Statement from Queer Collective
For the second year in a row, rainbow flags were placed atop lambradjies and burned on Holy Saturday. In 2025 it was Palodia, Lakatamia, and Limassol. In 2026, Vergina and Kalo Chorio in Larnaca. The images circulated. Organisations condemned. And now, we spent the week debating the act, not examining what produced it, and will likely find ourselves here again next year.
Queer Collective is issuing this statement because the cycle of condemnation without analysis has run its course. We are not interested in another round of press statements that change nothing. We want to name what is actually happening.
The law should be enforced. There is no doubt as to that. Hate speech based on sexual orientation and gender expression has been a criminal offence in Cyprus since 2015, and not a single conviction has been secured in eleven years. That is a failure in itself. But even if convictions start tomorrow, the conditions that produce this behaviour will still be intact. You can fine every person who puts a flag on a lambradjia and next year someone else will do it.
Consider what the act actually says. The lambradjia burns an effigy of Judas, the traitor. Replacing Judas with a rainbow flag is not generic homophobia. It is a specific claim: that LGBTQIA+ people are traitors to the nation. This is the same rhetorical move that treats queerness, migration, and multiculturalism as threats to Greek Cypriot identity in a single breath. It is nationalism with a target, and it did not come from nowhere.
Look at who is doing this. The images, this year and last, show teenagers and young men in their early twenties, a generation that came of age online, inside an algorithmic pipeline that runs from edgy humour to outright bigotry, through influencers who package misogyny, sexism, and homophobia as countercultural rebellion. Social media is not the sole cause, and treating it as one would be lazy. But it is a major factor and a powerful accelerant, and in Cyprus it finds no serious counterweight to compete with it.
A young person can complete twelve years of schooling in Cyprus without encountering a single positive reference to LGBTQIA+ existence. No inclusive education. No discussion of diverse families or identities. What they will encounter is the casual use of slurs, the policing of gender expression, and silence from teachers, family members, and friends who hear it all and say nothing. The vacuum left by the education system creates fertile ground for the algorithm to fill. The lambradjia is simply where the result becomes visible.
Here is what makes this more complicated than it appears: Cypriot society has actually moved. In 2006, 14% of Cypriots supported same-sex marriage. By 2023, that figure was 50%. That is an extraordinary shift. But the education system has not moved with it. The political class has not moved with it. The Church has not moved with it. The gap between where society actually is and where its institutions pretend it still is, that is where extremism grows. ELAM went from 0.88% in 2013 to 11.2% in the 2024 European elections. After the 2021 elections, the party was invited to participate in a governing coalition. That is not fringe politics. That is the mainstream holding the door open.
After the 2025 lambradjia incidents, only Akel and Volt publicly condemned what happened. The president of the House of Representatives was recently heard saying “society is not ready,” referring to marriage equality. Fifty percent support, and society is not ready. The question is not whether society is ready. The question is whether its leaders are willing.
Queer Collective Cy is calling for concrete action on four fronts. First, an education system that includes LGBTQIA+ lives as part of the human experience, across curriculum, not as an optional add-on. Second, media literacy in schools that gives young people the tools to recognise when they are being radicalised by algorithms, not only by political parties. Third, political leaders who name hate clearly and publicly, in real time, by name, with consequences attached. Fourth, a media landscape that connects these incidents to the conditions that keep producing them, rather than covering each one as if it appeared from nowhere.
The fire is not the problem. What feeds it is.
Also read: Occupied Cyprus reacts to Turkish flag burning at Easter bonfires
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