Goufes is a mainly Turkish community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 29 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, 90 metres above sea level, in the southern foothills of the Pentadaktylos. Low hills spread north of the settlement and the plain of the Mesaoria to the south, and the village is crossed by a small stream coming down from the mountain.¹ In the 1960 census it had 338 inhabitants, 87 of them Greeks and 251 Turks.

Name

The official gazetteer of Cyprus gives the name as “Γούφες, αι”, in the plural.² On the British Kitchener map of 1885 the village is written “Gouphaes”,³ and in the 1931 census “Gouphes”.

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Goufes is recorded as a mixed village with 29 property-holding households. The owners had cotton fields, a few fields of fodder crops and threshing floors, while most of their land was barren or fallow. They had 72 olive trees, more than 400 sheep, oxen for ploughing, cows, mares and beehives.⁴

Churches and monasteries

The village’s Greek Orthodox church is dedicated to Saint Georgios. It stands in the northern part of the settlement and, according to Cyprus Religious Heritage, was consecrated in 1955. Around it lay the cemetery of the Greek inhabitants.⁵

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village’s land was mainly sown with cereals, although considerable areas were left uncultivated, and in 1973 the inhabitants kept 1,088 sheep, 388 goats and 9 calves. Stock-raising was already important in the survey of 1832/33. Much of the land north of the settlement was state forest.⁶ The Gazetteer marks the Tennaria forest there.⁷

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 263 inhabitants in 1881, 249 in 1891, 277 in 1901, 300 in 1911 and 302 in 1921, of whom 76 were Christians and 226 Muslims.⁸ In 1931 Goufes had 287 inhabitants, 84 Christians and 203 Muslims, and in 1946 335, of whom 94 were Orthodox and 241 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 338 inhabitants, 87 Greeks and 251 Turks. Almost all the Greek inhabitants left in 1964, and the rest had gone by the 1973 census, which no longer records any Greek inhabitants; Goufes then had around 250 Turkish inhabitants (an estimate).

National struggles

The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 26 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

The Greek inhabitants of Goufes had been forced to abandon the village because of the events of the Turkish insurrection of 1963–64. During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Goufes was taken by the Turkish army, and since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of its Greek inhabitants.

Two inhabitants of Goufes, both civilians, vanished in the village itself and were recorded as missing; their remains were later located and identified. One more inhabitant of the village, a soldier, is among the dead of 1974; he was killed in the area of Ovgoros.

The occupation authorities have illegally converted the church of Agios Georgios into a hay barn, as recorded in the Church of Cyprus list of churches in the occupied areas of 2009. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, which visited it in 2022, all the crosses have been removed from the church, and no visible trace of the cemetery survives.⁹