Cyprus: The Island still divided between Turkey and Greece's influences.

The Cyprus problem represents one of the few still open conflicts within the European borders. At the same time, it corresponds to the only island divided into two different parties in which the capital, Nicosia, is known to be “the last divided capital” in Europe. This situation has seen only tiny improvements since the escalation of this issue, at the beginning of the 1960s. But the problem does not find its origin uniquely within the island’s border, rather it is the result of the foreign policy preferences and practices that external countries, neighbours and not, implemented towards the island: starting from the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, to the modern relations between Greece and Turkey. And despite the official independence of the island from the United Kingdom obtained in 1960, Cyprus is located at the heart of one of the most unstable and precarious region, the MENA area, in which every country influences the actions of all the others, more than it happens in other regions. For Cyprus, these persuasive and affecting decisions come mainly from other two countries, Greece and Turkey, whose relationship has presented many complications since the establishment of the two independent nations. The rivalry between them, however, has not seen any improvements and, today, it can still be judged as one of the factors responsible for the non-resolution of the Cyprus problem. This primordial antagonism, nevertheless, is difficult to be solved in the first place as it is composed of many intersecting aspects, from the oldest struggle for supremacy in the Aegean to the most recent rivalry for the control of energy resources, each of which contributes to the non-resolution of the Cyprus problem.