Cyprus license plate: Historic black
Issued today 2013 to today. Historic plates for car, van, truck, bus, and motorcycle, issued by Έφορος Μηχανοκινήτων Οχημάτων / Τμήμα Οδικών Μεταφορών (Registrar of Motor Vehicles, Road Transport Department). One of 5 Cyprus license plates.
Not a series but a colour permission: any vehicle first registered on or before 31 December 1974 may carry its existing number on a black plate with white or silver characters.
Format, years and the law
- Format
-
LLL 999, for exampleSKK 859(L is any letter, 9 any digit)Nothing hides in the characters, they are the vehicle's ordinary mark. The black ground is the message: it may be worn by old vehicles and anything registered in the Republic by 31 December 1974, a fixed cutoff rather than the rolling "30 years" so often claimed.
The format above is broad: a registration that fits it has the right shape, which does not show that this series issued it.
- Years issued
- 2013 to today. Still issued.
- Vehicle class
- Historic: vintage/oldtimer regimes (German H, ES historico). Issued for car, van, truck, bus, and motorcycle.
- Colours
-
Characters
#FFFFFFBackground#000000 - About this plate
- Secondary sources say "vehicles older than 30 years". The instrument says «παλαιών οχημάτων ή οχημάτων που ενεγράφησαν στη Δημοκρατία μέχρι την 31 Δεκεμβρίου 1974», old vehicles, OR vehicles registered in the Republic ON OR BEFORE 31 DECEMBER 1974. A fixed calendar cutoff does not move: the eligible population shrinks every year and can never grow, which is the opposite of a rolling 30-year rule. NOTE THE DISJUNCTION, and it is the honest residue: the phrase is "παλαιών οχημάτων Ή ...", so there are two limbs, and «παλαιό όχημα» (old vehicle) is NOT DEFINED anywhere in the instruments read. The permission is expressed as «είναι δυνατόν», MAY be, so the black plate is optional, and an eligible vehicle on a white plate is not irregular. Period start is 3-6-2013 because that is when this Schedule commenced; black plates on old Cypriot cars long predate it in practice, under arrangements not sourced here.
- About the format
- This is not a series with its own grammar at all: it is a COLOUR PERMISSION attaching to a vehicle's EXISTING registration mark. A match here says "this string has a shape Cyprus has issued and the vehicle MAY be eligible for a black plate", it is emphatically not a claim that the plate is black.
Legal basis and sources
This plate in your app
The series id is cy-historic-black-2013. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of Cyprus's series:
curl -s https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/cy \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $VEHICLESDB_API_KEY" \ | jq '.series[] | select(.id == "cy-historic-black-2013")'
- Plate image (SVG, sample serial): https://vehiclesdb.com/plates/cy/cy-historic-black-2013.svg
- Blank template, filled on your side: https://vehiclesdb.com/plates/cy/cy-historic-black-2013/template.svg
