The Kyrenia Castle Escape took place early in the Cyprus Emergency. A number of the EOKA were being held prisoner at Kyrenia Castle and on 23 September 1955, sixteen of them escaped by climbing down sheets tied to be a rope.
The escapees were: Marcos Drakos, Christakis Eleftheriou, Evangelos Evangelakis, Mikis Fyrillas, Lambros Kafkallides, Constantinos Loizou, Pavlos Nikitas, Petros Papaioannou, Panayiotis Papanastasiou, Andreas Polyviou, Michalakis Rossides, Lefkios Rodosthenous, Stelios Siamisis, Petros Stylianou, Demos Vryonides, Charilaos Xenofontos.
Seven were caught but the other nine – Evangelakis, Xenofontos, Kafkalides, Drakos, Rodosthenous, Fyrillas, Polyviou, Eleftheriou, and Nikitas – joined EOKA guerrilla outfits. The incident was extremely embarrassing to the British government.
Evangelakis was recaptured in February 1957. Firillas was recaptured in April 1957.
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Text from the Wikipedia article “Kyrenia Castle Escape”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.