Bimbo

An Anglican exile in the Indian Ocean

Archbishop Makarios III, the first president of independent Cyprus, was deposed and detained by the British colonial administration in March 1956 over his support for enosis, the political movement seeking union of Cyprus with Greece. He was deported by the Royal Navy to Mahé, the largest island of the Seychelles archipelago, where he was held until April 1957 at Sans Souci, a colonial house above Victoria leased by the Governor for the purpose. The household allowance permitted by the Colonial Office covered a cook, a steward, and what visitors recorded as a single resident cat. Makarios named the cat Bimbo.

The household cat at Sans Souci

Bimbo was a short-haired cat of unrecorded breed, present in every available photograph of the archbishop reading in the garden or working at his writing desk during the thirteen-month confinement. Makarios was permitted visitors, books, and a typewriter, but no Cypriot political contact; biographer Stanley Mayes records that the cat became one of the few stable presences in the archbishop's daily routine. The journalist René Maugé, who visited Sans Souci on assignment for Paris Match in late 1956, described Bimbo as "the only one in the room not pretending the conversation was casual." The cat was fed kitchen scraps from the steward, and the colonial inventory at the time of Makarios's release lists no provision for its onward care.

After release

When the British government revoked the deportation order on 28 March 1957, Makarios was flown to Athens rather than back to Nicosia, and Bimbo was left at Sans Souci. The colonial records of the period are silent on the cat's fate. Makarios returned to Cyprus only in March 1959 after the Zürich-London agreements paved the way for independence, becoming the country's first president in August 1960. He kept no further pets during his presidency at the Nicosia Presidential Palace, according to the household memoirs of his private secretary Patroklos Stavrou. The Bimbo episode survives in the literature mainly through references in Mayes's 1981 biography Makarios: A Biography and in Cypriot oral history of the exile period.