There are a minority of Armenians and Lebanese. There are some minorities such as Maronites . A meze consists of a number of small dishes, sometimes up to thirty. Potatoes are a popular vegetable. Honey is used in pastries such as baklava and kadaiffi.
Coffee is drunk very strong.
During the Bronze Age, the island had an important trade in copper. Cyprus remained in the Lusignan family for three hundred years until 1489 when the last queen Catherina Cornaro passed Cyprus to the powerful city state of Venice . In 1571 the Ottoman Turks took Cyprus and ruled the island until they rented Cyprus to the British at the end of the 1870s. In 1960 Cyprus gained its independence from Britain. In 1963 fighting broke out between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots as the Turkish Cypriots wanted to partition the island.