Lefkonoiko is a large Greek community in the occupied part of the Famagusta (Ammochostos) district. It lies 24 kilometres north-west of Famagusta, at an altitude of 70 metres, on the northernmost edge of the Mesaoria plain, in the foothills of the Pentadaktylos range. It has been a municipality since 1939, and it is the birthplace of the national poet of Cyprus, Vasilis Michaelides.¹ At the 1960 census it had 2,358 inhabitants, of whom 2,355 were Greeks.

Name

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, citing the Cypriot linguist Simos Menardos, the name was formed from the phrase eis ton leukon oikon, “at the white house”, after a house that stood there before the settlement; according to Menardos, the ancient words leukos and oikos, which in the common language later gave way to aspro and spiti, show the age of the name.² According to the Municipality of Lefkonoiko, the village tradition holds that its first house was all white.³ Leontios Machairas writes “Lefkonikon”, and the Italian sources “Levconico” and “Lefconico”.⁴

Founding and first records

Lefkonoiko is already mentioned at the beginning of the 14th century. The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron writes that in 1310 the escort taking the deposed King Henry II into exile stopped for a meal at the village of Lefkonoiko before going on to Gastria.⁵

Archaeological sites

In 1913 a landowner found walls, large statues and a bronze object at Lefkonoiko, and the British archaeologist John Myres excavated the site for the Cyprus Museum. He uncovered a sanctuary with a chamber, about three and a half metres across, packed with stone statuettes and fragments of sculpture, which had been gathered there when the sanctuary went out of use. Myres recorded more than thirty statue bases, which show that life-size statues were also dedicated, and small bronze figures and four bronze cows were found among the stone works. The offerings date from the 7th century BC to the 3rd or 4th century AD; the earliest, hand-modelled clay figures go back to the Early Iron Age. A later scholar puts the limestone sculptures at almost six hundred. One of them, a seated “temple boy” holding a bird, is in the Cyprus Museum.⁶ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, south of the village, in the area of the archaeological site, the occupation regime built a military airfield after 1974.⁷

Antiquity

The sanctuary of Lefkonoiko received offerings for more than a thousand years, from the archaic ancient Greek to the Roman period. The historical atlas of the ancient Greek and Roman world (the Barrington Atlas) marks at the site of the village an ancient settlement named Leukos Oikos (“White House”), inhabited from the archaic ancient Greek to the early Greek medieval period.⁸

Greek medieval period (“Byzantium”)

The 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas records that at Lefkonikon Saint Euphemianos was venerated, one of the three hundred ascetics who, according to tradition, came to Cyprus from Palestine and lived in caves in various parts of the island. Bustron says the same.⁹

Frankish rule

In 1426, after the devastating raid of the Mamluks and the capture of King Janus, the peasants rose up in many parts of Cyprus and appointed captains of their own. Machairas writes that “at Lefkonikon” a certain Alexis was proclaimed king and all the peasants accepted him. He was a serf (parikos) of the king and overseer of the royal herds. The rebels broke into the stores and took wine, wheat and sugar, and they stopped and robbed the Latin bishop who was on his way to Famagusta. When order was restored, “King” Alexis was taken by a trick and hanged in Nicosia on 12 May 1427.¹⁰

Venetian rule

Under Venetian rule Lefkonoiko was the seat of a bailiwick, an administrative district of the state. In a Venetian list of the royal villages from the end of the 15th century, published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, the “bailiwick of Lefconico” comprises Lefkonoiko itself, Genagra, Pyrga and three villages of Apalestra.¹¹

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Lefkonoiko belonged to the district of the Mesaoria and is recorded as a mixed village, with Christian and Muslim owners. It had 118 households with property. The land was mostly grain fields and cotton fields, with a few vineyards and gardens and about 150 olive trees, and the animals were more than a thousand sheep, around 160 oxen and cows, horses and mules, and three camels.¹² The German archaeologist Ludwig Ross, who passed through in 1845, describes it as the biggest village of the Mesaoria.¹³

British rule

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the villagers took part in the uprising of October 1931, and a young man from the village was killed in Famagusta. On 25 March 1945, the national anniversary, the police broke up a parade in Lefkonoiko with gunfire; three people were killed and several wounded.¹⁴

Churches and monasteries

Lefkonoiko had two parishes, the upper parish of the Archangel Michael and the lower parish of the Saviour (Sotiros).¹⁵ The Greek Orthodox church of the Archangel Michael, in the northern part of the old village, dates from the 14th century and was rebuilt in the 19th century. The church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour, in the eastern part of the village, was built in 1867.¹⁶ Both are Ancient Monuments.

