Andrey Vystavkin Blog

If you ask what bothers foreigners in Cyprus, most of the people asked will tell you “slow living” and “xenophobia”, and you can easily put these two answers at the first place, cuz it’s truth.

After reading about the case which has been witnessed by Leonid Mamchenkov, I was a little bit shocked, these things became casualty in Cyprus, unfortunately, and it will take ages to get these young Cypriots to respect other people, no matter what nationality they are.

The idea of keeping your identity in the country which got its independency few scores ago played a bad joke with native islanders, let’s count: Byzantium Empire, Venice colony, Ottoman Empire, English colony, not counting the period of crusades. The natives were trying to keep their national identity – they kept it, by the cause of xenophobia, and transforming its economy on parasitizing the “colonizers”.

They got their independency but the things didn’t change: the economy was transformed to tourist service, simplifying the visa entrance for the foreigners. Despite being colonized, the fortune was on the side of the islanders: previous Lebanese conflict moved all off-shore stock to Cyprus, Kosovo conflict in 1998 brought Serbian immigrants and their finances, non-visa regime brought a huge Russian community, big companies.

In this case, mononational country became full of foreigners, which made the competition to the native liveners in all aspects of business, employment etc. The Cypriots couldn’t resist the competition, and as the result, the main problem after “Turkish invasion” for them became the topic where “All the foreigners are guilty in Cyprus problems!”.

Look at this problem from another side: if you talk about foreigner’s problem all the time at home with your wife, your small kid is listening to you, – at this point his vision of the immigrants became the main problem of his home island. He goes to school, they discuss it, and as the result these kids grow with the idea that all the problems are coming from “xeno” [foreigners].

The generation of Cypriots of the age 40-50 still remember the times how it was before the foreigners came, that Limassol was just a small village with a small port and few wine factories, when the bottle of J&B was 50 cents. These people understand from where Cyprus got its money, and the behavior of these people is more kind to foreigners, I had time to notice that for 4 years in Cyprus.