A less discussed consequence of the war in and around Iran is the logistical disruption of the Cypriot Presidency of the Council of the European Union. Every six months, one of the 27 Member States takes on the task of organizing meetings between national governments. The country chooses priorities, sets goals, prefers to have concrete results at the end of that six-month period, and makes decisions on new laws. Ministers and government leaders are invited to meetings in the host country. In the case of Cyprus, which took over in January, this became equally difficult: the British air base on the strategically located island was targeted by suspected Iranian drones, after which flights to the island were stopped and meetings with ministers were canceled as a precaution.
Well, in Cyprus you don’t notice much of that unrest, says Marios Kouroufexis (41) on the phone. The heads of government will soon return to Cyprus for a meeting. He works as an independent designer and now has the Cypriot Presidency as his client. With every presidency comes a logo and he designed it.
That logo is the figurative mark of a presidency, and for six months it can be seen accompanied by the European flag on background screens in press conferences, on banners, posters, flags, mugs, linen bags, notebooks, posters on institutional buildings.
When Kouroufexis first saw the logo in the wild, on a large billboard in Nicosia, he made sure to take a photo. A lot, in fact. It’s quite an honor, he thinks.
It started like this. Kouroufexis is in a pool of the government news agency, which organized a closed competition at the end of 2024. The designers received a briefing, during which the Cypriots explained what their priorities would be in the presidency. And above all: what values they were going to convey with the logo. That is not determined by the EU, says the designer, a country can decide that for itself.
The designers were told: we, Cyprus, want to emphasize European unity, our shared future and green energy. This could possibly be incorporated into the design. The only concrete substantive requirement was that the culture and history of Cyprus should be given a role in the design.
You see that more often, with greater and lesser degrees of surrender. Spain simply opted for the flag colors and the Spanish language, Hungary for the Rubik’s cube (because it was invented by a Hungarian, but perhaps it also says something about the difficult-to-solve puzzle that is Orbán’s attitude in the EU), and Poland invited a designer for 2025 who designed the logo of the Polish trade union Solidarność, which opposed the communist regime in the 1980s.
In preparation, Kouroufexis had already visited the Archaeological Cyprus Museum in Nicosia for inspiration. He found old vases and sculptures there. But, he says, when he had that briefing and heard about European unity, he thought: Lefkara side.
That’s Cypriot heritage, even UNESCO heritage. A flower- or star-like embroidery, where (here is the message about European unity) each thread does not go far on its own, but together they form a strong and coherent whole. In the Kouroufexis logo, the embroidery has become a yellow-copper-colored star or sun, consisting of 27 pieces – one for each member state.
The colors of the accompanying letters (CY 2026 .EU) are blue, after the Cypriot sea and the European flag, and green, from the olive branches on the Cypriot flag. He chose the sans-serif and (tastes differ) not very appealing font because of its readability.
National identities are sometimes incorporated in the logos in an almost clichéd manner, and that sometimes caused problems. In 1998, the British appointed thirty children for the design, who worked in pairs to create one star for each EU country. The star that a British child made with an Italian child caused a riot, because Italy found it stigmatizing that the star had pizza on it. The explanation of Matthew and Axel, the two children, at the BBC: First they depicted the downfall of Pompeii, with Mount Vesuvius erupting. “But we both love pizza so we made our star like a pizza.” The stars were up too tie available, then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw wore it during a meeting.
