Early on that same morning when people in Argaki, and all over Cyprus, turned on their radios, they heard martial music, followed by an announcement that President Makarios was dead, that a 'revolution' was under way, that the military were in command and that a curfew had been imposed. For some, a small minority of EOKA B activists; this meant that five years of intermittent insurrection were about to be rewarded.

For the men of the coup, the first crucial act was to make sure that the socialist militants, and other core followers of Makarios, were arrested or, at the very least, disarmed. So, the orders of the day were the curfew, road blocks, and the arrest of potential resisters for interrogation. If the Argaki pattern was typical, one of the ground-rules seems to have been that arrests and searches in one village were made by EOKA B men from neighbouring villages, of whom, in the case of Argaki, Philia and Masari were the prominent ones. Meanwhile, key Argaki EOKA B supporters were making arrests in other villages.

The communists and socialists had been caught offguard - that, after all, is axiomatic of a coup d'etat. One of the communist leaders in Argaki received a phone call from Polyviou, a member of an armed group supporting Makarios, who said, 'Bring the leftists down to Morphou, so we can demonstrate.' He thought for a bit, but since he had received no order from the party, he refused. Although individual communists seem to have fought alongside other Makarios supporters, the party did not appear to have mounted any mass resistance. To start with, they had no guns, whereas the socialist militants had some, apparently as part of a semi-official agreement with Makarios under which many of them had enrolled as special constables. The Argaki socialist group had some machine-guns but as we shall shortly see they did not manage to use them.

We must infer that those first days were marked by great tension and anxiety, each political activist maintaining a restless surveillance of certain others, to ascertain if enemies were about to make hostile moves, and if it were to be a time of killing. The villagers soon saw who favoured the coup from the way they behaved. Some started openly carrying machine-guns 'to support the new government' or publicly expressed their satisfaction with the way things had turned out by what they said in the coffee shops. EOKA B supporters made themselves available to the army for the task of rounding up possible opponents and disarming them. Some men, including at least one who had married into the village, went to enroll as policeman, to replace those police whom Sampson's henchmen were dismissing or would dismiss. But, as we shall see, there were also certain important gestures, acts of communication across party lines, which played their own small part in shaping the reactions of Argaki people, although they were powerless to influence events in the larger arena.

One of the keenest EOKA B supporters in Argaki was a man called Kajis (a pseudonym) who in his youth had been mixed up in a gang war which had arisen when certain men near Limassol had invented a Cypriot variant of the Mafia's protection racket. In 1968 Kajis had boasted to me that a few years earlier, when Greek and Turkish irregulars had been fighting, he had shot a Turkish shepherd; he spoke as proudly of this as an English schoolboy might have done about scoring a goal in an 'away' match. In recent years, he had been passionately in favour of the Greek junta and Enosis. His close friend Gigas had been murdered in 1963 and the suspect acquitted, which had probably pushed Kajis further into his oppositional outlook.

As spring turned to summer in 1974, Kajis knew that the coup was about to happen, and was given orders to stand by. But he did not know the precise date, until 15 July:

Monday I was sleeping, and a fellow came and said 'Get up - the Revolution is on.= I got up, took the car and went to the cache. Out came the automatics. I'd got six machine guns, and I put them in the car and drove off to the coffee shop, leaving the guns in the car outside. We waited and listened to the radio, different stations. I heard Makarios was dead, so I went off to Morphou. That afternoon, when Sampson had been sworn in, I went straight off to Nicosia. I embraced Sampson, took some weapons, fifteen new ones, put them in the car and went on duty under our senior man at Morphou. I took a police car and some of our lads to Morphou, and we were given orders to start arresting people. We were to co-operate with the army, which had taken command in Morphou, to arrest the supporters of Lyssarides [the socialist leader]. Just them, not the communists. To pick up anyone with weapons, whoever we knew about, and anyone we suspected had guns, and bring them in. An order came to arrest some people from Argaki, and I said to them, 'You must not take any of the Argaki people, OK? OK!' We followers of Grivas, the men who wanted Union, the EOKA B men. we knew where everyone stood. This one is left-wing; so-and-so is with Makarios: that one's with Azinas, a nationalist. We had a file on everyone and the goods on everyone. We had it all written down, which groupings people were with and whether they had guns or not.

