Lefka is an occupied town of the Lefkosia district. It lies 48 kilometres west of Lefkosia and 16 kilometres south-west of Morfou, at an elevation of 130 metres, in the valley of the Setrachos, which passes to its east, while the Xeros flows to its west. It was the centre of the area named after it, and the settlement of Apliki and the Mavrovouni mine lie within its boundaries.¹ In the 1960 census it had 3,673 inhabitants, of whom 34 were Greeks and 3,585 Turks.

Name

The official gazetteer of Cyprus writes “Λεύκα, η” (Lefka).² The 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas writes “Λεύκα”, while in the medieval documents of the 15th century, written in French and Italian, Lefka appears as “Lefques” and “Lefcha”, and in the chronicle of the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron as “Leuca” and “Levca”.³

Archaeological sites

On the land of Lefka, at Mavrovouni, Pleiades, the international gazetteer of ancient places, records an ancient mine that was in use from the Archaic ancient Greek to the Roman period.⁴ The site of Agia Marina–Mavrovouni was among the sites recorded by the archaeological and environmental survey of the northern slopes of Troodos carried out by the University of Glasgow and the University of Cyprus in 2000–2005.⁵ The philologist Athanasios Sakellarios, who described Lefka in 1890, noted south of the village the ruins of an ancient town, extending as far as Kalo Chorio and Peristerona, and took them to be probably Aipeia.⁶ Bustron writes that the ancient city of Soloi, which lies on the land of neighbouring Karavostasi, was near Lefka.⁷ With its mines, the area of Lefka most probably belonged to the ancient Greek kingdom of Soloi.

Frankish rule, Venetian rule

Under Frankish rule Lefka was the seat of a royal “bailiwick”, that is, an administrative district of the royal domain. Bustron writes that the river Niffatis, that is, the Setrachos, ran down to the royal bailiwick of Lefka, where sugar and cotton were produced.⁸ The documents of King James II, published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, show Lefka among the places that produced sugar for the royal treasury: in October 1468 the king sold the sugar of Lefka to the Venetian Andrea Cornaro to settle debts, and he promised Venice sugar powder from the bailiwicks of Morfou and Lefka.⁹

Machairas mentions Lefka in the events that followed the invasion of the Mamluks of Egypt in 1426. The peasants who rose up at that time appointed their own captains at Lefka, Lemesos, Oreini, Peristerona and Morfou, and at Lefkonoiko they proclaimed a certain Alexis king. When the authorities put down the revolt, the captains of Morfou and Lefka were hanged, others had their noses cut off, and others fled.¹⁰

Turkish rule

Under Turkish rule Lefka was the seat of a nahiye, that is, an administrative district.¹¹ In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Lefka is described as a mixed village and an administrative centre, with 189 property-holding households, one of the largest in the area. It had many gardens and orchards, fields of grain and cotton, more than 1,300 olive trees, 173 mulberry trees for the silkworm and walnut trees, eight olive presses and four water mills, and the owners had almost 1,000 sheep and goats.¹²

British rule

In 1890 Sakellarios found Lefka the seat of the district, with 900 inhabitants, most of them Muslims, and many gardens with orange, lemon and other fruit trees.¹³ The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the historic monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, writes in 1918 that many church ruins survived around Lefka, that the few Christian families who had settled there in recent years had built a small church near the river, and that according to local tradition the two principal mosques had been built on the sites of old churches of the Latin rite.¹⁴

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, under British rule Lefka was the administrative centre of the area, with a police station from 1905 and a district court from 1919–20, and the road linking it with Lefkosia, by way of Astromeritis and Petra, was completed in 1903. To the south of Lefka, within its boundaries, worked the cupriferous pyrite mines of Mavrovouni and Apliki, which together with the Skouriotissa mine, the installations at Xeros and the port of Karavostasi gave work to many inhabitants of Lefka and the surrounding villages. The ore was carried by railway to Xeros and loaded onto ships at Karavostasi.¹⁵

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of Lefka, Panagia Akentou, of the 17th century, stands in the north-eastern part of the old settlement, near the Marathasa stream. It was a parish church until 1958, and it is an Ancient Monument.¹⁶ According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the old Greek Orthodox cemetery of Lefka was closed in 1939, and a joint cemetery for Karavostasi and Lefka was then laid out.¹⁷

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 citrus, cereals, fodder crops and a few vines were grown on the land of Lefka, and the irrigated land in the Setrachos valley was watered from the Lefka dam. Water mills with arched aqueducts survive in the valley; one of them, believed to date from the Venetian period, was conserved in 2024 by the bi-communal Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage.¹⁸

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Lefka had 895 inhabitants in 1881, when it was the fifth largest settlement of the district after Lefkosia, Morfou, Kythrea and Kaimakli, 907 in 1891, 1,143 in 1901, 1,008 in 1911 and 1,262 in 1921.¹⁹ In 1931 Lefka had 1,781 inhabitants, 366 Christians and 1,415 Muslims, and the settlement of the Mavrovouni mine another 718, 482 Christians and 236 Muslims. In 1946 Lefka had 3,752 inhabitants, of whom 981 were Orthodox, 2,685 Muslims and 86 others (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded religion only).

According to the same encyclopaedia, most of the Greek inhabitants left Lefka during the struggle of 1955–59, and Lefka was among the places from which the first Greek refugees were uprooted in 1958.²⁰ In 1960 Lefka had 3,673 inhabitants: 34 Greeks, 3,585 Turks, 6 Maronites, 2 Armenians, 26 British and 20 others. The few Greeks who had remained were forced to leave because of the events of the Turkish insurrection of 1963–64: almost all of them left in 1964, and the rest had gone by the census of 1973, which no longer records any Greek inhabitants.²¹ The Turkish inhabitants then numbered around 4,500 (estimate).

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 601 inhabitants of Lefka signed, all the adult Greek inhabitants in effect. The Register of EOKA Fighters records 35 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle. The EOKA fighter Andreas Zakos, from Linou, grew up in Lefka and attended its primary school, and Markos Drakos also attended the same school for a time.²² At the Lefka police station the EOKA fighter Nikolaos Giagkou from Pano Zodeia died under torture in October 1958.²³

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Lefka was occupied by the Turkish army. One soldier was killed in the area of Lefka, and another soldier from Lefka was killed in the area of Agios Pavlos in Lefkosia.

The 2009 list of occupied churches of the Church of Cyprus records Panagia Akentou as desecrated, without doors, badly damaged and in danger of collapse. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, in 2021 the crosses had been removed, the belfry had no bell and the walls were covered in graffiti.²⁴