Anorthosis Famagusta is a club many football-fans will never have heard of before this season.
To be fair, all I knew was that the team originates from Cyprus. I was quite surprised to learn that the team has beaten Rapid Wien and Olympiakos Piraeus in the Champions League qualifiers to progress to the main tournament.
This made them the first Cypriot club ever to join the ranks of the European football aristocracy, and reach the group stages of the Champions League.
At first, I considered their results to be a fluke. A smaller side got lucky and eliminated arrogant opponents, who underestimated them. Anything can happen in the knock-out stages of the qualifiers, right?
Once again, Anorthosis proved me wrong by keeping Werder Bremen to a 0-0 draw in the Weserstadium in Germany, and by beating Panathinaikos 3-1 in Cyprus. This was reason enough for me to look into the history of this fairly unknown club.
After some searching, I uncovered a spectacular and intriguing story. Anorthosis Famagusta uses a phoenix in its crest. For those that aren’t into mythology, the phoenix is a mythical sacred firebird, with a tail of beautiful gold and red plumage.
It has a 1,000 year life-cycle, and near the end the phoenix builds itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix or phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again.
The Anorthosis phoenix, taken from their crest.
The new phoenix is destined to live as long as its old self. In some stories, the new phoenix embalms the ashes of its old self in an egg made of myrrh and deposits it in the Egypt city of Heliopolis (sun city in Greek). The bird was also said to regenerate when hurt or wounded by a foe, thus being almost immortal and invincible—it is also said that it can heal a person with a tear from its eyes and make them temporarily immune to death; a symbol of fire and divinity.
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