The New Social Insurance Scheme 12.4.1965

Merja sent me this nice FDC with three stamps issued on 12.4.1965 to commemorate The New Social Insurance Scheme which covered compulsorily every person gainfully occupied in Cyprus either as an employed person or as a self-employed person. Persons working abroad in the service of Cypriot employers and persons who interrupt their compulsory insurance are allowed, under certain conditions, to be insured voluntarily. The insured persons are classified in three categories; employed persons, self-employed persons and voluntary contributors.

The Scheme was financed by contributions payable by the employers, the insured persons and the State. The Scheme provides cash benefits for marriage, maternity, sickness, unemployment, widowhood, invalidity, orphan-hood, old age, death and employment injury. The Scheme provides also free medical treatment for persons receiving invalidity pension and for employed persons who sustain injuries as a result or an employment accident or an occupational disease.

Adamantios Diamantis (b Nicosia, 23 Jan 1900; d Nicosia, 28 April 1994). Who’s painting is portrayed on the 75M stamp and also depicted on the cover was a Cypriot painter and teacher. From 1921 to 1923 he studied painting at the Royal College of Art in London, and in 1926 he returned to Cyprus, where he combined his painting with extensive art teaching at numerous schools. His earlier works show a certain amount of experimentation with modernist styles, particularly Cubism, but he was also concerned with the rendering of the human form as he observed it in the villages of Cyprus. At the Festival of Our Lady of Araka showed his characteristically monumental and schematized female forms constructed of broad unified surfaces of colour with a similarly schematized but atmospheric landscape in the background. Diamantis had a major influence on succeeding generations of Cypriot artists.