Lapathos is a mixed community in the occupied part of the Famagusta (Ammochostos) district. It lies 20 kilometres north-west of Famagusta, at an altitude of 50 metres, in the Mesaoria plain, on the main road to the Karpasia.¹ At the 1960 census it had 579 inhabitants, of whom 375 were Greeks and 204 Turks.

Name

The name of the village is neuter in Greek, “to Lapathos”, as the official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) writes it.² In the Italian sources of the 16th century and on the old maps of Cyprus it is written “Lapathos”.³

Founding and first records

Lapathos first appears in a written source in the 1460s, as “Lapathos”, in the list of the fiefs distributed by King James II. The list is preserved by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron.⁴

Antiquity

The land of the village was already inhabited in antiquity. The British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus, noted in 1918 that around Gypsou and Lapathos there were many traces of ancient habitation, graves and wells.⁵

Frankish rule

James II granted Lapathos, “with its appurtenances”, as a fief to Polo Gonnem, together with Monagri in the Limassol district.⁶

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Lapathos belonged to the district of the Mesaoria and is recorded as a mixed village, with Christian and Muslim owners. It had 24 households with property, with cotton fields, grain fields, threshing floors and a few trees, mostly fig trees. The animals were almost 900 sheep and goats, oxen and cows, and there were also beehives.⁷

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of the village is dedicated to Saint John the Baptist (Timios Prodromos) and dates from the 17th century. It stands in the centre of the old village. On the south-eastern edge of the village stands the chapel of Agia Marina.⁸

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the villagers grew cereals, fodder crops, vegetables and some citrus fruit, irrigating a small area from an aquifer in the area, and stock-breeding was fairly well developed.⁹ The Lapathos Cooperative Credit Society was founded in 1940.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Lapathos had 158 inhabitants in 1881, 166 in 1891, 254 in 1901, 311 in 1911 and 386 in 1921.¹⁰ In 1931 it had 416 inhabitants, 278 Christians and 138 Muslims, and in 1946 481, of whom 337 were Orthodox and 144 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 579 inhabitants, 375 Greeks and 204 Turks, and in 1973 435 Greeks and around 250 Turks (estimate). In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school had 59 pupils and two teachers.

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for union with Greece (Enosis), 200 inhabitants of Lapathos signed, essentially all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 73 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Lapathos was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. Most of the inhabitants fled before the advancing army.¹¹ Those who stayed were held in confinement: according to tables of the Cyprus Red Cross submitted to the European Commission of Human Rights, on 8 September 1974 36 people from Pygi, Syngrasi and Lapathos were transferred to the detention centre at Gypsou.¹² Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

Two inhabitants of Lapathos, both soldiers, were recorded as missing. Neither went missing in the village itself: one went missing at the police station of Tziaos and the other in the Aspri Moutti–Syngchari area. The remains of both have been located and identified.

When Cyprus Religious Heritage surveyed the village in 2022, Timios Prodromos and Agia Marina had been left to decay; of the original furnishings of Agia Marina only parts of the altar and of the iconostasis survive. The new cemetery, north of the village, is abandoned, with much of its wall collapsed.¹³