“From ‘We Are Fully Prepared’ to a Nation in Flames – How President Christodoulides’ Government Lost Control of Cyprus’ Wildfires”
“The Fire Service is ready to face any incident that may occur.” With that ringing declaration on 16 May, Fire Chief Nikos Longinos, flanked by ministers and television cameras, wrapped up exercise “Pyrsos 2025” and ushered in the summer season. The drill, staged near Agios Theodoros, mobilised helicopters, Canadair water-bombers, army personnel, and volunteers in a display that the presidential palace promoted as definitive proof of state readiness. Two months later, the promise stands in ruins, consumed—along with more than 100 square kilometres of forest, farmland, and villages—by the worst wildfires Cyprus has witnessed in decades.
The first major blaze erupted at dusk on 23 July in parched scrubland above the village of Malia. Temperatures had touched forty-four degrees Celsius, humidity was negligible, and hot gusts whipped flames into a moving wall that descended on the Limassol district. By midnight, multiple fronts had opened, stretching already thin ground crews. When day broke on the 24th, the sky over the Troodos foothills was the color of rust; planes from Spain, Jordan, and the European rescue pool were circling because Cyprus’s fleet, though recently upgraded on paper, proved insufficient in the face of simultaneous outbreaks. Villages from Arsos to Vouni were evacuated in haste. Elderly residents who remembered the 2021 Arakapas tragedy said this fire moved faster.
Soon, the first casualties were confirmed: two people overtaken while trying to flee in a car between Monagri and Alassa. Their deaths punctuated any remaining confidence in official assurances. Power lines incinerated by the flames plunged at least fifteen communities into darkness. Growers in the celebrated wine villages of Koilani and Vasa stood helpless as vines that had survived Ottoman rule and British colonial rule alike burned within minutes. In Lofou, where more than twenty stone houses now lie in smoldering piles, residents complained that fire engines arrived with empty tanks because local standpipes had run dry. The Kouris reservoir is currently at fifteen-and-a-half percent capacity, after years of drought that scientists and environmental groups warned would make traditional firefighting tactics unreliable.
The government’s communication strategy has looked equally dehydrated. While President Nikos Christodoulides declared that “every resource is being deployed,” community leaders said they had not spoken with a single minister during the critical first twenty-four hours. Opposition parties are calling for an investigative committee to examine why the much-touted aerial unit, officially inaugurated in April, was unable to prevent Cyprus from needing foreign aircraft within hours. They also point to the May press conference in which officials breezily discounted the very risk factors—wind, topography, water scarcity—that are now being cited to explain the scale of the disaster.
Human stories cut through the political acrimony. In a sports arena turned shelter on the outskirts of Limassol, ninety-two evacuees wait for news: among them a vineyard owner who spent thirty years converting abandoned terraces into an organic label now reduced to ash, and a young couple from Ypsonas whose wedding album was the only belonging they managed to save. Environmental NGOs warn that protected Natura 2000 habitats west of the Kouris dam have been “functionally destroyed,” threatening endemic hare populations and the rare Bonelli’s eagle.
Yet the most searing loss may be public trust. The Christodoulides administration took office promising administrative efficiency and modern crisis management. The sound-bite “We are fully prepared,” replayed endlessly on social media under the hashtag #Ready2025, has become shorthand for hubris. Even if international reinforcements and a forecasted drop in wind speed allow firefighters to encircle the flames, finally, Cypriots will continue to ask why an island that practices fire drills every spring was unable to protect its people in July.
What comes next extends beyond dousing hotspots. The government must rebuild scorched homes and repair gutted power lines, compensate farmers whose livelihoods have been devastated, restore fragile ecosystems, and, above all, provide an honest account of how readiness rhetoric diverged so catastrophically from reality. Until that reckoning occurs, the phrase “fully prepared” will resonate less as reassurance than as a warning of the cost of political complacency in an age of climate-fuelled extremes.
Photo: Sigmalive