VehiclesDB

Cyprus license plate: Standard 1956

Retired 1956 to 1990. Standard plates for car, van, truck, and bus, issued by Έφορος Μηχανοκινήτων Οχημάτων / Τμήμα Οδικών Μεταφορών (Registrar of Motor Vehicles, Road Transport Department). One of 5 Cyprus license plates.

The two-letter era, running from before the Republic itself existed through to around 1990, on the same unprescribed white-front / yellow-rear basis as its three-letter successor.

Cyprus license plate, Standard 1956 (1956 to 1990), sample UE 829
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Format, years and the law

Format
LL 999, for example UE 829 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

The two letters spell nothing, they simply count upward, plate by plate. The same marks rolled on unchanged through independence in 1960: a registration series that outlived the colonial order that created it.

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
1956 to 1990. No longer issued.
Vehicle class
Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, and bus.
Colours
Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF
About this plate
THE TWO-LETTER ERA. 1956 is a secondary start date and predates the Republic's independence (1960) and the enabling Law (1972), the marks were carried forward across both, which is itself the reason a registration series can outlive the constitutional order that created it and why this file dates the SERIES rather than the STATE.
About the format
Secondary sources split it at 1973 into an unspaced AB123 form and a spaced AB 123 form; that is a TYPOGRAPHIC distinction with no instrument behind it (Κ.Δ.Π. 159/1973's Second Schedule is verbatim identical to Κ.Δ.Π. 66/1984's on plate content, i.e. it prescribes nothing), so the two are modelled as one series with an optional gap rather than as two series divided by an unsourced boundary. No letter set, no digit count and no dimensions were prescribed in this era.

Legal basis and sources

  1. Κ.Δ.Π. 159/1973 (Ε.Ε. Παρ. III(1) Αρ. 1023, 13-7-1973): Δεύτερον Παράρτημα, gazette pages 646-648, plate content unprescribed; Καν. 6(3) the Τ/Ζ prefixes https://www.cylaw.org/KDP/data/1973_1_159.pdf
  2. Κ.Δ.Π. 66/1984, same position restated; Δεύτερον Παράρτημα παρ. 3(γ) the front/rear colours https://www.cylaw.org/KDP/data/1984_1_66.pdf
  3. en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Cyprus

Before and after

Cyprus license plate, Standard 1990 (1990 to 2013) Replaced by Standard 1990 1990 to 2013

This plate in your app

The series id is cy-standard-1956. 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-standard-1956")'
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