Karavas is an occupied small town in the district of Keryneia. It stands on the coastal plain, about 11 kilometres west of Keryneia and two kilometres from the sea, next to Lapithos, and it was a municipality from 1884. It was made up of four quarters: Pano Geitonia, Exo Geitonia, Petrogeitonia and Agios Andreas. In the 1960 census it had 2,425 inhabitants, 2,416 of them Greeks.

Name

Local tradition links the name with the ship (karavi): the first inhabitant of the area, it says, was a craftsman who built ships, or a merchant who owned them. The river that runs through the village is the one the 2nd-century AD Greek geographer Claudius Ptolemy calls the Lapethos. The Greek philologist Athanasios Sakellarios noted in 1890 that locally it was by then called “the river of Karavas”.

Antiquity

According to the Municipality of Karavas, remains of pre-Greek settlement were found at Gyrisma in Pano Geitonia, and pottery of the Geometric and Archaic ancient Greek periods elsewhere in the village.

On the land of Karavas, near the sea, lies the archaeological site of Lambousa, at the place called Katalymata, which the Register of Ancient Monuments lists under Karavas. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Lambousa was the later name of ancient Lapithos, which stood on the coast, on a different site from present-day Lapithos. The history of the ancient city is given on the Lapithos page. Sakellarios saw pieces of columns and capitals all over the site, and noted that there would have been many more if the people of Karavas and Lapithos had not carried off the best of them to build their houses. In the rocks of the shore there are rock-cut tanks, filled with sea water through channels. Sakellarios thought they were baths or fish ponds; the British archaeologist David Hogarth took them for sea-baths.

Greek medieval period (“Byzantium”)

In the early medieval Greek (“Byzantine”) period Lambousa was a wealthy town, and two important treasures come from its land. The first was found at the end of the 19th century, and most of it was bought by the British Museum in 1899. According to the Municipality of Karavas, it includes a silver censer with the figures of Christ, the Virgin and four apostles, two silver plates and silver spoons. The second, far richer, was found in 1902 by labourers from Karavas who were quarrying the ruins for stone. Only part of it was seized and handed to the Cyprus Museum. Most pieces were smuggled out of Cyprus and bought in Paris by the American banker John Pierpont Morgan, and in 1917 they were given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The best-known part of the treasure is a set of nine silver plates with scenes from the life of David, which carry the control stamps of the emperor Heraclius and date from about 629–630. Six of them are in New York and three in the Cyprus Museum. With them were found silver plates with monograms and gold jewellery: necklaces, bracelets, earrings and crosses.

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, when Lambousa was destroyed in the medieval Greek period of the Arab raids, its population moved to present-day Lapithos and to Karavas, further from the coast.

The monastery of Panagia Acheiropoiitos was built on the ruins of the town. It takes its name from a miraculous icon “not made by hands”, that is, not made by a human hand. The British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, judged that the church goes back to a very early date. Its oldest part is a cruciform church with columns from an older building and a floor of coloured marble cut into geometric shapes. The 2009 list of the Church of Cyprus dates its phases to the 5th century and to the 12th to 16th centuries. According to the Municipality of Karavas and the Union of Cyprus Municipalities, until 1222 the monastery was the seat of the bishop of Lambousa, one of the fifteen bishops of the island. The people of Karavas believed that the Holy Mandylion was kept inside the icon, the image of Christ that according to tradition was sent to King Abgar of Edessa, and the church also kept a feast on 16 August, the day of the Holy Mandylion.

A few metres east of the monastery stands the rock-cut chapel of Agios Evlambios, in the middle of an ancient quarry. Its rock walls are full of tomb niches, as in the catacombs. Nearby is the church of Agios Evlalios, bishop of Lapithos, whom the 15th-century Greek chronicler Leontios Machairas lists among the saints of Cyprus.

Greek Orthodox chapels of the same period survive across the land of Karavas. Agios Panteleimon in Pano Geitonia dates from the early medieval Greek period, while Agios Antonios, Agia Marina and Apostolos Pavlos date from the 12th century. On the mountain south of the village is the rock-cut chapel of Panagia Galaterousa, of the 11th to 13th centuries. According to local tradition, the Apostle Paul took refuge at the site of the Apostolos Pavlos chapel when the people of Lambousa stoned him.

Frankish and Venetian rule

According to the Municipality of Karavas and the Union of Cyprus Municipalities, a settlement called Prastio di Caravo (Prasteio of Karavas), to which the monastery of Acheiropoiitos belonged, is recorded in the 14th and 15th centuries. The place name Prastion survived into the 20th century on the land of Karavas.

In the middle of the 16th century the church of Acheiropoiitos was greatly enlarged. A large new apse was built, the church was lengthened to the west and a porch with three arches was added. According to Jeffery, the work was most probably paid for by Alessandro Flatros, whose tomb, dated 1563, lies in the new part. The 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie could still read the date on the slab. In the same church Alexander Drummond, the British consul at Aleppo, who toured Cyprus in the mid-18th century, saw the tombstone of a man of Lapithos who died in 1546.

The present church of Agios Evlalios was also built in the 16th century, according to Jeffery, over the remains of an older church with a mosaic floor. Jeffery counted it among the finest and best-preserved churches of its age in Cyprus. Its dome rests on arches carried by four ancient marble columns. Three of them were pared down to match the fourth, and a large cross was left in relief on their surface.

