Could pro wrestling be coming to the island of Cyprus soon?
Over the past few years, there’s been a good deal of exploration and proposed activity when it comes to establishing a pro wrestling scene on the Mediterranean island county of Cyprus.
Pro wrestling most recently took place on the island in 2013 when a women’s wrestling event was organized in the city of Limassol that featured up to sixteen wrestlers from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and France.
Since the 2013 event in Limassol, there have been a couple of proposed promotions based in the country that have been gearing up to potentially bring pro wrestling to Cyprus on a more permanent basis. One of those proposed promotions is going by the name of Cyprus Pro Wrestling and is being headed up by Indian pro wrestler Sunny Nanda. Nanda recently held the first training seminar for his proposed promotion in the city of Paphos back in late October of this year. We spoke to Sunny a year or so back and he advised that his vision for Cyprus Pro Wrestling would take a few years to materialize. This first training seminar could very well be the first step of Sunny Nanda taking CyPW from the idea phase to the execution phase.
A second proposed promotion, Machí Wrestling, has popped up on Instagram over the last couple years. There hasn’t been much information from Machí as of late but they had identified a start date of early 2022 the last time we spoke with them in the summer of 2021.
Finally, an established wrestling promotion is taking a look at expanding operations into Cyprus in some way in the not too distant future. The CEO and founder of Greece’s ZMAK wrestling promotion, Petros Polychronidis, visited the island country over the weekend of November 18-20, 2022 for a two day business trip.
ZMAK Founder and CEO Petros Polychronidis has a conversation during his two day trip to Cyprus to look into expanding company operations into the country. Image courtesy of the ZMAK Facebook page.
ZMAK shared with WrestleMap that the purpose Mr. Polychronidis’s trip to Cyprus was to check out the local wrestling market and the opportunity for future shows there. Part of that exploratory effort included multiple meetings with sponsors, venues and PR companies in Cyprus. He also met with the small community of wrestlers based on the island, including Pambos Pallikaros, a Cypriot pro wrestler who trained in the UK and has been wrestling for ZMAK in Greece since July of this year. ZMAK relayed an official statement from Petros Polychronidis to WrestleMap during a recent conversation about the trip. According to the ZMAK CEO,
“We must push the market to open the doors for future wrestling shows in Cyprus. It’ll take time but I feel that we can achieve that target in the very next [few] years.”
With all of the activity and planning going on in Cyprus, it feels like it’s just a matter of time before the country hosts pro wrestling events on a regular basis. The next few years should certainly be interesting for the development of the pro wrestling scene in the country.
As for ZMAK, the Greek company held their event Immortals on November 5th which saw Pano Seretti win the 2022 Immortals tournament and Aaron Rammy of Belgium win the ZMAK International Championship. They have also recently finished uploading all of the matches from ZMAK 61 in October to their YouTube channel and are gearing up for their yearly major battle royal event, ZMAK Royal, which is set for December 11th.
