Cyprus

Cyprus has been inhabited since at least the ninth millennium BCE, with Neolithic settlements such as Khirokitia attesting to early village life on the island. By the Late Bronze Age, Cyprus had become a significant node in the eastern Mediterranean copper trade, often identified with the Alashiya of Egyptian, Hittite, and Ugaritic correspondence. From around the twelfth century BCE, Mycenaean Greek settlers established a network of city kingdoms, including Salamis, Paphos, Kition, Kourion, and Amathus, which would shape the island's enduringly Hellenic cultural character. Phoenician traders also founded a substantial presence at Kition, and successive overlordships by Assyria, Egypt, and the Achaemenid Persian Empire incorporated the kingdoms as tributaries while leaving local dynasties largely intact.

The campaigns of Alexander the Great brought Cyprus into the Hellenistic world, and after his death the island passed to the Ptolemies of Egypt, who abolished the city kingdoms and ruled it as a province from Paphos. Roman annexation followed in 58 BCE, and Cyprus remained under Roman and then Byzantine administration for more than a millennium, a period during which Christianity took deep root following the missionary journey of the apostles Paul and Barnabas. Arab raids from the seventh century disrupted but did not end Byzantine rule. In 1191 the island was seized by Richard I of England during the Third Crusade and sold first to the Templars and then to the Lusignan dynasty, which governed Cyprus as a Latin kingdom until 1489, when it passed to the Republic of Venice. Ottoman forces conquered the island in 1571 after a brutal siege of Famagusta, and Ottoman rule, which restored the Orthodox Church to a leading civic role and introduced a Turkish Muslim population, lasted three centuries.

In 1878 the Ottoman Empire ceded administration of Cyprus to the United Kingdom under the Cyprus Convention, and Britain formally annexed the island in 1914, designating it a Crown Colony in 1925. The mid twentieth century was dominated by the campaign of the Greek Cypriot majority for enosis, or union with Greece, pursued from 1955 by the EOKA insurgency under George Grivas, while the Turkish Cypriot minority increasingly sought taksim, or partition. The Zurich and London Agreements produced an independent Republic of Cyprus on 16 August 1960, with Archbishop Makarios III as its first president and a power sharing constitution guaranteed by Britain, Greece, and Turkey.

Intercommunal violence broke out in 1963 and 1964, prompting the deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping force that remains on the island. On 15 July 1974 a coup backed by the military junta in Athens overthrew Makarios, and Turkey responded five days later with an invasion that established control over the northern third of the island. The resulting de facto partition was formalised by the unilateral declaration in 1983 of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognised only by Turkey, while the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus continued to administer the south. A 2004 reunification plan brokered by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was rejected in referendum by Greek Cypriots, and the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union the same year, adopting the euro in 2008.

Cyprus today is a unitary presidential republic governed under the 1960 constitution as modified by practice since 1964, with a directly elected president, a unicameral House of Representatives, and continuing internationally backed efforts toward a bizonal, bicommunal federal settlement.