Galini is a large Greek community in the occupied district of Lefkosia. It lies 19 kilometres west of Morfou, 220 metres above sea level, in the geographical region of Tillyria, above Morfou Bay.¹ In the 1960 census it had 1,295 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

The origin of the name is not certain. The village is recorded in the Ottoman property survey of 1832/33.²

Founding and first records

Galini has not been found, either under its present name or under a similar one, in the 15th-century lists of fiefs and royal villages preserved by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron and the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie. Its first certain written record is in the property survey of 1832/33. The village’s land, however, was inhabited much earlier, as the ancient miners’ settlement at the locality of Aletri shows.

Archaeological sites

At Aletri, south-east of the village, which the official gazetteer of Cyprus marks as an ancient monument on the land of Galini, lies a pre-Greek settlement with a copper mine.³ It was partly cleared in 1942, for the Department of Antiquities, by the Cypriot archaeologist Porphyrios Dikaios. A pottery workshop with a primitive kiln came to light, together with two moulds for casting copper axes, a clay crucible with remains of copper slag and other smelting debris. The Australian archaeologist Robert Merrillees described the pottery workshop as unique in Bronze Age Cyprus and the site as the oldest of the few witnesses to copper production on the island. Almost all the material from the excavation was later located in the Cyprus Museum and was published in 2013.⁴ The copper of Aletri most probably reached Lapithos, with which the settlement had close ties.⁵ The part of the ancient mine at Aletri is an Ancient Monument.

A little further west, at the locality of Laxia tis Schistis, the Pleiades database of ancient places marks, on the basis of a scholarly atlas of the ancient world, a sanctuary of the archaic and classical Greek periods.⁶

The ancient mines also had a place in the village’s traditions. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the inhabitants used to say that the sea once reached the foot of the “mountain of gold”, where a ship loaded with gold sank; centuries later the old Cypriots discovered it and opened the galleries, that is, the ancient mine tunnels, to bring it out.⁷

Antiquity

The land of Galini was inhabited as early as the pre-Greek period by people who mined and worked copper. In the ancient Greek period the village, a few kilometres west of Soloi, most probably belonged to the kingdom of Soloi.

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Galini is recorded as a Christian village with 25 property-holding households. They had fields, almost 300 olive trees, a few mulberries, carobs and fig trees, an olive mill and beehives. The largest part of their property after the land was their animals: 400 goats, oxen and cows.⁸

Churches and monasteries

Galini had two Greek Orthodox churches, both dedicated to Saint Ioannis the Theologian, dating from the 18th or 19th century. Around the smaller one, which stood next to the school, was the old cemetery, which seems to have been closed in 1940.⁹ The chapel of Agia Mavri also stood on the village’s land.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew citrus along the valley of the Kampos river, carobs, cereals, figs and a few vines, and kept more than 500 sheep and 250 goats. The citrus groves were watered from the Galini dam on the Kampos river, within the village’s boundaries. Besides farming, logging and the production of firewood, many inhabitants worked at the mining installations of Xeros and in the neighbouring mines.¹⁰ The village had the New Cooperative Credit Society of Galini, from 1946, and the Galini Cooperative Grocery, from 1957.

Education

In the school year 1973–74 the Greek primary school of Galini had 99 pupils and three teachers.

Population

The population of Galini grew quickly in the middle of the 20th century. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 283 inhabitants in 1881, 325 in 1891, 404 in 1901, 498 in 1911 and 583 in 1921.¹¹ In 1946 the village had 849 inhabitants, of whom 847 were Orthodox and 2 Muslims (the 1946 census recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,295 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 888 Greeks.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 491 inhabitants of Galini signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 23 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The EOKA fighter Charilaos Michail came from Galini.¹²

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Galini was taken by the Turkish army and its Greek inhabitants were ethnically cleansed. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

Six inhabitants of Galini, five civilians and one soldier, were recorded as missing, and their remains have not been identified to this day. Five vanished at Galini and the sixth in the Karavas–Lapithos area. One more civilian from Galini was killed elsewhere, in the Soloi–Karavostasi area. One civilian was also killed on the land of Galini.

The village now lies inside a forbidden Turkish military zone. The two churches of Agios Ioannis the Theologian stand inside a Turkish military camp. In satellite images of 2011 both were roofless, and by 2013 the larger one had been demolished.¹³