Battle of Kokkina

Kokkina, known to Turkish Cypriots as Erenköy, is a cluster of villages on the coast of Morphou Bay in the Tylliria region of northwest Cyprus. After the fighting of 1963 and 1964 it became a fortified Turkish Cypriot enclave with direct access to the sea. Its small harbour mattered to both sides. The Greek Cypriot government suspected it was being used to land arms from Turkey, and in the summer of 1964 it added a radar station and patrol boats along the coast.

By then the Republic had created the National Guard, a conscript force set up by a House of Representatives sitting without its Turkish Cypriot members, and General Georgios Grivas, the former EOKA leader, had returned from Greece to command it. On 6 August 1964 the National Guard attacked the enclave with artillery, mortars and fire from the sea, and infantry slowly pushed the defenders back towards the shore.

Turkey answered on 8 August. Turkish jets attacked two Cypriot patrol boats, setting one, the Phaethon, on fire and killing seven of its crew, and over 8 and 9 August they struck Greek Cypriot positions and villages across Tylliria, including Kato Pyrgos. Greek Cypriot civilians as well as soldiers were among the dead; one widely cited count gives 33 Greek Cypriots killed and about 230 injured in the bombing. Turkish Cypriot accounts record ten Turkish soldiers and Turkish Cypriot fighters killed in the defence of the enclave. A Turkish pilot, Captain Cengiz Topel, was shot down on 8 August and died after being captured; Turkish accounts say he was tortured. Makarios threatened to attack Turkish Cypriot villages across the island if the strikes continued, and Greece and Turkey moved troops towards their border in Thrace. A ceasefire took hold on 10 August.

The enclave held, although reduced to a narrow strip along the beach. It is now an exclave of northern Cyprus, surrounded on land by territory controlled by the Republic. Greek Cypriots remember the bombing of Tylliria; Turkish Cypriots and Turks remember the defence of Erenköy as a story of resistance. For Turkey, the air strikes were its first direct military action on the island, and they showed both communities that Ankara was prepared to use force there.