Davlos is a Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 34 kilometres north of Ammochostos, 70 metres above sea level, on the northern side of the Pentadaktylos, one kilometre from the sea. Its land stretched from the coast up to the ridge and included the small mountain settlement of Kantara, around the monastery of Panagia Kantariotissa, and the medieval castle of Kantara; for this reason the community is officially called “Davlos and Kantara”.¹ In the 1960 census it had 462 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

The British consul in Aleppo Alexander Drummond, who passed through the village in 1750, writes its name as “Zdavlo”.²

Kantara took its name from the castle, which in the Frankish and Venetian sources is written “Cantara”, “Candare” or “La Candaire”. The Cypriots called it “Ekaton Spitia” (Εκατόν Σπίτια, “A Hundred Houses”).³

Founding and first records

Davlos was not found in the lists of villages and fiefs of Frankish and Venetian rule. The earliest record of it that has been traced is Drummond’s: in 1750 he found at Davlos “a pretty good bay, with a rock on each side, and ruins”.⁴

There were once other small settlements on the village’s land. The British archaeologist David Hogarth, who toured the area in 1888, noted to the east, near the spring of Thepos, the site of a small village with many olive-press stones. Ruins of ancient settlements also lie on the coast, at Galounia and at the site called Pyrgos.⁵

The settlement of Kantara is more recent. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, it grew up fairly recently around the monastery of Panagia Kantariotissa. In the 1931 census the monastery of Kantara was recorded separately, with 14 inhabitants, and from 1946 its population was counted together with Davlos.⁶

Archaeological sites

The ancient site at Galounia, on the coast east of the village, is a scheduled ancient monument. The 19th-century Greek scholar Athanasios Sakellarios described there Corinthian architraves, broken columns of marble or granite, the remains of a small aqueduct and many potsherds, and a deep, elongated harbour sheltered by the Galounia islets, where ships still put in during the summer. Sakellarios placed at Galounia Aphrodision, the ancient city mentioned by the 1st-century BC Greek geographer Strabo.⁷ Hogarth, who went there ready to accept the identification, found the ruins small, about 180 by 90 metres, with a piece of a stone triglyph, three small columns and many potsherds. He concluded that it was a village or a small skala, that is, an anchorage, and that Aphrodision lay further west, as later scholars also accept. On the soft rocks around the harbour he saw many initials of Greek names carved, a sign that seamen continued to use it.⁸

At the site called Pyrgos, on the coast north-east of the village, above the chapel of Agios Sozomenos, the British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus, noted in 1918 the column bases of a Roman temple and many ruins. The site was located in 1952 by the British archaeologist Hector Catling, in a surface survey of the north coast.⁹

Antiquity

The ancient settlements of Davlos were small and lived from the sea and from the land. The bays at Galounia and Pyrgos were among the few natural anchorages on this rocky coast: Drummond noted that the bay of Davlos was the first place resembling a harbour in the Karpasia area.¹⁰ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the many remains of olive presses in the area show that oil production was an old occupation.¹¹ According to the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places, the ancient site of Davlos dates from the Roman and early medieval Greek (“Byzantine”) periods.¹²

Greek medieval period (“Byzantium”)

The castle of Kantara, on the peak of Kavallaropetra, is the easternmost of the three castles of the Pentadaktylos. It is not known when it was built. Sakellarios and Hogarth considered that it was most probably built by the Greek governors of the island in the medieval Greek period of the Arab raids or shortly afterwards, to guard the coast against pirates. The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron describes it as an impregnable rock, built in the time of the Christians, with an entrance only on the eastern side and good cisterns.¹³ According to Hogarth, in 1191, when Richard the Lionheart took Cyprus from Isaac Komnenos, the castle surrendered without a fight.¹⁴

