Lapithos is a large Greek town in the occupied district of Keryneia, about 15 kilometres west of Keryneia. It is built like an amphitheatre on the northern slope of the Pentadaktylos, among lemon groves that reach down to the sea, and is watered by its great spring, the Kefalovryso. It had been a municipality since 1878. In the 1960 census it had 3,496 inhabitants, 3,124 of them Greeks.

Name

The town has kept the name of the ancient Greek city that stood on the coast in front of it. The 1st-century BC Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily and the 2nd-century AD Greek geographer Claudius Ptolemy write Lapethos, while the 1st-century BC Greek geographer Strabo writes Lapathos. The Greek poet Alexander of Ephesus (1st century BC), quoted by the 6th-century AD lexicographer Stephanus of Byzantium, calls it “himeroessa”, that is, lovely. According to the myth recorded by the Greek poet Nonnus (5th century AD), the city took its name from the hero Lapethos, who with Litros led the Cypriots in the mythical campaign of the god Dionysus to India. The city, in other words, had a place in the myths of the Greek world. Later the ancient city was called Lambousa.

Antiquity

The land of Lapithos has been inhabited since the pre-Greek period. At Vrysi tou Barba, within the town, lies one of the few known coastal cemeteries of the pre-Greek period in Cyprus, and at Sotira, north of the village, tombs of the same period were found. Extensive excavations of prehistoric tombs took place in 1913. At Kastros, within the town, tombs of the Geometric ancient Greek period were found. The British archaeologist David Hogarth, who visited in 1888, believed that the oldest town stood on the site of modern Lapithos and on the hills above it.

According to tradition, Lapithos was founded by Greek colonists from the Peloponnese after the Trojan War. Strabo writes that it was “built by the Laconians and Praxandros” and that it had a roadstead and docks, and the Greek poet Lycophron (3rd century BC) tells of Praxandros, who came to Cyprus with Laconians from Therapne.

In the ancient Greek period Lapithos was one of the kingdoms of Cyprus and one of the first cities on the island to strike coins. Its coins, from the late 6th century BC, show Athena and Herakles, while their legends, down to the time of Alexander the Great, are written in the Phoenician script. They name kings with Greek names, such as Demonikos, and with Phoenician names, such as Sidqmelek in the mid-5th century BC. The 4th-century BC Periplus attributed to Skylax calls the city “Lepethis of the Phoenicians”. At neighbouring Larnakas tis Lapithou a bilingual Greek and Phoenician inscription was found, as well as a Phoenician inscription of 274/273 BC recording the dedication of a statue to the god Melqart. Most probably, then, Phoenicians lived in the area alongside the Greeks.

Diodorus writes that in 315 BC the king of Lapithos, with the kings of Kition, Marion and Keryneia, allied himself with Antigonos, and that Seleukos, Ptolemy’s ally, took Keryneia and Lapithos. In 312 BC Ptolemy arrested the city’s last king, Praxippos, suspecting him of siding with Antigonos. Praxippos’s bronze coins bear Greek letters. The emblem of the Municipality of Lapithos is the head of Athena from an ancient coin of the city, underlining the Municipality’s link with its ancient Greek origins.

Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) period

Lapithos remained a flourishing Greek city. In the large inscription from Delphi of about 230 BC, which records which citizens of each Greek city hosted the sacred envoys of Apollo’s oracle, the host at Lapithos is Aristokles the Gortynian, son of Polianthes. Lapithos was also at the centre of the Ptolemaic dynasty’s struggles over Cyprus. The 2nd-century BC Greek historian Polybius writes that the younger brother of King Ptolemy VI Philometor tried to take the island from him. Philometor defeated him and captured him at Lapithos, but spared his life.

People of Lapithos also travelled and settled in other parts of the Greek world. At Lindos on Rhodes an inscription records an association of “Lapethiasts”, most probably people of Lapithos living there and honouring together the god of their home city.

