HISTORY

Some Historical Facts

Lordos Organisation is the epitome of a man’s success with the vision and the will to affect the lives of thousands of his fellow citizens in his beloved hometown, the city of Famagusta.
Mr Constantinos G. Lordos was born in 1940, five months from the start of the Planet’s so-called «Second World War». His childhood memories included games but also bombs falling from the sky within feet of his parents’ house. By the time he was a teenager, Cyprus was embarked on its liberation struggle and bombings, murders, concentration camps, prison and executions were the mainstay of the daily news.
He went to London to study architecture. Two months after his return to Cyprus as a graduate ready for work, Cyprus was immersed in a bloody civil strife which lasted 4 more years. Constantinos, between his bouts as volunteer for the Greek side, tried to build a life and a business but it was a tantalising attempt which he once described as «One thousand steps forward and 999 steps backward».

SUCCESS … All depends on the second letter

The young man must have had the Midas touch because -despite the difficulties- in 7 short years he came to dominate, with his family, nearly totally, both the Property Development Business and the Tourism and Travel Business of Cyprus. Foreign visitors were jokingly referring to Famagusta, the family’s home town, as «Lordogusta!..»

Life has no guarantee performance and past performance is no guarantee of future results

With that said, disaster did strike in July 1974, in the form of a coup by the Greek Military Junta against the legitimate Government of Cyprus; this led in turn to a Turkish Army invasion of the island and in less than 30 days the family became refugees and nearly-totally penniless.
Constantinos has described the horrible events of those days in touching but vivid language:
I packed my wife and 3 little sons in a car and drove to England as fast as I could and started making the rounds of banks and creditors explaining why they could be better off with more patience! It was stomach-wrenching but it worked; the company was saved from bankruptcy and went back into business, the creditors all got their money back, and the family name and reputation, our most important (and now only) assets were protected.
After 1975, things started looking up again; Constantinos started a property development company in Greece and at the same time his property development company in Cyprus also took off to house thousands of refugees.
At that time he got ambitious: “Why not build some hotels again and why not restart our Food Distribution Company of Famagusta – a memorial to our father’s first business – and why not develop for sale some property in London since we had the staff and the offices (the saved-from-bankruptcy in 1974 Travel Company) and why not everything? I look back now and am amazed at how young and lucky we really were!…