In the week following the coup. Kajis came into his own, and the way he described the events made this clear. He was from a family which had once been wealthy, but his father, a figure of ridicule in the village, had squandered a fortune. Kajis may have never enjoyed as much power and importance as he did for the six days of the coup. There are two themes in his account, just below the surface. One is the banality of having overthrown the legal government of the republic, revealed in his casual throw-away 'all in a day's work' delivery. The other is his wish to be seen as a man who was ready to get his fellow-villagers out of any political trouble.

This was further demonstrated by Kajis' account of how. during the first days of the coup, he went drinking with two 'best men' from his wedding. One of them, my cousin Tomas, was a communist. . . The other, Andrikos; had once been in the original EOKA and was a former drinking-companion of Sampson, although in recent years he had taken a government post, and had stopped murmuring against the establishment. Yet it is only superficially surprising that these two men would sit drinking with Kajis, even so soon after the coup. Their parties were formally opposed, but it had been long the practice in Argaki for friendships to be maintained across such obstacles, and for drinking together, in public, to be a way of expressing this intention. The act was a piece of political ceremonial, which communicated the belief that village friendships could override and outlast national antagonisms; this prob- ably helped reduce tension and anxiety on all sides.

At this meeting Andrikos asked Kajis to take him to see Sampson. Kajis replied that he knew what Andrikos wanted - the release of a man called Pipis, a socialist sympathiser who had been arrested because of a personal quarrel with an EOKA B supporter in his office. He was not regarded as a man likely to bear arms. Pipis was a first cousin of Tomas, and married to Andrikos' sister. He was also a godsibling of Kajis=. Kajis assured the other two men that he would get Pipis released. I was able to confirm that Pipis was arrested, and released after a few hours, but cannot be sure how great a role Kajis played in this. He had every motive to do his best, given the strength of the relevant relationships; but he also had every reason to tell me a story which put him in a very good light, in the hope that it might get back to the men involved, who might then help him in his hour of need.

Kajis had his own version of 'professional ethics', which emerged in another episode. He claimed to have intervened on behalf of a pro-government militant called Christos (a pseudonym) who was being held in the Morphou army camp, and who had once protected him from arrest by the special reserves. This man was thought to be the head of a small armed group, and he himself told me that when he was arrested and marched through the streets of Morphou some of the EOKA B supporters were delighted to have caught a 'big fish'. Kajis continued:

As I came back to the Morphou camp with a load of guns, Christos called out to me: 'Hey, koumpare, I handed out guns to some people, and I'll give you a piece of paper with all their names on, and you go and get them.' 'Right, koumpare, I said to him, 'You know we're friends. I'm not forcing you. You can't say I forced you. You're giving me this paper off your own bat, right? Then I'll go and pick the guns up.' He gave me this little scrap of paper with nine names on it. Anyway, off we went and arrested all nine of them. Eight of the nine handed over the guns straightaway, and so we didn't take them in. If you handed over, you didn't have to go inside. Some Czech automatics and two Martinis. One man had nothing. Said he was in Christos' group but hadn't been given a gun. 'But look, we've got your name down here, written down. Now you'll be for it. Right, it's inside for you.' He got knocked about a bit, I dunno, there was a bit of blood running, we put him in the car and took him inside. I'd got this police Landrover, and he was inside when we got back to the camp. Christos called out to me. 'Hey, koumpare', he called, 1 didn't give Andreas a gun, I forgot to tell you. I wrote it down but I never took him one.' I said to him, 'Lucky you told me, he'd have got hurt when he went inside. There'd have been consequences. You telling me you'd given him one and him saying he hadn't. He'd have been hurt.'

The point of his recounting this episode was undoubtedly to show that he felt that innocent men should not be beaten up, even in a military coup; there was even a note of apology for the amount of rough treatment Kajis himself had handed this particular man 'in ignorance'. Kajis continued:

The thing that surprised me was about Gallos [a pseudonym] from our village. I had no idea he was in a group, getting mixed up in secret organisations. But the list said that fifteen days before the coup he'd been seen in Platres, at the house of the socialist leader, Lyssarides. Really strange. I said to a friend, 'We said we wouldn't pick up anyone from Argaki. so I'd better go and get him by myself.' I went to the village and found Gallos sitting in the coffee shop. 'Come over here, brother-in-law~ I said to him. Some of his relatives were there. I said to them, 'I'm taking him somewhere and then I'll bring him back again. Don't give it a moment's thought.' We got in the car and set off.

