The history of Cyprus

Cyprus, the third-largest island in the Mediterranean, lies closer to the coasts of Turkey, Syria and Lebanon than to Greece. Its copper and its position on the sea lanes of the eastern Mediterranean drew a long succession of rulers: Bronze Age kings, Greek and Phoenician city-states, Assyrians, Egyptians and Persians, the Ptolemies, Rome and Byzantium, Crusader kings, Venice, the Ottomans and Britain. Two communities, Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians and Turkish-speaking Muslims, emerged from the Ottoman centuries, and their opposing hopes for the island's future shaped its twentieth century. Independent since 1960, Cyprus has been divided since 1974 between the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus and a Turkish Cypriot administration in the north recognised only by Turkey.

People first reached Cyprus by boat around 10,000 BCE, when the island was home to dwarf species of hippopotamus and elephant. These animals disappeared soon after humans arrived, and at the rock shelter of Akrotiri Aetokremnos their bones lie alongside early tools. By about 8500 BCE farmers from the Levant had brought wheat, barley, sheep, goats, pigs and cattle across the sea, an early offshoot of the Neolithic Revolution. At Shillourokambos archaeologists found a person buried with a cat about 9,500 years ago, among the oldest evidence for a bond between humans and cats.

The best-known Neolithic site is Khirokitia, a village of round stone houses on a hillside in the south, occupied from about 7000 BCE and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its people buried their dead beneath the floors of their homes. Later cultures made pottery, and in the Chalcolithic period, from about 3900 BCE, they carved small cross-shaped figures of picrolite and began to work copper.

Copper made Cyprus rich. In the Late Bronze Age the island, or part of it, was very probably the kingdom the Egyptians and Hittites called Alashiya, whose king exchanged letters with the pharaoh in the Amarna archive of the fourteenth century BCE. Ox-hide shaped copper ingots from Cyprus have been found in shipwrecks off the Turkish coast, and towns such as Enkomi, Kition and Kalavasos grew wealthy on the trade. Cypriot scribes wrote in a script known as Cypro-Minoan, which has not been deciphered.

From the thirteenth century BCE, Greek speakers from the Aegean world of Mycenaean Greece settled on the island, and they kept arriving through the upheavals of the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE. Greek tradition later credited heroes returning from the Trojan War with founding Salamis, Paphos and other towns. The newcomers brought the Greek language, written in a local syllabic script that survived until the Hellenistic age, while some older inhabitants kept their own language, known today as Eteocypriot.

By the eighth century BCE Cyprus was divided among about a dozen small kingdoms, including Salamis, Paphos, Kourion, Soloi, Amathus and Kition. Kition became a city of the Phoenicians from Tyre, while most of the others were Greek. The goddess worshipped at Paphos, later identified with Aphrodite, made the island famous across the Greek world.

The kings kept their thrones by paying tribute to larger powers. In 707 BCE a stele of Assyria's Sargon II recorded the submission of seven Cypriot kings. Egypt's pharaoh Amasis controlled the island for a time in the sixth century, and around 545 BCE the kings accepted the overlordship of the Achaemenid Empire. Most of them joined the Ionian revolt against Persia in 499 BCE, the opening of the Greco-Persian Wars, and were crushed the following year. Evagoras I of Salamis, who reigned from about 411 to 374 BCE, tried to unite the island under Greek leadership and fought Persia for a decade with Athenian help before he too had to submit.

The Cypriot kings went over to Alexander the Great in 333 BCE, and their fleets helped him besiege Tyre. After his death the island was contested by his generals until Ptolemy I took it in 294 BCE. Under the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt the old kingdoms were abolished, and Cyprus was run by a governor from Paphos. The Stoic philosopher Zeno, founder of a school that shaped Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, was born at Kition.

The Roman Republic annexed Cyprus in 58 BCE. Mark Antony briefly handed it back to Cleopatra, but from 30 BCE it was a Roman province again, with Paphos as its capital. Around 45 CE the apostles Paul and Barnabas, himself a Cypriot Jew from Salamis, preached on the island, and the Acts of the Apostles records that the Roman governor Sergius Paulus became a believer. A Jewish revolt in 116 CE was suppressed with great bloodshed, and Jews were afterwards banned from the island. Earthquakes in the fourth century wrecked Salamis and Paphos.

After the division of the Roman world Cyprus belonged to the Byzantine Empire. Salamis was rebuilt as Constantia and became the capital, and in 431 the Council of Ephesus recognised the Church of Cyprus as self-governing, a status it still holds within Orthodox Christianity. Its archbishop gained unusual privileges, including the right to sign in red ink.

