Asomatos is a Maronite community in the occupied district of Keryneia. It lies 21 kilometres west of Keryneia, 200 metres above sea level, in hilly country south of the Pentadaktylos. Together with Kormakitis, Karpaseia and Agia Marina Skyllouras it was one of the four Maronite villages of Cyprus in the 20th century.¹ In the 1960 census it had 506 inhabitants, of whom 9 were Greeks and 497 Maronites.

Name

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village took its name from the Archangel Michael, to whom its church is dedicated: the archangels are also called “Asomatoi”, that is, incorporeal, without a body.² The Jesuit Girolamo Dandini, who visited Cyprus in 1596 as the Pope’s envoy to the Maronites of Lebanon, writes the name “Asomatos”, and the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie “Assomatos”.³

Founding and first records

According to the tradition of the inhabitants themselves, recorded by the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the Maronites of Asomatos came from the village of Siamat in Lebanon.⁴

Asomatos has not been found in the 15th-century lists of villages: the villages “Assomato” and “Asomato” of the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron and of the Venetian lists published by Mas Latrie are Asomatos in the Lemesos district and a village of the same name in the bailiwick of Assia. The first known written reference to the village is Dandini’s. In 1596 Dandini asked Italians, Greeks and Maronites about the Maronites of the island and recorded the nineteen villages where they lived, among them Asomatos, Kampyli, Karpaseia and Kormakitis.⁵

Archaeological sites

On the land of Asomatos, at the site of Pigades, on the boundaries with Myrtou and Karpaseia, lies a pre-Greek sanctuary, known in the archaeological literature as “Myrtou-Pigades”. The Department of Antiquities’ Register of Ancient Monuments also places it in Asomatos. It was located in 1949 by the British archaeologist Joan du Plat Taylor, who made trial trenches that year, and she excavated it in 1950 and 1951 for the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford, in collaboration with the University of Sydney. The excavation was published in 1957.

A large courtyard came to light, surrounded by rooms, with a monumental altar of dressed stone at its east end. The altar was crowned by “horns of consecration”, that is, the cult symbol in the shape of bull’s horns. The sanctuary was built around 1300 BC, over earlier buildings, and was destroyed around 1175 BC. More than ten Mycenaean vases were found in the courtyard, showing contacts with the Mycenaean Greek world of the Aegean. Among the finds were also a hoard of bronze tripods and stands, an amulet of red jasper bearing the royal name of Pharaoh Ramesses II, and a cylinder seal in the style of the kingdom of Mitanni, in northern Mesopotamia.

Above the ruins of the altar a layer was found with pottery of the Geometric and Archaic ancient Greek periods, together with a few clay figurines and fragments of life-size statues. Among them were also a few imported vases from the Aegean. These finds show that worship continued or was revived at the site until about the 8th century BC.⁶

Turkish rule

During Turkish rule the number of Maronites in Cyprus fell sharply. In 1686, according to a publication of the Press and Information Office on the Maronites, they lived in only eight villages, among them Asomatos.⁷

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Asomatos is recorded with 15 Christian property-holding households. They had fields of grain and cotton, ten threshing floors, a small mulberry garden and 107 trees, almost all olives, with a few carobs, and an olive press. Their main property, however, was their animals: over 850 sheep and goats and a few oxen.⁸

In the 19th century Mas Latrie writes that the Maronites had gradually withdrawn towards the western end of the Lapithos area, and that Asomatos, Karpaseia and Kormakitis were entirely their own villages, with their churches.⁹

Churches and monasteries

The village church, Maronite, is dedicated to the Archangel Michael and stands at the northeastern edge of the old village.¹⁰ The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, writes that it was rebuilt in 1895, to a very good design for its time: a square building of dressed stone with an apse and a large west door under an arch with many mouldings.¹¹

The village had two cemeteries, the newer of which had been in use since 1911.¹²

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew wheat, barley, a few fodder crops and carobs, and animal husbandry was relatively developed, as already in the 1832/33 survey. The village lay beside the Lefkosia–Keryneia road via Myrtou.¹³ In 1945 the New Cooperative Credit Society of Asomatos was founded.

Education

The village’s mixed elementary school operated from 1887 to 1974.¹⁴ In the school year 1973–74 it had 54 pupils and 3 teachers.

Population

The population of Asomatos grew steadily. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 191 inhabitants in 1881, 219 in 1891, 240 in 1901, 279 in 1911 and 348 in 1921.¹⁵ In 1931 the village had 359 inhabitants, all of them Christians, and in 1946 417, of whom 5 were Orthodox and 412 of another religion, the Maronites of the village (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 506 inhabitants, 497 Maronites and 9 Greeks, and in 1973 527 inhabitants. In none of these censuses were any Turks recorded in the village.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Asomatos was captured by the Turkish army. Most of the inhabitants were displaced, and those who stayed in the village lived enclaved. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, immediately after the capture 80 inhabitants remained in the village; in 1979 there were 39 and in December 1985 26.¹⁶ In 2012 only one elderly woman still lived in Asomatos, and today no one lives there.¹⁷ The village’s population was thus subjected to ethnic cleansing.

One death is recorded in Asomatos: an elderly civilian inhabitant of the village, who died inside the village after its capture.

The village became a camp of the Turkish occupation forces. The inhabitants are allowed to enter it only on Sundays, solely for the Divine Liturgy in the church of the Archangel Michael, which lies inside the camp.¹⁸