Cyprus, 1955. The anti-colonial revolution that Castro admired, Pan-Africanists endorsed, and the IRA fought alongside.
The struggle of 1955–1959 is written in the blood of the people of Cyprus. But its reverberations travelled far beyond the island. The National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters — EOKA — waged a guerrilla campaign against British colonial rule with a force that, at its peak, numbered in the hundreds. They were outgunned, outnumbered, and operating under martial law — and when weapons ran short, they were forced to craft their own, from homemade guns to improvised mortars, turning scarcity into a lesson that guerrilla movements across the world studied. Their struggle was watched, admired, and actively supported by some of the most consequential anti-colonial movements and figures of the twentieth century — from Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana to Castro’s Cuba, from Algeria’s FLN to Ireland’s IRA. Their stories are bound to EOKA’s in ways that history rarely tells. This is that story.
First Words, Last Words
When EOKA’s first proclamation was issued on April 1, 1955, the word at its centre was liberation. It called on Cypriots to rid themselves of “the British yoke,” to show the world “that if international diplomacy is unfair and pusillanimous, the Cypriot psyche is brave” and that freedom would be claimed “with our own hands and blood.” Then it turned directly to those who had claimed victory in the Second World War while holding peoples under colonial rule: “It is a disgrace in the 20th century for a nation to have to shed blood to gain its freedom, the holy gift for which we fought on your side and for which you yourselves claim to have fought against nazism and fascism.”
On 9 March 1959, the ceasefire declaration opened by confirming what the struggle had always been: “On 1 April 1955, the flag of the revolutionary liberation movement was raised” with one declared purpose — “the liberation of Cyprus.” It then called on fighters to build “the new structure of the young Republic on the ruins and ashes of the Cypriot epic.”
From first declaration to last, the language was the same: liberation from colonial rule, defiance against fascism and nazism, dignity for a people under occupation, and in the end, a republic. Self-determination — the right of a people to decide their own political future — was, in the mid-1950s, the central demand of the global South. Enshrined in the United Nations Charter, it was the common language of an era. When EOKA raised that banner, the world recognised it.
Cypriot peasants, workers and people from every political line became part of the struggle. The one exception was AKEL (Progressive Party of Working People). Emerging after British colonial authorities illegalised the Communist Party of Cyprus, it lost its way — and in every critical period of Cypriot history stood apart from the people. Despite officially supporting Enosis until 1967, AKEL opposed armed resistance against colonial rule and turned its back on the masses. The party never offered a formal self-criticism. Many of its own leading figures — among them Andreas Fantis and Andreas Ziartidis — unwilling to carry the shame, personally acknowledged years later that AKEL’s abstention from the armed anti-colonial struggle and its hostility toward EOKA was morally wrong, politically costly, and led to isolation.
A Struggle for All Cypriots
As early as July 1955, EOKA circulated the first of many announcements and leaflets in Turkish Cypriot neighbourhoods, written in Turkish. The first of these declared that the struggle was not directed against them but against the British. It assured them that EOKA considered them genuine allies, that its intentions toward them were pure, and that any behavior endangering their lives, dignity, or property would not be tolerated. For as long as operationally possible, EOKA even tried its best to avoid targeting Turkish Cypriots who worked for the colonial administration, including those within the colonial police structures deployed against it.
There were Turkish Cypriots who helped EOKA’s struggle — a fact less surprising when considered against the social fabric of the island, shaped in part by the Linobambaki roots of Turkish Cypriots, who are of mixed Christian and Muslim heritage. The recorded reality that even in the 1950 referendum on Enosis (the union of Cyprus with Greece) there were Turkish Cypriots who voted in favour speaks to values that colonial divide-and-rule politics worked hard to erase.
No one articulated the vision of shared struggle more clearly than Kyriakos Matsis, one of EOKA’s leaders, who insisted that “this land belongs to those who work it, whether they are Greek or Turkish Cypriots.” On November 19, 1958, at 32 years old, Matsis was killed by British forces after refusing to surrender. He died holding a position — in every sense.
This vision of shared struggle was not confined to Greek Cypriots alone. Nazım Hikmet — one of the greatest poets and communists of the twentieth century — wrote letters to Turkish Cypriots urging them to join the anti-colonial struggle. He went a step further still and also asked them to support Enosis. That the most celebrated voice in the Turkish literary tradition stood with liberation speaks to what the struggle represented beyond ethnic lines.
On October 22, 1958, Panayiotis Toumazos, just 19 years old, placed an olive branch in his pocket before entering an ambush. He said: “If I fall, let the British find it and learn that we are fighting for a just peace.” He did fall. The British found it.
While Cypriot revolutionaries were giving their lives to the anti-colonial struggle, the British resorted to the same tactic they had used in many of their other colonies — divide and rule. The Turkish Cypriot separatist leadership established the TMT terrorist organisation — sponsored, directed, and armed by British colonialists and Turkey — to oppress progressive Turkish Cypriots and terrorise the island. Alongside this, they adopted “Taksim” (partition) a vision of ethnic separation that required the removal or displacement of the population. It was this embrace of segregation of the Cypriot people, working class and progressive forces, that was their intention.
