Once you have a program for dealing with refugees, they will keep coming. Greek Cyprus had a huge Greek refugee problem in 1974 after the island was divided along racial lines after the Turk invasion. A set of stamps were issued that year to financially support the fellow countrymen refugees. A nice gesture but the stamps just keep coming because so do the refugees, no longer Greek. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This is a very long lasting stamp issue. It was not a new design in 1990, and the same design still comes out today with the issue date adjusting in the bottom right corner. They also include the 1974 date to make the sad Greek girl sitting behind the barbed wire less bogus. In my research I read an article on the refugee crisis in modern day Cyprus. The refugee exemplar was a Syrian man who had been a teacher there and had paid smugglers $10,000 to get him to Cyprus in the hope that being in the EU would allow him to go on to Northern Europe and then perhaps on to Canada. He is stuck in an expensive legal limbo in Cyprus. No doubt a sad life but it is hard to make a charity stamp out of that. Wasn’t his duty as a Syrian to try to make his homeland a better place?
Todays stamp is issue PT3, a postal tax stamp issued by Cyprus shown here in it’s 1990 variation. That year it was a single stamp issue although the design has lasted so long that Cyprus has gone through three currencies with it. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 60 cents used.
In 1974 Turkey invaded and carved out a portion of southern Cyprus for the Turkish minority that they felt were not getting a fair shake from the Greek dominated government. Cyprus was and is not officially part of Greece. The aftermath was an ethnic cleansing that left 300,000 Greek Cypriots having to find a new home. There were of course also Turks that had to move, but that is a story for a different stamp. It should be remembered that there are fewer than one million Greeks on Cyprus so moving 300,000 really was a massive undertaking.
With Cyprus being set up as an ethnic state for Greeks, there are legacy refugee rules that have lasted into being in the EU. There is no legal provision for a non Greek refugee to be granted permanent residency. There is only a system for temporary deportation holds until the situation in the native country improves. Even this status only comes after a lengthy legal procedure and there is no provision for further travel to say Canada or Sweden. At some point the Cyprus government could declare the indeed slowly improving situation in Syria good enough and send them back.
You might think that perhaps harsh rules might discourage the flow of refugees. That has not been the case. Over 5 percent of the population are now non Greek refugees and that of course is a massive burden on Cyprus and one that will inevitably change the country.
Well my drink is empty and so I will have to wait till soon when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2020.