Kormakitis is a large Maronite community in the occupied district of Keryneia. It lies 29 kilometres west of Keryneia, at an elevation of 190 metres, at the north-western tip of Cyprus, near the cape that bears its name. It was the largest of the Maronite villages of Cyprus. In the 1960 census it had 1,115 inhabitants, of whom 1,093 were Maronites and 18 Greeks.

Name

The cape of the area is the ancient Krommyou Akra (Cape Krommyon), which the Greek geographer of the 1st century BC Strabo mentions opposite Anemourion in Cilicia.¹ In the medieval Italian sources the village is written “Cormachiti”, and the German archaeologist Ludwig Ross, who visited it in 1845, records it as “ὁ Κορμακίτης” (ho Kormakitis).

The inhabitants themselves had their own explanation. According to the village tradition, which the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia records from the Cypriot writer N. Kleridis, the first inhabitants came from Kour in Lebanon and, longing for their homeland, said in their own language “we came, but Kour did not come” (“Kour matz’iti”), a phrase from which the name arose.²

Founding and first records

According to the Union of Communities of Keryneia District, the settlement was originally built near the cape, at the site of Galala, and was moved inland, near the present church of the Panagia, because of the Arab raids. The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) records the place-name Galala on the village’s land, and in neighbouring Livera the site of Pano Galala as an ancient monument.³

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the earliest written record of the place is found in an apocryphal Christian text of the 5th century about the Apostle Barnabas.⁴ The text relates that the apostle and Mark, on their second journey to Cyprus, arrived by ship at night “at the place called Krommyakitis”, where they were given hospitality in the house of Timon and Ariston, servants of the pagan temples, and from there continued to Lapithos.⁵

On the village’s land the Gazetteer marks two sites as settlements: Cherissa, a chiftlik with ancient columns that the British architect George Jeffery also mentions in the early 20th century, and Agios, most probably the locality “Tsiflik tou Agiou”, where the ruins of a basilica survive.⁶

Archaeological sites

At the site of Panagia, near the village, the British archaeologist Hector Catling carried out in 1958, for the Department of Antiquities, a short rescue excavation, before the expansion of the village covered the ruins there. The investigation showed that the site was inhabited continuously from the 5th century BC to the middle of the 8th century AD, with a great flourishing in the early medieval Greek period. A chamber tomb, cut into the soft rock, yielded a group of vessels of the first half of the 1st century AD. In the debris of a building of the early medieval Greek period a silver coin of the emperor Artabasdos and his son Nikephoros, of 742/43, was found, unknown until then in Cyprus. According to Catling, the coin shows that the site was inhabited, in some form, at least until about the middle of the 8th century.⁷

Antiquity

The finds at Panagia show that the place was already inhabited in the Classical Greek period and continued to be inhabited in the Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) and Roman periods, from which the rock-cut tomb comes. To the same Roman years belongs the account of the arrival of Barnabas at Krommyakitis.

Greek medieval period (“Byzantium”)

In the early medieval Greek period the settlement at Panagia reached its greatest flourishing. From the same era is the 6th-century basilica at “Tsiflik tou Agiou”. The coin of 742/43 shows that the site was still inhabited in the first years of the medieval Greek period of the Arab raids.

Frankish rule

In 1310, when King Henry II was returning to the throne after the murder of his brother Amalric, who had deposed him, the constable, that is, the commander of the army, and the nobles who had supported Amalric withdrew from Lefkosia to Kormakitis. The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron describes the place: seven leagues from Lefkosia, near the sea, in a spacious locality near many villages, with forests and mountains and a difficult road, where they could defend themselves. Forty knights went there with their wives, children and households, and with them 226 horsemen and 600 foot soldiers. When the king’s men arrived, the constable hid in the forests of the area, while the other leaders returned to Lefkosia.⁸

In the middle of the 15th century the village belonged to Galtier de Nores, of the Frankish family of the Nores, which according to the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie held Kormakitis, Vasileia, Karpasia and other Maronite villages. Bustron writes that in 1461 Galtier, loyal to Queen Charlotte, was captured by the men of James II, who claimed the throne. He refused to swear allegiance to James, because he had sworn to defend Charlotte, and James took away his villages, among them Kormakitis, Vasileia, Myrtou and Karpasia.⁹

