Belapais is a Greek community in the occupied district of Keryneia. It stands at 220 metres on the northern slope of the Pentadaktylos, about 4 kilometres south-east of Keryneia, looking out over the coastal plain and the sea. On its land stands the great medieval monastery from which it took its name. In the 1960 census it had 725 inhabitants, 719 of them Greeks.

Name

The village took its name from the monastery. The 16th-century Cypriot historian Stephen Lusignan calls it “De la Pais”. The philologist Athanasios Sakellarios (1890) writes that the name most probably comes from the French “belle abbaye”, “beautiful abbey”. The name is also written Bellapais and Pella Pais. In the early 14th century the monastery was also known as “Episcopia”, a name that comes from the Greek word “episkopi”, a bishop’s seat. In the official register of the place names of Cyprus, a locality of the village near the monastery is recorded as “the River of the Episkopi”.

Antiquity

East of the monastery, on the hill of Vounoi, lies a large cemetery of the pre-Greek Bronze Age. The Cypriot archaeologist Porphyrios Dikaios, Curator of the Cyprus Museum, excavated it in 1931–1932. The British School at Athens continued the excavations in 1937–1938. A well-known clay model of an open-air sanctuary comes from this cemetery.

Greco-Roman period

In 1888 the British archaeologist David Hogarth was shown, in a field between Agios Epiktitos and Belapais, a badly worn milestone, a stone pillar that marked distances along a road. The villagers used it as a turning-post for the plough. Hogarth judged that it was most probably the 35th milestone on the road from Salamis to Lapithos.

Frankish and Venetian rule

The Latin Church came to Cyprus together with the island’s foreign rulers. Around 1206 the Latin archbishop of Nicosia, Thierry, founded a monastery of Latin monks here, at first Augustinian and later Premonstratensian. Pope Gregory IX confirmed it in 1232. The Premonstratensians wore white habits and were known as the “White Canons”.

The foreign kings endowed the monastery with rich estates. According to Lusignan, King Hugh III gave it many privileges, and according to some authorities he was buried there in 1284. The British architect George Jeffery, Curator of Ancient Monuments in Cyprus, writes that King Hugh IV rebuilt the monastery in the 14th century. The church dates from the 13th–14th century and the cloister from the 15th. The great refectory, about 30 metres long, was famous for its magnificence even in the Middle Ages. Jeffery notes that foreign architects supervised the work, but the building was done by local masons, who mixed the European designs with their own older ways of building.

Later the abbots were often in conflict with the Latin archbishop, and as the Latin Church declined in the island, the monastery and its estates fell into ruin.

Turkish rule

According to Sakellarios, the monastery was destroyed when the Turks took the island, and from then on it belonged to the village. The Greek villagers made the monastery church their parish church, dedicated to the Panagia Asprophorousa. An icon of 1646 survived from its old iconostasis.

Foreign travellers described the ruins. The Dutch traveller Cornelis van Bruyn, who visited in 1683, saw six or seven old paintings on the walls of the church. The British officer John Macdonald Kinneir, who came in 1814, writes that a Greek priest met him at the gate to show him the monastery, and that one of its halls had been turned into a Greek church.

British rule

In 1884 a new iconostasis was set up in the Panagia Asprophorousa. Sakellarios notes in 1890 that the villagers had repaired part of the half-ruined church with bricks, and that it served as the church of the Orthodox of the area, and that they made carob honey and pastelli from wild carobs. The great refectory of the monastery was used as the village school and for a time as a hospital. In 1912–1913 the Curator of Ancient Monuments shored up the ruins, because the refectory was in danger of collapse.

The village Co-operative Credit Society was founded in 1928 and the Co-operative Grocery in 1955. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 27 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, from 1834 the notable Savvas taught in his home, followed by Chatzigiannis Chatzichristodoulou, and the first community school was founded in 1855. The same source says that in 1880 the village teacher was a Greek monk from Mount Athos named Arsenios, and that his older pupils read “Gerostathis”. In 1890 the Greek primary school was housed in the great refectory of the monastery. In the school year 1973–74 the Greek primary school had 53 pupils and 2 teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 319 inhabitants in 1881, 398 in 1891, 500 in 1901, 613 in 1911 and 643 in 1921.¹ The population grew steadily: in 1931 it had 672 inhabitants and in 1946 it reached 792, almost all of them Greeks. In 1960 the Greeks numbered 719, and in 1973 685.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 the Turkish army took Belapais. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, many villagers stayed in their homes and were enclaved, together with Greeks from Keryneia who had taken refuge in the village. Later the Turkish authorities also moved here those confined at the Dome hotel in Keryneia. According to the same source, the enclaved in the village numbered 434 in October 1975, 411 in February 1976 and 303 in May. The Turkish authorities forced them to leave, and in September 1976 the last of them were expelled. The same encyclopaedia notes that during this time the primary school worked for a short while, with great difficulty. The Greek population was ethnically cleansed, and since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

Three reservists from the village were recorded as missing. Two vanished in the area of Sychari and one in Keryneia. The remains of one have been located and identified, while two are still missing. In Belapais itself and on its land 8 dead are recorded: 6 soldiers and 2 civilians. Three soldiers were killed in the village on 23 July, and three on 21 and 22 July at Aspri Moutti, in the area of Alonagra on the Pentadaktylos, within the village’s land. The 2 civilians were enclaved inhabitants who died in the village in 1975.

The occupation authorities have illegally converted the church of the Panagia Asprophorousa into a museum. The occupation authorities illegally converted Agios Georgios into a mosque, and now present it as a monument. The chapel of Agia Marina has been desecrated and looted, and is now illegally used as an art studio. The cemetery chapel of Agios Fotios has been desecrated and looted, and its roof has collapsed.