Kalograia is a Greek community in the occupied district of Keryneia. It lies 28 kilometres east of Keryneia, 140 metres above sea level, on the northern slopes of the Pentadaktylos. Its land stretched from the forests of the range down to the sea and included two important monuments, the church of Antifonitis and the monastery of the Panagia Melandryna.¹ In the 1960 census it had 571 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

On Kitchener’s map of Cyprus, in the first years of British rule, the village’s name is written “Kalorka”. In the 1931 census the village is written “Kalogrea”, and the British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, writes it “Kalorha”.²

Founding and first records

According to a local tradition recorded by the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the first to settle on the site of the village was a woman who cooked for the monks of the neighbouring monastery of Antifonitis. For this reason the settlement that later formed there was named Kalograia (in Greek, “nun”).³ The village is recorded under its own name in the Ottoman property survey of 1832/33.

Antiquity

The Greek philologist Athanasios Sakellarios, who travelled in Cyprus in the 19th century, found in 1851 at the monastery of the Panagia Melandryna, beside the church door, an incomplete Greek inscription, a dedication:

Ἀπολλονίδου εὐχήν.

(The vow of Apollonides.)

Sakellarios thought it most probable that the stone had been brought to the monastery from the ruins of an ancient coastal town on Cape Moulos, half an hour further east. He identified this town, as did later the British archaeologist David Hogarth, who travelled in Cyprus in 1888, with the Makaria mentioned by the 2nd-century Greek geographer Claudius Ptolemy.⁴

Venetian rule

In the 16th century the Cypriot Dominican historian Stefanos Lusignan mentions “our village called Antifoniti”, with the name of the monastery of Antifonitis.⁵ According to Hogarth, Antiphoniti was one of the villages of the Kythrea area, together with Knodara and Trypimeni, that belonged to the fief of the counts of Karpasia. From 1510 until the Turkish conquest the fief was held by the Venetian Giustiniani family.⁶

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Kalograia is recorded as a Christian village with nine property-holding households. They had vineyards, wheat fields, two threshing floors, 114 olive trees, 40 goats and a few oxen and cows. The monastery of Melandryna is recorded separately, with wheat fields, an orchard, running water, an olive mill, 180 olive trees and 250 goats; its property was valued at almost three times that of all the village’s owners together.⁷

In 1787 the English botanist John Sibthorp found the monastery of Antifonitis with a very old monk as abbot. In its garden stood a tree that the local people called “Xylon Efendi”, and those who visited it cut pieces from its trunk to keep in their houses and churches.⁸

Churches and monasteries

The village’s Greek Orthodox parish church is dedicated to Saint Mamas and was built in 1858.⁹

About one and a half kilometres south-west of the village, in a wooded valley of the Pentadaktylos, stands the church of Christ Antifonitis, the katholikon (main church) of the monastery of the same name. The Church of Cyprus list of churches in the occupied areas of 2009 dates it to the 12th century, the middle medieval Greek period, with additions of the 16th. Its large dome rests on eight built columns, and around the end of the 15th century a narthex was added and, on the south side, a portico with slender columns and pointed arches. Jeffery describes the wall paintings: Christ in the dome, life-size saints and a “Tree of Jesse”, that is, a depiction of the genealogy of Christ. According to him, at the Turkish conquest the monastery was in danger of passing to Muslim use, and a Cypriot bought it as his personal property; in 1906 it was sold to the monastery of Kykkos.¹⁰ The church and monastery of Antifonitis are Ancient Monuments.

About two kilometres north-west of the village, towards the sea, stands the monastery of the Panagia Melandryna. It too is an Ancient Monument. Its barrel-vaulted church is of the 15th century. Jeffery notes that its carved wooden iconostasis, of the 16th century, was the same as that of Antifonitis, and that of the monastery buildings a two-storey colonnade survived on the north side. Sakellarios found the monastery with a fine garden of fruit trees and a notable olive grove.¹¹

The Agiasma of Antifonitis, a 12th-century chapel, and the 20th-century chapel of Agios Nikolaos also stood on the village’s land.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew olives, carobs, cereals and fodder crops, often in the same fields. The village was known for the chrysomila, that is, the apricots, of its irrigated fields: in 1971, 7,621 apricot trees were counted.¹² According to the same encyclopaedia, the apricot growers of Kalograia, Agios Amvrosios and Charkeia founded a joint company, to sell their produce at better prices.¹³ In 1944 the New Cooperative Credit Society of Kalograia was founded, and in 1947 the Kalograia Cooperative Grocery.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before British rule the monks of the Panagia Melandryna taught letters to children from Kalograia and from the neighbouring villages of Trypimeni and Agios Amvrosios.¹⁴ In the school year 1973–74 the village’s Greek primary school had 72 pupils and three teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 283 inhabitants in 1881, 352 in 1891, 431 in 1901, 471 in 1911 and 566 in 1921.¹⁵ In 1931 Kalograia had 553 inhabitants, all Christians, and in 1946 682, all Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 571 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 587 Greeks.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 432 inhabitants signed, essentially all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 119 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The EOKA fighter Giakoumis Anastasi came from Kalograia.¹⁶

The Turkish invasion of 1974

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

Two inhabitants of Kalograia, both soldiers, were recorded as missing; both vanished in the Pellapais area. The remains of one have been located and identified, while the other is still missing. One civilian from Kalograia was killed elsewhere, at Vitsada.

The occupation authorities have illegally converted the church of Agios Mamas into a mosque.¹⁷ The church of Antifonitis has been desecrated and looted, and its wall paintings were removed by Turkish smugglers; the occupation authorities have illegally converted it into a museum. Parts of the wall paintings, among them the Last Judgement and the Tree of Jesse, were found in Munich in 1997, when the Bavarian police seized the stock of a Turkish antiquities dealer. Four 16th-century icons of the iconostasis, which had been sold in the Netherlands, returned to Cyprus in 2013.¹⁸

The church of the Panagia Melandryna has been desecrated, looted and partly collapsed, until emergency conservation work was carried out on it in 2014.¹⁹ The chapel of Agios Nikolaos has been desecrated and is in ruins, and in the abandoned village cemetery the crosses of the graves lie scattered.