Officially praying for rain in Cyprus

After a fairly dry spring, and a long summer, and not much rain in October or November, a lot of people have been praying for rain in Cyprus. We really need it - one of the main reservoirs would run out of water by the end of the year if there was no rain during December.

So the chief Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus apparently ordered all his priests to do some official praying for rain last Sunday. I gather it's part of an optional liturgy, which hasn't been used since the last serious drought in 1998. I would have thought that prayer for rain was fairly common, but apparently not in the Orthodox Church; so much so, that it made headlines not just in Cyprus - here's the Cyprus Weekly article about praying for rain - even the BBC took an interest. Here's their article about Cyprus praying for rain.

So, presumably, all the Orthodox churches around the island had official prayers for rain on Sunday, along with (I hope) much private praying. And God seems to have heard, since the sky turned grey on Monday, it rained Tuesday night, and today we had half an hour of very heavy rain around lunch-time - heavy enough that our roof leaked over the stairs, accumulating at least an inch of water in the hastily-positioned bucket.


Moreoever, the weather site, which has been showing almost unbroken sunshine for weeks, is showing a very different picture today - here's the ten-day forecast for Larnaka (of course, if someone comes across this post in the future it will probably look very different and be totally confusing. However today, 5th December 2007, it's showing rain almost every day)

Towards the end of the rain storm, it eased off a bit and the sun poked through the clouds. I grabbed my camera and headed for a balcony: sure enough, there was a terrific rainbow, even a hint of a second one above: