Flamoudi is a Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 32 kilometres north of Ammochostos, 160 metres above sea level, on the northern side of the Pentadaktylos. Its land stretched from the coast up to the steep peaks of the range, and its southern part was covered by the state forest of Kantara, below the peak with the medieval castle. In the 1960 census it had 299 inhabitants, all Greeks.

Name

The Italian Jesuit Girolamo Dandini, who passed through Cyprus in 1596 as an envoy of the Pope, mentions a village “Fludi”, which according to the British collector of travellers’ texts Claude Delaval Cobham is most probably Flamoudi.¹

Founding and first records

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, many of the inhabitants of Flamoudi are believed to have come from Melissa, a medieval settlement lower down, near the north coast. The settlement was gradually abandoned because it was exposed to pirate raids, and its people moved to safer villages, mainly to Flamoudi, which is built higher up the slope, in a position that cannot be seen from the sea.²

The traces of the settlement are known. The British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus, noted in 1918 the ruins of a village around the country chapel of the Panagia tis Melissas, and in the 1971 excavations at Melissa the pre-Greek settlement was found partly beneath a medieval Greek one.³ The chapel stands on the boundary with Akanthou. According to the Municipality of Akanthou, the inhabitants of the old settlement moved some to Akanthou and some to Flamoudi, and the two villages celebrated the church’s feast together.⁴

Archaeological sites

The land of Flamoudi was systematically explored from 1970 to 1973 by an expedition of Columbia University, New York, directed by the archaeologist Edith Porada, with Sarantis Symeonoglou as field director. The digging was done by people of the village, supervised by students of the expedition. On the hill of Vounari a monumental stone platform of the pre-Greek period was uncovered, about 16 by 16 metres, with retaining walls and buttresses. Its character is debated: the excavators considered it a sanctuary or a fort, while a more recent study of the archives argues that it had mainly economic and administrative functions. Much later, in the ancient Greek and the Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) periods, a rural sanctuary operated on the hill, with altars, statues and votive vessels; a limestone female head of the Classical period was also found.

A surface survey in 1971 recorded in the area eleven large and ten smaller settlements, four possible sanctuary sites and at least ten cemeteries. Trial trenches at Sapilou revealed a settlement of the Ptolemaic Greek and Roman periods. At Melissa, a level stretch near the coast two kilometres west of Vounari, a pre-Greek settlement was found that was inhabited without a break for centuries, until in the 13th century BC it was destroyed by earthquake and fire. It had large buildings, a gypsum floor, a paved courtyard and a workshop with copper slag and ivory. In a pit were found the remains of twenty storage jars with carbonised olives, which the excavators interpreted as an oil store, and in the same building a cylinder seal of haematite, carnelian beads and gold leaf. The Mycenaean pottery found there shows contacts with the Mycenaean Greek world of the Aegean.

The expedition planned a new season of excavations in 1974, but the Turkish invasion prevented it. The finds are kept at Columbia University and in the Cyprus Museum, and were studied later from the excavation diaries, photographs and drawings.⁵

North of the village, near the sea, lies an ancient rock-cut tomb. The Greek scholar Athanasios Sakellarios describes it in 1890: it is cut into the rock, six feet deep, with rows of columns on the west and north sides, similar to the rock-cut tombs of Nea Pafos. Jeffery describes it with an open court and Doric colonnades carved in the rock, and also notes near it a ruined tower of unknown date, built of large, roughly dressed stones.⁶ The tomb, at Lithosourka (Spilios), is an Ancient Monument.

Antiquity

The finds at Vounari and Melissa show that the land of Flamoudi had important settlements already in the pre-Greek period. In the ancient Greek period the inhabitants reused walls of the old buildings at Melissa, and the sanctuary at Vounari was in use until the Ptolemaic Greek period. According to the Pleiades database of ancient places, an ancient settlement of the Classical and Ptolemaic Greek periods also existed at Trachonas.⁷

Turkish rule

In the Ottoman property survey of 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Flamoudi has 19 property-holding households. They had fields of cotton and wheat, small vineyards and large areas of fallow land, about 300 olive trees, mostly mountain olives, and 12 beehives. Their main wealth was their animals: 380 sheep, five pairs of oxen, two horses and a mule.⁸

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village is dedicated to Saint George and dates from the 18th century, with later alterations. In the cemetery, at the southern edge of the village, stands the 16th-century chapel of Agios Ioannis o Theologos (Saint John the Theologian), which is an Ancient Monument.⁹

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew cereals, olives and carob trees, while large areas were left uncultivated, with wild vegetation. Stock-raising continued the tradition of 1832/33: in 1973 the village had 352 sheep, 100 goats, 39 oxen and more than a thousand poultry. In earlier times Flamoudi was also known for the baskets its inhabitants wove.¹⁰ The New Cooperative Credit Society of Flamoudi was founded in 1947.

Education

In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of Flamoudi had 34 pupils and two teachers. The Columbia University expedition had also set up in the school the place where the finds of the excavations were washed, measured and sorted.¹¹

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 235 inhabitants in 1881, 231 in 1891, 233 in 1901, 269 in 1911 and 335 in 1921.¹² In 1931 Flamoudi had 326 inhabitants, all Christians, and in 1946 366, all of them Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 299 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 247 Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 220 inhabitants signed, essentially all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 63 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974, as the Turkish army advanced, almost all the inhabitants of Flamoudi fled to the south.¹³ The village 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. On the land of Flamoudi one dead of 1974 is recorded, a civilian, in the area of the village.

According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Georgios into a mosque; its bell tower is missing and its crosses have been removed. The chapel of Agios Ioannis o Theologos was demolished by the Turks after 1974, according to the 2009 list, and in 2022 it was a roofless ruin, inside a cemetery where the crosses of the graves lie scattered on the ground.¹⁴