Today marks the 48th anniversary of a coup on the island of Cyprus against Archbishop Makarios and his democratically elected government.
The coup was engineered by the military junta then ruling Greece with an iron fist, and aimed to neutralize, and even assassinate Archbishop Makarios, in order to install a puppet regime.
The coup, its accompanying fraternal carnage and Archbishop Makarios’ escape from the east Mediterranean island served as the long-desired pretext by Turkey to invade Cyprus five days later.
Roughly one-third of the island republic remains illegally occupied by the Turkish military today, which propped up a Turkish Cypriot pseudo-state in 1983.