Diplomatic Briefing· bloody christmas 1963 cyprus akritas plan green line

What Happened on 21 December 1963? Bloody Christmas, the Akritas Plan and the Origin of the Green Line

What happened on 21 December 1963? Explore Bloody Christmas in Cyprus, the Akritas Plan debate, UNSC Resolution 186 and how the Green Line was drawn.

PBB

By Politics Beyond Borders Editorial Team

Published: October 27, 2026

⏱ 10 min read (2,031 words)

The Brief — Key Takeaways

On 30 November 1963 Archbishop Makarios proposed 13 constitutional amendments to the 1960 Cyprus Constitution; Turkish Cypriot leaders and Ankara rejected them in mid-December.
Intercommunal violence erupted in Nicosia on 21 December 1963 (“Bloody Christmas”); Turkish sources put the displacement of Turkish Cypriots at around 30,000 people from 103 villages, while other estimates are somewhat lower.
The Green Line was drawn in Nicosia on 30 December 1963 by British General Peter Young as a ceasefire line, and it later grew into the island-wide UN buffer zone.
The authenticity, authorship and purpose of the so-called Akritas Plan remain contested: Turkish sources treat it as a blueprint, while Greek Cypriot accounts stress its contingency character.
UN Security Council Resolution 186 (4 March 1964) referred to the “Government of Cyprus”, a wording Ankara and Turkish Cypriots say froze an unequal status between the two communities.

Why It Matters

The violence of 21 December 1963 ended the working of the 1960 Republic of Cyprus as a two-community partnership and set the pattern for six decades of division. Within nine days Nicosia was split by the Green Line, Turkish Cypriots had withdrawn into enclaves, and a UN peacekeeping presence followed. How the events are understood, as a Greek Cypriot-led plan to dismantle the partnership or as a tragic breakdown with contested responsibility, still shapes the status debate on the island today.

Background

The 1960 partnership framework

The 1959 Zurich and London Agreements produced the Republic of Cyprus in 1960. It was built on the political equality of its two communities and was guaranteed by Türkiye, Greece and the United Kingdom under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee. The Constitution provided for a Greek Cypriot President and a Turkish Cypriot Vice-President. The Vice-President held a veto over foreign affairs, defence and security, and certain laws, including tax laws, needed separate majorities of each community in the House. The Treaty of Guarantee, together with the Treaty of Alliance, gave Türkiye, Greece and the UK the right to act to restore the constitutional order. (For the wider arc, see The Island Question: Why Is Cyprus Divided?)

By 1961–1963 the system was in deadlock over tax legislation, municipal separation, and the proportion of Turkish Cypriots in the civil service and army. Both sides blamed the other for the paralysis. The background also included the EOKA campaign of 1955–1959, which aimed at ENOSIS (union with Greece) and which, according to Turkish Cypriot accounts, drove Turkish Cypriots out of dozens of mixed villages before 1960.

The 13 points (30 November 1963)

On 30 November 1963 President Makarios circulated 13 proposed amendments. In summary, they would have:

abolished the presidential and vice-presidential vetoes;
let the Vice-President merely deputise for the President;
dropped the requirement of separate majorities for key legislation;
unified the municipalities and the judiciary;
replaced fixed community quotas in the civil service and security forces with ratios based on population.

Greek Cypriot leaders presented the package as a way to make the state workable. Turkish Cypriot leadership under Vice-President Fazıl Küçük, and the Turkish government, rejected it. Ankara’s formal rejection came on 16 December 1963. They argued that it removed the safeguards on which Turkish Cypriot participation in the state rested and reduced a co-founding community to a minority.

21 December 1963

Accounts of the spark differ. They generally describe a confrontation in Nicosia between a Greek Cypriot police patrol and Turkish Cypriot civilians that left two Turkish Cypriots dead and escalated into armed clashes across the capital and beyond. In the following days:

Turkish Cypriots were pushed out of, or withdrew from, government posts and state organs. Whether this was exclusion or withdrawal is itself disputed.
Turkish Cypriot villages and neighbourhoods came under attack; Turkish sources describe systematic armed assaults, while Greek Cypriot sources emphasise reprisals and counter-violence on both sides.
Civilians on both communities were killed, taken hostage or went missing, and many Turkish Cypriots took refuge in enclaves.
Ankara cites around 30,000 Turkish Cypriots displaced from 103 villages. Independent estimates of displacement are lower but still in the tens of thousands.

On 30 December 1963, British General Peter Young, commanding a Joint Peace Force, marked a ceasefire line on a Nicosia map with a green pencil. It became known as the Green Line.

