In a move that feels as inevitable as it is wistful, last year saw the demolition of the Cape Greco radio towers, which have stood as sentinels on Cyprus’ landscape since the 1970s.
Today – Green Monday – that area, once sealed off with high fences – is bustling with picnickers, kite-flyers and winter tourists.
It seems strange to view the landscape without those towers. They weren’t just about structure and steel—they were the very whispers of history, stretching their tendrils of communication as far as Baghdad and echoing along the coast to Ayia Napa.
For decades, Cyprus has been more than just an island; it has been the world’s ear.
Military and diplomatic secrets floated through the air, snatched by aerials like fragments of an elusive puzzle.
The Cape Greco towers were French. But not far down the coast, British-operated aerials decoded transmissions from both allies and adversaries, relaying them back to a clandestine communications hub in England for scrutiny.
Sources with authority once disclosed that the signals base at western Ayios Nicolaos – with it’s sprawling nest of ariels and dishes – was privy to radio chatter from a kaleidoscope of nations: Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Greece, Turkey, and Israel.
Not to mention the ships and aircraft that wandered into the periphery.
This was a node in an extensive web of monitoring bases meticulously constructed by Britain and the United States on this eastern Mediterranean outpost.
The British presence wasn’t confined to just this.
Sovereign bases at Dhekelia and Episkopi-Akrotiri, along with communication and radar stations in the Troodos Mountains, dotted the map.
Meanwhile, U.S. monitoring was ensconced in a heavily fortified embassy, perched on a hill just a mile from central Nicosia, alongside a nearby Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) station. It was there a radio operator was said to heave heard the radio traffic of Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane being attacked in Africa – a remarkable catch over the airwaves.
The fate of Dag Hammarskjöld (pictured) was heard live in Cyprus over the radio.
The Americans’ ambitious plans didn’t stop at the embassy.
In the 1980s, they acquired a sprawling plot near central Nicosia, fueling rumors among Eastern European diplomats of a forthcoming state-of-the-art monitoring station—the most sophisticated in the Middle East.
And so, as the world transitioned from the analog hum of radio waves to the silent, digital ether, these antennas gradually slipped into obsolescence.
With Cape Greco’s towers dismantled, the massive transmission site at Zygi followed suit a few years back, as did the radio station near Pyrgos.
As we bid adieu to these mechanical behemoths, we’re left reminiscing about an era of windswept whispers and sky-bound secrets—an era now silenced, leaving behind only the faintest echoes of its storied past.
(C) Famagusta Gazette, 2025