Cyprus dispute Kingdom of Cyprus. In February 1489 it was seized by the Republic of Venice. Between September 1570 and August 1571 it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, starting three centuries of Turkish rule over Cyprus. Starting in the early nineteenth century, ethnic Greeks of the island sought to bring about an end to almost 300 years of Ottoman rule and unite Cyprus with Greece. The United Kingdom took administrative control of the island in 1878, to prevent Ottoman possessions from falling under Russian control following the Cyprus Convention, which led to the call for union with Greece ("enosis") to grow
Languages of the European Union Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek scripts. The current design of euro banknotes has the word "euro" written in both the Latin and Greek (Ευρώ) alphabets; the Cyrillic spelling (Eвро) was added to the new Europa series of banknotes started in 2013 (see Linguistic issues concerning the euro). Although Maltese is an official language, the Council set a transitional period of three years from 1 May 2004, during which the institutions were not obliged to draft all acts in Maltese. It was