Long before borders were drawn on modern maps, Greeks lived on the southern shore of the Black Sea. They called this land Pontos, from the Greek word for "sea." For nearly three thousand years the Pontian Greeks built cities, churches, monasteries and trading routes along that coast, from Sinope in the west to Trebizond in the east.

They spoke a Greek of their own, Pontiaka, a living branch of the Greek language that preserved sounds and forms used in the time of Homer. They wrote in Greek, prayed in Greek and traded across an empire of three continents in Greek. Pontos was not a province of someone else's story. Pontos was a homeland in its own right.

The heart of Pontos was Trebizond (modern Trabzon), a port city carved between mountains and the sea. After Constantinople fell to the Crusaders in 1204, Trebizond became the seat of its own Greek empire: the Empire of Trebizond, the last surviving fragment of Byzantium. It stood for two hundred and fifty-seven years, longer than any other Byzantine successor state, until it finally fell in 1461.

High in the cliffs above Trebizond, founded in 386 AD, stood the Monastery of Panagia Soumelá, a sanctuary built into a sheer rock face, a place of pilgrimage for every Pontian regardless of where life later took them. Sumela is more than architecture. It is the symbol that Pontian faith and identity were carved into the mountain itself.

Above the empire of Trebizond flew a banner that has never left Pontian memory: the double-headed eagle, one head looking east, one looking west. The eagle did not fall when Trebizond fell. It simply waited.

Between 1914 and 1923, the Pontian Greek population of Asia Minor was systematically destroyed. Villages were burned. Men, women and children were marched into the interior on death convoys. Churches were stripped, schools were closed, the language was forbidden. By the end, an estimated 353,000 Pontian Greeks had been killed.

In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne sealed what the violence had already begun: a forced population exchange. Those who had survived were uprooted from a homeland their families had lived in for almost three thousand years. They were given no choice and no return.

Greece officially recognised the Pontian Greek Genocide in 1994. Cyprus followed in 2006. 19 May is the day of remembrance. We name the date because forgetting is the second exile.

The survivors carried what could be carried, icons, prayer books, recipes, lullabies, and a language that refused to die. Many went to mainland Greece. Others crossed to the islands. And many came here, to Cyprus.

In Cyprus they found a Greek-speaking people, an Orthodox faith, and a coast that looked enough like the one they had lost to begin to feel like home. They did not erase Pontos. They folded it into Cypriot life. The lyra, the small bowed instrument of the Black Sea, found its place beside the Cypriot bouzouki. The Serra, the fast, masculine, defiant war dance of the Pontian men, found its place beside the local zeibekiko. Pontian feasts, Pontian saints' days, and Pontian Greek itself are still spoken, danced and remembered across the island today.

In Pafos, on the western edge of Cyprus, a Cypriot-Pontian community grew quietly through generations, small, close-knit, faithful to its origins, and proudly part of the city around it. Names from Trebizond and Sumela live on in baptisms here. Pontian weddings still open with the lyra. The Serra is still danced on 19 May.

This is the soil our club grew from. Not a marketing story. A family story, built by people whose grandparents arrived here with nothing, and whose grandchildren now wear the badge on a Saturday afternoon in front of their own town.

First established in 2009 as Chrysomilia FC, the club gave our community a local voice on the pitch. Reborn today as Incentive Eagles FC, that foundation now takes flight under a modern identity built for where we are going.

The double-headed eagle flew over Byzantium. It flew over the Empire of Trebizond from 1204 to 1461. It flew over every Pontian flag carried into exile. It flies, now, over Pafos in 2026.

It did not fall in 1461. It did not fall in 1923. It does not fall on a Saturday afternoon. Not when our players run out, not when our supporters stand, not when our community gathers. The eagle is older than this club. The club exists to carry the eagle forward.

We are the Eagles because we descend from people who, when they had every reason to fall, did not.