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Cyprus under Archbishop Makarios III – President 16 August 1960 – 15 July 1974
1974 Silver 37mm (30.04 grams)
Reference: X# M8 (Engraver: B. Phalireas)
•ΑΡΧΙΕΠΙΣΚΟΠΟΣ•ΜΑΚΑΡΙΟΣ•Γ• ΠΡΟΕΔΡΟΣ• ΚΥΠΡΙΑΚΗΣ• ΔΗΜΟΚΡΑΤΙΑΣ•, Archbishop facing left and wearing clerical heed-dress dignitary’s veil.
1974, Crowned Bicephalous (double-headed) eagle.
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The title archimandrite (Greek: ἀρχιμανδρίτης, romanized: archimandritēs), primarily used in the Eastern Orthodox and the Eastern Catholic churches, originally referred to a superior abbot (hegumenos, Greek: ἡγούμενος, present participle of the verb meaning to lead) whom a bishop appointed to supervise several ‘ordinary’ abbots and monasteries, or to the abbot of some especially great and important monastery.
It is also used purely as a title of honour, with no connection to any actual monastery, and is bestowed on clergy as a mark of respect or gratitude for service to the Church. This particular sign of respect is only given to those priests who have taken vows of celibacy, that is monks. Distinguished married clergy may receive the title of archpriest.
 Makarios III (Greek: Μακάριος Γ΄; born Michael Christodoulou Mouskos (Greek: Μιχαήλ Χριστοδούλου Μούσκος); 13 August 1913 – 3 August 1977) was a Greek Cypriot clergyman and politician who served as the Archbishop and Primate of the autocephalous Church of Cyprus (1950-1977) and as the first President of Cyprus (1960-1977). In his three terms as president he survived four assassination attempts and a coup d’état. He is widely regarded by Greek Cypriots as the Father of the Nation or “Ethnarch”.
Makarios and the Cyprus problem (1964-1977)
The political landscape in Cyprus remained intractable. UN peacekeeping operations (UNFICYP) commenced in 1964 and helped to soothe, but not solve, the situation. Makarios continued his high-profile neutrality, but ultimately failed either to reassure the Turkish Cypriots that they were safe in an independent Cyprus, or to convince the Greek Cypriots that independence was a satisfactory alternative to assimilation within a Greater Greece.
President Makarios, seeking a fresh mandate from his constituency, announced in January 1968 that elections would be held during February. Makarios received 220,911 votes (about 96 percent), and his opponent, Takis Evdokas, who ran on a platform for unification with Greece, received 8,577 votes. Even though there were 16,215 abstentions, Makarios’ overwhelming victory was seen as a massive endorsement of his personal leadership and of an independent Cyprus. At his investiture, the president stated that the Cyprus problem could not be solved by force, but had to be worked out within the framework of the UN. He also said that he and his followers wanted to live peacefully in a unitary state where all citizens enjoyed equal rights. Some Cypriots opposed Makarios’ conciliatory stance (and there was an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate him in 1970).
In 1967, a military junta seized power in Athens, and the relationship between the regime and Makarios was tense. Makarios held that the regime undermined his authority by supporting paramilitary organizations committed to enosis.
During the summer of 1971, tension built up between the two Cypriot communities, and incidents became more numerous. Sometime in the late summer or early autumn, Grivas (who had attacked Makarios as a traitor in an Athens newspaper) returned secretly to the island and began to rebuild his guerrilla organization, which became known as the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston B, aka EOKA B). Three new newspapers advocating enosis were also established; all of these activities were funded by the military junta in Greece.
The junta probably would have agreed to some form of partition similar to the Acheson Plan to settle the Cyprus question, but it faced rejection by Makarios. The overthrow of Makarios became the primary objective, and the junta backed Grivas toward that end. From hiding, Grivas directed terrorist attacks and propaganda assaults that shook the Makarios government[citation needed], but the president remained both a powerful and popular leader.
Relations between Nicosia and Athens were so bad that the colonels of the Greek junta, recognizing that they had Makarios in a perilous position, issued an ultimatum to him. They demanded that he purge his government of ministers who had been critical of the junta. Mass demonstrations proved that Makarios had the people behind him. In the end, however, Makarios bowed to Greek pressure and reshuffled the cabinet.