Roman period

Lapithos had a gymnasium, the centre of Greek education and athletics. An inscription of AD 29/30, published by the philologist Athanasios Sakellarios, records that Adrastos son of Adrastos, gymnasiarch and priest of the gods of the gymnasium, built at his own expense a temple and statue of the emperor Tiberius within the gymnasium. The city went on flourishing in the following centuries, and in the 2nd century AD Claudius Ptolemy records it together with the mouth of the river Lapethos. The message of Christianity reached it too. The Acts of Barnabas, a text of the 5th century, tell that when the apostle Barnabas and his companions came to Lapithos, a festival for the ancient gods was being held in the city’s theatre. They were not allowed into the city, and rested a little at its gate before going on their way.

Greek medieval period (“Byzantium”)

In the early Greek medieval period Lapithos was the seat of a bishopric. Its bishop Didymos was represented at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and the 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas names among the saints of the island Eulalios, bishop of Lapithos. The city’s wealth is shown by the hoards of 7th-century silverware found in its ruins at Lambousa, among them the famous David plates.

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Lambousa was the later name of ancient Lapithos, which stood in a different place from the present community, on the coast. When Lambousa was destroyed in the Greek medieval period of the Arab raids, its population moved further from the coast, to present-day Lapithos and to Karavas.

Frankish and Venetian rule

In the 1460s King James II gave Lapithos as a fief to the constable, that is, the commander-in-chief of the kingdom, Sor de Naves.¹

Bustron describes near Lapithos, on the coast, the ruins of an ancient city: towers of dressed stone, buildings carved in the rock, the harbour and the arsenal, and fishponds cut into the rocks, into which the sea flowed through channels. From the same centuries survive in Lapithos the Greek Orthodox chapels of Agia Marina and Agia Varvara, of the 15th–16th century.

Turkish rule

The Dutch traveller Johannes Cotovicus, who visited Cyprus in 1598–99, writes that a small village with very fertile soil, rich in cotton, sugar, lemons and oranges, kept the old name. The English traveller Richard Pococke (1738) notes that the name of ancient Lapithos had passed to a village nearby with very fine springs, and the British consul Alexander Drummond, who passed through the ruins of the ancient city in 1745 or 1750, writes that its fertile land explained the old name “Amabilis Lapithos”, lovely Lapithos.

The Greeks of Lapithos grew in number and were organised in six parishes, around the churches of Timios Prodromos, Agia Paraskevi, Agia Anastasia, Apostolos Loukas, Agios Theodoros and Agios Minas. The church of Timios Prodromos dates from the 17th–18th century. Agios Theodoros was built in 1834, Agios Minas in 1843, and Apostolos Loukas and Agia Anastasia somewhat later in the 19th century. The Turkish inhabitants lived in a quarter of their own in the centre of the village.

Lapithos paid heavily in the massacres of 1821. Sakellarios writes that on 13 July 1821 the Turks beheaded in the square of the Serai in Nicosia Hadji Ilias of Lapithos, together with 17 other notables of the town. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Hadji Ilias’s family escaped to Greece, and from it descend the Lapathiotis family, among them the poet Napoleon Lapathiotis. A local tradition recorded by the Municipality of Lapithos says that during the Greek Revolution the fireship captain Konstantinos Kanaris anchored at Asprovrysi, was a guest in the parish of Agia Paraskevi, and left with food, money and volunteers from Lapithos.

British rule

In 1878 Lapithos became one of the first municipalities of Cyprus. Sakellarios (1890) describes it as a town whose inhabitants were in their great majority Christians, with a town hall, a village court and Greek schools for boys and girls. The people of Lapithos, he writes, had made earthenware vessels since very ancient times, and also chairs and rosewater; the women raised silkworms and wove cloth; and the waters of the Kefalovryso watered lemon, orange, pomegranate and date trees, cotton and the best colocasia in the island, and drove many mills. In 1892 the new, large church of Agia Paraskevi was built.

The town hall was built in 1923. In 1937 the Cooperative Credit Society and the Cooperative Society of Lemon Growers of Lapithos were founded. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, General Ioannis Tsangaridis of the Greek army came from Lapithos.

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite, 1,906 inhabitants signed in the six parishes of the town, practically every adult Greek inhabitant. After the EOKA struggle the central square was named Heroes’ Square. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 95 Greek inhabitants of the town who took part in or supported the Struggle.

