Leivadia is a small Turkish community in the occupied district of Ammochostos, in the Karpasia. It lies 32 kilometres north of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 50 metres, among low hills.¹ On the village land stands the small church of the Panagia tis Kyras, which held one of the rare mosaics in Cyprus from the time before Iconoclasm. In the 1960 census it had 191 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

On the British Kitchener map of 1885 and in the 1931 census the village is written “Livadhia”.²

Archaeological sites

Beneath the church of the Panagia tis Kyras there is a system of underground channels, about six metres deep. In 2003 and 2009 it was explored without the permission of the Republic of Cyprus.³

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Leivadia appears as a mixed village, with Christian and Muslim owners and 28 property-holding households. The owners had cotton fields and a few wheat fields, while most of their land was barren or fallow; they had 13 olive trees, four mills, one of them a water mill, more than 300 sheep and goats, and cattle.⁴

Churches and monasteries

The church of the Panagia tis Kyras stands about 800 metres north-east of the village. It is a small cross-shaped church with a dome, and the 2009 list of churches in the occupied areas of the Church of Cyprus dates it to the 6th and 12th centuries; it is an Ancient Monument.⁵ The 12th-century church kept the apse of an older building, with a mosaic of the Virgin orans, that is, with her hands raised in prayer, on a gold ground, and perhaps with an archangel beside her. The mosaic dates from the early medieval Greek period, before Iconoclasm, and is one of the few mosaics of that time to have survived in Cyprus.⁶ The British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, wrote in 1918 that much of the mosaic was already missing, perhaps because it was taken away by visitors who believed it cured diseases of the blood.⁷

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 141 inhabitants in 1881, 115 in 1891, 95 in 1901, 121 in 1911 and 117 in 1921.⁸ According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the few Greek inhabitants, around 20, began to leave the village in the 1920s.⁹ In 1931 Leivadia had 120 inhabitants, 4 Christians and 116 Muslims, and in 1946 180, all Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 191 inhabitants, all Turks, and in 1973 about 200 Turkish inhabitants (estimate).

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Leivadia was occupied by the Turkish army. According to the University of Oxford, which cites the Cypriot archaeologist Demetrios Michaelides and a 1989 report of the Council of Europe, very little of the mosaic of the Panagia tis Kyras survives today, mostly because of the art thieves who were active after 1974.¹⁰ According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the church has been restored, in works completed in January 2022.¹¹