Ottoman rule

The English traveller Richard Pococke passed the ruins of Lambousa in 1738 and spent the night at the “rich convent” of Acheiropoiitos. According to the Municipality of Karavas, in the middle of the 18th century the monastery was looted and the Turks destroyed the old icon of the Virgin. In 1765 the hieromonk Philotheos made a new icon and placed in it a piece of linen cloth found in the old one. The iconostasis was remade with icons of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

In the Ottoman property survey of 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Karavas is recorded as a quarter of Lapithos, with 135 Christian households of property owners. The inhabitants grew grain, vines and cotton, and most of their trees were olives. The Greek inhabitants built their churches. Agios Georgios was built in the middle of the 19th century on the site of an older monastery, and Jeffery admired its interior, full of carved woodwork painted in an unusual manner. According to the Municipality of Karavas, Agia Eirini was built by the protosynkellos Lavrentios and his son, Hadji Nikolas.

According to local tradition, in 1821 the people of Karavas supplied food to the ships of Konstantinos Kanaris when they came to the coast of Karavas and Lapithos. On 13 July 1821, in the massacre of the prelates and notables of Cyprus, Hadji Nikolas Lavrentiou, protosynkellos and notable of Karavas, was beheaded in the square of the Serai in Nicosia.

British rule

On 7 June 1884 Karavas was declared a municipality. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, until 1933 the neighbouring villages of Motides, Palaiosofos, Fterycha and Elia, which had signed the petition with it, also belonged to the municipality. Sakellarios describes Karavas around 1890 as a village of Christian inhabitants, with a town hall, a village court and Greek elementary schools for boys and girls. The river water irrigated the gardens, which made Karavas and Lapithos “a true paradise” in summer, and drove many flour mills.

The Karavas Cooperative Credit Society “Sotiria” was founded in 1917 and was among the first entered in the register of cooperative societies in Cyprus. A cooperative grocery and a cooperative society of olive growers followed. In the 20th century lemons became the main crop. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Karavas had the largest area of citrus in the district. According to the Municipality of Karavas, from 1951 the people of Karavas celebrated every September, when the lemon picking began, with the “Lemon Dance” at the seaside restaurants of the village. Couples danced holding a lemon between their foreheads without touching it with their hands, and a “Miss Lemon” was chosen. The dance was later organised by the Athletic Union of Karavas, and the last one took place in September 1973. The women of Karavas were also known for their “fervolite” lace, which in 2017 was entered in the inventory of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Cyprus. In the early 20th century the largest church of the village, Panagia Evangelistria, was built in its centre.

According to the Municipality of Karavas, 65 men of Karavas fought as volunteers in the Balkan Wars and more than 150 in the Second World War. Many emigrated to America, where in 1937 emigrants from Karavas and Lapithos founded the “Lambousa” society in New York.

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 1,520 inhabitants signed in the three parishes of Karavas, Agios Georgios, Evangelistria and Agia Eirini, essentially all the adult Greek inhabitants. The EOKA Fighters’ Register lists 57 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

Churches and monasteries

The land of Karavas also holds the ruined chapels of Agios Andreas, of the 17th century, of the Archangelos, of Agios Petros and of Agios Kyriakos, and a second chapel of Apostolos Pavlos. The Greek Orthodox cemetery lies about one kilometre east of the centre, on the road to Motides.¹

Education

The children of Karavas first learned their letters at the monastery of Acheiropoiitos. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the school then moved to the metochi of Kykkos in the village, and in the 1860s the inhabitants built the first community school at their own expense. Josiah Spencer, the first British inspector of education, writes that the new teacher, Georgios Kyriakides, came from Lapithos bringing several of his pupils with him, and that his salary was paid by the church committee and the monastery of Acheiropoiitos. A separate girls’ school opened in 1883. In the school year 1973–74 the two Greek elementary schools of Karavas had 301 pupils and 10 teachers. There were also kindergartens and a private secondary school.

Population

Karavas grew steadily. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Karavas had 1,474 inhabitants in 1881, 1,586 in 1891, 1,593 in 1901, 1,695 in 1911 and 1,807 in 1921.² In 1931 it had 1,887 inhabitants and in 1946 2,156, almost all of them Orthodox (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 2,425 inhabitants, 2,416 of them Greeks, and in 1973 2,251 Greeks.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

On 20 July 1974 the Turkish army landed on the coast of Karavas, at Pente Mili, and Karavas was on the front line. According to the Municipality of Karavas, the inhabitants organised a makeshift line of defence from Exi Mili to the Pentadaktylos. On 6 August 1974, while the ceasefire was in force, Turkish forces attacked by land and sea and took Karavas and Lapithos. The Greek population was ethnically cleansed and the people of Karavas became refugees. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, 31 enclaved people were still in the village in October 1975 and 23 in February 1976, and by August 1976 all had been expelled. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning. The Municipality of Karavas operates temporarily in Nicosia, together with the Karavas Refugee Association “O Karavas”, founded in 1987, and the other societies of the people of Karavas.

Eleven people of Karavas, ten of them civilians, were recorded as missing. The remains of eight have been found and identified, while three are still missing. Two disappeared in Karavas itself and nine elsewhere, mostly in the areas of Elia and Fteryka, in Lapithos and at the Keryneia Police Station. Another four people of Karavas, three civilians and one soldier, were killed elsewhere, in Keryneia, in Ano Keryneia and in the Lapithos area.

On the land of Karavas 37 people were killed in 1974: 16 soldiers and 21 civilians, at Pente Mili, Exi Mili, Pikro Nero, Myloi and in the village.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Panagia Evangelistria into a mosque. Agios Georgios, Agia Eirini and Agios Andronikos were desecrated and looted. The occupation authorities illegally enclosed the monastery of Acheiropoiitos, Agios Evlalios and Agios Evlambios within a Turkish military camp. The monastery’s chapel and Agios Evlalios were desecrated and looted, and Agios Evlambios was desecrated and is used as a wood store. Panagia Galaterousa suffered serious damage.