It's a holiday destination with beaches and antiquities set in the Mediterranean Sea 70 km south of Turkey , the only country to recognise it. In its population was , This is not a political endorsement of claims by either side in the dispute. For travel information regarding the remainder of Cyprus, visit the Cyprus article. Cyprus has been contested for millennia by rival nations, who sought its minerals, cotton and control of sea lanes between Europe and the Levant.
Turkey was a relative newcomer to this dogfight, as it was only by the 16th century that the Ottomans had substantial control of the mainland and could expand into a maritime empire. They captured Rhodes in and their next target was Cyprus, where the Venetians were ensconced. That terrible assault succeeded in and is the background to Shakespeare's Othello. The Ottomans retained Cyprus for years and many Turks settled here, especially in the north, but overall there remained a Greek majority population.
Mainland Greece and almost all its islands likewise fell under Ottoman rule, but by the 19th century that empire was in decline, and Greece won its independence in That was the springboard for the Megali campaign to regain all the "Hellenistic" territories, which included Crete, Cyprus, and just about every trading port around the east Mediterranean. There were vicious wars that threatened to de-stabilise a much wider region code for "let the Russians in" so the western powers stepped in, and in Britain took over Cyprus though still acknowledging the Ottomans as nominal rulers.
The post-war treaty of led to extensive population exchanges between Greece and Turkey, but this didn't affect Cyprus, where the two communities continued to detest each other. Throughout all this, Greek Cypriots dreamed not of independence but enosis , a merger with mainland Greece. After World War II Britain's colonies moved towards independence but here one community insisted on enosis while the other imagined that Cyprus would joyfully become Turkish the minute the Union Flag was hauled down.
The outcome was independence on 15 Aug Britain retained two large military territories on the south coast, but there was no partition, rather a power-sharing agreement and noble declarations about protecting the rights of minorities. One crucial clause in the peace deal gave Britain, Greece and Turkey the right to intervene militarily "to restore the status quo" in case the deal was overthrown. But power-sharing was dysfunctional from the outset and community violence continued; a series of peace initiatives were launched and sank.
