Kalopsida is a Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 13 kilometres west of Ammochostos, 20 metres above sea level, in the geographical region of the Kokkinochoria. On its land lie a Bronze Age settlement and cemetery, investigated from 1894 to 1959. In the 1960 census it had 975 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, which cites Simos Menardos, the name is ancient Greek and comes from the word “καλοψίς”, that is, a place that yields good fare, or from “καλή όψις” (“fair view”).¹ The village appears under the same name in the 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas. In the Italian sources of the 15th and 16th centuries it is written “Calopsida”, “Galopsida” and “Calopsides”.²

Founding and first records

The land of Kalopsida has been inhabited since pre-Greek times, as its archaeological sites show. The first written mention of the village is by Machairas, who names it in the events of August 1425. The same episode is also told by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron.³

Archaeological sites

In April 1894 the British archaeologist John Linton Myres spent a week investigating Kalopsida, which was then the easternmost known Bronze Age settlement in Cyprus. In the cutting of the road he recognised the settlement from the handmade pottery and a layer of seashells. He found a stretch of stone-built wall, a hand mill, loom weights, small stone dishes with traces of red pigment, and slag, and concluded that there had been a pottery workshop in the village. He also opened 31 tombs at five spots in the cemetery, with vases, bronze daggers and pins, a silver ring and beads of Egyptian type. Some of the vases, of the type archaeologists call Tell el-Yahudiyeh, and the beads show contacts of the settlement with Egypt and the Syro-Palestinian coast. The finds were divided between the Cyprus Museum, the British Museum and the Ashmolean in Oxford, where the objects from Kalopsida formed the core of the museum’s Cypriot collection.⁴

In 1924 the Swedish archaeologist Einar Gjerstad excavated at Kalopsida a house with ten rooms, an inner and an outer courtyard, built with mud-brick walls on stone foundations, and beneath it the deposits were dug layer by layer down to the bedrock. Gjerstad took the rooms to be workshops, storerooms and sleeping quarters, and one courtyard to be a cooking area.⁵ In 1954 Kypros Tsangaridis, an assistant at the Cyprus Museum, located at the locality of Taoutis a tomb that had already been partly robbed, and later excavated it; in it was found a painted amphora decorated with net patterns and wavy lines.⁶

In 1959 the Swedish archaeologist Paul Astrom made trial trenches on the village hill and at the locality of Koufos. On the hill he found two rooms of a building with large storage jars, destroyed by fire around 1600 BC. At Koufos one trench yielded about 223,000 sherds, around 260 almost complete vases, copper slag, ores and a handle bearing signs of the Cypro-Minoan script, the writing of Bronze Age Cyprus. Astrom concluded that copper was smelted and metal objects were made in the settlement. According to his study, the settlement at Koufos was abandoned around 1400 BC.⁷ These excavations took place before 1974; since then, as the Australian archaeologist Jennifer Webb noted in 2012, the site has been in the occupied area and is not accessible for new research.⁸

Antiquity

The investigations show that the land of Kalopsida was inhabited through almost the whole of the pre-Greek Bronze Age, down to the middle of the second millennium BC. Among the sherds of Koufos there are also a few of the geometric ancient Greek period, which show that the site was inhabited again, if only briefly.⁹

Frankish and Venetian rule

In August 1425 the fleet of the sultan of Egypt, with fifty galleys, reached Ammochostos. The Mamluks landed an army, foot and horse, and burned Trapeza, on the land of neighbouring Acheritou, and Kalopsida. The prince of Galilee, the king’s brother, who had been sent against them, learned that they were at Kalopsida, but when he arrived they had left for Stylloi.¹⁰

In 1474 Queen Caterina Cornaro gave the Venetian nobleman Giorgio Contarini, her first cousin, the title of count of Jaffa. With the title she gave him as fiefs Kalopsida, Vavatsinia and Platanistasa; Georgios Boustronios adds Dali as well. A little later, according to the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, the county was taken from Contarini and its villages returned to the royal domain.¹¹

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Kalopsida is a village with a mixed population, with 64 property-holding households. They had mainly cotton fields, a few wheat fields, almost 900 sheep and goats and 19 pairs of oxen. The largest holding was a chiftlik (estate), which belonged to a Christian owner.¹²

Churches and monasteries

The village’s Greek Orthodox parish church, at the northern edge of the settlement, is dedicated to Saint John the Baptist (Timios Prodromos) and dates from the 17th or 18th century. It is an Ancient Monument. At the eastern edge of the village stands the chapel of the Panagia, of the 20th century.¹³

The church of Agios Andronikos is also an Ancient Monument. On the village’s land, south of the cemetery, there was also the small chapel of Agios Georgios, which is now in ruins.¹⁴

Economy and society

As early as the 16th century Kalopsida was known for a plant that grew in abundance on its land, the villagers’ “tseneri”, from whose ash they made soap. The Italian writer Tommaso Porcacchi writes in 1576 that it was also used to whiten camlet, the goat-hair cloth woven in large quantities on the island; the same is reported by the Flemish traveller Johannes Cotovicus, who visited Cyprus in 1598/99.¹⁵

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, despite the low rainfall, the groundwater of the Kokkinochoria allowed the inhabitants to turn early to irrigated crops. Before 1974 they grew mainly potatoes, citrus, cereals and vegetables, and in 1973 more than 3,300 sheep were kept in the village. Many inhabitants worked in nearby Ammochostos and at the British base of Dekeleia.¹⁶ In 1945 the New Cooperative Credit Society of Kalopsida was founded.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, in the 1870s a private school “of the common letters” operated at Kalopsida. In 1876 the scholar Ieronymos Peristianis, whose father had a large country house in the village, attended it with four other pupils. The teachers were Konstantis Papagiorki and the village priest Chatzipapagiannis.¹⁷ In the school year 1973–74 the Greek primary school of Kalopsida had 172 pupils and six teachers.

Population

The population of Kalopsida grew steadily in the 20th century. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Kalopsida had 307 inhabitants in 1881, 344 in 1891, 383 in 1901, 436 in 1911 and 471 in 1921.¹⁸ In 1931 it had 574 inhabitants, 573 Christians and one Muslim, and in 1946 851, of whom 850 were Orthodox and one Muslim (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 975 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 1,023 Greeks.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 451 inhabitants of Kalopsida signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 112 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The EOKA fighter Charalambos Michail came from Kalopsida.¹⁹

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974, as the Turkish army advanced, the inhabitants of Kalopsida were forced to abandon the village, which was taken, and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed.²⁰ According to the government of Cyprus, as recorded by the European Commission of Human Rights in its 1976 report, about ten people who had stayed in the village were held there in confinement, and the last inhabitants were expelled to the free areas at the end of June 1975. The same report cites reports of the UN Secretary-General on the removal of equipment by Turkish forces from a factory south of Kalopsida.²¹ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

Two inhabitants of the village, both civilians, were killed in Kalopsida itself. Two others, soldiers, were killed outside it: one was mortally wounded in the area of Agios Ermolaos and the other fell on the Green Line in Lefkosia. One more inhabitant, a soldier, was recorded as missing in the area of Klepini; his remains were located and identified.

The occupation authorities have illegally converted the church of the Timios Prodromos into a mosque and removed its crosses; since a new mosque was built, around 2000, it has been abandoned and is in poor condition. The chapel of the Panagia has been illegally converted into a fodder store, with its doors and windows walled up, and the village cemetery is now in ruins.²²