Africa, Bandung, and the Cypriot Struggle
In September 1959, Krobo Edusei, Ghana’s Minister of Public Works, travelled to Athens specifically to meet EOKA’s military commander. Edusei was no peripheral figure: he was an Ashanti activist, a member of the socialist Convention People’s Party, and a minister in the government of Kwame Nkrumah — the founding father of Ghanaian independence, one of the architects of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the great theorist of Pan-Africanism. Nkrumah would later receive the Lenin Peace Prize.
The Greek newspaper Eleftheria reported the meeting on September 12, 1959. Edusei had come, he said, to express the desire of his government and people to visit “the invincible freedom fighter Dighenis” and to convey their admiration for his achievements. EOKA’s commander expressed his emotion at the honour, asked Edusei to convey his warmest congratulations to the government and people of Ghana for achieving their freedom through struggle, and expressed the wish that through common effort, all enslaved peoples might achieve the highest good — freedom. He asked that his most friendly greetings be passed to the Prime Minister of Ghana. That Prime Minister was Kwame Nkrumah. The message was not lost on either side.
Archbishop Makarios, EOKA’s political leader, moved in the same world. Even before Cyprus gained independence, he had participated in the Bandung Conference of 1955 — the founding gathering of the anti-colonial world, alongside Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Nasser of Egypt. He went on to become one of the founding figures of the Non-Aligned Movement, a movement of newly independent states from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Among the African liberation leaders he maintained close relationships with were Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, leader of the Mau Mau liberation movement, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia — and across the continent, his name was known and respected among those fighting colonial rule.
Cells, Letters, and Solidarity: Castro, Camus, the IRA, and the Revolutionary World
On May 10, 1956, Michalis Karaolis, 23 years old, became the first EOKA fighter to be hanged by British authorities in Nicosia Central Prison. The execution was designed to terrorise — to show the population what resistance cost. It had the opposite effect.
Albert Camus, the French Nobel laureate born in Algeria, understood exactly what the gallows represented. He wrote to Queen Elizabeth personally, requesting clemency for Karaolis. For Camus, Cyprus was not a local dispute but a symptom of a system — he described the island as functioning like an advanced aircraft carrier of British and Western imperial power. The execution of a 23-year-old was not justice. It was a demonstration of who owned the Mediterranean.
In 1959, Fidel Castro wrote directly to Colonel Grivas, EOKA’s military commander. The letter was unambiguous: “Colonel, your struggle has fascinated me and at the same time served as an example for the freedom of my own homeland. My warmest congratulations. I wish that Democracy and Justice may finally reign in the world.” This was the Cold War era, when the West was drawing hard lines between acceptable and unacceptable liberation movements. And yet here was the architect of the Cuban Revolution publicly declaring that EOKA had shown him the way.
The founders of the Basque liberation movement, ETA, drew directly from EOKA — living proof that a small, outgunned people could force a colonial power to its knees. In those early years, Julen Madariaga declared with admiration that “ETA would soon be better known than EOKA” — a line that reveals the reverence a new generation of armed movements held for the Cypriot struggle, the standard against which they measured themselves.
The prison connections were perhaps the most operationally concrete expression of international solidarity. In Wormwood Scrubs and Wakefield, jailed EOKA fighters encountered imprisoned IRA members. Together they planned a joint escape — one Irishman, Seamus Murphy, actually made it out. Beyond escape routes, deep friendships were forged. Guerrilla tactics, historical analysis, and political philosophy crossed between the cells. There they met both future leaders of the IRA’s diverging branches — Cathal Goulding, of the Marxist-republican tradition, and Seán Mac Stíofáin, of the Catholic-republican tradition.
Also in those cells was Klaus Fuchs, the nuclear physicist whose decision to share atomic secrets with the Soviets had reshaped the Cold War. Fuchs, a committed communist, reportedly told fellow inmates he genuinely believed in the justice of the Cypriot cause.
When Solidarity Became Policy
The support EOKA commanded across the anti-colonial world was not confined to letters, prison cells, and diplomatic visits. It found its way to the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, where the lines were drawn with clarity: imperialist powers and their puppet regimes on one side, third world and socialist states on the other. The votes on whether Cyprus should even be debated became a map of the world’s power structure.
The support of the third world and socialist governments gave EOKA’s struggle international legitimacy at a time when Britain and Turkey were attempting to frame it as terrorism — an effort that continues to this day. When Cypriots finally had their republic in 1960, that international solidarity was part of what made it possible. But independence, as Cyprus would quickly discover, was not the same as sovereignty.
After Independence: The Struggle for Sovereignty Continues
Cyprus officially became a republic on 16 August 1960 as a result of the struggle of EOKA. It became one of the founders and leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement in September 1961. On paper, the colonial chapter was closed. It wasn’t.