James then gave Kormakitis, together with Lapithos, Vasileia, Dikomo and other villages, to Sor de Naves, constable of the kingdom, who in 1463 had handed over to him the castle of Keryneia.¹⁰

Turkish rule

The Italian Jesuit Girolamo Dandini, who passed through Cyprus in 1596 on his way as envoy of Pope Clement VIII to the Maronites of Lebanon, recorded Kormakitis among the nineteen villages and farming estates where Maronites then lived.¹¹

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Kormakitis is recorded as a Christian village with 50 property-holding households. They had mainly grain fields and cotton fields, more than 1,700 sheep and goats, a few oxen and horses, and beehives.¹²

Ross arrived at Kormakitis one morning in March 1845, while the inhabitants were in church. He writes that it was a large village of Catholic Maronites, half an hour from the sea, and that the priest preached in the vernacular Greek language, while he read the prayers and the Gospel partly in Arabic and partly in Syriac. He notes also that the Maronites spoke a corrupt Arabic among themselves, but no longer understood the written Arabic language.¹³ According to Mas Latrie, the priest of Kormakitis, with the title of protopapas, then stood in for the Maronite bishop of Cyprus, who lived in Syria.¹⁴

Churches and monasteries

The old church of the village is dedicated to Saint George. According to Jeffery, it is a building of the 15th century, with a long, narrow vaulted nave, an apse and a notable two-storey bell tower on the west front, which could be seen from afar. In 1918 Jeffery noted that the inhabitants wanted to demolish it to build a larger one. The old church was in the end preserved, and the new, large stone-built church of Agios Georgios was built near it; according to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, it was completed in 1933. According to the same encyclopaedia, the old church later housed a convent of nuns of the Franciscan Order.¹⁵

About one and a half kilometres west of the village, at a crossroads, stands the chapel of the Panagia, an Ancient Monument. Jeffery dates it to the 15th century and notes its wall paintings, of good workmanship but already worn at that time.¹⁶ The ruins of the 6th-century basilica at “Tsiflik tou Agiou” and the ruins of the church of Agios Theodoros and Agia Marina are also Ancient Monuments. The 2009 list of the occupied churches of the Church of Cyprus also mentions the ruined chapel of the Archangel. The old Maronite cemetery lies about 200 metres north of the new church of Agios Georgios and the new one about 800 metres south of it.¹⁷

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Kormakitis was in area the largest village of the Keryneia district, and a large part of its land was covered by the state forest of Kormakitis. Before 1974 the inhabitants grew citrus fruit, cereals, fodder crops, vegetables and carobs. Stock-breeding, already important in the survey of 1832/33, remained well developed: in 1973 173 stock-breeders kept 3,024 sheep, the third largest number in the district after Agios Amvrosios and Kato Dikomo.¹⁸ In 1928 the Kormakitis Cooperative Credit Society was founded.

According to the Union of Communities of Keryneia District, until 1974 Kormakitis was a closed society, and for this reason the inhabitants preserved their own language, Cypriot Maronite Arabic. According to the same source, in 1965 the village was connected to electricity and acquired running water in the houses.¹⁹

Education

According to the Union of Communities of Keryneia District, in 1962 a new, large school building was built.²⁰ In the school year 1973–74 the elementary school of Kormakitis had 191 pupils and seven teachers, and the kindergarten 53 children and three kindergarten teachers.

Population

The population of Kormakitis grew steadily. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 386 inhabitants in 1881, 429 in 1891, 513 in 1901, 628 in 1911 and 676 in 1921.²¹ In 1931 the village had 736 inhabitants, 730 Christians and 6 Muslims, and in 1946 894, of whom 5 were Orthodox and 889 were recorded under other religions (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,115 inhabitants, 1,093 Maronites, 18 Greeks, one English and three others, and in 1973 1,257 inhabitants.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Kormakitis was captured by the Turkish army. Many inhabitants remained enclaved in the village. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, in August 1976 they numbered 813, but they were gradually forced to leave and settle in the free areas: by 1979 486 remained and by 1985 264.²² In March 2026 37 enclaved persons lived in Kormakitis.²³ The remaining inhabitants were expelled from their home place, which was subjected to ethnic cleansing.

One soldier from Kormakitis is still missing; he went missing in the Lapithos–Karavas area. Two civilians from the village were killed in the area of Kontemenos.