CYPRUS, Edward VII, 18 Piastres 1907, Rare, VF

History

By 1907, the British administration of Cyprus had settled into a rhythm of quiet, efficient, and largely unwanted governance.

Twenty-nine years had passed since the Cyprus Convention of 1878, when Britain had taken the island from the Ottoman Empire as a diplomatic prize and strategic outpost on the sea route to India. Roads had been built, a railway constructed between Nicosia and Famagusta, malaria brought under some control, and a modest Legislative Council established – nine seats for Greek Cypriots, three for Turkish Cypriots, and enough appointed British officials to ensure that nothing inconvenient was ever actually decided. From London’s perspective, the arrangement was working tolerably well. From the perspective of the Greek Cypriot majority, it was simply an occupation by different management.

The desire for enosis – union with Greece – had been present from the first day of British rule, voiced at the very welcoming ceremony for the first High Commissioner by a bishop who apparently could not help himself. By 1907 it had evolved from a bishop’s hope into a sustained political movement, petitioning, demonstrating, and sending memoranda to London with a persistence that the Colonial Office found tiresome and chose largely to ignore. That same year, a young under-secretary named Winston Churchill visited the island on an official tour and wrote a confidential report criticizing the financial arrangements by which Cyprus was required to contribute to Ottoman tribute payments – an arrangement he described with characteristic bluntness as indefensible. Parliament eventually agreed with him and voted an annual grant to reduce the burden. It was one of the rare moments when British policy on Cyprus moved in a direction the islanders could appreciate.

The coin itself carries on its obverse the portrait of Edward VII – sixty-five years old in 1907, six years into the reign he had waited for his entire adult life while his mother Victoria lived on and on to the age of eighty-one. He was a different kind of monarch from his mother: sociable, cosmopolitan, diplomatically gifted, the architect of the Entente Cordiale with France that was quietly reshaping European alliances. His portrait on the 18 Piastres was the work of George William de Saulles, the Royal Mint’s engraver, showing a right-facing laureate bust of the King in the dignified Edwardian manner. The reverse retained the Lusignan lion on its crowned shield – that medieval heraldic ghost, reaching back past Ottoman centuries to the Christian kingdom that had once made Cyprus one of the wealthiest islands in the Mediterranean.

Eighteen piastres equalled two shillings – a significant denomination, the largest silver coin in everyday Cypriot circulation, passing through the hands of farmers in the Mesaoria plain, merchants in the Nicosia bazaar, fishermen on the Famagusta waterfront. The piastre itself was an Ottoman inheritance, a unit of account that the British had simply adopted and continued, one of the many quiet accommodations an imperial administration makes with the world it finds rather than the world it intended.

Edward VII would be dead within three years, his diplomacy outlasting him by decades. The Ottoman Empire, which still nominally owned Cyprus when this coin was struck, would be gone within eleven years, swept away by the same war that finally prompted Britain to annex the island outright in 1914.

This coin circulated in the calm before all of that – on an island that knew what it wanted, governed by an empire that had not yet decided what to do about it.