Another element working against Makarios was the fact that most officers of the Cypriot National Guard were Greek regulars who supported the junta, and they embraced its desire to remove him from office and achieve some degree of enosis. The veteran Grivas also continued to be a threat to the archbishop. He remained powerful and to some extent was independent of the junta that had permitted his return to Cyprus. While the Greek colonels were at times prepared to make a deal with Turkey about Cyprus, Grivas was ferociously opposed to any arrangement that did not lead to complete enosis.
In the spring of 1972, Makarios faced an attack from another quarter. The three bishops of the Church of Cyprus demanded that he resign as president, stating that his temporal duties violated canon law. Makarios foiled the three bishops and had them defrocked in the summer of 1973. Before choosing their replacements, he increased the number of bishops to five, thereby reducing the power of individual bishops (see ecclesiastical coup).
As time progressed Grivas’ pursuit of enosis through guerrilla tactics with the use of the EOKA-B’s paramilitary organisation failed to force Makarios to follow the policy of self-determination-union with Greece and led to a period of armed civil war in Cyprus among the Greek-Cypriot community. By the end of 1973 Makarios forces had won the civil struggle and Grivas was in a desperate position. In November 1973, Dimitrios Ioannidis, the hardliner nationalist brigadier, overthrew Georgios Papadopoulos (Greece’s President since 1967) and established the Second Junta, with himself as the “invisible dictator”. Grivas tried to contact the new regime in Greece in the end of 1973; but Ioannides refused to give any immediate indication as to what his intentions in Cyprus were. On 27 January 1974, Grivas died of a heart attack, uncertain to the end of Ioannides’ plans (The Tragic Duel and the Betrayal of Cyprus, 2011).
Meanwhile Makarios took advantage of Grivas’ demise by granting an amnesty to the dead leader’s followers. He hoped and believed that with Grivas gone, EOKA-B would disappear as a guerrilla force and could be politically tamed. Numerous EOKA-B members did actually accept the amnesty’s terms, but this merely increased the hardliners’ influence within the remainder of the movement. Ioannides finally disclosed his aims: he imposed on the organisation a secret memorandum, by which EOKA-B would be committed to deposing Makarios.
Deposition and return
On 3 May 1974, Makarios sent the Greek government a letter that identified certain Greek military officers stationed in Cyprus as undermining the Cypriot government. The Greek regime responded that it would withdraw the officers in question. In the second half of June 1974, Makarios decided to take the initiative and challenge Athens directly. He believed that he could eliminate the junta’s control of Cyprus by forcing the Cypriot National Guard to remain loyal to himself. On 2 July 1974 he wrote to the Athens colonels a letter which demanded that all Greek officers depart from the island within 19 days. Greek Foreign Minister Spyridon Tetenes suggested, as a compromise, that Makarios personally select the substitute officers from a roster of Greek officers; but this was something that Makarios refused to countenance. On 11 July, Glafkos Klerides (by this stage the speaker of the Cypriot parliament) visited Makarios in an unsuccessful attempt to promote a solution.
Four days later, Ioannides took Makarios by surprise by organizing a coup d’état in Nicosia at 8.15AM, when Makarios’ forces were off guard. Makarios was in Paphos and was rescued by a British helicopter. He fled Cyprus when the pro-Greek forces took control of the whole of the island; at first there were false reports that he had been slain (cf. The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 July 1974, p. 1). Nikos Sampson, a Nicosia-based newspaper editor and parliamentarian with a long-standing commitment to enosis, was installed as president in Makarios’ stead.
Speaking to the UN Security Council on 19 July, Makarios denounced the coup as an “invasion”, engineered by the Greek military junta, which “violated the internal peace of Cyprus”. Five hours after Makarios’ address to the Security Council, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus began, taking Ioannides by surprise. Under the terms of the Treaty of Guarantee, Britain, Greece and Turkey were entitled to co-operate in order to intervene with the purpose of restoring the constitution of the island.
At this time the Greek junta was imploding, and the British government (led since February 1974 by Harold Wilson) was facing the constitutional uncertainty of a hung parliament; moreover, according to the Greek diplomat Ange Vlachos, while in London Makarios lobbied for the British military not to intervene as a guarantor power. The testimony of Vlachos is not supported by the confidential minutes of the meeting of Makarios and Prime Minister Wilson on 17 July 1974. According to the minutes, Makarios urged Wilson to convey to the Turkish Prime Minister, Bulent Ecevit, “what practical measures can be taken. It is against the Turkish interests for Cyprus to become part of Greece.”