'Well, brother-in-law, I never thought you'd be the sort of man to join Lyssarides' group.' 'You know how it is', he said, 'Crystallos Tirkas kept going on at me [to join the socialists], and me, well, I'm not really with them. Bring me a piece of paper and I'll sign it, sign that I'm with Grivas.' I said to him, 'We don't want you to do that, we simply want you to be a fighter for Greece and Enosis. Look here, you've got a gun, give it to me. and you won't have to go inside. I'll take you to your house, and that'll be the end of it. Nothing will happen to you. We don't knock people about. We just want to get in the illegal weapons so that the army can ta~e them over. Your group leader told me he'd given you a gun.' He started crying. 'Brother-in-law, he didn't give me one. Crystallos had six guns and he showed us how they work, but he hung on to them. I never saw a gun again, and never laid a finger on one.' I took him inside, but of course nothing happened to him. I took him and showed him to the captain. 'He didn't have anything'. I told him. 'He's with us'; I said, and I sent him back to the village.

Kajis also told me of another attempt he had .made to get an Argaki man released, his old drinking-companion Patroklos, who had reputedly joined the pro-Makarios forces as an undercover special constable, and was therefore a sworn enemy of EOKA B. Kajis went to the central prison where Patroklos had been detained, but found it under the charge of a mainland Greek officer whom he didn't know, and who absolutely refused to release the prisoner. Kajis tried very hard to persuade the officer that he himself had enrolled Patroklos in EOKA B as a double agent, so that he really should be released. But he got nowhere with this argument, which was in any case quite untrue. Kajis said he ran the risk of being shot for his efforts, and he was anxious for it to be known how hard he had tried, for later Patroklos, who was released through the agency of another EOKA man, complained that Kajis hadn't really bothered himself, and had failed to reciprocate past favours, which was a very serious charge in the moral economy of the village.

If Kajis' account of these attempts to protect his Argaki friends is to be believed, it reveals him as amateurish in his failure to see that the bush-league subversive game that he and his EOKA B friends had been playing in the Morphou region was transferred by the coup to a metropolitan stadium. The men now making and enforcing the rules were ultra-serious, ultra-conservative professional army officers, from Greece. They were not prepared to make special exceptions for local drinking-companions. The game was now a deadly one, and its name was civil war. Much later, an Argaki teacher sympathetic to the EOKA B militants explained his subsequent disillusion with the anarchic conduct of this period, which included assaults, robberies, and attacks on Turkish property. In a proper coup none of this would have happened. In Greece in 1967, no one lost a copper coin.' A 'proper' coup . . .

For a few villagers, perhaps 100 out of the 1,500, the coup was a 'joyous day', the start of a 'revolution', the end of a 'tyranny'. One can only reflect how words can be twisted into many gnarled shapes. Most villagers did not share these reactions to the coup, and felt deep hostility to it, but although a few were to find themselves caught up in resistance, most did not. The curfew confined them to their houses, and although battles took place at points of strategic importance in the island, villages were not the usual sites for confrontations since their immediate control was of minor importance only. Few villagers, even socialist militants, expressed much regret at having missed a chance to resist, although some men, like Tomas, were retrospectively angry that the government had not trained and armed them for such an emergency.

A number of socialists and other supporters of Makarios from Argaki were arrested, but without bloodshed. Crystallos Tirkas, the Argaki socialist leader, had been made to hand over his cache of machine guns, and the outstanding shotguns and pistols in the village hardly posed an immediate threat to the Greek army. There were other minor incidents that occurred in the village during the week of the coup, trivial when compared with what happened elsewhere, but which stuck like splinters in the memories of the villagers in their later bitterness. For instance, Vassilis, a communist, complained to me that a young EOKA B man had fired a few rounds in the air deliberately to intimidate him. Another had been standing, gun in hand, outside his house, and when Vassilis' wife had come out on to her balcony to see what was happening, had told her to go indoors again. If she had been pro-EOKA, he'd have come upstairs for a coffee', Vassilis said.

