Cyprus

An island at the crossroads of three continents, Greek and Turkish, divided by a line drawn in green.

Cyprus has been shaped by everyone who has ever sailed the eastern Mediterranean. Settled by some of the oldest Neolithic communities outside the Near East, it became a string of Greek city-kingdoms famous for the worship of Aphrodite, then passed in turn to Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, the Hellenistic Ptolemies, Rome and Byzantium, becoming one of the first lands governed by a Christian convert. In the Middle Ages it was a Crusader kingdom under the French Lusignan dynasty, then a Venetian colony, before falling to the Ottomans in 1571 and passing to British administration in 1878. Independence came in 1960 under a complex Greek-Turkish power-sharing constitution guaranteed by Britain, Greece and Turkey, but the settlement broke down within three years; intercommunal violence in 1963-64 brought the deployment of the UN peacekeeping force UNFICYP, and a Greek-junta-backed coup in 1974 was followed by a Turkish military intervention that partitioned the island. A Turkish Cypriot state proclaimed in 1983 is recognised only by Turkey and was declared legally invalid by the United Nations; the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004 with the island still divided.