500 Mils FAO

Issued as part of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization coin program, which ran from the late 1960s onward and enlisted central banks worldwide to produce commemorative circulation strikes promoting agricultural development. Cyprus participated early, and this 1970 piece predates the island's catastrophic 1974 partition by just four years — the Central Bank of Cyprus would spend much of the following decade managing the economic fallout of Turkish military intervention and the displacement of roughly a third of the population.