Agirda is a Turkish community in the occupied part of the Keryneia district. It lies 6 kilometres south-west of Keryneia, at an elevation of 360 metres, at the southern foot of the Pentadaktylos range. It stands where the Lefkosia–Keryneia road begins to climb into the pass through the range, and from here the footpath to the castle of Saint Hilarion set out.¹ In the 1960 census it had 382 inhabitants, of whom 377 were Turks and one a Greek.

Name

In the medieval sources the village is written “Agridi”. This is the form used by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron, both for the battle of 1232 and for the fiefs of King James II.² The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the historic monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, writes “Agridhi” and “Aghirda”, and the 1931 census records the village as “Aghirda”.³

Founding and first records

Agirda enters the written sources with a battle. In 1232 the troops of the German emperor Frederick II, whom the chroniclers of Cyprus call “Lombards”, had encamped in the pass above the village and were besieging the castle of Saint Hilarion. On 15 June the army of King Henry I, led by John of Ibelin, lord of Beirut, camped beside the village, on the plain, and defeated them when they came down to attack it. The clash became known as the battle of Agridi. The 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie places the battlefield at the entrance to the pass, between Dikomo and Agirda and closer to Agirda.⁴

Frankish rule

In the 1460s King James II gave Agirda, together with neighbouring Krini (“Grini”) and another village, “Letrico”, as a fief to two persons jointly, Tuccio de Costanzo and Lady Helena Podocataro. The list of the fiefs of those years is preserved by Bustron.⁵

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Agirda is recorded as a Muslim village, with 24 property-holding households. The owners had wheat fields and threshing floors and 275 trees, mostly mountain olives, as well as almond and carob trees. They also had beehives, almost 500 goats and a few oxen and cows.⁶

Churches and monasteries

The 2009 list of churches in the occupied areas of the Church of Cyprus records at Agirda the chapel of the Prophet Elijah (Profitis Ilias), a cave that had been shaped and used as a chapel.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, without irrigation works farming was limited to cereals and a few carob trees, and much of the land lay uncultivated. In 1973 the village had almost 3,000 sheep and goats, mostly goats, and was third in the Keryneia district in number of cows.⁷

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 105 inhabitants in 1881, 130 in 1891, 114 in 1901, 178 in 1911 and 184 in 1921.⁸ In 1931 Agirda had 176 inhabitants, 2 Christians and 174 Muslims, and in 1946 279, of whom 7 were Orthodox, 271 Muslims and one other (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 382 inhabitants, 377 Turks, one Greek and 4 British, and in 1973 around 600 Turkish inhabitants (estimate) and no Greeks.