Agios Ilias is a Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos, at the beginning of the Karpasia peninsula. It lies 23 kilometres north of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 30 metres, near the west bank of the Geropotamos, about two kilometres north-west of Bogazi. A road from the village climbed north, by way of Kantara, to Davlos and the north coast.¹ In the 1960 census it had 422 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

The village took its name from the Prophet Elias (Ilias), to whom its church is dedicated.

Founding and first records

The earliest written record of the village found is the Ottoman property survey of 1832/33.² On the village’s land, to the east, the official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) records the place-name Palios Ais Ilias (“Old Agios Ilias”), and further east the place-names Palia Avgolida and Palion Ovgoros.³

Turkish rule

In the property survey of 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Agios Ilias is entered as a mixed village, with 18 property-holding households. The owners had mainly cotton fields, and also threshing floors, 157 olive trees, a few mulberry and fig trees, an olive press and a mill turned by horses, and almost 450 sheep and goats, cows, oxen and two mules.⁴

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the revolutionary monk Ioannikios came from Agios Ilias.⁵ According to the Union of Displaced Communities of Ammochostos, in 1833 he rose against the Turks and, when he was caught, was publicly executed by impalement. His words at the moment of his execution were remembered in a couplet:

Να πα να πείς της Μάνας μου, να κάμει Γιάννον άλλο, γιατί τον Γιάννον που ’κάμεν εκάτσαν τον στον πάλλον.

That is: “Go and tell my mother to bear another Giannis, for the Giannis she bore they have sat upon the stake.”⁶

British rule

According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, on 8 September 1902 the colonial government closed the old cemetery of the village, around the church, as a danger to public health, and the new one, south of the village, was most probably opened then.⁷

Churches and monasteries

The church of the Prophet Elias, in the southern part of the old village, was built in 1922. Outside the village, about 1.3 kilometres to the south-west, stands the chapel of Agios Dimitrios.⁸ The village also had the chapel of Agios Georgios.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, at Agios Ilias the plain of the Mesaoria ends and Karpasia begins: cereals were grown here together with olives and carobs, and the cultivation of tobacco began.⁹ A co-operative credit society worked in the village from 1927, and a co-operative grocery from 1948.

Education

In the school year 1973–74 the Greek primary school of the village had 26 pupils and one teacher.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 315 inhabitants in 1881, 398 in 1891, 452 in 1901, 548 in 1911 and 660 in 1921.¹⁰ In 1931 it had 638 inhabitants, and in 1946 631, all of them Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 422 inhabitants and in 1973 355, all of them Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for union with Greece 72 inhabitants signed. The EOKA Fighters’ Register lists 174 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Agios Ilias was occupied by the Turkish army, and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, all the inhabitants fled before the advancing Turkish army.¹¹ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent their return.

Two deaths are recorded in the village itself and its area, both of them civilians from Agios Ilias. Two more inhabitants of the village were killed elsewhere: a soldier in the area of Sakkaria in Ammochostos, and a civilian, who died at the Nicosia General Hospital.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of the Prophet Elias into a mosque. Its crosses and bell were removed, the south entrance was walled up to fit a mihrab inside, and only a few pieces of the iconostasis remained. When a new mosque was built in the village, the church was abandoned; in 2022 it stood open, with large cracks and its walls covered in graffiti. The chapel of Agios Dimitrios had lost its doors and windows, and the new cemetery is in ruins: its wall has largely collapsed and not a single cross is left standing.¹²