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Apart from Phoenician traders, Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors, Mark Antony gave the island to Cleopatra, St Paul preached there, and Richard the Lionheart sold it to the Templars in 1192. Cyprus stands at a unique geographical relationship to Europe, the Middle East and the Mediterranean and, since 1869, to the Suez short route to the East. It was its strategic importance to a post Second World War Britain engaged in the painful process of essential global military readjustments that precipitated one of the fiercest and most painful of colonial freedom struggles in the mid and late 1950s. Disraeli had acquired the island for Britain in 1878 as a potentially invaluable military and naval base and although still a valuable strategic site, Cyprus is an increasingly desirable and popular holiday destination whether to the north or more commonly to the south. There are wonderful Roman mosaics at Paphos and the fine Byzantine interior of Asinou Church. Includes historical gazetteer, chronology of major events, historical and contemporary maps and covers prehistory through the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Frankish, Venetian, Ottoman and British periods. 231pp, pen and ink drawings. Paperback.