On May 23, 1958, Savvas Menicou, a 50-year-old Greek Cypriot laborer, was beaten to death. Menicou had just returned to his home village of Goufes, having spent the day working in the nearby town of Lefkoniko. A mob of local villagers surrounded Menicou as he stepped off from the bus and proceeded to beat him. They eventually bound him to a tree in a nearby churchyard, where they left his body, bloodied and lifeless.
James Trainor, a governmental coroner, in delivering his verdict on June 13, 1958, said that “I have been, I suppose, for the best part of 25 years associated with the law in which time I have met some rather grim cases, but never have I in that period met anything that approaches the savagery and brutality of this case.” Trainor went on to describe the wounds sustained by Menicou , noting that the muscles of his upper arm and back had been “beaten into pulp.” Menicou’s murderers had included not only adults, but as Trainor noted, “among the youths of the age 12 to 20 there are a very large number with this murder on their conscience.”1
Even before the lynching of Menicou , Lefkoniko had developed a notorious reputation among the Security Forces. In December of 1955, Lefkoniko was issued with the first collective fine of the emergency; the 4000 villagers of Lefkoniko had to come up with £2000 after a gang of schoolboys burned down the local post office.2
More egregious, however, was an attack on British soldiers that occurred on October 23, 1956. A group of soldiers of the Highland Light Infantry had taken to playing football on a certain field in Lefkoniko; after the game, the soldiers walked over to the drinking fountain, tired no doubt from the match. An electronically detonated bomb, placed beside the fountain, disemboweled one soldier immediately; a second soldier would die several days later and another four Highlanders were gravely injured.3 The troops sent into Lefkoniko immediately after the explosion rounded up “more than a hundred people for questioning” and “did not conceal their anger”; Nancy Crawshaw, a journalist based in Cyprus for most of the Emergency, contends that “the incident culminated in the familiar pattern of complaints of ill-treatment and claims for damages on the part of the villagers.”4
Such events—the collective fine and the bombing of the Highlanders—fit well into the established paradigm of conflict between the Security Forces on the one hand and the rebels belonging to the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters5 (EOKA) on the other. The EOKA was a Greek Cypriot nationalist guerrilla group fighting to achieve Enosis, or union with the Greek mainland. On April 1, 1955, the EOKA launched the Cyprus Revolt, exploding a number of bombs throughout the island. Over the course of the rebellion, the EOKA not only attacked British soldiers but also murdered 187 “traitors”6—Greek Cypriots who had worked for the government, had given information to the Security Forces, or ignored the EOKA’s instructions. The death of Menicou was distinct, however, in that Menicou was neither a member of the Security Force apparatus nor was he a traitor to the Enosist cause.
Instead, Savvas’ wife, Rodhou S. Menicou, in a letter to the Human Rights Committee, published in the Greek Cypriot newspaper Haravghi, affirmed that Savvas was a nationalist and argued that Savvas had been murdered because of his leftist views:
At the same time, Ms. Menicou praised the Human Rights Committee for having “defended with zeal our people’s human rights which have been violated and trampled upon by the colonialists.”8 She was neither pro-EOKA nor pro-British. Likewise, a Haravghi op-ed piece congratulated the Committee for “having raised a courageous voice of protest” against the British and entreated the Committee to “raise with the same resoluteness and courage your voice against such horrible crimes.”9 The Menicou murder then defies paradigms that cast the Cyprus Emergency as solely a struggle between the British on the one hand and EOKA rebels on the other hand. The Cyprus conflict was multifaceted. Concurrent with that struggle were a series of other conflicts: in this case, the conflict between the Left and Right, not necessarily caused by the EOKA ; in addition, the Cyprus Revolt would see the killing of Greek Cypriot ‘traitors’ by the EOKA as well as intercommunal fighting between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.Those who had killed my husband began to spread the rumor that he was a traitor and this is why he was killed. Do not believe them…my husband was a leftist…he took many hours off his sleep in order to inspire into our children the love for Greece and the freedom of our Cyprus. And yet he was killed.7
The Cyprus Revolt, which resulted in the end of British rule and the declaration in 1960 of an independent Republic of Cyprus, fit into a larger pattern of power transition that has gripped the island since ancient times. Cyprus lies within 40 miles of Turkey’s southern coast and measures about 150 miles from east to west and 60 miles from north to south.10 Given its key location with respect to various ancient Mediterranean trade routes, it is no surprise that Cyprus historically enjoyed only fleeting periods of independence. Mycenaean Greeks had settled in Cyprus by the late Bronze Age, but over the next several centuries, Cyprus would endure Assyrian, Ptolemaic, Egyptian, Roman, Lusignanian, and Venetian rule, before finally being conquered by the Ottomans in 1571.11
Cyprus never actually belonged to the Kingdom of Greece, Greece only having gained independence in 1830. In 1878, the Ottomans, after three centuries of rule, ceded to the British the right to occupy and administer Cyprus, though the island remained under nominal Ottoman sovereignty. Following the Ottoman entry into the Great War on the side of the Central Powers, the British annexed Cyprus in 1914 and a decade later, in 1925, made it a Crown Colony.12 Despite the War Office’s high hopes for Cyprus’ strategic potential, however, the island remained an underfunded colonial backwater. The island had few adequate port facilities and given the excellent facilities available in the Suez Canal zone, there was little need, at least militarily speaking, for the British government to invest heavily in Cyprus.13 In practice, Cyprus had only a “negative strategic significance…for the British Empire”14; it was important to keep Cyprus ou...