Theo Panayides

With Cyprus Pride 2026 coming up, we asked a selection of people on the streets of Nicosia.

A total of 378,150 people voted in last Sunday’s parliamentary elections – but what about the foreign nationals? That number represents 66.4 per cent of those who were eligible to vote, but ...

It’s a game, of course. We the People vote for MPs every five years – then, once results are in, those politicians can relax. Voters have very little power to ...

The upgrade of Liopetri fishing shelter (Potamos Liopetriou) isn’t the most extreme example of a scenic spot being altered – some would say destroyed – in Cyprus. It’s not even ...

Dolphins – cute, clever dolphins, the tourist’s friend – are actually a menace, according to fishermen. “This is an SOS,” says Antonis Zampas, a fisherman in the Famagusta district, describing how ...

The facts are there, hidden behind a curtain in Arianna Economou’s rehearsal space in old Kaimakli: shelves upon shelves of boxes, the earliest dated ‘1983’. This is her personal archive, ...

A few days before the Eurovision song contest, we asked people on the streets of Nicosia how they feel about the contest in general, and Cyprus entry ‘Jalla’ in particular.

Let’s take, for instance, the ‘poiitarides’ – or ‘itinerant poets’, as Nicoletta Demetriou calls them. ‘Poiitarika’ (the category name for their works) were “long narrative songs,” she explains, “the closest ...

Does Yes have a Cyprus connection? In a word, yes. There are actually two obvious links. The more obvious is that Yes – though made by an Israeli filmmaker, and set ...

When does social-media rage turn into hate speech? Is Eoka a terrorist organisation? Should it be legal to blame Nato expansion for the war in Ukraine? And who gets to ...

As the Cyprus government prepares a bill banning social media for the under-15s, we asked a selection of 13- and 14-year-olds at the American International School in Cyprus for ...

It might appear that, like Mark Antony, I’ve come to bury Cyprus Film Days, not to praise it. But in fact the situation around CFD – by far the best ...

You’d be hard-pressed to find an interviewee as open and candid as Melanie Steliou. At one point, however, I ask her something (I won’t mention what) that she ...

Sitting down at Kala Kathoumena in Nicosia, Graham Butler greets me in Greek, then thanks the waitress with a very acceptable “Efharisto” when she brings his coffee. Nigel Hastings does ...

The whole world is watching the US and Israel’s war with Iran. But no-one’s watching as attentively – or with such a knot in their stomach – as the Iranian ...

Mastic and mustard, sea squill and agave and cistus and meadow crane’s-bill. “This is chickweed,” says Katie Richards, pointing out a thin leafy plant. “This one is chickweed. Let ...

The long-running effort to create a national ambulance agency took a big step forward last month, with the House health committee debating a bill aimed at establishing it. The bill, ...

Oksana Cherkashyna tells a story about death. Actually a near-death experience, an account of being on a plane that developed ‘technical problems’ during landing – a polite way of saying they ...

Hundreds of activists gathered in the centre of Nicosia on March 7 to peacefully protest the presence of the British bases in Akrotiri and Dhekelia amid the ongoing war against Iran. ...

A few days after Iranian drones started attacking the British Bases in Cyprus, we asked a selection of people in Nicosia if they felt threatened or in danger, and who ...

“This is a celebratory event – I do understand. It’s not my intention to make it all doom and gloom,” joked Boris Erg of IUCN (International Union for Conservation of ...

Michael Friedrich recalls a journalist from German TV channel ZDF who interviewed him and his wife Sabine while in the West Bank. The journalist (or at least his channel) took ...

The government’s GMI (Guaranteed Minimum Income) scheme provides financial support to around 17,000 families, and some 22,000 people in total. One common criticism, though, is that the scheme acts as a ...

She’s ‘the queen of Colombian trap music’. She also appears in thriller show Fake Profile, “the most-viewed Latin series on Netflix the year it came out”. (Her song ‘Problem ...