against what the Papacy regarded as fraudulent orders of chivalry. This campaign had become highly publicised in the Spanish media by 1953 when negotiations between the Papacy and the Spanish government—the Concordat of 1953—were approaching an end. Since Lascorz was at the head of several orders and organizations seen by the Vatican as false orders, he repeatedly aroused misgivings in the Spanish government and authorities. It is unlikely Lascorz would have attracted enough attention to be exposed had he not publicly promoted his order in Madrid. He gave out numerous noble titles to his friends and supporters attracting the attention of the authorities and the real Spanish nobility. On 23 April 1953, an article in the ABC newspaper, "Falsas órdenes de caballería y falsos títulos nobiliarios" ("False chivalric orders and false titles of nobility"), identified Lascorz as a forger and his orders and institutions as fake, stating that Lascorz violated "not only the principles of Church law, but also the sovereignty of the Spanish state". In later issues the newspaper also published and rebuked Lascorz's responses to the article, pointing out that the Spanish government had not approved his orders. More damaging than the ABC articles were articles published early in 1954 in Hidalguía which denounced and debunked Lascorz's claims, sometimes in a somewhat humorous tone. The author of these articles, José María Palacio, wrote that Lascorz had used his knowledge of the legal system and the complicity or ignorance of certain key people to carry out legal deceptions and falsifications to transform his identity and insert himself as a descendant of the Laskaris dynasty. Furthermore, Palacio suggested correctly that the end goal of this plan was to gain the throne of Greece. On 13 March that same year, the Lascorz family responded through an interview with Teodoro (Eugenio's oldest son and family spokesman because of Eugenio's advanced age) in the daily newspaper in Madrid, in which he claimed that Palacio was an "old enemy" of the family and was actively attempting to "persecute" them. Throughout the rest of the 1950s, any references to Lascorz and his family were split between supporting, or more commonly, opposing them. Final years and death Despite the negative press, Lascorz continued to push his claims. On 29 October 1955, he issued a proclamation to the people of Cyprus, then a British crown colony and not yet an independent country, in the hopes that they