye out for donkey figures worked into local pottery, embroidery, and roadside souvenirs too — a small, everyday reminder of how long this animal has been part of the island’s daily rhythm, official national symbol or not.