Angie Iacovou has spent her life making decisions by trusting her gut instinct and being fine about it. Backpacking through Australia and Southeast Asia at 21 with a Lonely Planet book. Meeting a man at 17 who would, twenty years later, become both her husband and her business partner in a sport neither of them had heard of when they met. Walking away from a stable retail management career with three-year-old twins at home to bet on a small surf house she and her husband were building.
“I’m one of those people that I didn’t know what I wanted to do growing up,” she says of her school years, “but I didn’t care that I didn’t know.”
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That instinct, of moving forward without a map because the moving was and is the point, is how Kahuna Surf House community thrives today.
Angie Iacovou is the co-founder and manager of Kahuna Surf House in Larnaca, Cyprus. Together with her husband, Elias Elmanto, they have grown Kahuna into one of Cyprus’s most recognisable water sports communities, offering kitesurfing, surfing, stand-up paddleboarding, wing camps, corporate experiences, and the annual King of Kite Championship. But at its heart, Kahuna is a space founded on a love of the sea, movement, sustainability, and community.
Iacovou grew up in the village of Ormideia, Cyprus. She remembers spending her childhood climbing trees, walking to the beach with her brother, and getting into whatever adventure the day promised.
“My mom said I could swim before I could walk,” she laughs, “but I don’t know if that’s just one of her things she says.” Whether or not the story is true, it fits snugly into where she felt most at peace: the Mediterranean waters.
The women she grew up around, her mother, her grandmother, the aunts and neighbours in the village, worked with their hands, kept beautiful homes, went out into the fields, and did not treat the sea as something to be feared. Angie absorbed all of it. “I learnt that it’s okay to get dirty,” she says of what she took away. “You can climb a tree, you can fall over, and it doesn’t matter.”
Her parents were the kind who gave their children enough rope to make their own decisions and learn through experience. Their daughter was allowed to try things. She was allowed to fail at them. And what these lessons taught her was that she was not afraid of working hard. She started working at 16 years old, mostly in people-facing service. “I never worked alone. I didn’t have a job ever where I was sitting at a desk on my own.” She loved interacting with different personalities and how every day was different, a new challenge, a new conversation.
The first sign that she was not going to do what most young Cypriot women of her generation did came when she turned 21 years old. She and her best friend told their parents they were going to backpack around Australia and Southeast Asia. This was back in 2005 when accessing the internet was mostly through those dim-lit internet cafes. It was unheard of: two Cypriot young women just going off travelling on their own. Her parents weren’t enthusiastic about the idea, but in the end they agreed. She was an adult after all, and they trusted her.
Iacovou and her friend worked all summer to save the visa deposit Australia required, then flew out with a backpack, Lonely Planet book, and two nights reserved in a small hotel in Sydney. They spent a year on the road, travelling across Australia to South East Asia. Angie has never quite been able to name what changed in her over that year, but it was an experience of a lifetime. But after spending so long away from her family, Iacovou was ready to return. She missed her home and her family. “I like roots. I like my people around me.”
As she settled back into her life in Cyprus, returning to the retail job she held prior to the trip abroad, she reconnected with a past partner, Elias Elmanto. One day, whilst they were hanging out on the beach, they noticed someone trying to catch a few waves kite surfing. At that time, neither of them actually knew what that man was doing, but something in Elias clicked. “He waited until this stranger came out of the water and stopped him on the beach, bought his equipment on the spot, and then set about teaching himself the sport. He nearly killed himself, I don’t know how many times.”
Eventually, Elmanto got certified and left his corporate job to try to teach others how to kitesurf. Iacovou kept her job and became, on weekends, his assistant, holding flags, driving to different beaches, and learning to kitesurf herself. The two of them travelled to kite centres around the world, and everywhere they went they saw the same thing.
A community around a beach and a way of living that felt natural to them. “We said we have to have this in Cyprus.”
Building this type of space took time. First they had to find the right beach. Then they had to construct the shack. Then they had to get certified. Then they had to move everything to Softades Beach when the certification came through, and start again from a certified beach with a real foundation. All of this happened while Angie was still working her retail job and while the Kahuna community was growing slowly around them, one weekend at a time.
Then in 2015 she gave birth to twins. In 2018, three years into being a first-time mother of two, she finally made the jump to quit her retail management job. This is the sentence in Iacovou’s life that sounds simple to say but is hardest to finally take the leap to pin down on paper. “Yeah, I’m going to leave my really stable, cool, awesome job with three-year-old twins and go and try and make Kahuna really work.” But even if there was even a tinge of fear for what the future held, the people closest to her, especially her parents, were there to support her. Her father, she says, told her he never worried about her making this new project of hers work.
“He said, ‘I don’t worry about you because you have no fear of working. I’m not a procrastinator. When it comes to push comes to shove, you’ll do anything.’” She gave herself a year. Seven years in, she is still there.
The community that grew around Kahuna in the years since is what Iacovou is proudest of. Regulars come every weekend. They bring friends. Some of them have got married after meeting there. Others have become close friends and now travel together. “It’s just such a nice vibe here, or I feel really comfortable here,” she has heard people say. She and her partner have learned to hold the space open without holding the ropes too tightly.
“You come there and spend all day there. You can bring your kids. Bring your dog on a lead. Sit in a corner and read a book if that’s what you want. If you want to kite, kite. If you don’t and just want to watch, watch.”
What she says to visitors who are afraid of the sea, or worried about their kids getting hurt, or hesitant to try, is generally something along the lines of: just get in.
“I feel like you’ve got this amazing playground. Warm water, low waves, no tide. There’s no battle with this sea. Nothing is frightening in it.”
What Iacovou feels when she gets in the water is what makes all of her and her partner’s work make sense. She swims most mornings now. She has become genuinely serious about it. Swimming is her meditation, and it’s only recently that she connected the two activities. “It is. Because you are constantly in your thoughts. And you can’t put music in. You can’t be doing anything in your life. Just you in the water.”
The future Iacovou is working toward has two shapes, one dreamy and one a little more “practical.” The dreamy one is that more kids in Cyprus grow up by and in the sea the way she did. That the ocean becomes a normal part of Cypriot childhood on an island that has warm water and low waves and no reason to be afraid of any of it. The practical one is that Kahuna grows beyond a seasonal water sports school into a year-round outdoor company that takes people up into the Troodos mountains too. Cyprus, in her own often-repeated line, is the country where you can snowboard and surf in the same day. She wants more of that. Already there is evidence that it is starting to happen. And she thinks Kahuna, small as it is, has something to do with why.
Angie Iacovou is a guest on The Future Makers: Women Building Cyprus. The full episode, including her reflections on being a Cypriot backpacker in 2005, why she and Ilias divide the business by the beach and everything above it, and her advice on when to ask for professional help versus a friend’s opinion, is available to watch now.
The Future Makers Podcast is a series of in-depth conversations about how future-makers are made, in Cyprus and beyond. Host Annetta Benzar sits down with people who are a leading force in our shared future and looks past the titles. Together, they travel back to the people and moments that shaped them, walk through the choices and challenges they are living through now, and look ahead to the futures they are trying to build.
A production of The Future Media.
