In a cell in the Nicosia Central Prison's Block 8, a haggard young (23) tax clerk named Michael Karaolis told his blackshawled mother: "They're going to hang me." From the next cell Andreas Demetriou, also 23, and awaiting a similar fate, shouted the news to prisoners down the row. Field Marshal Sir John Harding, the doughty little Governor of Cyprus, had made a soldier's unpleasant decision: finding "no grounds for exercising Royal Prerogative of Mercy," the two young Greek Cypriots must hang.
In the year-long fight between Greek-speaking Cypriots and their British masters in the crown colony of Cyprus, 92 people had lost their lives up to week's end—not a very big figure when set against such other tragic struggles as Kenya and Algeria. But what made it heartbreaking is the fact that it is a fight between friends. Greeks have fought beside Britons for freedom since Byron; they cannot understand now why the British should deny their fellow Greeks' desire for self-determination.
In Athens, Governor Harding's stern decision touched off the worst street killings and disorders since the Communists tried to grab power in 1944. Blocked off by army barricades from the British embassy, Athens mobs stoned the U.S. Information Office and started a sprinting, shooting street fight with troops and cops in which three died, 200 were wounded. Greek Premier Constantine Karamanlis pleaded with the British to call off the executions. So did 30 British Labor M.P.s. And so, departing briefly from the U.S. decision to be neutral over Cyprus, did John Foster Dulles, who asked Britain's Selwyn Lloyd "whether it would not be prudent to postpone the hanging."
Britain's Tory government was unmoved by outcries abroad or protests at home. It had steeled itself to a hard course and engaged on a dangerous gamble. By exiling Archbishop Makarios to an Indian Ocean island without legal process, and ruthlessly stamping out terrorism, it hoped to create a "fertile vacuum" in which new, more compliant leaders would emerge. Karaolis had killed a cop, Demetriou had wounded a British businessman; they must pay.
Unhallowed Ground. As Harding prepared for the first political execution in Britain's 78-year island rule, 400,000 Cypriots mounted a death watch. Behind shuttered doors Nicosia waited as Father Antonios, head priest of Archbishop Makarios' palace chapel, went to give the doomed pair the Holy Sacraments. Karaolis wrote out his confession on a piece of paper. At 4 a.m. a guard nudged Antonios from a restless couch, led him to a dim room where two plain coffins stood by the wall. Because the British insisted on burial in the prison courtyard, i.e., in unhallowed ground, the Orthodox priest could not hold service. He read briefly from the Bible, then kissed each man on the forehead. They died bravely, he said.
Outside the gate, Karaolis' mother sat on a little chair. An air of smoldering enmity hung over the capital city of Nicosia. Shops shut tight in protest; workers left jobs. Men no longer sat at cafes but lounged sullenly at the curbs; they glared and spat as young British troopers rattled past in Land Rovers, their Bren guns trained outboard.