Exo Metochi is a Greek community in the occupied part of the district of Lefkosia. It lies 15 kilometres east of Lefkosia, 90 metres above sea level, on the plain of the Mesaoria, near the Lefkosia–Ammochostos road.¹ In the 1960 census it had 852 inhabitants, 851 of them Greeks.

Name

In the chronicle of Leontios Machairas, in the 15th century, the village is called Xometochi, and in the Italian sources of the 15th and 16th centuries “Exometochi”, as one word.² The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) also records, on the village’s land, the “Road of Exo Metochi” and place names such as “Exometochiana”.³

Founding and first records

The first written record of Exo Metochi is in the chronicle of the 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas, who names it among the villages that King James I distributed to his knights at the end of the 14th century.⁴ The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron mentions it among the twelve villages watered by the great spring of Kythrea. Its water, he writes, ran down from Kythrea and Chrysida to Trachoni, Neo Chorio, Voni, Palaikythro and then to Exo Metochi and Epicho, and turned more than fifty mills.⁵

Frankish and Venetian rule

James I gave Xometochi, together with other villages he distributed to the knights who had stood by him, to Jean de Neuville, whom King Peter II had appointed viscount of Lefkosia, that is, head of the city’s administration and justice.⁶

In the 1460s, when King James II redistributed the fiefs of the island, Bustron records that Marietta Bragadin received “Exometochi”, Amargeti, three more villages and a house with vineyards. Her family, the Bragadin, was a Venetian family settled in Cyprus. In 1473, after James’s death, her brother Luca Bragadin presented Marietta’s privileges to Queen Catherine, who confirmed them.⁷

At the end of the 15th century Exo Metochi was a royal village, that is, it belonged directly to the state. In a Venetian statistical memorandum published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, “Casal Exometochi” is recorded in the bailiwick of Palaikythro, together with Palaikythro, Voni and other villages.⁸

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Exo Metochi is recorded as a Christian village with 33 property-holding households. Among the owners there was also a priest. The holdings were mainly grain fields, gardens and threshing floors, and 14 owners had water rights. They had 132 olive trees, about 800 sheep and goats, and a few oxen and cows.⁹

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village, in the southern part of the old centre, is dedicated to Saint George. It was built at the end of the 19th century: the year 1894 is carved above the north entrance and 1898 above the south one. Around it lay the old cemetery, which was later moved 500 metres to the south.¹⁰

East of the village stood the chapel of the Panagia ton Paidon.¹¹ The village also had the chapel of Agia Zoni and Agia Marina.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew mainly cereals and olives and kept many animals: in 1973 the village had almost 900 sheep, about 500 goats, cows, oxen and more than 4,000 poultry. The village lay near the Lefkosia–Ammochostos road, and many inhabitants worked in the two towns. According to the same encyclopaedia, Exo Metochi also had a station of the railway that from 1905 linked Lefkosia with Ammochostos.¹² The Cooperative Credit Society of Exo Metochi was founded in 1928 and the Cooperative Grocery of Exo Metochi in 1954.

Education

In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of Exo Metochi had 92 pupils and 3 teachers.

Population

The population of Exo Metochi grew steadily. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 332 inhabitants in 1881, 364 in 1891, 413 in 1901, 483 in 1911 and 540 in 1921.¹³ In 1931 the village had 605 inhabitants, 604 Christians and one Muslim, and in 1946 784, all of them Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 852 inhabitants, 851 of them Greeks and one English, and in 1973 890 Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 452 inhabitants of Exo Metochi signed, essentially all the adult Greek inhabitants.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 the inhabitants fled before the advancing Turkish army.¹⁴ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had been bombed by the Turkish air force.¹⁵ Exo Metochi was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of its inhabitants.

Nineteen inhabitants of Exo Metochi, 16 civilians and 3 soldiers, were recorded as missing. Seventeen vanished in the village itself and in its area; the other two in Keryneia and in the area of Tziaos. The remains of 8 have been located and identified; the other 11 are still missing. Three more inhabitants, one civilian and two soldiers, were killed elsewhere, in the area of Epicho, in the area of Voni and at Kontemenos.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Georgios into a mosque, and the crosses are missing from the building today. A wall was built through the middle of the new cemetery, and its eastern part is used as a Muslim cemetery; of the old cemetery around the church no trace remains.¹⁶