Agios Theodoros is a mainly Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos, at the entrance to the Karpasia peninsula. It lies 29 kilometres north of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 30 metres, on the main road from Ammochostos to Aigialousa. South of the village stretches the forest of Valeia, as far as Cape Elaia, where the ruins of an ancient city lie.¹ In the 1960 census it had 828 inhabitants, of whom 805 were Greeks and 23 Turks.

Name

The village took its name from Saint Theodoros, to whom one of its churches is dedicated. According to the Union of Displaced Communities of Ammochostos, the patron saint of the village was Saint Theodoros Stratilatis.²

Founding and first records

According to the Union of Displaced Communities of Ammochostos, Agios Theodoros appears in written documents at the end of the 18th century, and the registers of the Archbishopric for the years 1800, 1820 and 1825 contain lists of taxpayers of the village, who paid their taxes to the Ottoman administration through the Archbishopric.³ The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the historic monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, describes it as a straggling village of considerable antiquity.⁴

Archaeological sites

On the village’s land, at the locality Akrotiri, on Cape Elaia, lie the ruins of an ancient city. They were first described by the Greek scholar Athanasios Sakellarios, who also noted there a small rectangular enclosure with a large upright stone, and beside it the best anchorage of the coast, that of Palloura.⁵ The English archaeologist David Hogarth, who visited the site in 1888, saw heaps of stones around a small bay for about 800 metres, traces of houses and of the city wall, and many large stones of olive presses; the cape, he notes, was called Elaia. In an open rock-cut tomb he found sherds of early pottery, and he was told that Alexander di Cesnola’s workmen had opened five or six tombs.⁶

Pleiades marks two ancient sites on the village’s land, Knidos, on Cape Elaia, and Alaas, both inhabited from the Archaic to the Roman period.⁷

At Alaas, in the forest of Valeia, between Agios Theodoros and Gastria, the Department of Antiquities located in 1966 a cemetery whose tombs had already been looted. In 1973, and up to July 1974, the Cypriot archaeologist Vassos Karageorghis carried out a rescue excavation of nine tombs of the 11th century BC, most of them intact, and found that the place had been inhabited since the Late Bronze Age. The tombs held many vessels, among them stirrup jars, kylikes, pyxides and animal-shaped vessels, gold earrings, fibulae and bronze scales from a cuirass, and an older Mycenaean jar, buried as an heirloom. The finds show close ties with the Mycenaean Greek world.⁸

In 1966 the Department of Antiquities carried out a rescue excavation of a rich tomb in the village, with finds of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.⁹

Antiquity

In the coffee-house of Gastria Hogarth was brought an inscribed stele, which, he was told, had been found in the Valeia, among the ruins of the cape. From the letter forms he dated it to the 4th century BC:

Συμμάχο(υ) ἐστι τὸ σᾶμα τριηράρχο(υ) Κνιδίου.

That is: “This is the tomb of Symmachos, trierarch, of Knidos.” A trierarch was the commander of a trireme, that is, a warship.¹⁰

On the strength of the inscription Sakellarios and Hogarth identified the ruins with the Cypriot Knidos. It is mentioned by the 12th-century medieval Greek scholar John Tzetzes, who writes that the Greek physician and historian Ctesias came from there:

ἐξωρμημένος πόλεως ἐκ Κνίδου τῆς Κυπρίας

That is: “who came from the city of Knidos in Cyprus”. The Roman poet Ovid names “Cnidus, rich in fish” together with Paphos and Amathous, and Sakellarios noted that most of the fish of Cyprus were caught in its bay.¹¹

Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) period

The tomb excavated in 1966 held two Megarian bowls, that is, moulded clay cups, lagynoi, glass flasks, a bronze mirror, gold and silver rings, earrings and myrtle leaves. A silver coin of Ptolemy of 132 BC dates the first burial, and the tomb was used again into the Roman period, as coins down to Marcus Aurelius show.¹²

Roman period

Agios Theodoros lay on the Roman road from Salamis to Karpasia. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, citing the British historian George Hill, a milestone of AD 80 was found in the village.¹³ Jeffery noted the Roman milestone near a small chapel north of the village, and Sakellarios a column and millstones of Roman times.¹⁴

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Agios Theodoros is entered as a mixed village, with 42 property-holding households. The owners had mainly cotton fields, and also vineyards and a few grain fields, 82 olive trees and a few mulberry, fig, almond, walnut and carob trees, two mills turned by horses, more than 500 sheep, and cows, oxen, horses and mules.¹⁵

British rule

In 1890 Sakellarios noted that Agios Theodoros had a telegraph station, which linked the island with the coast of Latakia by submarine cable.¹⁶ In the early 20th century it was, according to Jeffery, the chief village of the sub-district, with the principal police station.¹⁷

Churches and monasteries

The parish church of the village, Agia Paraskevi, stands in the centre of the old settlement; according to Cyprus Religious Heritage, its building began in 1870, but it was consecrated only in 1923. The church of Agios Theodoros, in the north-eastern part of the old village, dates from the 17th to the 20th century; around it lay the old cemetery, which was closed in 1902.¹⁸ Jeffery noted a small old church of the village beneath which, it was said, there was a mysterious underground passage, most probably an old horizontal well.¹⁹

The church of Agios Evlogios, in the new cemetery north-east of the village, on the road to Vokolida, is an Ancient Monument.²⁰

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew cereals, carobs and a few olives; much of the land was uncultivated or forest, that of Valeia, and stock-breeding was well developed, with about 2,700 sheep and goats in 1973. A fishing shelter was built at the village, and fishing had long been important.²¹ A co-operative credit society worked in the village from 1925, and a co-operative grocery from 1949.

Education

In the school year 1973–74 the Greek primary school of the village had 104 pupils and three teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 315 inhabitants in 1881, 327 in 1891, 471 in 1901, 629 in 1911 and 602 in 1921.²² In 1931 it had 578 inhabitants, 512 Christians and 66 Muslims, and in 1946 852, of whom 782 were Orthodox and 70 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 828 inhabitants, 805 Greeks and 23 Turks, and in 1973 810, all of them Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for union with Greece 395 inhabitants signed. The EOKA Fighters’ Register lists 179 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 Theodoros was occupied by the Turkish army. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, almost all the inhabitants fled in the summer of 1974 before the advancing Turkish army, and only 30 stayed in the village. By December 1976 five remained, and by the early 1980s all had left.²³ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, three enclaved persons were still living in the village in 1979.²⁴ The Greek population of Agios Theodoros was thus ethnically cleansed, and since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

One death, of a civilian, is recorded in the village itself. Five more inhabitants of the village were killed elsewhere: three soldiers, in the area of Sakkaria in Ammochostos, in the area of Pikro Nero in Keryneia and near Sygchari, and two civilians at the Athalassa psychiatric hospital.

In 2022 the churches of Agios Theodoros and Agios Evlogios were in very poor condition, with large cracks and roofs that had partly collapsed; in 2024 they were repaired. In the new cemetery the wall was restored, but the graves remained wrecked, with their crosses scattered or piled up. Agia Paraskevi had lost the cross of its bell tower, and its interior had been damaged by damp and birds.²⁵