From 649 Arab fleets raided the island repeatedly, beginning under the caliph Uthman of the Rashidun Caliphate. Many towns were sacked and inhabitants carried off. In 688 the emperor Justinian II and the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik agreed that Cyprus would be neutral and that its taxes would be shared. This unusual condominium lasted, with interruptions, for nearly three centuries, until the general Nikephoros Phokas restored full Byzantine control in 965. In 1184 the Byzantine noble Isaac Komnenos made himself independent ruler of the island.

During the Crusades, in 1191, Richard I of England was on his way to the Holy Land when ships of his fleet were wrecked off Cyprus and Isaac Komnenos mistreated the survivors. Richard conquered the island in a few weeks, then sold it to the Knights Templar, who handed it back after a revolt. In 1192 it passed to Guy de Lusignan, the former king of Jerusalem, whose family ruled as kings of Cyprus until 1489.

The Lusignan kingdom was a feudal state on the French model. A Catholic nobility and a Latin church sat above an Orthodox Greek peasantry, whose bishops were made subordinate to Latin ones. After the fall of Acre in 1291 Cyprus became the last Crusader outpost in the east, and Famagusta grew rich as a market between Europe and the Levant, its Gothic cathedral built in the style of Reims. Peter I led an attack on Alexandria in 1365. Decline followed: Genoa seized Famagusta in 1373, and in 1426 a Mamluk army from Egypt defeated the Cypriots at Khirokitia and captured King Janus, after which the kingdom paid tribute to the Mamluk Sultanate.

The last Lusignan king, James II, married a Venetian noblewoman, Catherine Cornaro. After his death she reigned alone until 1489, when the Republic of Venice made her abdicate and took the island over. Venice valued Cyprus as a naval base against the Ottomans and built the great star-shaped walls of Nicosia, but it ruled harshly and taxed the islanders heavily.

An Ottoman army landed in 1570, took Nicosia in September after a siege that ended in a massacre, and then besieged Famagusta, which held out until August 1571. Its commander, Marco Antonio Bragadin, was flayed alive after the surrender. The Ottoman Empire abolished the feudal system, expelled the Latin clergy and restored the Orthodox archbishop, who in time became the recognised leader, or ethnarch, of the island's Christians and was responsible for collecting their taxes. Soldiers and settlers from Anatolia formed the beginnings of a Turkish-speaking Muslim community, and some Christians converted to Islam.

Ottoman rule brought long periods of neglect, heavy taxes, plague and famine, and revolts by both Christians and Muslims against oppressive officials. In 1821, when the Greek War of Independence broke out on the mainland, the Ottoman governor had Archbishop Kyprianos and other leading clergy and notables executed in Nicosia to forestall a rising. By 1872 the island had about 144,000 inhabitants, around 100,000 of them Christians and 44,000 Muslims.

In 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, the Ottoman government placed Cyprus under British administration in return for a promise of British support against Russia, though the island formally remained Ottoman. When the Ottomans entered the First World War on Germany's side in 1914, Britain annexed it, and Turkey recognised the annexation in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Cyprus became a crown colony of the British Empire in 1925.

Many Greek Cypriots wanted enosis, union with Greece. In October 1931 protests turned into riots and Government House in Nicosia was burned, and the British responded by suspending the legislative council and restricting political life. Thousands of Cypriots served in British forces in the Second World War. In a church-organised plebiscite in 1950, about 96 per cent of Greek Cypriots who took part voted for enosis, and that year Makarios III became archbishop and the movement's leader. Turkish Cypriots, about a fifth of the population, opposed enosis and came to favour taksim, partition of the island, with the support of Turkey.

In April 1955 EOKA, a Greek Cypriot guerrilla organisation led by George Grivas, began a campaign of bombings and shootings against British rule. The British declared a state of emergency, exiled Makarios to the Seychelles in 1956, and recruited Turkish Cypriots into the police, which deepened hostility between the communities. A Turkish Cypriot underground group, TMT, was formed, and intercommunal killings rose in 1958.

Agreements reached at Zurich and London in 1959 by Britain, Greece, Turkey and the two communities produced a compromise: an independent republic, with enosis and partition both ruled out. Cyprus became independent on 16 August 1960, with Makarios as president and the Turkish Cypriot leader Fazıl Küçük as vice-president, each holding a veto. The constitution fixed the shares of Greek and Turkish Cypriots in parliament, the civil service and the army, and Britain, Greece and Turkey became guarantors with the right to act to restore it. Britain kept two sovereign base areas at Akrotiri and Dhekelia.

