On 12 January 1934, Henry Blackall, the Attorney General since 1932, gave notice of his intention to marry Maria Severis, daughter of Demosthenis Severis and first cousin of Loulla Triantafyllides, Antonios's wife, in the Orthodox Church (which happened on 21 April 1934). But that night he returned to his diary (noticeable by the darker ink) to enter the details of what was then ‘an attempt to assassinate Triantafyllides’. Blackall rang and then visited the General Hospital where Triantafyllides was being operated on. One shot had entered the intestines, which were perforated in four places, and the ‘doctors regard his condition as very serious, but there is […] some hope’. His immediate view was that this was ‘the first political assassination here and it is doubtless owed to the poison instilled by the local press’, and therefore ‘censorship should be revived’. Blackall noted that Triantafyllides had ‘helped a lot towards our engagement’. The next day, Blackall entered the death of Triantafyllides and how he influenced the immediate actions of Governor Palmer (Figure 3.1).

Palmer agreed and also called a company of troops from Limassol to Nicosia, which Blackall disagreed with because

Meanwhile, in Athens, Savvas Loizides, Bishop Makarios, Theophanis Tsangarides and Theodoros Kolokasides must have received the news that Triantafyllides had died with a mixture of excitement and apprehension.

You may think there is nobody alive to recall the assassination of Antonios Triantafyllides. Well you would be wrong. Antonis Pitrakkou, a grand old man and my wife's uncle by marriage, remembers it well. Uncle Antonis is a great storyteller. One day I was telling him about my research on the assassination of Triantafyllides. At length he stopped me and asked: ‘Although I’m from Rizokarpasso, you know I was born in Aglanja?’ I said: ‘yes I know’. He then leaned forward and recounted:

We were both astonished and it is amazing that a migrant to Adelaide, Australia, in 1948, and now 94, could recall, yet, as he said: ‘how could I forget’. The fear and shock in the Greek Cypriot community were palpable. And the comment ‘our best one’, shows that uncle Antonis's father, an ordinary worker, considered Triantafyllides the best politician going around.

The way the past is remembered and forgotten are integral to forming state-controlled national histories and identities. The degree of state control depends on the character of the state and the level of nation-building that elites perceive is necessary. The control is greatest in postcolonial societies that maintain the rage against the colonial authority and in divided societies – Cyprus is both. I have previously shown how one of the largest enlistments in the British forces during the Great War, the Cypriot Mule Corps, was silenced from Cypriot historical consciousness and historiography.

Antonios (often Antonakis) Triantafyllides was born on 26 January 1890 to a Cypriot family with prominent and significant public service dating from the late Ottoman period and his family became prominent Cypriots too. His father was Michalakis and his grandfather, and namesake, born in Beirut, had been instrumental in removing Archbishop Panaretos for abuse of power in 1840 and was a member of deputations to Constantinople (1840, 1856 and 1870), with that in 1856 obtaining administrative reforms from the Porte. Antonakis was educated in Nicosia, studied law at the University of Athens (1907–11) and returned to Nicosia and established in July 1912 what became one of the finest law firms in Cyprus.

His three sons were all prominent Cypriots. His eldest, Michalakis (1927–2005), had represented EOKA members before the courts, and was considered, even at 28 when EOKA started by Charles Foley, a British journalist sympathetic to EOKA, as ‘one of the most brilliant lawyers’ in Cyprus. Michalakis was a member of the Constitutional Commission (1959–60) that drew up the constitution, was appointed judge of the Supreme Constitutional Court when Cyprus became independent in 1960, was made a judge of the Supreme Court in 1964, before being appointed president of the Supreme Court in 1971 and Attorney General in 1988 by President George Vassiliou and his successor, President Glafkos Clerides, until Michalakis retired in 1995. In 1974, when the Greek Junta ordered the coup against President Archbishop Makarios III, Nicos Sampson, a former EOKA gunman and later paramilitary leader, who became the president of the coup, was ordered to find Michalakis Triantafyllides to be the president. Triantafyllides was overseas, but is unlikely to have accepted, since the Junta wanted him only to give legitimacy to the coup. His second son, Solon (b. 1932; d. 2016), was an accountant, the first president of the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Cyprus in 1961, and the long-time chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, 1988–2005 (Antonios was on the board when he died). During his chairmanship, the Bank of Cyprus grew, he invested more in its Cultural Foundation, and established the Bank of Cyprus Oncology Centre.

After a long and hard day's work, partly in Larnaca, Antonios Triantafyllides, a leading Cypriot lawyer recently appointed to the government's new advisory council, arrived at his Nicosia home in the cool evening of 12 January 1934, only to be met with an assassin's bullets. He died the next morning. Twelve months later, Stavros Christodoulou was charged, but acquitted of murder. The assassination is a taboo subject for Cypriot society and historians alike, and a cold case that nobody has seemingly wanted to explore, until now.

This is true even when on 1 February 2002 Antonios's son, Michalakis A. Triantafyllides, made startling revelations in an interview on who was behind the assassination. Michalakis acknowledged that much was rumoured about it, but after discovering the ‘British file’ left in Cyprus, he found that his father had been a trusted friend of the Greek prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, and had decided to follow, along with others, the advice of Venizelos to cooperate with the British to achieve their acceptance of the union of Cyprus with Greece (enosis). This angered a group of ‘raging fanatics’ from Kyrenia, who claimed that such cooperation would kill enosis. To prevent this, they decided to assassinate one of the men cooperating with the British. They put four names in a hat, Antonios's ‘trusted’ physician drew his name out and they paid someone to do it. Michalakis was careful not to mention any names, but left little to the imagination, by referring to the ‘raging fanatics’ from Kyrenia and that the man accused of the shooting in court later approached him for forgiveness. When he was Attorney General (i.e., 1988–95) he was informed that the assassin was dying of cancer and that he wanted Michalakis to forgive him. Michalakis does not say if he visited him, but he did forgive him in a public statement, which the assassin did not appreciate and issued legal proceedings, forcing Michalakis to publish an apology. Clearly, he did not want the publicity of a libel case.

