🏺 Cyprus: History

Picture an island that a metallic element is named after, where according to Hesiod the goddess of love was born out of sea foam, where an English king held a wedding only because the ship carrying his bride was wrecked there - and where a border still runs through the capital, guarded by UN soldiers.

Welcome to Cyprus. This is the story of the third largest island in the Mediterranean, so unluckily placed that every empire that ever existed nearby wanted it.

Chapter 1: A Cat, a Well, and the Island That Gave Copper Its Name

People have lived on Cyprus for at least ten thousand years. The village of Choirokoitia, from the end of the seventh millennium BC, had round stone houses and is on the UNESCO list today.

From one grave at Shillourokambos comes a find that had the textbooks rewritten: a human skeleton and beside it, carefully laid out, the skeleton of a cat, nine and a half thousand years old. Until then the oldest evidence of cat domestication was Egyptian and four thousand years younger. What is more, cats did not live wild on Cyprus - somebody must have brought this one over by boat.

Real wealth came in the Bronze Age. Cyprus had copper, in such quantity that it was exported all round the Mediterranean. The Latin *cuprum*, from which come the German Kupfer and the English copper, derives from the name of the island: *aes cyprium*, "metal from Cyprus". The island is thus one of the few places in the world after which a chemical element is named.

Around 1200 BC Greeks returning from Troy sailed in, founded royal cities and brought the Greek language that is still spoken here.

Chapter 2: Aphrodite, a Stone, and a Sanctuary Half the Mediterranean Walked To

According to Hesiod, Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, was born of the sea foam off the Cypriot coast. The Greeks called her Kypris, the Cyprian, and the place of her birth is still pointed out: the rock formation Petra tou Romiou by the road between Paphos and Limassol.

Her chief sanctuary stood at Palaipaphos and was one of the most important places of pilgrimage in the ancient world - people came from all over Greece and Rome. The odd thing about it is what stood inside: no statue of the goddess, but a black conical stone. She was worshipped in a form nobody today would take for a goddess of beauty. That stone can still be seen in the museum by the excavations.

The island changed masters one after another: Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians. In 332 BC the Cypriot kings went over to Alexander the Great, after him Ptolemaic Egypt, and in 58 BC Rome. Under the Romans the capital was Paphos, and the mosaic floors people still travel there for were laid.

In AD 45 the apostle Paul landed on the island with Barnabas, who was a Cypriot. Cyprus thereby became the first country in the world governed by a Christian. Legend has it that in Paphos Paul was first flogged, for safety's sake, at a column that is shown there.

Chapter 3: Byzantium, a Kingdom, and a King Who Married Here Because of a Storm

After the empire was divided, Cyprus fell to Byzantium and stayed with it for nearly eight hundred years. Most of the monasteries in the Troodos mountains date from then - and so does a peculiar building type: the mountain churches have a second, enormous pitched roof built over them that looks like a barn. It protected them from snow, and that is why frescoes survived beneath it that survived nowhere else in the Mediterranean. Ten such churches are on the UNESCO list.

In 1191 the English king Richard the Lionheart was on his way to the Third Crusade. Off the Cypriot coast the ship carrying his betrothed Berengaria and his sister was nearly wrecked. The local ruler treated them badly, Richard lost his temper, landed, and conquered the island in a matter of weeks. Then he held his wedding at Limassol - Berengaria is the only English queen who probably never set foot in England.

Richard promptly sold Cyprus to the Templars, who gave it back, and it ended up with the French house of Lusignan, who ruled here for three hundred years. They built Gothic cathedrals that look as though somebody had left them in the Mediterranean by mistake - they are genuine northern French buildings, only in yellow stone and in thirty-five degrees of heat.

After them came Venice, which fortified the island. Around Nicosia the Venetians built a star-shaped fortress with eleven bastions, one of the most modern defences of its day. They built it in three years and lost it in 1570.

Chapter 4: Three Hundred Years Under the Ottomans

In 1570 the Ottomans took the island. Nicosia fell after seven weeks; Famagusta held out for ten months against many times its numbers, and after the surrender the Turkish commander had its defender Marcantonio Bragadin flayed alive - a story still told in Venice, and the reason Bragadin has a tomb in a Venetian church containing that skin.

