Communities have been invited to submit projects for a new €3.5 billion funding round, President Nikos Christodoulides said on Wednesday during a visit to the village of Sykopetra in Limassol.

Speaking at the opening of the Prophet Elias community park and mini football pitch, Christodoulides said the government would decide on projects across Cyprus worth that sum in the new period.

He urged the community council to put forward projects, alone or with neighbouring communities, so they could be approved next September.

He said the government had shown through its projects that rural and mountain areas were a priority.

He cited the 2024 decision to keep Kampos primary school open when it had only one pupil.

Many more children now attend, he said, because the school drew young parents to the village.

He said communities needed infrastructure, especially in Limassol, so that young couples could return, and that the aim was for villages to grow beyond 120 residents.

The community council’s contribution to development projects has been cut to 5 per cent.

Christodoulides said support for equipping the clinic at the community stadium should be taken for granted.

For community toilets, he asked the council to say how much was needed for studies, to be handled through the commissioner for mountainous communities.

A house renovation for an office and a thematic museum would be supported once plans were mature and permits secured.

He said the Palaichori to Sykopetra road widening, or a new link to Apliki, concerned the Nicosia district governor Constantinos Yiorkadjis, and promised to return to see whether work could proceed in phases.

Greek Cypriot negotiator Menelaos Menelaou said on Wednesday that problems over the routing of the Pyroi crossing point “have been overcome”, although a dispute over a second crossing point still stands in the way of an agreement.

Speaking to the Cyprus Mail, Menelaou said the remaining obstacle was the Turkish Cypriot demand that the Louroujina to Lympia crossing be included in any such deal.

He said the Louroujina issue remains open and has not yet been reconciled with the Greek Cypriot proposal for a crossing at Kokkina.

The earlier dispute concerned the route of the proposed road from Athienou through Pyroi to the Nicosia suburb of Aglandjia.

The Greek Cypriot side treats it as a single crossing, while the Turkish Cypriot side objected to a road running through so many kilometres of the buffer zone, arguing that it created security complications.

Menelaou told the Cyprus Mail the route now sits roughly evenly, between the government-controlled areas and the occupied north.

Pyroi is a ruined village in the north, inside a Turkish military zone, whose residents have been displaced since 1974.

Athienou lies on the government-controlled side, and a crossing would cut the drive from there to Nicosia from up to an hour to about ten minutes.

Christodoulides said on Tuesday that he had given Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman two new proposals on crossing points, one of which had already been rejected.

Erhurman separately confirmed late on Tuesday that he had rejected a proposal to open the fenced-off area of Varosha under United Nations administration and the port of Famagusta under European Union control.

He said formal negotiations could not begin until the sides agree on methodology and make progress on confidence-building measures.

New crossing points are the most concrete of those measures, as both sides agreed on a package of four after an enlarged meeting in Geneva in March 2025, when UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told each side to suggest two.

The Greek Cypriot side proposed the Athienou to Aglandjia road, with a crossing at each end, while the Turkish Cypriot side proposed Mia Milia and Louroujina.

The package has since stalled, for during Guterres’ visit in July, sources told the Cyprus Mail that the Greek Cypriot side suggested opening only two of the four, with Louroujina shelved, which the Turkish Cypriot side refused.