Andrikos was known locally to be an active supporter of Azinas, himself staunchly pro-Makarios. Accordingly, a squad of soldiers, supported by several EOKA B militants from a village near Argaki, came to his house and demanded that he hand over his weapons. He gave them a pistol. He knew at least one of the EOKA B men well. 'He was an old friend whom I=d helped many times,= Andrikos told me. The use of EOKA men from a neighboring village was characteristic of how the local EOKA people wanted to do business - - people in Argaki did not want to make these arrests themselves if they could avoid it, but at the same time, they had to be done by men with good local knowledge.

I received a number of different retrospective accounts of how the coup actually occurred. One young villager, Andreas Toumbas, was on duty as a police guard at the Archbishopric, when it started:

I was at the Archbishopric. on 15 July 1974, guarding the President of the Cyprus Republic, Archbishop Makarios. That day the Archbishop was away at Troodos, and we knew that he would come from the mountains to the Presidential Palace to carry out his presidential business, as he usually did. I was on duty from 5:45 a.m. At about 8 a.m we heard the first shots and we knew that a coup was on. We took up positions at the Archbishopric. We hadn't expected a coup at this time. If, for instance, it had been the day the Archbishop told the mainland Greek army officers to leave Cyprus, we would have expected it. We would have been in better order and the coup would not have happened. So, at 8:00 a.m. we heard the first shots and took up our positions. At 8:30 we heard more shooting, and they said the military are doing exercises. We had a radio link to HQ, and to all the other police stations, and we heard over the radio that there was definitely a coup going on. We started securing our position, to defend the Archbishopric, without the soldiers noticing. About midday, army units started letting us have it from long range. We were pinned down, and we couldn't see who was shooting at us. We could only see the heavy gun which was firing at us. Well, then we took our bazookas and other weapons, and went down into the street, towards the flat rooftops, to repulse the coup. But we couldn't take on the army properly, and they pinned us down until 8:00 in the evening. Earlier in the day we heard the Archbishop over the radio from Paphos. He told us not to surrender and to fight on, and that he would send reinforcements from Paphos. We held out until 8:30 that evening but, when we saw the soldiers around the iron gates of the Archbishopric, moving to surround us, we put up a white flag, a white handkerchief it was, on a bit of a stick. We put it up in the air to show them we wanted peace.

Because it was night-time we shone a torch on the bit of cloth, for the soldiers to see, that they should stop shooting. But they didn't stop. We got their commander on the radio, at HQ, and he told us he would arrange for the shooting to stop. But it still didn't. We said, 'they're out to kill the lot of us', so me and another fellow decided to come out with our hands up. That's what we did, and luckily, they stopped. We said, 'We surrender', and they said, "Everybody out of there'. Then they came out, the soldiers surrounded us, and the officer told them to stop shooting as we'd given in.

They had us all outside, hands on our heads and they searched us. They told us to stay there, and, after twenty minutes, we asked them for water because we were tired and thirsty. The officer said 'OK., have a drink', and then we asked for cigarettes and they gave us those too, we had a sit-down while we waited to see where they would send us. Then they made us sing the National Anthem, and shout, 'Long live Sampson." The threat of their guns forced us to say what they wanted. After midnight army vehicles came and took us to the central prison There was a captain there, and as we got out of the lorry, one at a time he kicked us. As we went into the cells he told us to take our clothes off from the waist up. We took off our clothes, and were half naked.

They dealt with us one at a time, hitting us. As we were being dealt with, a captain came up and asked us, one at a time, our names and where we were from. When my turn came I told him who I was and that I was from Argaki, Morphou, and he said to me, 'I know you.' He said "What are you up to? Your brothers were with us but yet you. where did you get your crazy ideas from?' He was trying to say that my brother, Kyriakos, sympathised with EOKA B, but not me. So he gave me a kick and pulled my hair, just as he did with the others, and went on down the line.

