An LGBTQ advocacy group has called for systemic reform in education, politics and media after rainbow flags were burned on Easter bonfires in two Larnaca district villages on Holy Saturday, describing the incidents as a symptom of deeper structural failures rather than isolated acts of hooliganism.
Queer Collective issued a statement saying the pattern has now repeated itself for the second consecutive year. In 2025 the incidents occurred in Palodia, Lakatamia and Limassol. This year it was Vergina and Kalo Chorio in Larnaca. Images circulated, organisations condemned, and the week was spent debating the act rather than examining what produced it, the group said.
The organisation argued that the law must be enforced — hate speech based on sexual orientation has been a criminal offence in Cyprus since 2015 — but said convictions alone would not resolve the underlying conditions. “You can fine every person who puts a flag on a lambradjia and next year someone else will do it,” it said.
Queer Collective said the act carries a specific political meaning. The lambradjia is a traditional Cypriot Easter bonfire in which an effigy of Judas, the biblical traitor, is burned. Replacing Judas with a rainbow flag, the group argued, is a claim that LGBTQ people are traitors to the nation, a rhetorical move it linked to broader nationalist currents treating queerness, migration and multiculturalism as threats to Greek Cypriot identity.
The group said the perpetrators — teenagers and young men in their early twenties — are a generation that came of age online, inside what it described as an algorithmic pipeline running from edgy humour to outright bigotry through influencers packaging misogyny and homophobia as countercultural rebellion. It said social media finds no serious counterweight in Cyprus, partly because a young person can complete twelve years of schooling without encountering a single positive reference to LGBTQ existence.
Queer Collective also pointed to a gap between public opinion and institutional positions. Support for same-sex marriage in Cyprus rose from 14% in 2006 to 50% in 2023, the group said, but the education system, the political class and the Church had not moved with it. It noted that after the 2025 lambradjia incidents, only AKEL and Volt publicly condemned what happened, and said the President of the House of Representatives was recently heard describing society as “not ready” for marriage equality despite majority support.
The group called for four concrete measures: inclusion of LGBTQ lives across the school curriculum rather than as an optional add-on; media literacy education giving young people tools to recognise online radicalisation; political leaders willing to name hate clearly and publicly with consequences attached; and a media landscape that connects individual incidents to the conditions producing them.
Accept-LGBTI Cyprus also condemned the incidents, describing them as “fires of hatred” and warning that burning LGBTQ flags instead of effigies of Judas amounts to “education in violence and in the making of fascists out of our youth.”
The organisation accused institutions of complicity through inaction, saying that “the church, the unions, the political parties, and the state are not mere spectators to this. When they remain silent, when they ‘do not see’ what is burning at the top of a lambradjia, they send a message that some lives are worth less.”
Accept called on police to implement anti-discrimination and hate speech legislation and to issue a circular to local stations instructing them to prevent flags or symbols of any group being placed on bonfires.
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