ABSTRACT
Launching the domestic campaign for Cyprus in 1950, its ex officio leader, Archbishop Spyridon of Athens and all Greece, declared Enosis to be not only an incontestable right but also the duty of all Greeks to ‘complete the liberation and strengthen the independence of Hellenism’.1 If proof were needed, the rhetoric and literature of Enosis revealed that the political culture of irredentist campaigns in times past was alive and kicking. That it seemed out of step with the prevailing mood in post-war Europe did not unduly worry its advocates. They continued to stress the continuity and historic mission of Hellenism, sprinkled with references to divine election and doses of racial determinism. From late 1954, when the opposition of most Western governments to Enosis became painfully apparent, the image of a martyred people, constantly victimized by the ‘powerful of the earth’, blended with a bitter antiWestern, especially anti-American, sentiment.