The system soon broke down over taxation, separate municipalities and the civil service quotas. In November 1963 Makarios proposed thirteen amendments to the constitution, which Turkish Cypriot leaders and Turkey rejected. In December fighting broke out in Nicosia, an episode Turkish Cypriots remember as Bloody Christmas, and spread across the island. Several hundred people were killed in the following months, most of them Turkish Cypriots, and more than 25,000 Turkish Cypriots moved into armed enclaves. Turkish Cypriot officials left or were excluded from the government, which from then on was run by Greek Cypriots. A United Nations peacekeeping force, UNFICYP, arrived in March 1964 and has remained ever since, and a dividing line through Nicosia, the Green Line, dates from this time. Fresh violence at Kophinou in 1967 brought Greece and Turkey close to war.

In Greece a military junta had seized power in 1967, and it backed Greek Cypriot nationalists who regarded Makarios as having abandoned enosis. On 15 July 1974 the Cypriot National Guard, led by Greek officers, overthrew Makarios and installed Nikos Sampson, a former EOKA gunman, as president. Turkey, invoking its rights as a guarantor power, landed troops on the northern coast on 20 July. Turkey and Turkish Cypriots call this a peace operation to protect the Turkish Cypriot community; the Republic of Cyprus, Greece and most of the international community describe it as an invasion and the subsequent presence as an occupation. The coup collapsed within days, and the junta in Athens fell soon after.

Talks in Geneva failed, and on 14 August Turkish forces launched a second offensive, taking control of about 36 to 37 per cent of the island, including Kyrenia, Famagusta and the north of Nicosia. Thousands were killed on both sides. Counting the violence of 1963–64 and 1974 together, about 1,500 Greek Cypriots and 500 Turkish Cypriots were listed as missing, and a joint committee is still identifying their remains. Roughly 160,000 to 200,000 Greek Cypriots fled or were expelled from the north, and some 40,000 to 60,000 Turkish Cypriots moved from the south to the north, many under a 1975 population exchange agreement. The modern resort quarter of Varosha in Famagusta was fenced off by the Turkish army and left empty.

Makarios returned as president of the Republic of Cyprus at the end of 1974 and remained in office until his death in 1977. The south rebuilt rapidly: refugees were rehoused, and tourism, shipping and financial services made the Republic one of the more prosperous economies in the Mediterranean. In the north, a Turkish Federated State of Cyprus was proclaimed in 1975, and on 15 November 1983 its leader Rauf Denktaş declared the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. UN Security Council Resolution 541 called the declaration legally invalid, and only Turkey recognises the state, which depends heavily on Turkish aid and has received many settlers from Turkey. Turkish Cypriots, for their part, point to the experience of 1963 to 1974 and to their international isolation since.

UN-led negotiations have aimed since the late 1970s at a bizonal, bicommunal federation, a formula still endorsed by the Security Council. In 2003 the Turkish Cypriot authorities opened crossing points on the Green Line, and for the first time in decades people could visit the other side. The most detailed settlement, the Annan Plan, named after the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, was put to separate referendums on 24 April 2004. About 65 per cent of Turkish Cypriots voted in favour and about three quarters of Greek Cypriots voted against, many objecting to its terms on property, security and the continued presence of Turkish troops. A week later, on 1 May 2004, Cyprus joined the European Union as a divided island, with EU law suspended in the north until a settlement.

The Republic adopted the euro in 2008. Its oversized banking sector was hit hard by the Greek debt crisis, and in 2013 an international bailout imposed losses on large deposits in the two biggest banks, one of which was closed. The economy recovered later in the decade, though the island's citizenship-for-investment programme and its links with Russian money drew criticism and the programme was ended in 2020. Discoveries of natural gas off the southern coast from 2011 added a new source of friction with Turkey, which disputes Cypriot maritime claims.

Reunification talks between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders collapsed at Crans-Montana in Switzerland in 2017. Ersin Tatar, elected Turkish Cypriot leader in 2020, and the Turkish government argued for a two-state solution, which the Republic of Cyprus, Greece, the EU and the UN rejected, and formal negotiations stalled. Nikos Christodoulides became president of the Republic in February 2023. In October 2025 Tufan Erhürman, who favours resuming talks on a federal settlement, defeated Tatar with about 63 per cent of the vote. In parliamentary elections in May 2026 the centre-right Democratic Rally remained the largest party, while the far-right ELAM became joint third and several small centrist parties lost all their seats.