Aigialousa (Gialousa) is a large Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos, in the centre of the Karpasia peninsula. It lies 52 kilometres north-east of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 120 metres, on the road to Rizokarpaso, and its land runs down to the north coast. It was the second largest village of Karpasia after Rizokarpaso. In the 1960 census it had 2,541 inhabitants, of whom 2,537 were Greeks.

Name

The Greek philologist Athanasios Sakellarios recorded the village in 1890 as “Gialousa (Aigialousa)”.¹ According to the same encyclopaedia, Venetian maps mark the village as “Ialusa”.² The English traveller Richard Pococke wrote it in 1738 as “Yaleusee” or “Jalousa”.³

Founding and first records

The first certain written record of the village is Pococke’s: in 1738 he spent the night in the house of the priest of Gialousa and noted that there was an old Greek church there. From Gialousa he made his excursions all over Karpasia.⁴

The village had two parishes, of the Archangel Michael and of Agia Marina, and quarters such as Glykopotamos and Kalamia.⁵ To the east, towards Agios Thyrsos (Agios Therissos), lay abandoned settlements. Pococke passed a ruined village, Machariona, where the local people said that a king had once lived. The English archaeologist David Hogarth, who toured Karpasia in 1888, found Machariona a summer hamlet on a small bay. Twenty minutes inland, at Pyrgos, he saw the ruins of a square tower, probably built as a look-out and a refuge from pirates, and next to it two ruined churches and the traces of a large village.⁶

Archaeological sites

In 1957, after a mosaic floor came to light, the Department of Antiquities dug trial trenches at the basilica of Agia Triada, in the neighbouring settlement of Agia Triada, and at a second site on the land of Gialousa, which the register of excavations records as Chtomolia. The basilica was excavated until 1971 and is described on the page of Agia Triada.⁷

In 1890 Sakellarios noted between the village and the sea ancient ruins, churches of the medieval Greek period and rock-cut caves, which the villagers used for various needs.⁸

Antiquity

The Greek geographer of the 1st century BC Strabo, describing the north coast of Cyprus, names after Aphrodision the “Beach of the Achaeans”:

εἶτ’ Ἀχαιῶν ἀκτή, ὅπου Τεῦκρος προσωρμίσθη πρῶτον ὁ κτίσας Σαλαμῖνα τὴν ἐν Κύπρῳ

That is: “Then the Beach of the Achaeans, where Teucer, the founder of Salamis in Cyprus, first came to anchor.” Teucer was, in the tradition, the hero of the Trojan War from Salamis in Attica who founded the city of the same name in Cyprus.⁹

Pococke in 1738 and Sakellarios in 1890 placed the Beach of the Achaeans on the shore of Gialousa. Sakellarios noted that along the whole of this part of the north coast only there did the shore allow a landing, while elsewhere it was rocky and steep, and he cited an ancient sailing guide that gave the distance from Aphrodisias in Cilicia to the Beach of the Achaeans. Hogarth found on the headland below Gialousa, Akamas, no ruins to support the identification, and the site most probably lay somewhere on the north coast of Karpasia.¹⁰

Greek medieval period (“Byzantium”)

The medieval Greek period of the Arab raids was remembered in local tradition: according to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the villagers spoke of fights between their forebears and the Saracens, that is, the Arab raiders. A place name of Gialousa is “Mnimata tous Sarakinous”, the Graves of the Saracens.¹¹

From the middle medieval Greek period there survive on the village land the north church of the Archangel, the chapel of Agia Marina at Pyrgos, of the 12th century, and the church of the monastery of Agios Georgios Sakkas, of the 11th or 12th century. Hogarth took the ruins of Agios Ioannis, near the village, and the small coves of the coast, such as those of Gialousa and Machariona, to be stations of the trade with Asia Minor in the Middle Ages.¹²

Turkish rule

Pococke wrote in 1738 that the villages of the area suffered from the Maltese corsairs.¹³ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the church of Gialousa was renovated in 1793 through the care of Archbishop Chrysanthos.¹⁴

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Gialousa appears as a mixed village, with 54 property-holding households, Christian and Muslim. They had cotton fields, grain fields, mulberry gardens for the silkworm, gardens and threshing floors, 640 olive trees, mostly wild olives, and 129 carob trees. They had eight horse-driven mills and two olive presses, beehives, almost 500 sheep, oxen, cows, horses and mules.¹⁵

British rule

In 1890 Sakellarios wrote that Gialousa stood in a fine position with an excellent climate, was full of fruit trees and produced much silk. He described its people as sturdy, affable and hospitable.¹⁶ In 1918 it was, according to the English architect George Jeffery, a large village with a police station.¹⁷ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the station had operated since 1905, and from the beginning of the century a district medical officer and a district court were based in the village. From the first decades of the 20th century many people of Gialousa emigrated to England, Australia and the United States.¹⁸

