Gastria is a Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos, at the beginning of the Karpasia peninsula. It lies 26 kilometres north of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 20 metres, in a small plain near the shore of the bay of Ammochostos, about five kilometres north-east of Bogazi.¹ Near the village survive traces of a medieval castle. In the 1960 census it had 261 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

The official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) writes the name “Gastria”. The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron writes “Gastria”.²

Founding and first records

Gastria appears in the chronicles from the early 13th century, as a village and castle of the Knights Templar by the sea.³ On the village’s land the Gazetteer records the hill of Kastros, south-west of the settlement, and the Register of Ancient Monuments protects the remains of the castle, the so-called “Kastroulli”.⁴

Archaeological sites

In 1882 George Gordon Hake excavated tombs at Gastria for the South Kensington Museum in London, today’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The vessels from Gastria in the catalogue of ancientcyprus.com are mostly of the Geometric and Archaic ancient Greek periods: White Painted, Black-on-Red and Bichrome wares, with jugs, lekythoi, askoi and amphorae.⁵

To the south-east, in the forest of Valeia, between Gastria and Agios Theodoros, lies the cemetery of Alaas, of the 11th century BC, excavated in 1973–74 by Vassos Karageorghis and described on the page of Agios Theodoros.⁶

Frankish rule

In the years of Frankish rule Gastria belonged to the order of the Knights Templar, which had a castle there. The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the historic monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, noted that the castle is often mentioned in the medieval chronicles.⁷ According to Bustron, when the Templars quarrelled with King Hugh III, he ordered their houses at Limassol and at Gastria to be pulled down. In 1310 King Henry II, deposed by his brother Amaury, was taken to the “casal Gastria del Tempio”, that is, the Templars’ village of Gastria, near the sea, and from there sent into exile in Armenia.⁸

When the order of the Templars was abolished, in 1313 their property in Cyprus was given to the Knights Hospitaller. Among what was handed over Bustron lists “the castle of Gastria with the villages of Gastria and Kamares”. In his own day, in the 16th century, the castle was, he writes, completely ruined.⁹

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Gastria is entered as a mixed village, with 20 property-holding households. The owners had mainly cotton fields and a few grain fields, threshing floors, 35 beehives, a mill turned by horses, more than 200 sheep, and cows and oxen.¹⁰

British rule

The English archaeologist David Hogarth, who passed through in 1888, found Gastria a prosperous village, in a fertile plain below the cliffs of the Valeia. In the village coffee-house he was brought a Greek funerary stele of the 4th century BC from Knidos, on the land of Agios Theodoros.¹¹ According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, in 1905 the old cemetery around the church of Panagia Faneromeni was closed as a danger to public health.¹²

Churches and monasteries

The parish church of the village, Panagia Faneromeni, in the northern part of the old settlement, was built in 1895. In the eastern part of the village stands the church of Agios Georgios, of the 18th century; according to Jeffery, in the early 20th century it housed the village school.¹³

The church of Agios Ioannis Prodromos, about two kilometres west of the village, on the Ammochostos–Karpasia road, is an Ancient Monument.¹⁴ The village also had a second chapel of Agios Ioannis Prodromos, of the 18th century, and the chapel of Agios Prokopios.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew mainly cereals and carobs, but much of the land was left uncultivated, and in 1973 about 1,600 sheep were kept in the village.¹⁵ A co-operative credit society worked in the village from 1946.

Education

In the school year 1973–74 the Greek primary school of the village had 14 pupils and one teacher.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 247 inhabitants in 1881, 297 in 1891, 289 in 1901, 357 in 1911 and 316 in 1921.¹⁶ In 1931 it had 315 inhabitants, all Christians, and in 1946 376, all Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 261 inhabitants and in 1973 198, all of them Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for union with Greece 186 inhabitants signed. The EOKA Fighters’ Register lists 39 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Gastria was occupied by the Turkish army. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, in August 1974 almost all the inhabitants fled before the advancing Turkish army, and only 29 stayed in the village, surrounded. The last of them were moved to the free areas in September 1976.¹⁷ The Greek population of the village was thus ethnically cleansed, and since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

One death, of a civilian, is recorded in the village itself. One more inhabitant of Gastria, a soldier, was killed at Sygchari.

In 2022 the church of Panagia Faneromeni was in poor condition: all its crosses had been removed, the roof had been damaged by water, and the interior, with its wooden iconostasis, was covered in graffiti. Agios Georgios appears to be illegally used for another purpose, and the interior of Agios Ioannis Prodromos is almost in ruins. The new cemetery is in ruins, with the grave crosses scattered.¹⁸