He soon became a leading advocate for enosis (the unification of Cyprus with Greece), and during the early part of the decade he maintained close links with the Greek government.

Makarios undoubtedly had common political ground with EOKA and was acquainted with its leader, the Greek-Cypriot soldier and politician George Grivas, but the extent of his involvement is unclear and disputed.

In October 1955, with the security situation deteriorating, the British governor, Sir John Harding, opened talks on the island's future.

At the Kenyan port the party were embarked in the East African Naval Vessel Rosalind, escorted by the frigate HMS Loch Fada.

In the latter years of the 1950s, the Turkish Cypriot community first began to float the idea of Taksim or partition, as a counterweight to the Greek ideal of enosis or union.

During the following two years he attended the General Assembly of the United Nations where the Cyprus question was discussed; and he worked hard to achieve union with Greece.

The reversal of his self-determination or enosis stance, and his eventual agreement to sign the conditions for the independence of Cyprus, have been attributed to blackmail on behalf of the Greek and British governments.

[4] On 1 March 1959, the archbishop returned to Cyprus to an unprecedented reception in Nicosia, where almost two-thirds of the adult Greek Cypriot population turned out to welcome him.

He attended the 1st Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in September 1961, and troubled the governments in London and Washington, D.C. with his lukewarm policy towards the West.

During his stay in Belgrade, alongside the conference he also led the liturgical celebration at the St. Michael's Cathedral of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

There was increasing acrimony between Turkish and Greek Cypriots about the workings of the constitution, and Makarios was forced to act to salvage the machinery of state from imminent collapse.

In November 1963, Makarios proposed thirteen amendments to the Constitution, which would free many public offices from the ethnic restrictions agreed in London and Zurich.

The junta probably would have agreed to some form of partition similar to the Acheson Plan to settle the Cyprus question, but it faced rejection by Makarios.

From hiding, Grivas directed terrorist attacks and propaganda assaults that shook the Makarios government[citation needed], but the president remained both a powerful and popular leader.

Relations between Nicosia and Athens were so bad that the colonels of the Greek junta, recognizing that they had Makarios in a perilous position, issued an ultimatum to him.

While the Greek colonels were at times prepared to make a deal with Turkey about Cyprus, Grivas was ferociously opposed to any arrangement that did not lead to complete enosis.

The three bishops of the Church of Cyprus demanded that he resign as president, stating that his temporal duties violated canon law.

As time progressed Grivas' pursuit of enosis through guerrilla tactics with the use of the EOKA-B's paramilitary organisation failed to force Makarios to follow the policy of self-determination-union with Greece and led to a period of armed civil war in Cyprus among the Greek-Cypriot community.

In November 1973, Dimitrios Ioannidis, the hardliner nationalist brigadier, overthrew Georgios Papadopoulos (Greece's President since 1967) and established the Second Junta, with himself as the "invisible dictator".

On 11 July, Glafkos Klerides (by this stage the speaker of the Cypriot parliament) visited Makarios in an unsuccessful attempt to promote a solution.

Nikos Sampson, a Nicosia-based newspaper editor and parliamentarian with a long-standing commitment to enosis, was installed as president in Makarios' stead.

Speaking to the UN Security Council on 19 July, Makarios denounced the coup as an "invasion", engineered by the Greek military junta, which "violated the internal peace of Cyprus".

[12] Five hours after Makarios' address to the Security Council, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus began, taking Ioannidis by surprise.

Under the terms of the Treaty of Guarantee, Britain, Greece and Turkey were entitled to co-operate in order to intervene with the purpose of restoring the constitution of the island.

It was noted at the time that Turkey threatened to invade Greece, and that the colonels suddenly had to concentrate on trying to defend the country, rather than staying in power.

Makarios remained in London for five months; then, having succeeded in securing international recognition that his administration was the rightful government of the whole island, he returned to Cyprus and with the focus of restoring Cypriot territory.

At his funeral in Saint John's Cathedral outside the Archbishopric in Nicosia, 182 dignitaries from 52 countries attended while an estimated 250,000 mourners—about half the Greek Cypriot population of the island—filed past his coffin.