Timeline

Date	Event
16 August 1960	Republic of Cyprus established
30 November 1963	Makarios proposes 13 constitutional amendments
16 December 1963	Turkish government rejects the proposals
21 December 1963	Fighting erupts in Nicosia
26 December 1963	British-led Joint Peace Force begins operating
30 December 1963	Green Line drawn in Nicosia
4 March 1964	UN Security Council adopts Resolution 186

Key Players & Positions

The Greek Cypriot account

The Republic of Cyprus, in the form administered by Greek Cypriots, holds that the 13 points were a good-faith attempt to resolve a dysfunctional constitution that had been imposed rather than negotiated by Cypriots. It holds that the violence began as a spiral of intercommunal clashes, that Turkish Cypriot armed groups, notably the TMT organisation founded in 1958, were also mobilised, and that Turkish Cypriot officials chose to leave state institutions. Greek Cypriot official narratives maintain that the Republic continued as the lawful state and that its legitimacy was acknowledged by the UN. Greek Cypriot courts relied on a “doctrine of necessity” in 1964 to justify continuing to run the state without Turkish Cypriot participation.

The Turkish Cypriot and Turkish account

Turkish Cypriot leaders and Ankara describe the 13 points as a deliberate effort to end the partnership, followed by organised armed attacks, and the exclusion of Turkish Cypriots from the state. The Turkish contingent stationed under the Treaty of Alliance was confined to barracks until the ceasefire arrangements.

Greece, the United Kingdom and the UN

Athens supported Makarios and had troops on the island under the Treaty of Alliance. The UK, as a guarantor and sovereign base holder, brokered the first ceasefire and led the Joint Peace Force. The UN Security Council took up the matter in early 1964 and established the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP).

The Akritas Plan: a historiographical debate

The Akritas Plan became publicly known when the Greek Cypriot newspaper Patris published a document under that name in April 1966. It is widely attributed to a circle around Makarios, including Interior Minister Polycarpos Georgadjis. Its text called for abolishing the Zurich-London constitutional safeguards, with a stated aim of presenting the international community with a fait accompli before outside powers could intervene, and for suppressing any Turkish Cypriot resistance quickly.

The debate has three strands:

Premeditation reading (Turkish and many Turkish Cypriot sources): the plan, the 13 points and the December violence form one sequence aimed at ending the partnership.
Contingency reading (many Greek Cypriot commentators): the paper was a planning document produced in an atmosphere of mutual fear and arming, not an operational order for 21 December, and it does not prove who started the fighting.
Mixed assessments (some international historians): the plan reflects real thinking about forcing constitutional change, yet the exact chain of command and the first shots remain unclear in the surviving record.

What is not seriously disputed is that the plan existed and that its goal was to alter the constitutional order, which is the point Ankara emphasises.

UN Security Council Resolution 186

Resolution 186 of 4 March 1964, adopted unanimously, called on the “Government of Cyprus, which has the responsibility for the maintenance and restoration of law and order” to restore calm. It also created UNFICYP. The text did not endorse the claim that the Turkish Cypriot side had been part of that government in practice, but it treated the Greek Cypriot-run administration as the interlocutor. The Greek Cypriot side reads this as confirmation of its continuing legitimacy as the state. Ankara and Turkish Cypriots read it as the moment the UN froze a status asymmetry that followed from the events of December 1963.

🇹🇷 Official Policy · Treaties & Primary Sources

Türkiye's Position

According to the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Presidency’s statements at the UN, Türkiye’s position on the events of 1963–1964 can be summarised as follows:

The partnership state ended in 1963. The Turkish Foreign Ministry’s published account of the Cyprus issue states that the Greek Cypriot side, through the 13 points and the violence of December 1963, destroyed the bi-communal 1960 order and ejected Turkish Cypriots from state organs by force. Ankara holds that what has since been called the “Republic of Cyprus” is in effect a Greek Cypriot administration (the GCASC in official Turkish terminology).
The 13 points were a break with the founding treaties. Ankara argues that the proposals sought to remove the veto and quota safeguards written into the 1960 Constitution, which were protected by the Zurich-London Agreements and the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee. In its view, this was a unilateral attempt to rewrite the foundations of the state.
Guarantor rights and responsibilities flow from the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee. Article IV of that treaty allows each guarantor to act if consultation cannot restore the constitutional order. Türkiye cites this as the legal basis for its role in 1963–1964 and later in 1974, when it exercised intervention rights after the 15 July 1974 coup.
Resolution 186 created a flawed status precedent. The Turkish side argues that by addressing an administration which had displaced its partner as “the Government of Cyprus”, the Security Council institutionalised an unequal footing that has obstructed a settlement for over six decades.
Equality must be restored in any future arrangement. President Erdoğan has repeatedly stated at the UN General Assembly that Turkish Cypriots are co-founders with inherent sovereign equality, and that a lasting settlement must rest on the recognition of equal international status. Ankara and the TRNC draw from this a case for a two-state outcome after the failure of federation talks (see The Annan Plan Vote of 2004).