Later they took four of us and put us in a cell at the central prison. We were so tired and hungry that as soon as we got inside we fell asleep until morning. In the morning I was hungry and asked for something to eat but they didn't give us anything till four o'clock that Tuesday afternoon. and then just a koulouri [biscuit]. There had been forty-five of us at the Archbishopric, and all the police stations gave in before we did. Our post was the last to fall. Most of the people with me were in civilian clothes and so they were able to escape, but I was in police uniform and couldn't escape because I was afraid I'd get shot and killed, you see.

Another young villager had become a member of the Tactical Reserve Police, which had been specially recruited to deal with the EOKA B insurrections of recent years. He told me how during the coup his unit had been involved in the fighting, and how a man firing a Browning machine-gun had been wounded. Their commander called out to my informant, 'Hey, do you know how to use it?', to which he replied. 'Not me, sir. All I know how to do is cook!' In fact, he knew perfectly well how to fire the gun, but when he told me this story, he did so without the least embarrassment, rather with a certain pride at his own quickness of wits.

His unit, about 150 men, finally surrendered, after their commander had been captured and told them over the two-way radio to give in. First they were made to lie on the ground, but he was not afraid, because there were so many of them. Then he was taken to prison, where he saw an Argaki boy, an EOKA B supporter, to whom he said 'Hallo - what's going on?' 'Hub! You didn't want to know me before, did you?', replied the boy, and cold-shouldered him. Later he saw another Argaki EOKA B sympathiser, who was a warder, and who said to him curtly, 'You're lucky to be alive.' Inside the prison he saw several other Argaki boys who were either prison officers who supported the coup, or EOKA B volunteers, who were helping them. He was twice beaten up. The second time was by men who before the coup had been imprisoned as EOKA B suspects, and had now been released to help their comrades. They formed a double line, and beat him and other pro-Makarios supporters now in their hands.

Christos Kaourmas, an officer who had worked in the prison for several years, was quiet and usually kept out of politics:

On Monday 15 July, the coup. By chance some of my workmates came to the village and said to me, 'Let's go to work because they've been in touch with us from the prison and told us to come on duty.' So we set out in the afternoon. When we got to Yerolakkos, the police station had not yet been captured by the putschists. The police stopped us. There were lots of people there, civilians with guns to help the police. They stopped us. At first they thought we were Sampson's people, setting out with the idea of helping him in Nicosia, so they set about us really ferociously, and fired bursts over our heads, to make us tell them the truth. They locked us up in the police station for about an hour, and then they let us go back to our villages, because Nicosia had fallen to the coup. If we'd gone on ahead they might have killed us. So we went home.

Tuesday morning I woke up, and listened to the radio. It told all the police and security forces to go to work. So I set off too. There were a lot of checkpoints on the way to the capital. As soon as I got to the prison I saw that all my workmates had been put under lock and key. They locked me up too. Later, a few EOKA B blokes showed up who knew who I am and who I'm not. They knew that I'd never been mixed up in armed groups, political parties, or situations of any kind. They called to me to come out and start work. So about ten o'clock this is what happened. They let most of the warders out. except for ten or fifteen who'd been [politically] involved in the situation. At the same time as this was happening they were bringing into the prisons lots of Makarios' people. They kept them with their hands up with the Greek Army officers standing by.

There was an officer there who was really decent. We don't have to condemn the putschists all the time, [by saying] that they did this and they did that. In this one situation I saw a second lieutenant in the reserves (they'd called up all the conscripts) who had got something personal against one of the Makarios men. and as soon as he saw him brought inside he started assaulting him. but the Greek officer in charge wouldn't let him and struck him, saying 'That isn't right, it isn't humane behaviour.' You see it's always been the rule in the prison that whoever is the government of the day, the prison laws are observed. And there was relative order in the prison during the week of the coup. They were bringing in men who had been knocked about, and wounded men too; but as soon as they got inside the prison gates, they all calmed down, and no one suffered a thing while inside.

That Tuesday I got sick and went off to the hospital, where it was quite a different matter. I saw a bloke there who'd been a prisoner charged with a homosexual offence. He was a reserve officer and as soon as the radio announcement about calling up the reserve came through this man was put in charge of the Danish hospital, which later became notorious. He gave orders that the wounded supporters of Makarios should be left unattended and priority should be given to the soldiers and pro-Grivas people. There were lots more with the same view. Once, by chance, some policemen brought one of their mates into a ward occupied by soldiers, and this officer cursed the policemen, wounded anc all, for intruding. The soldiers always had to have priority. It was like that for four or five days. He was half-crazy; but he was second-in-command. A vile man.

