Koma tou Gialou is a Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos, on the Karpasia peninsula. It lies 39 kilometres north-east of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 30 metres, on level ground near the southern shore of the peninsula, beside the main Ammochostos–Gialousa road.¹ In the 1960 census it had 854 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

The official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) writes the name “Koma tou Gialou”. In the Venetian list of the royal villages of the late 15th century, as in the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron, the village is written simply “Coma”.² According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, which cites Simos Menardos, the people of Koma tou Gialou were called “Komiates”, while those of neighbouring Komi Kepir were called “Komites”.³

Founding and first records

The oldest record of the village found is a tombstone of the 14th century. The British traveller Alexander Drummond, who passed through Koma tou Gialou in 1745, found in the ruins of the church of the Panagia a slab with an inscription in Old French: “Here lies Dame Marguerite de Boudaper, wife of Messire Antoine de Gebelin, who died on 30 October 1324”.⁴ Bustron mentions the “casal Coma” in Karpasia when he lists the saints honoured in the various parts of Cyprus.⁵

Archaeological sites

In 1966, during the levelling of a field at Kortylas, on the northern edge of the village, a tomb of the Archaic ancient Greek period was found and excavated by the Department of Antiquities. The cemetery had not been known before. The tomb held mainly undecorated white ware, among it an unusually large jug, 40.5 centimetres high, and a bronze brooch.⁶

The English archaeologist David Hogarth, who visited the village in 1888, found in the ruins of the church of the Panagia two pieces of a limestone cornice bearing a Greek inscription, worn away in the middle:

[Κ]αλλιστὼ Κο[ί]ν[τος] … τὴν ἄλοχο[ν].

That is: “Kallisto … Kointos … his wife”. The inscription speaks of a Kointos and his wife Kallisto, using the old Greek word “alochos” for wife.⁷

Venetian rule

At the end of the 15th century Koma tou Gialou was a royal village, that is, it belonged directly to the state and not to a feudal lord. In a Venetian statistical memorandum published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, the “Casal Coma” is listed among the royal villages of the bailiwick of Karpasia, together with Ardana, Galinoporni and Lythragkomi.⁸

Near the sea, east of the village, beside the ruined chapel of Agia Anna, there is a quarry with the date M.D.XXXIII, that is 1533, cut into the rock; a small ruined chapel nearby bears the same date, with the day 12 March. According to the British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the historic monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, the stone for the walls of Ammochostos may have come from there.⁹

Turkish rule

In 1745 Drummond found the village prettily situated, with well laid-out fields near the sea. He was told that it had once been so large that it had fourteen churches, but by then five-sixths of it lay in ruins.¹⁰

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Koma tou Gialou is entered as a mixed village, with 25 property-holding households. Among the owners were priests. They had mainly cotton fields, and also grain fields, mulberry gardens with wells, a garden with a water-wheel, 40 beehives, an oil mill, a watermill, a mill turned by horses, about 830 sheep and goats and thirteen pairs of oxen.¹¹

British rule

Hogarth found Koma tou Gialou one of the prettiest and richest villages of Karpasia. The ruins of four churches were still standing, and the villagers showed him the sites of seven more.¹² The Greek philologist Athanasios Sakellarios, who travelled in Cyprus in the 19th century, noted in 1890 the ruins of many old churches in the village, and more ruined churches and rock-cut caves at the site of Kaminaria.¹³

Churches and monasteries

The parish church of the village is dedicated to the Archangel Michael, at the western edge of the old settlement, and the 2009 list dates it to the 16th–18th century. According to Jeffery, the large church of the Archangel, like the churches of Agios Georgios, Agios Nikolaos, Agionikoloudi and the Panagia, had been rebuilt, and the church of the Archangel bore the date 1859.¹⁴ At the eastern edge of the village stands the second large church, Agios Georgios, built in 1897 and consecrated in 1909. At the western edge of the village stands the church of the Panagia, of the 14th–15th century.¹⁵

Two chapels are Ancient Monuments. The chapel of Agia Solomoni, about 700 metres north-east of the village, dates from the 8th century, and beneath it there is a cave. The chapel of Agios Nikolaos, at the northern edge of the village, is of the 15th–16th century.¹⁶

Agia Sofia is a cave that had been made into a chapel.¹⁷ The village also had the chapels of Agia Anna and Agionikoloudi, of the 16th century.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew carobs, olives, tobacco, cereals and fodder crops, a few pistachio and almond trees, and, on the small irrigated plots, mainly oranges. Much of the village land was state forest. In 1973 about 1,700 sheep and 220 goats were kept in the village. The village’s position near the sea helped fishing: before the invasion there was a fishing shelter, with 19 fishing boats in 1974.¹⁸ A co-operative credit society worked in the village from 1926, and a co-operative grocery from 1947.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, which cites Ieronymos Peristianis, the community school of the village was founded in 1866 by the church of the Archangel, and the first to teach in it was Chatzinikolas in 1868. From 1872 to 1880 Ioannis Saparippas from Syros taught by the monitorial method, and in 1877–78 Antonis Karyadis from Kalymnos, who settled in the village, taught Byzantine music in his house.¹⁹ In the school year 1973–74 the Greek primary school of the village had 86 pupils and three teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 482 inhabitants in 1881, 497 in 1891, 528 in 1901, 680 in 1911 and 730 in 1921.²⁰ In 1931 it had 842 inhabitants, of whom 841 were Christians and one a Muslim, and in 1946 1,091, of whom 1,089 were Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 854 inhabitants and in 1973 818, all of them Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for union with Greece 557 inhabitants signed. The EOKA Fighters’ Register lists 117 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle. The EOKA fighter Andreas Paraskeva came from Koma tou Gialou.²¹

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Koma tou Gialou was occupied by the Turkish army. Many inhabitants fled, but a good number stayed in the village, enclaved. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, in October 1975 there were still 147 enclaved people living in the village, all of whom were gradually driven out by September 1977.²² The Greek population of the village was thus ethnically cleansed, and since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

Seven inhabitants of Koma tou Gialou were recorded as missing, five civilians and two soldiers. The remains of six have been identified; one is still missing. Four civilians disappeared in the village itself and one in the area of Agios Georgios Spatharikou; of the two soldiers, one disappeared in the Belapais–Sygchari area and the other in Keryneia. In the village itself five more deaths are recorded, all of them civilian inhabitants.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of the Archangel Michael into a mosque, until a new mosque was built in the village. All the crosses were removed, and nothing is left of the Orthodox furnishings of the church. The church of Agios Georgios has lost the icons of its iconostasis and all its furnishings, and its interior has been damaged by damp and birds. The cemetery is in ruins: its wall has largely collapsed, and the grave crosses are scattered.²³