On February 21 (Thursday) at 16:00, the BHFC will host a lecture “Archbishop Makarios III: the symbol of Cyprus and a man of mystery” by Dr. Stanislav Kovalskiy, Associate Professor of the Department of History and Philosophy of the I.I. Mechnikov Odessa National University

For seventeen years of Archbishop Makarios’s III service as the President of Cyprus, the island experienced a lot.  Cyprus was at the epicenter of political and international crises, it was shaken by ethnic conflict as well as became the arena of a peacekeeping operation.  The President of Cyprus shared all these troubles with his people and his country.  In the distant 1978, the leading American newspaper New York Times spoke of Archbishop Makarios III as a great figure among the politicians of the “third world”.  The personality of Makarios III has become a vivid phenomenon of the era of the Cold War.  Some called him a dictator, guilty of all the troubles of the island.  Others regarded him as an outstanding leader, protector of the Greek Cypriots, and the guardian of the interests of their homeland.  So, who was he?

How did it happen, that a priest, a leader of a small Mediterranean state, became one of the main mysteries of the Mediterranean policy of the Cold War?  Why did he remain a “tough nut crack” for the most famous diplomats and politicians of the Western world?  Why was he disliked in Greece and openly hated in Turkey?  Was he a real “last Byzantine politician,” as an eminent American diplomat Henry Kissinger wrote about him? The lecture by Stanislav Kovalskiy will address these questions and expand on these issues.