Churches and monasteries

The two parish churches of the village were the Archangel Michael and Agia Marina. The Archangel is a twin church: the north church, the older one, dates from the 12th century and is an Ancient Monument, and the south one from the 18th or 19th century. Jeffery describes the old church as three-aisled and cross-planned, with two small domes and blind arcading on the outer walls. Agia Marina dates from the 18th or 19th century, and Jeffery noted its decoration imitating 15th-century Gothic models.¹⁹

The monastery of Agios Georgios Sakkas, east of the village, has a church of the 11th or 12th century, which is an Ancient Monument.²⁰

Also Ancient Monuments are the chapel of Agia Marina at Pyrgos, of the 12th century, with remains of wall paintings, and the other ruined chapels at Pyrgos, the old church of Agios Thyrsos, of the 17th century, right by the sea, the church of Agios Fotios, and the ruins of the church of Agia Triada at Agia. Next to the old Agios Thyrsos the new church of the saint was built in the 19th or 20th century. On the village land there was also the rock-cut chapel of Agios Ioannis Theologos.²¹

The village also had the chapels of Agios Georgios, Zoodochos Pigi, Agia Solomoni, Agia Pavla, Agia Thekla, Agia Glykeria and Panagia Galaktini.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the villagers grew cereals, olives, carobs, pulses and above all tobacco, for years the main crop of the area. The Cooperative Tobacco Organisation had its seat in Gialousa. The villagers kept sheep, goats and calves, and the village had a fishing shelter. In earlier times gypsum was extracted from local quarries.²²

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the first school of the village was founded in 1862, and the teacher was at the same time cantor and music teacher.²³ According to the Union of Displaced Communities of Ammochostos, until 1930 the children were taught in two rooms beside the church. In 1938 the first elementary school was built, and in 1969 a second one, at Glykopotamos.²⁴ Gialousa also had a Greek secondary school (gymnasium), which served the neighbouring villages as well.²⁵ In the school year 1973–74 the two Greek elementary schools had 279 pupils, 181 and 98, and nine teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Gialousa had 1,302 inhabitants in 1881, 1,438 in 1891, 2,034 in 1901, 2,519 in 1911 and 2,875 in 1921.²⁶ In 1931, when the census did not record Agia Triada separately, Gialousa had 3,202 inhabitants, 3,186 Christians and 16 Muslims. In 1946 it had 2,771 inhabitants, of whom 2,766 were Orthodox and 2 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 2,541 inhabitants, 2,537 Greeks, 3 Armenians and one Turk, and in 1973 2,460 inhabitants, all Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 1,546 inhabitants signed in the two parishes of the village, the Archangel and Agia Marina, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants. The EOKA Fighters’ Register lists 376 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle. At the Gialousa gymnasium there was an EOKA pupils’ group.²⁷

The EOKA fighter Stavros Stylianidis came from Gialousa.²⁸

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Gialousa was occupied by the Turkish army. Most of the inhabitants, as in other villages of northern Karpasia, stayed in their homes and found themselves in confinement, enclaved.²⁹ A woman of the village stated, in a written statement to the European Commission of Human Rights, that from August 1974 a curfew was imposed from 6 in the evening to 6 in the morning, which was still in force in February 1975, when she left.³⁰

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, in October 1975 there were still 1,909 Greeks living in the village.³¹ In 1976, according to the reports of the UN Secretary-General, the Greeks of the area could not leave the bounds of their villages without permission. At the end of the year the Turkish Cypriot authorities called on those who remained to apply for transfer to the free areas, and all of them did so. The evacuation went on at 36 persons a day, and on 6 December 1976, out of about 1,800, there were 696 left. The village school had closed, and according to the Cyprus Government the Greek gymnasium that served the area was being converted into a Turkish lyceum.³² According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, in January 1977 there were 310 left, and in April 1978 two. In December 1985 six Greeks still lived at Agios Thyrsos and four nuns at the monastery of Agios Georgios Sakkas.³³ In March 2026 two enclaved persons lived at Agios Thyrsos. The Greek population of Gialousa was thus ethnically cleansed, and since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

In August 1974, according to a UN report cited by the Commission, the people of Karpasia could not harvest the tobacco because most of the young men had been detained.³⁴ Ten inhabitants of Gialousa, all civilians, were recorded as missing. Eight had been held in the Pavlides Garage prison in the Turkish sector of Nicosia; their remains have been located and identified. The other two were arrested in Gialousa and are still missing. In the village itself seven deaths are recorded, all civilians and elderly enclaved people, six inhabitants of Gialousa and one of Agios Andronikos. Five other inhabitants of Gialousa were killed elsewhere, one civilian and four soldiers, in the Agios Symeon area and at the Famagusta hospital, at Mia Milia, in the Aspri Moutti area and at Agios Epiktitos.

The 2009 list of churches in the occupied areas of the Church of Cyprus does not record the condition of the churches of Gialousa. In 2022 Agia Marina was in very poor condition, Agios Georgios had lost its doors, windows and bell, and the cemetery behind the Archangel was in ruins, with the grave crosses scattered.³⁵