Despite what Michalakis stated in that interview there are still many unanswered questions, inconsistencies and gaps, and the subject remains controversial.

My father died in 2019 when I was 39. I cannot imagine what my life would have been like had I lost him aged 7, when Michalakis Triantafyllides lost his father Antonios and his brothers were even younger. While being interviewed at 75, he cried uncontrollably as he recollected how his idyllic childhood was destroyed that fateful evening when his father was shot. He was in the house with his mother and brothers, when they heard the shots and a maid rushed in with the tragic news. The family were fortunately taken in by their aunt and uncle (Maria and Stelios Pavlides), yet they had lost a husband and father, an irreplaceable part of their lives, and he missed seeing them grow into upstanding members of society. And the nation lost a son. A man of intelligence, integrity and political acumen beyond most Cypriots then and since, and as Blackall stated: ‘he was the most statesmanlike figure among the Greek Cypriots’. Antonios Triantafyllides was not merely a once in a generation politician for Cyprus, but a once in a lifetime one.

The analysis of the evidence has shown that there existed a far right, specifically fascist, pro-enosis faction anxious to address the dilution of the nationalist pro-enosis ranks and enosis and only enosis stance with violence, thus highlighting the ambiguities in the prosecution of Cypriot nationalist and pro-enosis politics during the interwar years. Evidence pointed to a group of extremist nationalists, with fascist tendencies, some deported after the October 1931 disturbances and living in Athens and others still in Cyprus, as masterminding the assassination. This was the original view of Palmer, Blackall and Paschalis, and five of them were interned, including Dr Pigasiou, named as the mastermind by crown witnesses, contrary to the crown's communist conspiracy. This was reinforced by the evidence from Theodotou and Surridge; by the writings in the Athenian newspapers from the deportees to establish the ‘personal motive’ theory to deny the assassination; and by the threatening letters received by other Greek Cypriots either nominated or elected to represent the people.

During the night of 12 January, many of the newspaper editors in Nicosia were in deep shock as news of the shooting of Antonios Triantafyllides spread. The editor of Πρωινή was at the hospital, where Dr Themistocles Dervis, the Mayor of Nicosia (1929–46 and 1949–59), stated that ‘his situation was critical’. As the editors went to press, they could only report on his shooting, and had no idea that their next print would be reporting his death, which caused much heartache and loss for his family, friends, colleagues and the public, as evidenced by the numerous published memorials, for example the epigram, which places the assassination of Triantafyllides on the same level of importance as that of Kyrillos III.

This chapter explores the colonial newspapers which cover two periods of the Triantafyllides case. The first with articles on the shooting, his death and the funeral and memorial services. These provide the reactions (generally of shock and sadness) from the newspaper editors, the public and his friends and colleagues. The articles also establish a timeline of the before and after the shooting, until his death, with numerous important facts revealed that were not covered in the subsequent trial. These articles are vital for analysing the second series of articles, on the pre-hearing and criminal court case against Stavros Christodoulou, which took place a year after the assassination. Without the court records or a comprehensive account of the court proceedings in the government files, the newspapers proved essential for establishing many facts in connection with the shooting, death, funeral and memorials, and the subsequent court case, especially the case of the prosecution and the testimonies of witnesses.

The chapter has two broad aims. Methodologically it aims to show that a community of records can only be created when all the sources are consulted, and in this case the newspapers proved pivotal to exploring the case because they provided information and detail otherwise unavailable.

Introduction

On 13 December 1951, the Corsica left Limassol with 761 Cypriot migrants for Australia, including my father, Varnavas Michael Varnava. Arriving at Fremantle and Melbourne in early 1952, the trip was described by a woman passenger as a ‘hell trip on a floating slum’, because of the horrendous conditions on-board. This was the first and only ship to leave Cyprus with so many migrants, at least in the modern era, and contributed to the 2,509 Cypriots who left for Australia in 1951. The first mass Cypriot emigration started after the Second World War. A detailed study of this period and of the Corsica goes beyond the scope of this chapter, yet that period cannot be understood without first understanding the preceding emigratory periods. This is the aim of this chapter. Between 1820 and 1911, Cypriot emigration was limited; it became significant from 1912, despite restrictions. The context with the post-Second World War might be different, but there were similarities with the conditions propelling the emigration, namely socioeconomic. To understand the significant emigration and interest to emigrate after 1912, it is important to understand the earlier period, first under the Ottomans (from 1820s to 1878) and particularly under the British (1878–1911), when the conditions for the significant emigration that followed were laid. This chapter is the first attempt to explore Cypriot emigration before mass Cypriot emigration began after the Second World War, peaking with the departure of the Corsica.

The chapter attempts to achieve these aims by using an interpretive methodology adapted from the work of Eric Richards, namely that of exploring emigration through local and global patterns. By local patterns is meant local conditions triggering people to move, internally to a specific constituent place96 or within nearby internal imperial borders. When Richards discussed Scottish emigration, there was the movement of Scots within Scotland from rural to urban and from rural (interior highlands) to other rural (coastal lowland), and there was the movement of Scots to other parts of the UK. This applies to the Cypriot case, since, as it will be shown, there were movements of Cypriots from rural to urban spaces in Cyprus under Ottoman and especially under British rule, as well as movement to other parts of the Ottoman (i.e. Anatolia and Syria) and British empires in the vicinity (i.e. Egypt).