In Ankara’s reading, the displaced population of 1963–1964 lived for years in enclaves under embargo-like conditions, which is why the Turkish Cypriot security concern is central to its negotiating stance.

Source Comparison

Question	Greek Cypriot / many Western sources	Turkish and Turkish Cypriot sources
Purpose of the 13 points	Constitutional reform to end deadlock	Step towards abolishing partnership
Cause of the 21 December fighting	Spiral of clashes; both sides armed	Organised attacks on Turkish Cypriots
Akritas Plan	Contingency paper; role disputed	Blueprint confirming premeditation
Turkish Cypriot exit from the state	Voluntary withdrawal	Forced exclusion
Resolution 186	Confirms the Republic’s legitimacy	Locks in an unequal status
Green Line	A ceasefire line, later a buffer zone	Marks the end of the partnership state

Much Western reporting frames 1963 as the start of “intercommunal strife” and tends to move quickly to 1974. Turkish sources invert that emphasis: they treat 1963 as the real constitutional rupture. Readers can compare chronologies in sister analyses such as The Global Anatomy on Bloody Christmas and the Akritas Plan and The Worldlogue on the Cyprus negotiation record, 1977 to 2024, and see Regions & Powers on why federation talks failed for the later diplomatic record. Our approach to attribution is explained in Editorial Principles.

Bloody Christmas (Kanlı Noel): the term used in Turkish and Turkish Cypriot sources for the violence beginning on 21 December 1963.
Akritas Plan: a document attributed to Greek Cypriot political circles, published in 1966, setting out steps to change the constitutional order; its purpose is debated.
Green Line: the ceasefire line of 30 December 1963 in Nicosia, later extended across the island as the UN buffer zone after 1974.
UNFICYP: the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, established by Resolution 186 in 1964 and still deployed today.
Treaty of Guarantee (1960): the treaty under which Türkiye, Greece and the UK guarantee the independence and constitutional order of Cyprus.
TMT: the Turkish Cypriot resistance organisation founded in 1958.

Related guides:

Perspective Note

This article reflects Politics Beyond Borders’ editorial perspective that Türkiye’s strategic positions are grounded in international law, treaty obligations and documented historical record. Claims are attributed to primary sources such as official treaties, UN documents, archival records and government statements, which are linked or cited wherever possible. Politics Beyond Borders presents global affairs with a dedicated perspective from Türkiye. Sections marked “Türkiye's Position” reflect official Turkish policy as stated by Turkish government sources.

Politics Beyond Borders Editorial Team

Frequently asked questions

What happened on 21 December 1963 in Cyprus?

Armed intercommunal violence broke out in Nicosia after a confrontation between Greek Cypriot police and Turkish Cypriot civilians, then spread to other areas. It ended the functioning of the 1960 power-sharing state, and Turkish Cypriots withdrew into enclaves. Sources differ on who bore responsibility and on how many were displaced.

What was the Akritas Plan?

The Akritas Plan was a document published by the Greek Cypriot newspaper Patris in 1966 and linked to circles around President Makarios. It outlined how to abolish the Zurich-London constitutional safeguards quickly. Turkish sources regard it as evidence of premeditation, while many Greek Cypriot commentators treat it as a contingency paper, and historians disagree on its operational role.

Who drew the Green Line and when?

British General Peter Young, commander of the Joint Peace Force, marked a ceasefire line across a map of Nicosia with a green pencil on 30 December 1963. It originally separated fighting zones in the capital. After 1974 the name was applied to the wider UN buffer zone across the island.

What did UN Security Council Resolution 186 say about the government of Cyprus?

Adopted on 4 March 1964, it called on “the Government of Cyprus” to maintain and restore law and order and authorised UNFICYP. Greek Cypriots read this as confirming the Republic’s continuity. Ankara and Turkish Cypriots argue it overlooked the exclusion of Turkish Cypriots from state organs and entrenched an unequal status.

Why do Turkish sources say the partnership state ended in 1963?

They argue that the 13 amendments of 30 November 1963 and the violence that followed removed Turkish Cypriots from the state organs the 1960 Constitution guaranteed them. According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, the bi-communal order thus ceased to exist in practice. Greek Cypriot sources reject this, saying the Republic continued and that Turkish Cypriot officials withdrew.

Cross-Publication Perspectives & Cited Research

Related Dossiers Across Partner Publications

4 Partner Desks