Cyprus of Turkish territory. Meanwhile, by 1964, "enosis" was a Greek policy that could not be abandoned; Makarios and the Greek prime minister Georgios Papandreou agreed that "enosis" should be the ultimate aim and King Constantine wished Cyprus "a speedy union with the mother country". Greece dispatched 10,000 troops to Cyprus to counter a possible Turkish invasion. On 15 July 1974, the Greek military junta under Dimitrios Ioannides carried out a coup d'état in Cyprus, to unite the island with Greece. The coup ousted president Makarios III and replaced him with pro-enosis nationalist Nikos Sampson. In response to the coup, five
Cyprus–Greece relations Cyprus–Greece relations Cypriot–Greek relations are the foreign relations between Cyprus and Greece. Cyprus has an embassy in Athens and a consulate-general in Thessaloniki. Greece has an embassy in Nicosia. Both countries are full members of the European Union, Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Relations between the two countries have been exceptionally close since antiquity. The Greek Cypriot majority in Cyprus and the ethnic Greek population of Greece share a common ethnicity, heritage, language, and religion, leading to an exceptionally close relationship between the two countries. Traditionally, Greece has been the major export