The village of Phini, in the scenic Troödos Mountains Photo: Alamy
At last, tourists are returning to Cyprus, says Paul Kendall, who ‘risked’ a holiday there at the height of its banking crisis on Telegraph.
Beside a coastal road, outside an empty villa, stands a billboard for the Cyprus Samaritans. “We listen. We care,” it says. “When times are hard, contact us.” The advertisement isn’t new; the Samaritans have been operating in Cyprus since 1997, but never before has its message been so relevant. Earlier this year, Cyprus’s government staged an unprecedented raid on its citizens’ bank accounts. Anything over €100,000 (£85,000) in the country’s two biggest banks was frozen with immediate effect; today it’s still not clear whether any of it will ever be returned.
The move – carried out at the insistence of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund – left countless retirement plans in tatters. It also brought to a screeching halt a cavalier economic experiment which had seen Cyprus’s banking sector grow to eight times the size of the country’s GDP, a figure higher than in Iceland or Ireland, two of Europe’s biggest basket cases.
To make matters worse, when Cyprus needed them most, its holidaymakers stopped coming. In the run-up to Easter, when Cyprus is usually one of the most popular destinations for British tourists, bookings fell through the floor. The website Lastminute.com reported a 75 per cent drop compared with the same period last year; hotels that would normally have been packed were left deserted.
You couldn’t blame tourists for staying away. Photographs of long queues for cashpoint machines and reports in the papers of strict capital controls suggested it would be difficult to get money out. Retailers were on the brink of bankruptcy and those that survived were not taking cards. Worst of all, the Foreign Office’s advice – that holidaymakers should take enough cash to “cover the duration of their stay” – seemed to be a recipe for muggings.
“Advising people to take large amounts of cash to a place where people are desperate for it is an open invitation to criminals,” said one MP.
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