By Michele Kambas

NICOSIA, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Former Cyprus President George Vassiliou, who died on Wednesday aged 94, once risked arrest in Cold War Hungary smuggling a banned political manifesto past the Iron Curtain.

In 1956, as Soviet tanks crushed a popular uprising in Budapest, he agreed to carry to the West the document, one of the anonymous "Hungaricus" pamphlets that gave the outside world its first uncensored accounts of the crackdown.

"I read it, agreed with what was written, and said I would gladly take it," Vassiliou, who was president of Cyprus between 1988 and 1993, later recalled.

"And I was lucky because nobody noticed I took it."

That early act of defiance helped shape the reformer who would later lead Cyprus toward Europe’s political mainstream and out of post-colonial uncertainty, helping to turn the former British island colony into a member of the European Union.

Vassiliou died in hospital aged 94, his wife Androulla said on X on Wednesday, adding, "He passed away peacefully in our arms." The couple had been married for 59 years.

'AN INTERESTING FELLOW'

Vassiliou was born in Cyprus in 1931 to parents who were both doctors and die-hard Communists who went wherever their cause would take them.

He initially enrolled in medical school in Geneva, and then Austria. But funds ran out when his father left a lucrative practice in Cyprus to join the communists in the Greek civil war that ran from 1946 to 1949.

Vassiliou moved to Budapest to be closer to his mother and younger sister,who were caught up in the tumult after that war, which stranded tens of thousands of partisans in Eastern Europe, barred from returning to Greece.

His father found himself in Albania, with the route through then-Yugoslavia shut after a fallout between Josip Tito, its prime minister at the time, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

In Hungary,Vassiliou became an interpreter for Greek political........

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