Cyprus Alive

The Team celebrates its third year

It’s  almost a year to the day that we’d gathered together at the Zakos to celebrate the close of our second year. Before our lunch that day I had walked round Larnaca, taking pictures to write my article, "Images of Larnaca on a typical Winter's day in Cyprus".

It was a little colder this year and I had to wear a light sweater as well as a fleece. Clouds pushed their way intrusively onto the blue backdrop to St Lazarus Church.

At McKenzie a cat was the sole customer of one of the beach bars, availing itself of the rainwater that had collected in a protective tarpaulin.

On the beach, mounds of seaweed faced the sea like gun turrets on the look out for invaders. The seaweed had presumably been swept up by the municipality after the recent storms and lay in readiness for collection.

Yes the weather was colder this year.

But inside the Zakos restaurant where we had our three-hour, fish-meze lunch, the atmosphere was warm and animated as we chatted to our colleagues from other parts of the island and were introduced to new members of our team – both writers and new sales people.

Tasos, our founder, recapped on our progress and achievements. Our rise in readership is indeed quite spectacular. In 2016, our first year, our pages had 28,859 unique views, in 2017 we progressed to 197,970 unique views and this figure more than doubled to 491,497 unique views in 2018. I smile when I think back to the early days in 2016 when we were obtaining an average of 137 unique views a day. Up to the 17th of this month of January 2019, we have averaged 2,363 unique views a day.

Who knows what heights we will reach this year?