Gypsou is a large Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos, in the geographical region of the Mesaoria. It lies 21 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, 70 metres above sea level, in the low foothills of the Pentadaktylos, east of Lefkonoiko, on the main road to the Karpasia.¹ In the 1960 census it had 1,184 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, which cites the Cypriot scholars N. G. Kyriazis and N. Klirides, the village was also called “Sakkochori”.²

On old maps it is marked as “Ipso”, and in the English of British rule it was written “Yipsos” or “Gypsos”.³

Founding and first records

The first known mention of the village on its present site is on the old maps of Cyprus, where it is marked as “Ipso” together with neighbouring Lapathos. This was noted in 1918 by the British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus, in his description of the island’s monuments.⁴ The village is not mentioned 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.

Antiquity

Jeffery noted that around Gypsou and Lapathos there were many traces of ancient habitation, tombs and wells.⁵ The historical atlas of the ancient Greek and Roman world (Barrington Atlas) marks at the site of the village an ancient settlement, of whose name only the first letters are known, “Γυ…”, with a question mark, inhabited in the Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”), Roman and early medieval Greek periods.⁶

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the name is already attested in the Ptolemaic period: on a dedication inscribed in the Greek alphabet from the sanctuary of the Nymph on the hill of Kafizin, south of Lefkosia, the potter who dedicated it is described as “κώμης Γύ[ψου]”, that is, from the village of Gypsou.⁷

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Gypsou is recorded as a Christian village with 48 property-holding households, among them that of the village priest. Most of the village’s fields were cotton fields, and the rest unirrigated fields and threshing floors. They had very few trees, a few olives and wild olives. They had around 360 sheep, oxen, cows and beehives.⁸

Churches and monasteries

The parish church of Gypsou is dedicated to Saint John the Baptist (Timios Prodromos) and dates from the 18th century. It stands at the north-eastern edge of the old core of the village, and the old cemetery was beside it. The village also has the church of Agios Georgios, of the 20th century, built on the site of an older church. In the northern part of the old village stands the church of the Panagia, of the 19th or 20th century; it was built in 1890 and its bell tower was added in 1970.⁹ A little south of the village stands the Greek Orthodox chapel of the Prophet Elias, of the 18th or 19th century.

Economy and society

Gypsou was famous for its cotton cloth, as the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia notes, citing the Cypriot scholar Kostas Myriantheas (1945). According to the same encyclopaedia, the making of sacks, which the men wove on the loom from cotton thread, also flourished in the village in the past.¹⁰ Cotton already dominated the village’s fields in the survey of 1832/33. On the village’s land the official gazetteer of Cyprus also records two kilns, the Kamini tou Ai Drika and the Kamini tou Fterou.¹¹

According to the same encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew cereals, a few vegetables, fruit trees and a little citrus, on land with little rain and very little water for irrigation. Stock-raising was well developed: in 1973 the village had almost 3,000 sheep and more than 300 goats. In 1955 a small earth dam was built at Gypsou. Farming, stock-raising, gypsum quarrying and the short distance from Ammochostos kept the village’s population growing steadily.¹² In 1924 the Gypsou Cooperative Credit Society was founded.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, learning was cultivated at Gypsou earlier than in many other Cypriot villages: the Cypriot scholars Loizos Philippou and I. K. Peristianis record teachers who taught in the village from the middle of the 19th century and even earlier.¹³ In the school year 1973–74 the Greek primary school of Gypsou had 133 pupils and five teachers.

Population

Gypsou was one of the villages of the Mesaoria that grew steadily. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Gypsou had 425 inhabitants in 1881, 529 in 1891, 615 in 1901, 783 in 1911 and 848 in 1921.¹⁴ In 1931 it had 1,005 inhabitants, all Christians, and in 1946 1,184, all Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it again had 1,184 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 1,187 Greeks.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 750 inhabitants of Gypsou signed, essentially all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 149 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Gypsou was taken by the Turkish army, and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. Most of the inhabitants fled before the advancing army; those who stayed were held in the village until November.¹⁵ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

After its capture the Turkish army made Gypsou one of the main detention centres where it gathered the Greek civilians, among them many elderly people and children, who had stayed in the villages of the area, such as Milia, Lefkonoiko, Akanthou, Mandres and Lapathos. Later the detainees of the centres at Marathovounos and Vitsada were also moved there. They were held in confinement in the school, the church and houses of the village, behind barbed wire, under guard. A report of the UN Secretary-General of 18 September 1974 mentioned 500 people at Gypsou. After an agreement between the two sides on 11 November 1974, the detainees were moved to the free areas; the transfer from Gypsou was completed on 30 November, and according to the UN 1,123 people were moved. A Red Cross witness testified to the European Commission of Human Rights to having cared for women released from the centres of Voni and Gypsou who had been raped. The Commission found, by 13 votes to one, that the confinement of more than two thousand Greeks in schools and churches at Voni, Gypsou and Morfou, and in houses at Gypsou and Morfou, imputable to Turkey, was a deprivation of liberty in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.¹⁶

At Gypsou 29 dead of 1974 are recorded, all civilians: 27 in the village itself and 2 in its area. Of these, 13 were inhabitants of Gypsou and 16 were detainees from other villages. Four more inhabitants of Gypsou, all soldiers, were killed elsewhere: one at Larnaka, one in the area of Kantara, one in the area of Kaimakli and one at an unknown place.

Four inhabitants of Gypsou, one civilian and three soldiers, were recorded as missing. The civilian was arrested in the village; according to the official list, he and one of the soldiers vanished at the police station of Tziaos, while the other two soldiers vanished at Voni and in the Lapithos–Karavas area. The remains of three have been located and identified; the fourth is still missing.

The occupation authorities have illegally converted the church of Agios Georgios into a mosque; all the crosses and the bells have been removed from the building. When Cyprus Religious Heritage recorded it in 2022, the church of the Panagia had been left to decay and its interior was empty, except for parts of the altar and the wooden frame of the iconostasis. The icons are missing from the iconostasis of the Timios Prodromos. Of the old cemetery beside the Timios Prodromos only one grave remains, and in the new cemetery many memorials are damaged.¹⁷