Churches and monasteries

Lapithos and its land also had the chapels of Panagia Airkotissa and Agios Mamas, of the 19th century, of Agia Eleni, Agia Mavri and the Transfiguration of Christ, which is now in ruins. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, in 1891 the High Commissioner closed the old cemeteries around the churches as a danger to public health, and three new burial grounds were set aside for the Greeks. Two have been identified: the cemetery of Agios Mamas, on the northern edge of the old centre, and the cemetery of Agios Theodoros, in the parish of that name, with the chapel of Airkotissa below it. The chapels of the Archangelos and of Agia Evdokia, of the 19th century, and the rock-cut Agios Georgios Spiliotis, at the south-eastern end of Lapithos, whose cemetery is in ruins, are also cemetery chapels.²

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, citing the records of the churches, a school was running in the parish of Agios Theodoros from 1850, and in 1855 the parishes of Agia Paraskevi and Agia Anastasia founded a joint school with Andreas Savva as teacher. According to the Municipality of Lapithos, the Higher Greek School of Lapithos and Karavas opened in 1910–11 and was refounded in 1917–18 in Lapithos alone. In 1938 it became a junior gymnasium, in 1943 it moved into its own building, and in 1950 it became the six-class Greek Gymnasium of Lapithos, attended also by children from Karavas and the neighbouring villages. In the school year 1973–74 the town’s two Greek primary schools had 291 pupils and 10 teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Lapithos had 2,370 inhabitants in 1881, 2,602 in 1891, 2,741 in 1901, 2,940 in 1911 and 2,954 in 1921.³ In 1931 and 1946 Lapithos was the largest settlement in the district of Keryneia, larger even than the town itself. In 1931 it had 2,924 inhabitants, 2,679 of them Christians, and in 1946 3,327, of whom 2,997 were Orthodox (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 there were 3,124 Greeks and 370 Turks. In 1973 the Greeks numbered 3,196.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

The Municipality of Lapithos describes the course of events. At dawn on 20 July 1974 Turkish aircraft and warships, which had anchored off the coast, bombed the Greek army camps of the area, and in the following days the ships shelled the Pentadaktylos and the surrounding villages. The Turkish army had landed at Pente Mili, between Lapithos and Keryneia. On 22 July the UN Security Council decided on a ceasefire, but the Turkish forces kept advancing and that same day took Keryneia, while many inhabitants left for Nicosia. Later, with the ceasefire in force, there was hard fighting on the hills and in the orchards of Lapithos. The Turkish army finally broke the ceasefire and attacked the Lapithos–Karavas area with superior forces. For hours it was not able to take a single house. When the Greek companies were ordered to withdraw to the Vasileia–Vavylas line, they were ambushed in the reeds at Airkotissa. In the end, on 6 August 1974, Turkish tanks passed from Karavas into Lapithos, and the town was taken.

Its Greek population was ethnically cleansed and its people became refugees. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, in October 1975 55 Greeks were still enclaved in Lapithos; they were gradually expelled, and the last of them left in September 1976. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning. The Municipality of Lapithos operates temporarily in Strovolos.

Twenty-one people from Lapithos, 3 civilians and 18 soldiers, were recorded as missing. The remains of 6 have been located and identified, while 15 are still missing. Three disappeared inside Lapithos and 18 elsewhere, mostly in the Pente Mili and Pikro Nero area of Keryneia, and also at Temblos, Koutsoventis, Agios Georgios of Keryneia, Karavas and Keryneia. Eight more people from Lapithos, 2 civilians and 6 soldiers, were killed elsewhere, mostly in the Keryneia area, and also at Koutsoventis, Mia Milia and the Athalassa psychiatric hospital. Within the land of Lapithos 68 people were killed, 10 soldiers and 58 civilians, in the town and its surroundings, at Airkotissa, at Vrysi tou Barba and at Agios Pavlos.

The churches and chapels of Lapithos have been desecrated and looted. The occupation authorities have illegally converted the church of Agia Paraskevi into a mosque, Apostolos Loukas into a music and dance school, and Agia Anastasia, with its complex, into a hotel and later a care home. They have also illegally converted Agios Georgios Exorinos into company offices, Agios Georgios Spiliotis into an animal pen and Agios Kournoutas into a barn. The church of Timios Prodromos has been illegally handed over to an association. The chapel of Agios Andronikos has been seriously damaged.