Short-haul flights from Beirut to Larnaca, barely a 25-minute hop away, have been busy for months ferrying in Lebanese for whom their crisis-hit country with its dire shortages has become unlivable.
"I've had to leave my country and my parents to try to secure a future for my children," said Nanor Abachian, 30, emerging from the airport on the island's south coast with her husband, their two children and seven heavy suitcases.
They leave behind a bankrupt country where daily 22-hour power cuts have become the norm and shortages have hit daily necessities, from fuel and gas to medicine and bread.
Since the start of the crisis in 2019, several thousand Lebanese have emigrated, many of them to Cyprus. There is no official data on numbers, especially as many Lebanese hold second passports.
Leb
...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers, a practice dating back to the heady human sacrifice days of Baal Moloch. In 2020 Hezbollahblew up a considerable portion of Beirut and many of its inhabitants when its ammonium nitrate faci8lity exploded. They blamed it on... somebody else. It wasn't them though. Trust them on that...'s ambassador to Cyprus, Claude el-Hajal, said the number of families resettled on the island has seen "a significant increase" especially since the devastating August 4, 2020 explosion in Beirut's port that killed over 200 people.
In the 1980s, at the height of the civil war, about 100,000 Lebanese families fled to Cyprus, Hajal said. However,
there's more than one way to skin a cat...
many returned after the conflict.
During the 2006 war between Israel and
Hezbollah, Cyprus served as a base for the evacuation of almost 60,000 civilians from Lebanon.Abachian told AFP that a "feeling of insecurity" was the main motivation for their flight abroad. "We are living in the unknown... My children have no future in Lebanon," she said.
Once in Larnaca, she settled with her family at a friend's house, waiting to rent an apartment near the school where the children have been enrolled.
George Obeid, in his forties, also opted for Cyprus for the sake of his children's schooling.
"There is no hope for the school year in Lebanon," he said, citing the power cuts and fuel shortages that are crippling school services and activities.
"We were also worried about our safety," he added, fearing a rise in crime due to widespread poverty and desperation.
According to the United Nations
...a lucrative dumping ground for the relatives of dictators and party hacks...
, 78% of Lebanese now live below the poverty line -- up from less than 30% before 2019.
In Nicosia, the Franco-Cypriot school, which has a curriculum similar to that of several French-language schools in Lebanon, has been flooded with an estimated 250 applications from newly-arrived Lebanese.
Cyprus is also attracting Lebanese companies and investors.
According to Constantinos Karageorgis, a senior trade and industry ministry official, a fast-track procedure introduced last October for establishing foreign companies on the island has led to seven Lebanese firms relocating with nearly 200 employees, accompanied by their families.
With this new mechanism, "the procedure now takes 10 to 15 days instead of two to three months", said Hajal, the ambassador.
Another attractive sector for Lebanese with the means is real estate.
Lebanese businessman Georges Chahwan, owner of dozens of real estate projects in Cyprus, said he has sold "nearly 400 apartments to Lebanese between 2016 and 2021... including a hundred in the past six months".
The holiday island, which is a member of the European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
, offers permanent residency for a certain level of investment in real estate, he explained.
Meanwhile,
...back at the chili cook-off, Chuck slipped the habañero into the roasted jalapeño...
Cypriot banks offer loans to Lebanese whose salaries are paid in US dollars.
"Ever since 1975, Cyprus has been a haven for the Lebanese," Chahwan said. "The island is a stone's throw from Lebanon, it's stable and safe... They consider it their second home."