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Was reading about this earlier and figured I'd share since it's the anniversary today.

The fleet left Constantinople on 27 June and reached Cyprus on 1 July.

Spotted off Paphos first, then sailed down past Limassol and landed at Larnaca a couple days later. No resistance at the beach. The Venetians just pulled back into the walled cities.

Nicosia held out for 45 days. When it fell, they killed basically everyone. 20,000 dead. They even killed the pigs because Muslims considered them unclean. Only women and boys were kept alive for the slave markets.

Kyrenia gave up immediately after that.

Then Famagusta. 8,500 Venetians vs a force of 200,000.

They held for 11 months. Ran out of gunpowder, ran out of food, surrendered on 1 August 1571.

The Ottoman commander Lala Mustafa Pasha said they'd be allowed to leave peacefully. Then he found out some Muslim prisoners had been executed during the siege.

So he had the Venetian commander Marco Antonio Bragadin flayed alive. They skinned him, stuffed the skin and paraded it around Cyprus and then shipped it to Constantinople.

The disturbing part is that a lot of Greek Cypriots were fine with the Ottomans showing up because the Venetians had been fu***** them up with taxes since 1489 and treated Orthodox Christians like second-class citizens.

Ottoman rule wasn't great either but at that point anything was better than Venice.

Europe did react. Spain, Venice and the Pope formed the Holy League and smashed the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto a few months later.

But, it didn't matter because the Ottomans rebuilt their whole navy in a year. Venice signed a peace deal in 1573 and Cyprus stayed Ottoman until the British came in 1878.

Sultan Selim II was the guy who ordered the invasion. His nickname was "Selim the Sot" because he was a massive drunk. Some say one of the reason he wanted Cyprus was the wine.

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Image source: Camocio's 1574 engraving of the siege of Nicosia, Wikimedia Commons.

Sources: CVAR Severis Foundation archives (Senator Giacomo Diedo's contemporary account), Wikipedia timeline of Cypriot history, and David Abulafia's The Great Sea.

*edit: Added the missing quotes

On 7 June 1958, a bomb exploded at the entrance of the Turkish Press Office in Nicosia. The bombing was immediately blamed on Greek Cypriots. Turkish Cypriot mobs responded by looting and burning Greek Cypriot shops and homes across the capital, marking a turning point in the ethno-sectarian violence that would scar the island for the next two decades.

Twenty-six years later, in a 1984 interview for the British ITV documentary End of Empire: Cyprus, Britain's Grim Legacy (produced by Granada TV), Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktaş admitted in his own words that the bomb had been placed by Turkish extremists.

His direct quote from the documentary:

>"There was an explosion at the information bureau to the Turkish consulate. A crowd had already gathered there, a crowd of the Turkish Cypriot community. And they almost immediately decided that Greeks had done it and they were swearing vengeance against the Greeks and so on."

And, on the same programme, former Turkish diplomat Emin Dirvana confirmed what had really happened:

>"A friend of mine, whose name must still be kept secret, was to confess to me that he had put this little bomb in the doorway in order to create an atmosphere of tension so that people would know that the Turkish Cypriots mattered."

Denktaş had actually admitted the same thing earlier, in 1964, to the Turkish newspaper Milliyet. The Turkish Cypriot ambassador to Nicosia at the time, Emin Dirvana, also wrote in Milliyet on 15 June 1964:

>"I was informed that on 7 June 1958 a bomb had been planted in the Turkish press office in Nicosia by persons who, as was later established, had nothing to do with the Greek Cypriots. The Turks of Nicosia were then incited to be overwhelmed by holy indignation and perpetrated acts similar to those committed on 6 and 7 September 1955 in Istanbul."

According to a later Special Branch report of the colonial police, the bomb "was planted by the Turks as a pretext for the arson and looting" that followed.

This is widely regarded as a key piece of evidence on how the intercommunal violence that culminated in the 1974 division was deliberately inflamed from within the Turkish Cypriot side.

Sources:

• Wikipedia, Cypriot intercommunal violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypriot_intercommunal_violence
• Andrekos Varnava, "Reinterpreting Macmillan's Cyprus Policy, 1957–1960", The Cyprus Review, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 79–106: https://www.cyprusreview.org/index.php/cr/article/download/183/147
• Arif Hasan Tahsin, He Anodos Tou Denktas Sten Koryphe, 2001

Video:

• ITV Britain's Grim Legacy clip with Denktaş admitting Turkish guilt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1tUGnWqw2M
• Longer documentary excerpt with academic context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVhM97thI4c

Image:

• Rauf Denktaş photo, free for reuse (TRNC President's Office): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rauf_Denktash.jpg

Today is June 24, and on this exact date in 2019, the Nicosia Criminal Court sentenced Nikos Metaxas to seven life sentences, making it the largest sentence ever handed down in Cyprus.

He was a 35-year-old Greek Cypriot army officer in the National Guard who confessed to murdering five women and two children between September 2016 and August 2018.

All of his adult victims were foreign migrant workers he had met on the dating app Badoo. The children killed were the daughters of two of his victims.

Some facts about the case:

• In April 2019, a tourist taking photos near an abandoned mine shaft in Mitsero uncovered the first body, that of 38-year-old Filipina Mary Rose Tiburcio
• Three victims were stuffed into suitcases and dumped in the toxic Red Lake near Mitsero
• The final body, that of 6-year-old Sierra Seucalliuc, was found in Lake Memi on June 12, 2019
• The police had been warned about the missing women months earlier but failed to act, which led Prime Minister Anastasiades to publicly slam the "sheer negligence"
• Justice Minister Ionas Nicolaou resigned over the scandal, and Police Chief Zacharias Chrysostomou was fired
• EasyJet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou personally donated €10,000 to each victim's closest family member, and gave an extra €10,000 to each of Metaxas's own two children (a son and daughter) for their future education

Metaxas told investigators he strangled two of the women and their daughters because he believed the women planned to "pimp out" their children. He said he wanted to punish the mothers and "free" the kids.

This case shook Cyprus to its core. Before this, the country did not really have a concept of a serial killer.

The investigation also exposed serious failures inside the Cyprus Police (again), including destroyed evidence and lost reports.

*img source: lifo.gr