The Ottomans ruled for three hundred years. They turned cathedrals into mosques - which is why the Gothic cathedral in Famagusta and the one in Nicosia still have a slender minaret beside them, a sight you will not see anywhere else. They brought Turkish settlers to the island and thereby laid the foundation of the double population that lives here to this day.

They also abolished the Latin church and restored the Orthodox archbishop, whom they additionally made the political representative of the Christians. That decision will still have consequences in the twentieth century.

In 1878 the Ottomans leased the island to Britain in return for support against Russia. The British annexed it in 1914 and made it a crown colony in 1925.

Chapter 5: Enosis, Independence, and the Year 1974

For most of the British era, Greek Cypriots wanted *enosis* - union with Greece. Turkish Cypriots, about a fifth of the population, were fundamentally opposed. From 1955 the organisation EOKA waged an armed struggle against the British.

In 1960 the Republic of Cyprus came into being as an independent state, with a constitution dividing power between the two communities and guaranteed by Greece, Turkey and Britain. Archbishop Makarios III became president - head of church and state at once. The constitution worked for three years, then fell apart, and in 1964 the first UN mission arrived.

In July 1974 the Greek military junta staged a coup on Cyprus with the aim of joining the island to Greece. Five days later Turkey intervened militarily and occupied the northern third of the island. Over a hundred and fifty thousand Greek Cypriots fled south, over fifty thousand Turkish Cypriots north. The island split in two along a line called the Green Line - named, they say, after the green pencil a British commander used to draw it on a map.

In 1983 the north declared its own state, recognised by Turkey alone. Between the two parts lies a buffer zone patrolled by the UN, one of the longest-running missions in the organisation's history.

The strongest image of that division is Varosha, a district of Famagusta. It was the most modern resort in the eastern Mediterranean, visited by Brigitte Bardot and Elizabeth Taylor. In 1974 its inhabitants left within a few hours, and a fence has surrounded it ever since. The hotels have stood empty there for fifty years, with the fittings of 1974 inside. Part of the district opened in 2020, but a large part remains closed.

Chapter 6: Nicosia, the Last Divided Capital

Nicosia is today the only divided capital city in the world. The border runs straight through the old town inside the Venetian walls: streets that look perfectly normal end at a concrete block, sandbags or sheet metal.

Since 2003 you can cross on foot. The crossing in the middle of the Ledra shopping street opened in 2008 and thousands of people use it daily. On one side you pay in euros, on the other in Turkish lira, and between them lie a few dozen metres of zone where photography is forbidden.

Among other things, an international airport was left in the buffer zone, closed in 1974 in mid-operation. A Cyprus Airways aircraft that never took off still stands on the apron.

The Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004. Formally the whole island joined; in practice European law is not applied in the north. A referendum on unification was held just beforehand: Turkish Cypriots approved it, Greek Cypriots rejected it, and the island joined divided.

Chapter 7: The Cyprus Under Your Feet

Cyprus has a little over a million inhabitants and between three hundred and three hundred and forty sunny days a year, the most in Europe.

The Troodos mountains are not ordinary mountains. They are an ophiolite - a piece of oceanic crust and upper mantle, pushed above the surface by a collision of plates. Geologists come here from all over the world, because everywhere else this layer is several kilometres under the sea. So you are walking, literally, on the sea floor at a height of nearly two kilometres.

From here also comes Commandaria, a sweet dessert wine that has been made without interruption since at least the twelfth century and is considered the oldest wine still produced under a constant name in the world. It is said to have supplied Richard the Lionheart's wedding, and a French king is supposed to have called it the apostle of wines.

And one more commodity: the carob, whose pods were exported so profitably for centuries that they were called black gold. A carob seed has such a consistent weight that goldsmiths used it as a counterweight - and from its Greek name *keration* comes the word carat.

The island has two British military bases which are still British overseas territory, so on Cyprus you will find a piece of the United Kingdom with road signs in miles.

They drive on the left, they speak Greek and Turkish, they pay in euros and lira, and in the mountains stand churches that look like barns. Cyprus is used to being several things at once - it has been doing it for ten thousand years.