This article is interesting with respect to the history of mining in Cyprus:
CYPRUS: Copper Island
Monday, Mar. 12,
1956
Hoping to pull off a coup by personal diplomacy, British Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd flew to Cyprus last week to try to win a settlement from the island's Ethnarch, Archbishop Makarios. The bearded archbishop was plainly in no mood for compromise. "The British," he said, "must exclude any possibility of further retreat by us no matter how tough their stand may appear."
Self-determination for Cyprus is an issue that agitates three NATO partners, Greece. Britain and Turkey. Not so well known is an American interest there.
Scholars disagree on whether the island of Cyprus (in Greek, Kupros) took its name from the Greek word for copper, or whether it was just the other way around. For 30 centuries before the birth of Christ, much of the copper known to the Mediterranean world came from Cyprus, where clumps of almost pure metal once lay loose on the ground. Agamemnon was said to have sailed for Troy carrying a brand-new sword of Cyprian copper. The weapon Alexander the Great brandished against his enemies was the gift of a Cypriot king.
Roman know-how, spreading to Cyprus in 58 B.C., managed to squeeze a rich payload out of Cyprian ore bodies for at least four centuries more, leaving behind slag heaps of exhausted ore that are still standing today. Then, for close to 1,500 years, the world forgot the copper that made Cyprus famous.
Late Date. Conqueror after conqueror followed the Romans across the beachheads of the vulnerable Mediterranean island, but none bothered to investigate the mineral riches that lay beneath its soil.
In 1912 the chance visit of an American geologist to a New York Public Library led to their rediscovery.
Hired by a Los Angeles engineering firm to hunt out new deposits in the southwestern U.S. and the Mexican desert, discouraged by his failure and waiting impatiently for a primping girl friend to meet him at the library, Geologist Charles Godfrey Gunther idly thumbed his way through an old volume of ancient history. His eye fell on a chapter concerning ancient Cyprus and copper. Months later, with the backing of Colonel Seeley Mudd and Philip Wiseman, Gunther began the long and finally successful search for new copper on Cyprus. Twenty years of U.S. perseverance, frugality and hardship passed before the Cyprus Mines Corp. paid its first dividends in 1936.
Uncertain Future.
Today the copper mines developed by Gunther, and still largely controlled by the American Mudd family of Los Angeles, have become Cyprus' largest industry, supporting some 2,000 of its inhabitants and providing more than 25% of the island's entire annual revenue. Cyprus Mines Corp. exports nearly 1,000,000 tons of copper a year, runs an up-to-date, 65-bed hospital for its employees, has built scores of low-cost houses for them to live in, helps to run schools, sports clubs, welfare centers and summer camps for their families, and pays its employees 15% to 20% above the island average.
Despite the contentment of its unorganized workers, the company has been a steady target for the politically conscious island labor unions, and these unions have the powerful outside backing of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., whose roving European Ambassador Irving Brown argues:
"When we attack totalitarian systems, we can't justify an American company in Cyprus refusing its workers the right to organize." The company now finds itself beset by pickets, by recently raised taxes (from 35% to 42½% of net profits) and by the uncertainty of Cyprus' political future. Says the company's undeterred resident director, Robert J. Hendricks:
"We hope to stay in Cyprus for a long time. Americans abroad have responsibilities. When we do leave Cyprus, we want to leave it a better place than when we found it."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 84,00.html
by Klik » Fri Jan 28, 2011 2:07 am 
(those who can't think deep enough, remind yourselves what was going on in late 60s and in the 70s in the big stage)