The invasion of Cyprus by Turkey occurred on 20 July, five days after the coup. As of 2020 Northern Cyprus remains occupied by the Turkish Army, despite the constitution and presidency having been restored. To Turks and Turkish Cypriots the invasion is still known as a “peace operation”, designed to protect the Turkish Cypriot community.
Sampson’s presidency was short-lived, because the regime of Ioannides in Athens collapsed only a few days after the Turkish invasion. It was noted at the time that Turkey threatened to invade Greece, and that the colonels suddenly had to concentrate on trying to defend the country, rather than staying in power. The regime’s failure to predict, let alone to thwart, Turkish intervention had destroyed its power at home. Unsupported, Sampson resigned on 23 July and the presidency passed to Glafkos Klerides. Makarios remained in London for five months; then, having succeeded in securing international recognition that his administration was the rightful government of the whole island, he returned to Cyprus and focused solely on restoring Cypriot territorial integrity. He was not successful, and Turkey has remained as an occupying power ever since, with the political, military and diplomatic status of the island unresolved.
 Cyprus, officially the Republic of Cyprus, is an island country in the Eastern Mediterranean and the third largest and third most populous island in the Mediterranean. Cyprus is located south of Turkey, west of Syria and Lebanon, northwest of Israel, north of Egypt, and southeast of Greece.
The earliest known human activity on the island dates to around the 10th millennium BC. Archaeological remains from this period include the well-preserved Neolithic village of Khirokitia, and Cyprus is home to some of the oldest water wells in the world. Cyprus was settled by Mycenaean Greeks in two waves in the 2nd millennium BC. As a strategic location in the Middle East, it was subsequently occupied by several major powers, including the empires of the Assyrians, Egyptians and Persians, from whom the island was seized in 333 BC by Alexander the Great. Subsequent rule by Ptolemaic Egypt, the Classical and Eastern Roman Empire, Arab caliphates for a short period, the French Lusignan dynasty and the Venetians, was followed by over three centuries of Ottoman rule between 1571 and 1878 (de jure until 1914).
 Cyprus was placed under British administration based on the Cyprus Convention in 1878 and was formally annexed by Britain in 1914. While Turkish Cypriots made up 18% of the population, the partition of Cyprus and creation of a Turkish state in the north became a policy of Turkish Cypriot leaders and Turkey in the 1950s. Turkish leaders for a period advocated the annexation of Cyprus to Turkey as Cyprus was considered an “extension of Anatolia” by them; while, since the 19th century, the majority Greek Cypriot population and its Orthodox church had been pursuing union with Greece, which became a Greek national policy in the 1950s. Following nationalist violence in the 1950s, Cyprus was granted independence in 1960. In 1963, the 11-year intercommunal violence between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots started, which displaced more than 25,000 Turkish Cypriots and brought the end of Turkish Cypriot representation in the republic. On 15 July 1974, a coup d’état was staged by Greek Cypriot nationalists and elements of the Greek military junta in an attempt at enosis, the incorporation of Cyprus into Greece. This action precipitated the Turkish invasion of Cyprus on 20 July, which led to the capture of the present-day territory of Northern Cyprus in the following month, after a ceasefire collapsed, and the displacement of over 150,000 Greek Cypriots and 50,000 Turkish Cypriots. A separate Turkish Cypriot state in the north was established by unilateral declaration in 1983; the move was widely condemned by the international community, with Turkey alone recognizing the new state. These events and the resulting political situation are matters of a continuing dispute.
 The Republic of Cyprus has de jure sovereignty over the entire island, including its territorial waters and exclusive economic zone, with the exception of the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, which remain under British control according to the London and Zürich Agreements. However, the Republic of Cyprus is de facto partitioned into two main parts: the area under the effective control of the Republic, located in the south and west, and comprising about 59% of the island’s area; and the north, administered by the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, covering about 36% of the island’s area. Another nearly 4% of the island’s area is covered by the UN buffer zone. The international community considers the northern part of the island as territory of the Republic of Cyprus occupied by Turkish forces. The occupation is viewed as illegal under international law, amounting to illegal occupation of EU territory since Cyprus became a member of the European Union.
Cyprus is a major tourist destination in the Mediterranean. With an advanced, high-income economy and a very high Human Development Index, the Republic of Cyprus has been a member of the Commonwealth since 1961 and was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement until it joined the European Union on 1 May 2004. On 1 January 2008, the Republic of Cyprus joined the eurozone.
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