ATHENS: Greece’s state intelligence agency on Wednesday said it had declassified a set of archival documents for the first time in its history, covering the period of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

Turkiye invaded the island of Cyprus in 1974 in response to a coup against the government led by a military dictatorship in Athens. Cyprus has since been divided between the Greek-speaking UN-recognised republic in the south and the Turkish Cypriot north, which unilaterally declared independence in 1983.

Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, a professor of postwar history at the National University of Athens, in a statement said the archives cover the period of the invasion from July to August 1974.

One conclusion that can be drawn from the documents is that the intelligence agency EYP was “not informed” of the attempted coup organised by the Greek dictatorship against Archbishop Makarios, the president of Cyprus, Hatzivassiliou said. “The (dictatorship) … informed only those absolutely necessary,” he said.

After the coup, the agency was “quite accurate” in describing Turkish preparations for war, but the warnings were ignored in Athens, he said.

The failure to defend Cyprus led to the fall of the Greek dictatorship in July 1974. A second Turkish invasion followed weeks later in August.

EYP director-general Themistoklis Demiris on Wednesday said that the agency would go on to declassify additional documents referring to “dark” periods of Greek history, without elaborating.

Published in Dawn, November 14th, 2024