Klepini is a small, mainly Greek community in the occupied district of Keryneia. It lies 11 kilometres east of Keryneia, at an elevation of 220 metres, on the northern slopes of the Pentadaktylos. Its land stretched from the coast to the ridge and included part of the forests of the Pentadaktylos and Buffavento, around the medieval castle of Buffavento, which lies on the land of neighbouring Koutsoventis. In the 1960 census it had 233 inhabitants, of whom 206 were Greeks and 27 Turks.

Name

The origin of the name is not known. In the Italian sources of the 15th century the village is written “Sclepini” and “Clepini”.

Founding and first records

Klepini first appears in a written source in the 1460s, as “Sclepini”, in the list of the fiefs distributed by King James II. It is preserved by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron. There, as in a Venetian list a little later, Klepini is mentioned together with a settlement “Stefani”.¹

About one kilometre north of the village, towards the sea, the official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) records the place-name “Palia Klepini” (Old Klepini), and further east the place-names “Palia” and “Plevra tis Palias”. On the village’s land, to the north-east, the same index also marks the site of Vourgaris as a settlement.²

Archaeological sites

On the coast of Klepini, on a headland, at the site of Troulli, lies a pre-Greek coastal settlement. It was investigated for the Department of Antiquities by the Cypriot archaeologist Porphyrios Dikaios. In 1935 he made a trial excavation, and in 1941, when he learned that the site was being looted by illicit diggers, a rescue excavation at three points, with a trench more than five metres deep on the southern slope.

Dikaios recognised two phases of habitation, an earlier one without pottery and a later one with pottery. Later researchers consider that they were separated by a layer without traces of life, that is, that the settlement was deserted for a time before it was inhabited again. The stone foundations of a circular building were found, tools of flint and bone, obsidian blades, fragments of stone vessels and, in the upper layers, pottery.³

The settlement had already been damaged by erosion and illicit digging. After the invasion the site was enclosed within a power station built in the occupied areas in 1995, and its construction and the works that followed destroyed a further part of it. In 2004 the occupation regime carried out, without a permit, a surface survey at the site, where sherds, mainly of painted pottery, and pieces of flint were collected.⁴

Frankish and Venetian rule

Klepini was given as a fief to Sor de Naves, constable, that is, commander-in-chief, of the kingdom. According to the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, he was a ship’s captain from Sicily, who entered the service of Queen Charlotte and her husband Louis when they shut themselves up in the castle of Keryneia, in their struggle against James for the throne. As governor of the castle he defended it for years, until in 1463 he surrendered it to James, who promised him one of his natural daughters as a wife. Bustron records the fiefs with which the king rewarded him: Lapithos, Vasileia, Kormakitis, Dikomo, “Stefani” and Klepini, and villages in other districts, such as Lefkara.⁵

Shortly after Cyprus passed to the Venetians, Klepini was a royal village, that is, it belonged directly to the state and not to a feudal lord. In a Venetian statistical memorandum of the late 15th century, published by Mas Latrie, “Casal Clepini” is recorded among the fourteen royal villages of the bailiwick of Lapithos, the administrative district to which it belonged, together with Lapithos, Vasileia and Myrtou.⁶

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33 only those who owned property were recorded, not all the inhabitants. At Klepini five property-holding households are recorded, Christian and Muslim, with grain fields, threshing floors, a fountain and 132 trees, mainly olives and carobs. They had almost 400 goats, a few oxen and cows, and beehives. Among the owners a convert to Islam is also recorded, Osman, with his wife.⁷

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village is dedicated to Saint Luke and dates from the 16th or 17th century. In the cemetery, a little west of the church, stands the chapel of the Panagia, also known as the Panagia Klepiniotissa, of the 17th century.⁸

Outside the village, high on the slopes of the Pentadaktylos, near the spring of Karga, stands the Greek Orthodox chapel of the Panagia Karka, which the Gazetteer writes Panagia Kargotissa. The Union of Communities of Keryneia District also mentions, in the forests of Karka, the “kneeling” pine of the Panagia and the cave of the Archangel.⁹

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew mainly cereals, fodder crops, olives and carobs, and kept many goats, as already in the survey of 1832/33. A large part of the land was forest. In 1952 the Klepini Cooperative Credit Society was founded. The new Lefkosia–Keryneia road, built from 1967, passed beside the village, and for this reason, according to the same encyclopaedia, it became known as the “Klepini road”.¹⁰

Population

The population of Klepini always remained small. According to a local tradition, recorded by the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the families of the village could not exceed forty, because then some of the inhabitants would die.¹¹ According to the same encyclopaedia, the village had 88 inhabitants in 1881, 129 in 1891, 170 in 1901, 238 in 1911 and 283 in 1921.¹² In 1931 the village had 268 inhabitants, 225 Christians and 43 Muslims, and in 1946 328, of whom 283 were Orthodox and 45 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 233 inhabitants, 206 Greeks and 27 Turks, and in 1973 179 Greeks and about 30 Turks (estimate). In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school had 13 pupils and one teacher.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 159 inhabitants signed, essentially all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 22 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Klepini was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

Two inhabitants of Klepini, both soldiers, were recorded as missing, and their remains have not been located to this day. Neither went missing in the village itself; both went missing in the area of Templos. On the land of Klepini four dead of 1974 are recorded, all soldiers, who were killed or fatally wounded in the fighting in the area of the Pentadaktylos and in the Klepini–Agios Chrysostomos area.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Loukas into a mosque;¹³ the 2009 list records it as desecrated, looted and seriously damaged. The chapel of the Panagia in the cemetery was desecrated and used as a stable and tool store.