Nicosia has one central woodland lung: Athalassa Forest. Years ago, some state genius decided it needed a road carved straight through it. Cars! Through the forest!
When the scheme first surfaced, people mobilised. They were discouraged—but the plan never died. Now we’ve got blueprints, and they’re still banging on about it. Every year, like clockwork, it comes back round.
This year’s no different. They’ve even stuck the funding in the 2026 budget. “As we do every year, we’ll block the spending,” said Christiana Erotokritou, who raised the issue at Parliament’s Interior Committee.
Thank God some MPs pushed back. Committee chair Aristos Damianou made it clear: Parliament won’t accept any planning that damages the natural or urban environment.
Let’s hope he means it. But someone needs to haul in the Town Planning department—drag in the planners with all their fancy credentials—and get them to explain this bloody-minded obsession. The state’s specialists. Nicosia municipality.
Do they genuinely still not grasp that traffic problems aren’t solved by building more roads? We see it in practice. More cars, more roads—and we’re always stuck in the same place.
So if that’s the mathematical outcome of building new or wider roads, is there any earthly reason to build them at the expense of forests and parks as well?
What altar are we sacrificing the green space on? Cars? Oil companies? It’s absurd that we’re even debating things that should be blindingly obvious.
The scheme to drive a road through Athalassa has been haunting Aglantzia residents since 1992, according to Stelios Ioannou, spokesperson for the Initiative for Aglantzia.
Imagine! Someone cooked up this idea in 1992, and here we are in 2025—as if we’ve learnt nothing new—still trying to ram it through. Never mind that every developed European city is trying to reduce car use.
We’re trying to increase it, offering more and more opportunities for vehicles to circulate. Through forests, no less! Unbelievable.
Charalambos Theopemptou condemned the fact that “for decades, Town Planning has been trying to push roads through Athalassa Park”.
He noted that in the past, tarmac was laid inside the park without permits, whilst the current plan “is part of a grandiose scheme involving new junctions, including at Nicosia’s entrance”.
Nicosia’s entrance absolutely suffers from congestion. But who said the problem gets solved by building junctions or roads through parks? Look at the junctions in Limassol—built, then scrapped.
Some specialists say the only solution for Nicosia’s entrance is to sink the road and build flyovers. We’re not specialists. But we know there are experts who can offer modern solutions.
Ask them. Don’t dust off a 1992 blueprint and insist on implementing it in 2025. Besides, traffic problems plague the entire planet. We can learn from others with more experience. Let’s not play the clever clogs.
A 2009 study compared new road construction in various American cities with total vehicle kilometres travelled in those same cities. Result: when a city increased its roads by 10%, total driving also rose by 10%.
The relationship is so consistent that scientists now call it the “fundamental law of road congestion”. And there are scientific explanations for this phenomenon.
Yet we’re not only still doing what we did in the 1960s and 70s—we’re determined to sacrifice the little urban green space we have left to build more roads. It’s enough to make you weep.
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