Kato Zodeia is a large Greek community in the occupied part of the district of Lefkosia. It lies 4 kilometres south of Morfou, 90 metres above sea level, in the western Mesaoria. Together with Pano Zodeia, only half a kilometre away, it forms a twin village, close to the present ceasefire line.¹ In the 1960 census it had 2,279 inhabitants, 2,278 of them Greeks.

Name

The origin of the name is not known. The 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas writes “Ζωτία”, a Venetian memorandum of the end of the same century “Cato Zodia” and “Apano Zodia”, and the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron “Zodies”.² The archimandrite Kyprianos, who wrote his history of Cyprus in 1788, speaks of the “two Zodies”, and the English traveller William Turner, who passed through the area in 1815, writes “Zothia”.³

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the two communities were known by the common name “Ζώδκιες”.⁴

Founding and first records

The oldest mention of Zodeia is in Machairas. When the Saracens took the Holy Land, he writes, three hundred Christians fled to Cyprus and lived as hermits scattered over the whole island, in holes in the ground. One of them, Saint Eirinikos, lived as a hermit “towards Zotia”. Bustron later records the same.⁵

Machairas speaks of one settlement. In the Venetian memorandum of the late 15th century, however, Kato and Pano Zodeia are already recorded as two separate villages, so the division existed from that time.⁶

Venetian rule

Shortly after Cyprus passed to the Venetians, Kato Zodeia was a royal village, that is, it belonged directly to the state and not to a feudal lord. In the memorandum published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, “Casal Cato Zodia” is one of the twelve royal villages of the bailiwick of Morfou, the administrative district to which it belonged, together with Morfou, Peristerona, Akaki, Lefka and Pano Zodeia.⁷

Turkish rule

Kyprianos notes that the pasha of Lefkosia collected the revenues of the sanjak of Pafos and of the office of defterdar-kehaya, about 9,000 piastres, mainly from the tax farm (mukataa) of the two Zodies and partly from other villages.⁸

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Kato Zodeia is recorded as a Christian village with 23 property-holding households, fewer than Pano Zodeia, which had 32. Their property was mainly fields, about 750 donums, with threshing floors, while no trees are recorded. They had 160 sheep and goats and 29 oxen and cows.⁹

Churches and monasteries

The village’s Greek Orthodox parish church, in the centre of the old settlement, is dedicated to the Holy Cross. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, which cites Kassinis, it was consecrated in 1914 by Bishop Kyrillos of Keryneia. The old cemetery most probably lay around it; it was closed in 1915 for health reasons. The new cemetery is north-east of the church, on the road to Argaki.¹⁰

The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus in 1918, found in the two Zodeias, “a large village and agricultural centre”, the churches of the Holy Cross, Agios Georgios and the Archangel, all in a modern style.¹¹ The chapel of Agios Georgios tou Xalonou also stands on the land of Kato Zodeia.

Economy and society

The land of Kato Zodeia was flat and irrigated. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, it was watered from boreholes and from the waters of the Serrachis, and before 1974 the inhabitants grew mainly citrus, vegetables and cereals. The village’s oranges, on more than 2,000 donums of land, were famous throughout Cyprus. In 1973 the inhabitants kept 1,355 sheep and goats, 43 cows and 28,585 poultry.¹² The official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) records on the village’s land the channels of Nikitas and of Prastio, which brought the water.¹³

In 1923 the Flax Cooperative Society, with the Department of Agriculture, built a flax mill, that is, a factory for processing flax, outside the village on the road to Katokopia. In 1927 it was bought by the Monastery of Kykkos.¹⁴

In 1940 the Zodia Cooperative Credit Society was founded, in 1946 the New Cooperative Credit Society of Kato Zodia and in 1953 the Kato Zodia Cooperative Grocery.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, which cites the Cypriot scholar Ieronymos Peristianis, a school operated at Kato Zodeia from 1860. The “common letters” were taught there first by Chatzidimitris Ttiritas and then by Chatzinikolas Chatzigiannis, a good cantor, who also taught church music. Around 1875–76 the teacher Neofytos Papadopoulos from Argaki, who had studied in Smyrna, opened a school in his house using the monitorial method, attended by about 230 children from the two Zodeias and the villages around.¹⁵ In the school year 1973–74 the two Greek primary schools of Zodeia were operating: the First, with the first three classes, 288 pupils and 9 teachers, and the Second, with the last three, 282 pupils and 10 teachers.

Population

Kato Zodeia grew steadily. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 497 inhabitants in 1881, 566 in 1891, 686 in 1901 and 882 in 1911.¹⁶ In 1931 it had 1,277 inhabitants, all Christians, and in 1946 1,712, of whom 1,711 were Orthodox and one of another religion (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 2,279 inhabitants, 2,278 Greeks and one Briton, and in 1973 2,894 Greeks. It was then, after Morfou itself, the largest village of the Morfou area.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 955 inhabitants of Kato Zodeia signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 101 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

After an EOKA ambush at Kato Zodeia in October 1958, the EOKA fighter Nikolaos Giagkou from neighbouring Pano Zodeia was arrested.¹⁷

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Kato Zodeia was taken by the Turkish army and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. According to the European Commission of Human Rights, in early 1975 inhabitants of Zodeia who had stayed in the village were moved, together with inhabitants of other villages of the area, to the second primary school of Morfou, where the Greeks who had remained in Morfou were held in confinement.¹⁸ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

Six inhabitants of Kato Zodeia were recorded as missing, four soldiers and two civilians. The two civilians vanished in the village itself; the four soldiers vanished elsewhere, at Lapithos, in the area of Karavas, in the area of Lefkosia airport and on the Keryneia–Panagra road. The remains of two have been identified; the other four are still missing. Five more inhabitants of the village were killed elsewhere: four soldiers and one civilian, in the area of Agridaki, in the area of Kazivera, in the area of Agios Pavlos in Lefkosia, at Morfou and in the area of the Pentadaktylos.

The occupation authorities have illegally converted the church of the Holy Cross into a mosque, in 1979, and the chapel of Agios Georgios tou Xalonou into a cultural centre.¹⁹