Stamp to honour Cypriot Nobel winner

NEW stamps to honour Nobel Prize winner Christopher Pissarides will be issued in the summer, the Postal Service has announced.

The stamp will feature a photo of Professor Pissarides, with a background dedicated to the Nobel winner’s work.

“We have a philatelic committee, which at times makes suggestions for new stamps,” said Chrystalla Charalambous, an official at the Postal Service. “So it was suggested that with Cyprus being such a small country and producing such a renowned Nobelist, a stamp to honour him was clearly the right thing to do.”

The stamp, which will go into circulation on June 8 this year, will cost €1,71 and can be used for letters sent locally but also the rest of Europe and other countries.

There will be 600,000 copies and on the first day of circulation, 8,000 special envelopes will be available at a cost of €2,05.

Pissarides won the Nobel for Economics last autumn and has been hailed as a national hero, both for his work, and for promoting Cyprus abroad.

Meanwhile, the Bank of Cyprus in Greece is planning an event in honour of the professor next month, though a spokesman for the bank yesterday said the details had not yet been finalised.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.