Agios Georgios, also known as Agios Georgios Spatharikou, is a Greek community in the occupied part of the Ammochostos district. It lies 17 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 20 metres, in the Spathariko area of the Mesaoria. Its neighbours were Arnadi, Spathariko, Trikomo, Sygkrasi and Lapathos, and its plain stretched east as far as the sea of Ammochostos Bay.¹ In the 1960 census it had 446 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

The village takes its name from Saint George, to whom its church is dedicated. According to a village tradition, recorded in a 2019 publication of the Republic of Cyprus on the displaced municipalities and communities, the qualifier “Spatharikou” was added because of an icon of the saint that the inhabitants of neighbouring Spathariko, a little to the south, brought to the village.² The qualifier is old: it already appears in the Ottoman property survey of 1832/33.³ The official gazetteer of Cyprus records it simply as Agios Georgios.⁴

Founding and first records

The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus in 1918, noted that Agios Georgios is an old village, already marked on the medieval maps.⁵

Turkish rule

In the Ottoman property survey of 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Agios Georgios has 38 households holding property. Most of the cultivated fields were cotton fields, and there were also a few wheat fields and fields of fodder crops, large barren tracts, threshing floors and some orchards with water-wheels for irrigation, one of them with mulberry trees. The households had over 500 sheep, oxen for ploughing, cows, horses and mules, camels, beehives and a flour mill, but very few trees, almost only wild olives.⁶

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village, dedicated to Saint George, stands in the centre of the old settlement and dates from the eighteenth–nineteenth century. Around it was most probably the old cemetery, which, according to the official gazette of the British administration, was closed in 1910 because it was a danger to public health; the new cemetery lies in the fields, about 700 metres south-east of the church.⁷

Economy and society

Agios Georgios was a village of farming and stock-raising. The villagers grew wheat, barley and chickpeas and kept sheep, a few goats and, in the last years, cows. In its many orchards they grew citrus, potatoes, beans, black-eyed beans, colocasia, artichokes and other vegetables, and its renowned “ananades” (melons). After independence the village acquired electricity, a water supply, asphalted roads and a community telephone. It had grocer’s shops, coffee shops, tailors’ shops, barbers’ shops and two sports clubs, and buses linked it every day with Ammochostos, together with Arnadi and Spathariko.⁸ In 1955 the Agios Georgios Spatharikou Co-operative Credit Society was founded.

Education

According to the 2019 publication, the village’s elementary school began operating in 1889 with one teacher and from 1955 it had two. After independence a new school was built. After elementary school the children attended the secondary schools of Ammochostos, and some the English School and later the Trikomo Gymnasium.⁹ In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school had 64 pupils and two teachers.

Population

The population of Agios Georgios grew steadily. In 1931 the village had 404 inhabitants, all of them Christians, and in 1946 421, all of them Orthodox (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 446 inhabitants, all of them Greeks, and in 1973 464 Greeks.

National struggles

The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 111 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Agios Georgios was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. According to the Union of Displaced Communities of Ammochostos, when the Turkish army entered the village most of the inhabitants had already left.¹⁰ In its application to the European Commission of Human Rights the Republic of Cyprus stated that among the 778 people expelled from the occupied areas at the end of June 1975 were the last inhabitants of Agios Georgios and Spathariko.¹¹ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent their return.

Five inhabitants of Agios Georgios were recorded as missing. Four, all civilians, went missing in the village itself and are still missing. The fifth, a soldier, went missing at Agios Georgios in the Keryneia district, and his remains have been located and identified. In the village itself three dead of 1974 are recorded, all of them civilians. Three more inhabitants were killed elsewhere: one civilian in the Ammochostos area and two soldiers, in the area of Koutsoventis and in the area of Limnitis.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Georgios into a mosque; all its crosses and bells have been removed. The roof of its porch has collapsed and the bell tower has been damaged. In the Greek Orthodox cemetery only a few of the grave crosses remain.¹²