The new state was born compromised — an ethnically segregated constitution imposed from outside, treaty rights granted to foreign powers to intervene militarily, British bases remaining on the island. Makarios made his position clear. While visiting his close friend Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt in 1964, he declared: “We do not want any foreign bases. We do not want Greek bases, Turkish bases, British bases, NATO bases, any bases.” For the anti-colonial world, this was not a diplomatic statement. It was a declaration of principle from one of their own.
In the first Cypriot parliament, it was the once EOKA-aligned Greek Cypriot MPs who refused to condemn Algeria’s FLN. The Turkish Cypriot MPs, operating under the grip of the separatist leadership that controlled and suppressed their community, did not extend the same solidarity — a stance that reflected Ankara’s own position in 1955, when Turkey voted against placing “the question of Algeria” on the UN General Assembly agenda, a vote that helped shield French colonial rule in Algeria from international scrutiny and contributed to the prolonging of a war that cost over a million Algerian lives.
While EOKA had ended, TMT continued its campaign against the non-aligned Republic and those defending it. Progressive Turkish Cypriots who supported the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Cyprus faced intimidation and violence from TMT. Among those killed were journalists Ayhan Hikmet and Ahmet Muzaffer Gürkan — founders of the People’s Party (Halk Partisi, not to be confused with the later Halkın Partisi) and co-owners of the newspaper Cumhuriyet, both of which were shut down following their murders — as well as Derviş Ali Kavazoğlu, a Turkish Cypriot communist who opposed the forced enclavisation of Turkish Cypriots by TMT. Turkish Cypriot political leader İhsan Ali reported Turkey’s policy in Cyprus as aggressive in communications to the United Nations.
In August 1964, Turkey launched military operations in the Tillyria region in a manoeuvre directly inspired by the CIA’s Bay of Pigs operation against Cuba. Turkish Cypriot university students who were studying in Turkey were armed and trained, then transferred covertly into Tillyria to fight against the Republic. Turkish air power provided cover. Napalm bombs were dropped on Cypriot civilians. A NATO member state deploying the tactics of covert regime change against a republic that had pursued genuine non-alignment.
Nasser, who was confronting Israel alongside British and French attacks on Egypt while championing the broader Arab cause, including Palestine, received EOKA’s solidarity when EOKA fighters attacked British aircraft, set ambushes, and seized weapons from British and French forces using Cyprus as a base for military operations against Egypt. He, in turn, returned the gesture by sending weapons to Cypriots fighting the TMT. Solidarity thus took material form.
Then, in December 1964, just four months after Turkish jets had dropped napalm on Cypriot civilians, Che Guevara stood at the United Nations podium and declared: “Peaceful coexistence has also been brutally put to the test in Cyprus, due to pressures from the Turkish Government and NATO, compelling the people and the government of Cyprus to make a heroic and firm stand in defense of their sovereignty.” This was not a romantic salute to a struggle safely in the past. This was Che, in real time, responding to a NATO member’s military assault on a small republic, defending its right to exist.
EOKA had formally ended in 1959. But some of its fighters could not put down their arms — not while the young republic had no army and faced organised terrorist violence from within. Doros Elia was one of them. A former EOKA fighter, he went on to lead the Red Berets — Kokkinoskoufides — a socialist armed formation confronting the foreign-controlled TMT and the forces operating under Turkish and British patronage. At 27, he led resistance against TMT in the Pentadaktylos mountains. He had fought for liberation. Now he fought to keep it.
The Meaning of All This
In 2025, the Imperial War Museum — a museum built on the history of Britain’s wars — dedicated its first ever exhibition on anti-colonial independence movements to three struggles together: the fight for independence in Malaysia, Kenya, and Cyprus. Three peoples, three continents, one empire, one story.
The reach of EOKA’s example was not confined to the past. In 2019, I had the opportunity to meet Jose Maria Sison — founder of the Communist Party of Philippines and the New People’s Army, the longest-running communist guerrilla movement in the world, and one of the most important communist leaders in history. Knowing I was from Cyprus, the first words he said to me were: “We taught our fighters about EOKA and its guerrilla warfare tactics.” A line, from the mountains of the Philippines to the mountains of Cyprus.
This is what anti-colonial struggles do. They cross borders, find each other, and refuse to stay contained in the histories written by those who opposed them. Pan-Africanists, Cuban revolutionaries, Algerian nationalists, Irish republicans — they did not need to be told what EOKA was. They already knew. Those who occupy Cypriot soil — and who, like every occupier and coloniser anywhere, call liberation fighters terrorists — heard it. The struggle still speaks. And some would rather it didn’t.
And perhaps that is the clearest measure of its meaning. History is not always allowed to speak. But sometimes the people living it knew exactly what they were watching. A teenager with an olive branch in his pocket. A guerrilla who said the land belongs to those who work it. A physicist in a British prison who believed in someone else’s freedom. A revolutionary in Havana who said: you showed me how.
Cyprus gave the world a revolution. The world raised its fist.
Oz Karahan
President of the Union of Cypriots
Vice Chair of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS)
