The Cyprus mystique is as much a product of its legendary beauty as it is of millennia of competing empires, all unable to resist the island’s strategic allure of the island. The perfect location, of course, never goes out of style. Nestled into the eastern Mediterranean Sea and a veritable crossroads of three continents, Cyprus is the third largest island in the Mediterranean and an ideal starting point for the discovery of other exotic locales such as the Greek Islands, Egypt and the Middle East - in fact, mini-cruises set off for these places from Cyprus almost every day. But close as Cyprus may be to the world's center stage, it is a distinctive place that can feel blissfully apart from it all.
Abundant copper in antiquity put small Cyprus on the map. In fact Cyprus (Kypros in Greek) gave copper its latin name: cuprum. In the late Bronze Age, Mycenaen Greeks settled on Cyprus and established trade links with Egypt and the Aegean islands. This is also the period when ceramic art first flourished. As centuries drifted by, the island came variously under Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Roman rule. It was during the latter era that Marc Antony, enraptured by the island's sweet wines, gave Cyprus as a gift to his lover, the matchless Cleopatra. After a long period of Byzantine domination, European awareness of Cyprus surged with the Crusades. In 1191 a fierce sea storm led Richard the Lionheart to put his ship into port at Lemesos. He claimed the island as his own.

Source: www.visitcyprus.org.cy