A Wounded Soul

When Archbishop Makarios, the bearded political and religious leader of Cyprus, visited Athens last January, Greek Strongman George Papadopoulos warned him: "Your Beatitude, you should be careful. Your safety is in danger." Makarios nodded knowingly; only recently, he confided, a foreign diplomat had told him that an assassination attempt was to be made when he returned to his troubled island. "And what did you do?" asked Papadopoulos. "I didn't pay attention," Makarios replied.

He should have. Last week, bound for a monastery 30 miles away to celebrate Mass, Makarios strapped himself inside the presidential helicopter just outside his palace in Nicosia. When the silver-and-white chopper reached rooftop level, automatic gunfire spat out from a high school across the street, riddling the craft. Makarios was uninjured, but the pilot, Army Major Zacharias Papadoyiannis, 38, was wounded seriously in the abdomen. Nonetheless, though he grazed a tree as he swung desperately from the line of fire, he managed to set the craft down on a 12-ft. by 12-ft. open square. Then, mumbling, "Forgive me. Your Beatitude, but I am wounded," Papadoyiannis crawled out of the cockpit and collapsed.

Makarios, his robes smeared with the pilot's blood, pronounced a blessing over him at the hospital, then went on to preside at the appointed Mass. That evening, addressing his nation in a calm but sorrowful voice, he declared: "If the bullets did not strike my body, they struck and wounded my soul."

Still Vulnerable. Suspicion immediately centered on several Greek extremist organizations that stubbornly refuse to accept any political solution for the divided island short of enosis (union with Greece). Makarios has firmly expressed his belief in independence for both the Greek Cypriot majority of 490,000 and the Turkish Cypriot minority of 110,000. Moreover, the military regime in Athens has formally abandoned the idea of enosis. Despite such opposition, extremists in recent months embarked on a new campaign of terrorism.

After the assassination attempt, police arrested more than a dozen right-wing Greek Cypriots suspected of belonging to gun-packing private armies such as the National Front. By week's end, however, at least six had been released. Police also searched the home of former Interior Minister Polycarpos Georgadjes, one of Makarios' political opponents, and announced that they had found two pistols. Despite Georgadjes' claim that they had been gifts from Makarios in friendlier days, he was fined $384 for illegal possession. Meanwhile, Makarios' attempted assassins apparently remained on the loose, leaving the archbishop--and his volatile land--as vulnerable to danger as ever.

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