I have been living in Limassol for a few weeks now. I still wake up and look out of the window like a tourist, I still get confused about which side of the road to drive on (Cyprus drives on the left, a British legacy), and I still count the sunny days, though I gave up somewhere around twenty. Plenty of friends have asked me, some surprised, some a little hurt: why Cyprus? Why now? And, above all, “are you leaving us?”
I owe them an honest answer, so I am writing it here, once, for everyone. This is not a manifesto and it is not an ad for emigration. It is simply the story of a decision my wife and I weighed for a long time, and made thinking mostly about our children.
I am not running away from Romania
I will start with this, because it matters most. I did not move out of anger and I am not closing any doors. I started my first business in Bucharest at 18, and everything I have built since has had its roots there. Romania is still my country, the good and the bad, and I will keep writing about it, getting annoyed with it and enjoying it.
The only thing I genuinely miss is my friends. Everything else is a short flight away. And I will visit often, much more often than some people think. It is just that, from now on, I come as a visitor.
The weather, the sea and the air
It sounds trivial, but it is not. Anyone who has lived through years of grey Bucharest winters, smog on the boulevards and an hour lost in traffic every day knows how much your surroundings matter. Here, sunshine is the rule, not the exception. The sea is minutes away. The air is clean. For someone who loves diving and outdoor sport, it is almost too good to be true.
And I am not only talking about my own comfort. I am talking about energy. Last year I wrote about how I learned to stop before I burned out. One lesson from that time was that you cannot work well if you live badly. Light, movement and an evening walk along the seafront are not a luxury. They are fuel.
An open society
Cyprus is a small island, but a very international one. On the street you hear Greek, English, Russian, Romanian, Arabic. People are used to foreigners and do not treat you as an intruder. I felt that from the first days: at government offices, at the bank, with the neighbours. Nobody judges you for your accent or where you come from.
For my children, I think this is the biggest win. Growing up somewhere diversity is normal, with classmates from dozens of countries, where the world does not end at the border of a single language. You cannot learn that from a textbook.
English, everywhere
Officially, the languages of Cyprus are Greek and Turkish. In practice, it feels as if English were the second official language. You find it everywhere: in public administration, banks, contracts, shops, at the doctor’s. For a family arriving from elsewhere, that changes everything. You do not start from zero, you do not need a translator for every form, and you can fit in from week one.
And for someone who has spent years working with international clients and partners, it is simply convenient. English is already my working language for half the day.
A state that does not treat you like a suspect
I promised not to turn this into a detailed tax comparison; that will come in other articles. But I cannot avoid saying what I have felt: the Cypriot state is fair and transparent with entrepreneurs. The rules are clear, they change rarely and, when they do, you hear about it in advance. Last autumn I wrote that overnight tax changes are killing business back home. Here I found the opposite: predictability.
One more thing matters to me: taxes on labour are more reasonable. That means you can hire people who live well on their salary, without any creative accounting. For an entrepreneur who wants to pay fairly and sleep at night, the difference is real. It is exactly what I was getting at when I tried to explain what a fair society means to someone who builds companies.
The work comes with me
Now the practical side. I have worked online for many years and, since Retargeting, with clients in several countries. Teams, meetings and decisions mostly happen on a screen. I have already written about building a SaaS from Romania for customers worldwide. The logic works in reverse too: you can work with Romania and the rest of the world from another corner of Europe.
Limassol is a short flight from Bucharest and well connected to the rest of Europe and the Middle East. It is even in the same time zone as Romania. For my colleagues, practically nothing has changed except the background on our video calls.
Family first
If I had to sum it all up in one sentence: I moved for my family’s quality of life. My wife, my daughter and my son were at the centre of every conversation. We asked ourselves some simple questions:
- where do we spend more time together and less in traffic?
- where do the kids grow up healthy, outdoors, not just in front of screens?
- where do they learn to find their way in an open world, in several languages?
- where do we feel safe and respected?
The answers brought us here. I do not know yet whether it is forever. Nobody knows that when they leave. But I know that, for this stage of our life, it is the right choice.
What comes next
The first weeks are about settling in: paperwork, new habits, new routes, a lot of sun. As I find my rhythm, I will write more about what it is like to do business from here, what works better, what works worse, and what Romania could learn from it. No rose-tinted glasses: I am sure I will discover the less pleasant sides too.
Until then, the coffee on the seafront is on me. And for those of you who have been through this: what convinced you to move, or what kept you at home?