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A bomb exploded mysteriously at the Turkish information office in Nicosia. No one was hurt. Turkish Cypriots accused Greek Cypriots of setting off the bomb, but British officials accused the Turks themselves of planting the bomb as a pretext for starting trouble. Turkish Cypriots surged from their quarter of Nicosia, armed with guns, sticks, stones and knives. Screaming "Partition or death!", they wrecked and burned Greek Cypriot shops, beat every Greek Cypriot they could lay hands upon, killed two. When British security forces arrived, the Greek Cypriots, forgetting three years of terror against the British, taunted the Tommies: "Where have you been?"
Three hours after the rioting erupted, the British ordered a curfew, but it was 4 o'clock next morning before order was restored. Summoned to battle by the peal of church bells, Greek Cypriots out for revenge killed a Turkish Cypriot woman, shot a Turkish Cypriot auxiliary policeman. Busloads of Greek Cypriots poured into the towns from the hills. When the curfew was lifted later to allow housewives to shop, the Turks descended with a roar from their quarter again, looting and beating. In one fearful day Turkish Cypriots set fires in 30 Greek Cypriot establishments, then stoned the firemen who came to put them out.
Out of the Corn Fields. British security forces dropped barricades of barbed wire across the so-called "Mason-Dixon line" that divides the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot quarters of Nicosia. In the hills near the capital. British forces intervened in the nick of time to prevent a clash between marching columns of Greek and Turkish Cypriots. But after arresting and questioning a band of Greek Cypriots armed with cudgels, the British drove them not home but into the countryside, and released them unarmed on a road near Guenyeli, a Turkish Cypriot community near Nicosia. "We ran and ran," one 14-year-old Greek Cypriot survivor recalled later, "but the Turks were everywhere. They came out of the corn fields in the hundreds with knives and axes and meat skewers." The toll in that incident: eight killed. The week's toll: 15 killed, hundreds injured.
To bolster the protest on Cyprus, the Turkish government whipped up a demonstration of 100,000 persons in Istanbul, and similar rallies in other major Turkish cities. From Ankara radio came a week-long tirade of incitement to Turkish Cypriots. The Greek government protested Turkish "barbarism" in NATO's permanent Council in Paris, and asked for NATO intervention. In a protest to the U.N. Security Council, the Greeks accused the British of a "very poor show" and "inadequate action" in curbing the Turkish Cypriots. The Greeks withdrew their 200 men and their families from NATO headquarters at Izmir. Turkey.
All this took place even before this week's public announcement of the British plan. At men of Britain's 16th Parachute Brigade flew into Cyprus from Britain to rein force the 20,000 troops and police already on duty. They came at the request of harried Governor Sir Hugh Foot, who went out to Cyprus six months ago with liberal plans to end harsh British security measures, and in high hopes of solving the Cyprus dispute.