Several thousand people turned out for Cyprus’s first gay pride parade in its capital Nicosia on Saturday to call for equal rights and progress on a bill for civil partnership.

Organizers Accept LGBT Cyprus hailed the event as a ‘huge success’ and said that the turnout shows that Cypriots are shedding their conservative views.

After the parade, organisers said on Twitter: ‘Cyprus is changing. Thank you all.’

Incyprus quoted Alecos Modinos, an 81-year old veteran gay activist, as telling the crowd gathered in Nicosia’s Eleftheria (Freedom) Square: ‘I am incredibly moved. A dream of 25 years has come true.’

In the 1990s, Modinos took a case to the European Court of Human Rights which led to the decriminalization of homosexuality in Cyprus in 1998. The anti-gay law is a vestige from the Mediterranean island nation’s British colonial past.

Scuffles broke out between a group of some 200 Orthodox Christian protesters including clerics – who denounced the event they called ‘shameful’ – and the police as they tried to break a police cordon and approach the parade, the Associated Press reported.

The influential Cyprus Orthodox Christian church had earlier condemned the parade and issued a strongly-worded statement saying it considers homosexuality ‘the human being’s fall from grace and an illness and not a natural way of life or choice.’

The gay pride parade is reportedly one of the largest marches seen in Cyprus in several years, and notably bigger than protest gatherings over Cyprus’s tumultuous financial bailout in 2013.