Turkish Cypriot community during the British administration (1923-1960)

Cyprus, the third largest island in the Mediterranean, has been the focus of many states throughout history due to its strategic location. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled the island from 1571 to1878, temporarily left the administration of the island to England in 1878 and the British administration started on the island. This annexation of Britain, which declared that it annexed the island unilaterally in 1914, was recognized by the Lausanne Peace Treaty signed in 1923 and the island officially became a British colony. This situation continued until the British gave independence to the island in 1960. This study aims to reveal what kind of policy Britain followed on the island in the period from 1923 to 1960, the effects of these policies on both the Turkish Cypriot community and the Greek society, the main problems faced by societies and their inter-communal relations, and the economic, cultural, social and political conditions of the societies. Investigating and analyzing the strategies that Britain, which is the determiner and implementer of the policies regarding the future of Cyprus, followed in the specified period will be useful in understanding the historical roots of the Cyprus issue. Our study, which was created by following a chronological order, consists of four main sections. In this context, in the first part of the thesis, the situation of the island before the 1923 Lausanne Peace Treaty is discussed at in general without more details. The second part of the thesis started with the 1923 Lausanne Peace Treaty and was maintained until the beginning of the Second World War. In the period from 1923 to 1939, the policies that Britain tried to develop in Cyprus were discussed from different aspects and the effects of the strategies implemented by the British around the world on these policies were discussed. In this section, where archive documents are mostly used, the educational status, cultures, traditions and customs, economic and religious situations, and inter-communal relations of the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities are also discussed in detail. In the third part of the thesis, political and social developments in the island in the period from 1939 to 1950 are included. The fourth part, on the other hand, started in 1950 when Greece had plebiscite built on the island and ended with the independence given to the island in 1960 and the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus. The main source of the thesis is archive documents and local and foreign press sources of the period. As the secondary literature, especially memoirs written by the statesmen of the period and other research works were used.