Agios Nikolaos is a Greek community in the occupied part of the Ammochostos district. It lies 33 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 310 metres, on the southern slopes of the Pentadaktylos. Its land was wedged between the forests of the range: Tennaria to the south, Mavron Oros to the west and Malounta to the north.¹ In the 1960 census it had 309 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

It took its name from Saint Nicholas, to whom its church is dedicated. In the British topographical survey of Cyprus made by Herbert Kitchener in the first years of British rule it is written “Ayios Nikolaos”.² To distinguish it from the villages of the same name, it was also called Agios Nikolaos Lefkonoikou, after neighbouring Lefkonoiko. It is written thus, as “Agios Nikolas Lefkonoikou”, in the results of the 1950 Enosis referendum, and this is also what a handwritten collection of folklore material from 1969 calls it.³

Turkish rule

The first written record of the village found so far is the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property. Agios Nikolaos is recorded there as a Christian village of the district of the Mesaoria, with four households holding property. They had fields and 22 mountain olive trees, but almost half the value of their property was made up of the animals: about 190 goats and sheep and eight oxen and horses, with their folds and sheds.⁴

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village, its parish church, is dedicated to Saint Nicholas and dates from the 19th–20th century. The 2009 list of occupied churches of the Church of Cyprus also records two chapels, that of Agios Polychronios, which the official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) marks about two kilometres north of the village, and that of Agios Antonios.⁵ According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the new Greek Orthodox cemetery lies about 250 metres west of the church, and within it survive the ruins of Agios Antonios; the village also had an older cemetery.⁶

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the steep, broken ground and the low rainfall limited cultivation to cereals, olives and carobs. Livestock farming was also well developed, as already in the 1832/33 survey: before the invasion the inhabitants kept about 920 sheep and goats. The village was isolated, and an asphalt road linked it to the west with neighbouring Trypimeni.⁷ The village’s Co-operative Credit Society was founded in 1927 and the Co-operative Grocery in 1949.

The customs and traditions of the village are recorded in the 1969 collection of folklore material, kept at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.⁸

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 105 inhabitants in 1881, 117 in 1891, 146 in 1901, 187 in 1911 and 205 in 1921.⁹ In 1931 Agios Nikolaos had 252 inhabitants, all of them Christians, and in 1946 366, all of them Orthodox (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 309 inhabitants, all of them Greeks, and in 1973 244 Greeks. Agios Nikolaos, together with neighbouring Trypimeni, was surrounded by villages which in 1960 had only Turkish inhabitants: Melounta, Artemi, Platani, Knodara and Agios Chariton. In the school year 1973–74 the village’s Greek primary school had 37 pupils and two teachers.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis referendum 202 inhabitants signed, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 51 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 Nikolaos was occupied by the Turkish army. Its Greek inhabitants fled before the advancing army, and the Greek population of the village was subjected to ethnic cleansing. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Nikolaos into a mosque. The church was later abandoned. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, in 2022 the mihrab, the prayer niche cut into its south wall, was still there, but a makeshift iconostasis with five icons had been set up again inside, and the building appeared to be used once more as a church.¹⁰