Page 12 - The Princess Mary's Hospital 124pp book.pdf

CYPRUS IN CONTEXT – THE CYPRUS EMERGENCY: 1955–1959
After the Second World War, the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus was under duress from a resurgent Cyprus Communist Party. The politically ambitious Archbishop Makarios III, elected in 1950 at the early age of 37, launched an emotionally charged campaign for Enosis (union with Greece, a long- standing aspiration of many Greek Cypriots)18 and independence from Britain as a way of re-asserting the Church’s authority and influence in society, and many Greek Cypriots followed his lead. This caused a reactive struggle for Taksim (partition) by many Turkish Cypriots.
Makarios secretly collaborated with a retired Greek Army colonel and very experienced guerrilla fighter, 52-year-old Cypriot-born George Grivas, to help achieve Enosis by military means. Grivas founded the organisation EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kypriou Agonistou, or ‘National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters’) for this purpose. EOKA commenced its operations with a bombing campaign against the British Colonial Administration on 1 April 1955, and the increasingly bitter guerrilla conflict resulted in the declaration of a State of Emergency in November 1955 by newly appointed Governor and Commander-in-Chief Cyprus Field Marshal Sir John Harding19. The developing situation is eloquently described by Lawrence Durrell in his prize-winning 1957 book, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus.
Lest We Forget
The British Cyprus Memorial 1955–1959.
Cyprus - Britain's Grim Legacy (Part 1)
© Granada Television 1984 (see DVD for Part 2)
18 The Cyprus Conspiracy 1999. Chapter 2: The Enemy Within: the rise of the Enosis Campaign.
19 Tabitha Morgan. Sweet and Bitter Island: A History of the British in Cyprus. I B Tauris, 2010. Chapter 13: A Child’s Game of Pretend 1955–58, p 211.
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