Grecian Hotels

Its logo is "The Pathfinder", and when you read further down you'll realise why. The man behind this success story is Takis Kounnas, an enterprising Cypriot who was in the fruit exporting and shipping business until 1964, when, after a trip to Sweden, he realised this island has much to offer a tourist: sunshine nearly ten out of twelve months of t... he year, Grecian blue sea and fine sand. "I was on a business trip to Sweden when I saw dozens of people gathered outside the opera house looking up at the sky," says Mr. Kounnas. "When I asked the taxi driver what they were doing, I was taken aback with his reply: they are trying to soak up the sun, of course! For any person coming from a Mediterranean island, this scene sounds extraordinary, if not funny, and when this person is also enterprising, he immediately knows how to turn the sun into money. "I knew then and there that the sun in Cyprus could be beneficial" says Mr. Kounnas, and time proved him right. In 1965 he built his first hotel, the five star "Grecian", in Famagusta, which, had seen no tourist development until then. The long stretches of golden sand were undeveloped and the only hotels in the region were small businesses, which did not operate in the way we know hotels to operate today, nor were they built up to today's standards."The Grecian was the first hotel in Famagusta area to be built on modem design" says Mr. Kounnas, and, as any person from the region will say, it was then considered to be built on the town's outskirts. As for its design, the hotel's architect, the late Neoptolemos Michaelides, was known all over Cyprus for his creativity and the fact that he wanted his buildings to blend in with their surrounding environment. he hotel's name came out of a conversation its owner had with a British journalist, who, in describing the colour of the Famagusta sea had said "this is real GRECIAN blue". After the Grecian was built, other Cypriots followed suit, among them Mr. Kounnas who built the four stars "Troian", right next to his first ...Read More