The story behind Agabi.

Agabi began, as most Cypriot things do, around a kitchen table. My yiayiá — my grandmother — would spend the week before a village wedding hand-tying koufeta into little tulle parcels, five almonds in each: health, wealth, happiness, fertility, long life. She would hum as she worked, and everyone who came through the door — neighbour, cousin, priest — would leave with one tucked into their coat pocket.

When our family left our village in the hills above Polis Chrysochous for the UK, that ritual came with us. Weddings, christenings, name days — no celebration ever passed without the familiar rustle of a favour being pressed into a guest's hand, and the pinning of the martyriko at the church door. It was our small way of keeping Cyprus close, of offering filoxenia — the love of a stranger — even in a new country.

I am Margarita. For years I made pouches for family, for friends, for their friends — each one stitched at the same table, with the same recipe for koufeta yiayiá taught me, using almonds and oil sent over from our family's grove in Polis Chrysochous. When the orders outgrew the kitchen, I gave the work a proper name: Agabi, from agápi — the word for love. Because that is the only ingredient that truly matters.

Every pouch, every martyriko, every bottle of oil still passes through my atelier here in the UK. Soft Cypriot linen, almonds and thyme honey from the Polis Chrysochous hillsides, olive-branch charms and cold-pressed oil from our own trees each November. Nothing is mass-produced. Nothing is rushed. That is the whole point.