The Friday afternoon we heard that an invasion was imminent. Rumours started to get around -- they'd landed at Famagusta, in Kyrenia, and there was general chaos. I got up, to leave the hospital; I said to the doctor, 'Doctor, I'm off.' It was complete chaos in there, bedlam, not the slightest order. He said to me, >off you go then.=

I went off to the prison. I found a fellow-villager, Kyriacos, the [a senior warder]. I asked him if he was going to the village, would he take me in his car? Since I was sick and couldn't stay. The doctor had given me sick leave. Kyriakos said, 'I can't go to the village now. Anyway, there=s all kind of trouble afoot. And if anything happens to you on the way, they'd put the blame on me. OK? OK. Stay here and go tomorrow evening.' So I stayed. About quarter to five that morning some of my workmates were coming off duty, and came into the room where I was sleeping. One had a radio in his hands and he turned it on and found Bayrak, the Turkish-Cypriot propaganda station. It was giving out that the Turks were on their way to liberate Cyprus. As soon as they'd woken me with this, I heard the planes start bombing Eldyk, the Greek Army HQ, across the road.

The transport planes started bringing the [Turkish] parachutists in and they started jumping. The [EOKA B] men in control started giving out weapons immediately, arms which had been stored in the prison, to the warders they knew were with them. They were giving out guns until 7 a.m. and still not a single order came through. The prisoners were still locked up, and they didn't let them out. There must have been 2,000 or 3,000 in the cells, when normally they would have been 650.

About seven o'clock the order came through to let the prisoners out. We opened up and for a moment you could see the corridors and streets filling up with men who didn't know whether they were laughing or crying. The planes were bombing us and the parachutists were coming down, and pretty soon they starred letting us have it with mortars. I was pinned down -- I couldn't even put my head out. That's how it was to be till Monday. No bread. No water. Nobody had any taste for combat. You waited there saying, here comes a shell which will land in the midst of us and that'll be that. That's how it was for three days.

During the six days between the start of the coup and the Turkish invasion, men loyal to President Makarios continued to put up a resistance. A few police units, some armed socialist militants, and some communists who found weapons fought on with rifles and machine-guns, which were all they had to use against tanks and artillery. As with Hungary in 1956, and Chile in 1973, they were crushed in spite of their bravery. It is conceivable that a rapid mass mobilisation of armed civilians might have deterred even professional soldiers equipped with heavy weapons - such a mobilisation is said to have sustained the elected Bolivian government in November 1978.

The invasion by Turkey stopped the miniature civil war between the Greeks in Cyprus, and so it is impossible to say how long it would have gone on, and how many lives would have been lost in it. If the putschists had succeeded in destroying organised resistance quickly, there would undoubtedly have been torture and executions for many months afterwards. There were man) old scores to be settled; and the fighting of that first week had created many new ones. In the area between Paphos and Limassol, where there was strong resistance, the men of the coup are said to have buried some of Makarios' supporters alive, and to have put out the eyes of others.

There is one terrible image of what might have happened in Cyprus, which comes down to us from a much earlier period in Greek history. Thucydides describes the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, in the year 431 BC. It started in the city-state of Corcyra, the present-day island of Corfu, or Kerkira. as it is called in modern Greek.

... the Corcyrans continued to massacre those of their own citizens they considered to be their enemies. Their victims were accused of conspiring to overthrow the democracy, but in fact men were often killed on grounds of personal hatred or else by their debtors because of the money that they owed. There was death in every shape and form.

And as usually happens in such situations people went to every extreme and beyond it. There were fathers who killed their sons; men were dragged from the temples or butchered on the very altars: and some were actually walled up in the temple of Dionysios and died there . . . To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member: to think of the future and to wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward: any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character: ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became suspect.

From this, at least, most of the Greek Cypriots were spared. But the cost was very high: the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey, and the loss of many people and much territory in war.

From The Heart Grown Bitter (Cambridge University Press, 1981), chapter 4.