Frankish and Venetian rule

In the early years of Frankish rule a monastery at Kantara was a centre of Orthodox resistance to the Latin Church. According to Jeffery, the present monastery most probably stands on the site of the medieval monastery where, around 1230, the monks Ioannis and Konon from Mount Athos settled, with disciples who gathered around them. The monks of Kantara were summoned to Nicosia by the Latin archbishop, imprisoned because they would not accept the Latin liturgy with unleavened bread, and after three years in prison were put to death.¹⁵

The castle was besieged in the war of the Frankish nobles of 1228–1232, and Bustron notes that, despite the damage done by a siege engine, the besiegers could not take it. In 1373, when the Genoese seized Ammochostos, the Prince of Antioch, uncle of King Peter II, took refuge there after escaping from prison disguised as his cook’s assistant, as the 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas relates.¹⁶ The Venetians kept a garrison in the castle until 1525, when they abandoned it together with the other mountain castles, and from then on it fell into ruin.¹⁷

Turkish rule

The Ottoman property survey of 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, lists 19 property-holding households at Davlos, all Christian, among them that of the village priest. They had unirrigated fields, six threshing floors, a mill and over 400 olive trees, mostly wild olives, and more than 650 sheep and a few oxen and cows. The survey also records the property of a church in the village.¹⁸

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village is dedicated to Saint George and dates from the 19th century. Jeffery noted in 1918 that it had been rebuilt about fifty years earlier with pieces of an older building.¹⁹

Two monasteries lie on the land of Davlos. The monastery of Panagia Kantariotissa, in the settlement of Kantara, is an Ancient Monument and was completely renovated in the 18th century; Jeffery describes a simple single-aisled church with a fine brass chandelier of medieval type.²⁰ The monastery of Agios Nikolaos lies on the slopes, about two kilometres north-east of the village, between the village and the castle; its church dates from the 18th–19th century.²¹

On the coast, at Pyrgos, stands the chapel of Agios Sozomenos, which according to Jeffery had been rebuilt and kept an old stone iconostasis.²²

Economy and society

Hogarth wrote in 1888 that the plain of Davlos, Flamoudi and Akanthou was the richest area of the island in carobs and wheat. The villagers stored their surplus wheat in funnel-shaped pits, the “voufes”, dug into the earth or the soft rock and hardened with fire.²³ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew mainly cereals, olives and carobs, raised sheep and goats, and fished from a small fishing harbour. The village was known for its medicinal baths and had begun to receive summer visitors, while Kantara, with its cool climate, had become a mountain resort with holiday homes and a small hotel.²⁴ The Davlos Cooperative Credit Society “Proodos” was founded in 1927 and the Davlos Cooperative Grocery in 1957.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 359 inhabitants in 1881, 396 in 1891, 474 in 1901, 558 in 1911 and 661 in 1921.²⁵ In 1931 Davlos had 662 inhabitants, all Christians, its largest population in the censuses. In 1946, together with Kantara, it had 599 inhabitants, all Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 462 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 342 Greeks. In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of the village had 30 pupils and one teacher.

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for union with Greece, 416 inhabitants signed, essentially all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 74 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Davlos was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. Some of the inhabitants stayed in the village, under occupation. In October 1974 the UN Secretary-General reported that the UN peacekeeping force had distributed blankets and food to Greeks in need at Davlos, as well as at Voni, Gypsou and Vitsada. According to the statement of the Cyprus Government to the European Commission of Human Rights, the last inhabitants were expelled from the village at the end of June 1975, together with the last inhabitants of other villages of Karpasia.²⁶ Today no Greek lives in Davlos. The Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants’ return.

Two inhabitants of Davlos, both civilians, were recorded as missing: one was lost in the village itself and the other in the area of Kato Deryneia. The remains of one have been located and identified, while the other is still missing. One more inhabitant, a civilian, was killed at Ammochostos hospital. On the land of Davlos four people killed in 1974 are recorded, two soldiers and two civilians, in the village, in the Davlos area and in the Kantara area.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Panagia Kantariotissa into a storeroom and workshop. All the crosses have been removed from the church of Agios Georgios and nothing is left of its furnishings, and almost nothing survives of the Greek Orthodox cemetery.²⁷