By Jody Brumage
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In the past few weeks, the Byrd Center archives staff has been at work processing the extensive photograph collection of Senator Robert Byrd. Spanning his entire life and career, the collection includes official images from the U.S. Senate, delegation trips, campaign events, project dedications, and family photographs. Numbering in the thousands of photographs, the collection will be a long-term process to rehouse, describe, and digitize.

By Jody Brumage
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In the 1970s, a coup d’état and subsequent military invasion of the eastern Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus entangled U.S. foreign policy and left Congress and two presidential administrations in the position of determining how the government would respond to the complex situation. In this two part blog post, we will investigate how the Senate responded to the initial invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and then how those actions were reconsidered later in the decade under Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd’s leadership.

The Republic of Cyprus was established to govern the island, inhabited by ethnic Greek and Turkish communities in 1960, placing the nations of Greece and Turkey in opposition over control of the new government. For over a decade, Greece sought to unite Cyprus under its policy of “enosis” (union of Greek communities living outside of Greece with the Greek state). These tensions boiled over into the July 15, 1974 coup d’état which overthrew President Makarios III and established a pro-union government. In response, Turkey invaded Cyprus on July 20, 1974 and in the coming weeks established the Turkish Republic of Cyprus, claiming the northern section of the island as its own territory.