Diplomats from Britain, Greece, and Turkey concluded talks in London on February 19, 1959, agreeing on a framework granting Cyprus independence while preserving British military bases and guaranteeing rights for the island's Turkish minority. The agreement ended years of EOKA guerrilla warfare against British rule but planted the seeds of the Greek-Turkish division that would erupt again in 1974.
After nearly four years of guerrilla warfare waged by the Greek Cypriot organization EOKA against British colonial rule, exhausted negotiators from Greece, Turkey, and Britain hammered out a compromise in London that would grant Cyprus independence rather than union with Greece, which most Greek Cypriots had actually wanted.
The agreement guaranteed Britain continued use of military bases at Akrotiri and Dhekelia — bases it retains to this day — while establishing power-sharing arrangements meant to protect the Turkish Cypriot minority, roughly a fifth of the island's population.
The compromise satisfied almost no one completely, and the constitutional arrangements it created proved fragile. Intercommunal violence flared repeatedly through the 1960s, culminating in the 1974 Turkish invasion and the island's de facto partition — a division that persists to this day, making the 1959 agreement as much a story of unresolved tension as of successful decolonization.
Key people: Konstantinos Karamanlis, Adnan Menderes, Harold Macmillan, Archbishop Makarios III