Leonarisso is a Greek community of the occupied district of Ammochostos, on the Karpasia peninsula. It lies 43 kilometres northeast of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 140 metres, at the point where the Karpasia road divided into a northern and a southern branch. Together with neighbouring Vasili it formed, according to the British architect George Jeffery, practically a single settlement.¹ In the 1960 census it had 707 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

The origin of the name is not known. In the lists of the Frankish and Venetian periods the village is written “Lionarsos”.² The British consul at Aleppo Alexander Drummond, who passed through Karpasia in 1750, writes it “Lionarissa”,³ and the nineteenth-century Greek philologist Athanasios Sakellarios “Λεονάρισον”.⁴

Founding and first records

Leonarisso first appears in a written source in the 1460s, as “Lionarsos”, in the list of the fiefs distributed by King James II. It is preserved by the sixteenth-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron.⁵

Archaeological sites

About half an hour’s walk north-north-west of the village, on the crest of the Karpasia ridge, lies the site of Peristefani. It was studied in the nineteenth century by the British archaeologist David Hogarth. The villagers had brought the small plateau under cultivation and built its stones into heaps and fences, and out of these projected the torsos and legs of large stone statues of a very early period: a nude female figure which, when complete, would have stood almost three metres high, a female head, part of a bearded male figure larger than life, and a draped torso with the right hand on the breast. Hogarth compared them with the archaic statues of Idalion and thought it most probable that they came from a solitary sanctuary, perhaps of a great goddess, which looked down from the crest onto both seas.⁶ The same ruins, with the limbs of statues “of archaic art” built into the folds, are described by Sakellarios, who also notes that a temple probably stood there.⁷ South-east of the village, towards the sea, on the land of neighbouring Vasili, lies the ancient site of Mazerades, with twelve rock-cut tombs.⁸

Frankish rule, Venetian rule

In Bustron’s list Leonarisso was given as a fief, together with Agia Varvara, Psyllatos and one more village, to Antonio de Bon.⁹ A little later, in a Venetian list of the villages of the island published by the nineteenth-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, “Casal Lionarsos” is recorded among the four villages “of the late messer Antonio de Bon”, together with Agia Varvara, Vasili and Psyllatos.¹⁰

Turkish rule

Drummond noted in 1750 that from the tops of the hills around Leonarisso the view of the plains and gardens was particularly pleasant.¹¹ In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Leonarisso is recorded as a Christian village, with 54 property-holding households. Cotton fields were the largest crop, and there were also grain fields and gardens, 376 olive trees, mills and a shop. The households owned some 750 sheep and goats, 69 oxen and cows and a few horses and mules.¹²

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of the village, in the western part of the old settlement, is dedicated to Saint Demetrios and dates from the 19th–20th century. It was consecrated in 1878 by Archbishop Sophronios.¹³ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, a great fair was held on the saint’s feast, on 26 October.¹⁴

At the eastern edge of the village stands the chapel of Agios Antonios, of the 20th century, and on the village land the rock-cut chapel of Agios Ioannis.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew carobs, olives, tobacco, cereals, fodder crops, almonds and a few citrus fruits, and stock-raising was fairly developed. A large part of the village land was state forest, such as Versari, Anedra and Aspromoutti.¹⁵ In 1953 the Leonarisso Co-operative Credit Society and the Leonarisso Co-operative Grocery were founded.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, which cites the Cypriot local historian Ieronymos Peristianis, until 1838 the basic letters were taught in the open air, in the churchyard, by Tsalavouris from Rhodes, who was also a carpenter. He was followed, until the arrival of the British in 1878, by Giannakos Chatzizoufri or Koutsogiannakos, Giorkatzis Chatzicharalambous and Stylianos Giorkatzis from Larnaka, a blind teacher, Paraskevas, and Iraklis Antoni. They taught in houses, because there was not yet a community school.¹⁶ In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of Leonarisso–Koilanemos had 108 pupils and four teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Leonarisso had 484 inhabitants in 1881, 546 in 1891, 367 in 1901, 782 in 1911 and 790 in 1921.¹⁷ In 1931 it had 858 inhabitants, 857 Christians and one Muslim, and in 1946 1,027, of whom 1,017 were Orthodox and 10 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 707 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 617 Greeks.

National struggles

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the uprising of October 1931, the Oktovriana, began in Karpasia at Leonarisso, where the great fair of Saint Demetrios was being held, and spread to the whole peninsula.¹⁸ The EOKA Fighters’ Register records 192 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Leonarisso was occupied by the Turkish army. Most of the inhabitants, as in other villages of Karpasia, stayed in their homes and found themselves in confinement, enclaved.¹⁹ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, in October 1975 420 Greeks were still living in the village, and a year later 333.²⁰ In 1976, according to a report of the UN Secretary-General, Leonarisso was one of four villages in the north, with Agia Trias, Rizokarpaso and Gialousa, where the UN police distributed welfare benefits and pensions every week rather than once a month, because of their larger populations.²¹ According to the same encyclopaedia, in 1976 the Greek elementary school operated for a short time for the children of the enclaved, but the inhabitants were under constant pressure to leave for the free areas: in 1978 44 remained, in 1979 38, in 1985 14 and in 2008 four.²² In 2005 a liaison post of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Karpasia was operating in the village.²³ In March 2026 no enclaved person lived in Leonarisso any longer.²⁴ The Greek population of the village was thus ethnically cleansed, and since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Dimitrios into a mosque; the 2009 list records it as desecrated and looted. Later a mosque was built in the village and the church was abandoned. In 2022 it had large cracks and damage to the roof, the bells were missing from the bell tower and a metal cone imitating a minaret had been placed on top of it; inside, only the carved wooden iconostasis remained. The chapel of Agios Antonios collapsed after 1974, according to the 2009 list, and in 2022 it was being used as a storeroom.²⁵