Born: At Panayia, a Cypriot village, in 1913, the son of a peasant.
Education: At the village school, Kykko Monastery, the Pancyprian gymnasium in Nicosia and the Theology School of Athens, where he graduated in 1943.
Religious Career: Ordained a priest (1946) of the Greek Orthodox Church. Continuing his studies on a scholarship awarded by the World Council of Churches to Boston University, he also served as a priest in Orthodox churches jn New England. While in the U.S. he was elected Bishop of Kition, and returned to Cyprus, where two years later he was elected archbishop.
Personality: Handsome, tall, slender, with glistening black eyes and trimmed black beard (a must for Orthodox priests), he has a soft, musical voice, which he uses without oratorical tricks. In interviews with foreign correspondents (which he gives readily) he is quiet-spoken, impassive, with no trace of emotion except, occasionally, a quick, bland smile that, says one correspondent, "crinkles his face like that of a boy who knows where the pot of jam is hidden." When talking, he likes to make a little cage of his hands, fingertips against fingertips.
Political Career: Finding the Church of Cyprus at low tide, Makarios set out to re-establish church prestige and improve the life of village priests. He stirred the dying enosis (union with Greece) movement into holding a plebiscite (1950), which produced a 95% vote in favor of union. He then sponsored a nationalist youth organization and called for a boycott of everything British. Carrying his propaganda into foreign fields, he visited Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Britain and the U.S., and last year went to the Bandung conference to seek Asian support for Cypriot self-determination. According to the British, he also organized "a systematic campaign of passive resistance" on Cyprus, which became, after arms and explosives were smuggled from Greece, a campaign of active sabotage and terrorism.
Cypriot Cnurcn: The Church of Cyprus, to which 80% of the island's population belongs, is part of the Eastern Orthodox Church and has been autocephalic (self-ruled) since 431. Founded by St. Barnabas and St. Paul, it is in ecclesiastical communion with the other sees of Eastern Orthodox Churches, in dogma and liturgical tradition is close to the Roman Catholic Church because it preserves the faith as interpreted by the seven Ecumenical Councils of the first eight centuries (when the church was one and undivided). The Greek Orthodox Church is also in communion with the established Church of England and has already protested to it—as well as to other Christian groups around the world—over the archbishop's exile.