Of the chapels of the village, that of the Holy Cross (Timios Stavros), in the southern part of the centre, dates from the 18th century and that of Agios Theodoros from the 18th or 19th century. There are also the chapels of Agios Fokas, Profitis Ilias and Agia Zoni, and the ruined chapels of Agios Georgios and Agia Paraskevi.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the villagers grew mainly cereals and fodder crops, as well as citrus fruit, peaches, apples and almonds, and stock-breeding was highly developed. The women of the village were known for their Lefkonoiko weavings, with their rich combinations of colours and designs. The first cooperative society of Cyprus was founded at Lefkonoiko in 1909, and the government services of the area were concentrated there, the court, the hospital, the police and others, serving the surrounding villages.¹⁷ In 1932 the Lefkonoiko Farmers’ Cooperative Society was founded. According to the Municipality of Lefkonoiko, the first Pancyprian Agricultural Exhibition was held in the village in 1920, and the first Cypriot threshing machine was built there in 1938.¹⁸

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, a community school was already operating at Lefkonoiko in the middle of the 19th century. In 1938 a private higher school was founded, which two years later became a community school and was named the Kamintzeios Higher School, in honour of its benefactor Georgios Kamintzis; it later became the Lefkonoiko Gymnasium, which until 1974 also served the surrounding villages. The British authorities closed it for a year, in 1955–56, because many of its pupils had joined EOKA.¹⁹ In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school had 211 pupils and seven teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Lefkonoiko had 1,448 inhabitants in 1881, 1,618 in 1891, 1,831 in 1901, 2,036 in 1911 and 2,325 in 1921.²⁰ In 1931 it had 2,435 inhabitants, 2,293 Christians and 142 Muslims, and in 1946 2,596, of whom 2,470 were Orthodox and 126 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 2,358 inhabitants, 2,355 Greeks and three Turks, and in 1973 2,116 Greeks.

Municipality

Lefkonoiko was declared a municipality on 1 April 1939.²¹ The first municipal council was appointed by the Governor of Cyprus, Richmond Palmer, and the first mayor was Christos Michalopoulos. At the first municipal elections, in 1943, Loukas Grigoriou was elected mayor.²²

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for union with Greece (Enosis), 1,333 inhabitants signed in the two parishes of Lefkonoiko. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 455 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle. The EOKA fighter Savvas Zanou came from Lefkonoiko.²³

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Lefkonoiko was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. Most of the inhabitants fled before the advancing army.²⁴ Those who stayed were held in confinement: according to tables of the Cyprus Red Cross submitted to the European Commission of Human Rights, on 2 September 1974 26 people from Lefkonoiko were transferred to the detention centre at Gypsou.²⁵ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

Eight dead of 1974 are recorded in Lefkonoiko and its area, seven civilians and one soldier. Seventeen inhabitants of Lefkonoiko, eight civilians and nine soldiers, were recorded as missing. Eight went missing in the village itself and the others in the Syngchari–Pella Pais area, at Voni, in the Aspri Moutti–Dikomo area, at Kyra and in the Kythrea–Lefkonoiko–Chalevga area. The remains of ten have been located and identified; seven are still missing. Eight more inhabitants of the village, four civilians and four soldiers, were killed elsewhere: in the area of Famagusta harbour, at Vitsada, in the area of Agios Andronikos, in the Klepini–Agios Chrysostomos area, in the area of Ovgoros and at Mia Milia.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of the Saviour into a mosque in 1977. When a new mosque was built, the church was abandoned; all the crosses have been removed from the building, a mihrab has been added to the south wall, and much of the roof of the portico is missing. In the new cemetery most of the monuments and all the crosses are damaged. The Archangel Michael, which had been badly damaged after the invasion, was repaired by the Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage, and the Holy Cross was renovated in 2019.²⁶