A towering bronze statue of Archbishop Makarios III, Cyprus’s first post-independence president who led the political wing of the struggle against British colonial rule in the 1950s, was uprooted from Nicosia today after the Church deemed it an “eyesore”.

As well as being shrewd and charismatic, the revered priest-politician was renowned for his wry sense of humour. It would have been useful today: the expert operator of the main crane that delicately hoisted Makarios’s 10-metre statue onto a long-bed lorry was a Briton.

Gerry Newby, with 28 years’ experience in the crane business, swapped his life in Cleethorpes for a job in the sun just six weeks ago.

It was “purely coincidence” that he was given today’s task of uprooting the 11-tonne iconic figure of Cyprus’s modern history before a crowd of gawping tourists, Mr Newby told The Times with the tact of a Foreign Office veteran.

The statue, which some locals affectionately refer to as “Big Mac”, is to be re-installed near Makarios’s tomb on a craggy peak in the pine-clad Troodos mountains 50 miles from the Cypriot capital. It will be given a make-over: the sculpture was recently defaced by paint-throwing vandals.

Makarios was vilified by most of Fleet Street in the 1950s. Britain, in the twilight years of its once unassailable empire, had been determined to hold on to Cyprus as a vital strategic base after the humiliating loss of Suez.

Makarios remained in power through often turbulent years until he died of a heart attack in 1977. After his death 250,000 Greek Cypriots, more than a third of their community, filed by his coffin.

Britain had stopped smarting by then. An obituary in The Times paid tribute to Makarios as a “statesman too big for his small island” and described him as a “familiar and respected figure of the councils of the United Nations, the Commonwealth and of the Third World”.

Streets are named after him in Kenya and India as well as the Seychelles where Britain exiled the “turbulent priest” in 1956. There is even a statue of him in Cuba.

For 21 years Makarios’s imposing statue, designed and sculpted by a London-based Greek Cypriot artist, had stood as a major landmark in front of the Archbishop’s Palace in central Nicosia.

But people had long complained that the statue was too big and an eyesore, according to the palace’s incumbent, Archbishop Chrysostomos II.

A new life-sized statue of Makarios in dazzling white marble was installed several weeks ago in the front garden of the Archbishop’s Palace, braced to usurp the bronze behemoth.

But the old statue grew on many Nicosians in the same way that the originally unloved Eiffel Tower is now central to the identity of Paris,

“It keeps alive good memories of Cyprus’s best president and it’s very good for the area. It’s a great pity if it goes,” Angelos Angelides, a car mechanic who works within a spanner’s throw of the sculpture, told The Times.

The statue was also Nicosia’s most-photographed tourist attraction. Lesley Grant, a holidaymaker from Yorkshire, was unimpressed by its new, life-sized replacement. “They’ve gone from one extreme to the other,” she told The Times.

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