Agios Symeon is a Turkish community in the occupied district of Ammochostos, in the Karpasia. It lies 49 kilometres northeast of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 190 metres, on the road from Leonarisso to Galinoporni, about seven kilometres east of Leonarisso.¹ In the 1960 census it had 333 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

The village bears the name of Saint Symeon. The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) writes it “Άγιος Συμεών, ο”,² and the British Kitchener map of 1885 and the 1931 census “Ayios Symeon”.³

Archaeological sites

The Register of Ancient Monuments of the Department of Antiquities includes the site and remains of a burial complex at the locality Aplagies, east of the village.⁴

A great rock-cut tomb high in the cliff of a hill, northeast of Agios Symeon, near the settlement of Elisi, was also known by the village’s name. The English archaeologist David Hogarth, who climbed up to it in 1888, describes it as the most remarkable tomb in Cyprus for size and situation. It is cut 87 feet (about 26 metres) into the rock, with a central nave and two side aisles, like a church, and burial chambers along the sides; Hogarth found no inscription inside. He connected it, like the smaller tomb of Galinoporni, with a large ancient site on the coast south of Koroveia, and suggested that they may have been royal tombs.⁵ The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus in 1918, notes that it was called the “summer castle of St. Symeon” and that in folk tales it was the summer retreat of the army of a mysterious “queen”.⁶

Turkish rule

The village is recorded in the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, as Muslim, with 10 property-holding households. The holders had mainly cotton fields and a few grain fields, 25 olive trees, more than 220 sheep and goats, cows, oxen, horses and mules, and a mill turned by horses.⁷

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the fairly level land of the village was farmed with cereals, carob and olive trees together, while considerable areas were state land with wild vegetation. Stock-raising was well developed: in 1973, 72 stock-keepers had 1,544 sheep, 1,198 goats and 32 oxen.⁸

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 271 inhabitants in 1891, 180 in 1901, 207 in 1911 and 199 in 1921.⁹ In 1931 Agios Symeon had 206 inhabitants, 198 Muslims and 8 Christians, and in 1946 241, of whom 240 were Muslims and one Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded religion only). In 1960 it had 333 inhabitants, all Turks, and in 1973 around 350 Turkish inhabitants (estimate).

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Agios Symeon was occupied by the Turkish army. One soldier was killed in the area of the village.