Livera is a small Greek community in the occupied district of Keryneia. It lies 34 kilometres west of Keryneia, at an elevation of 60 metres, on the Kormakitis peninsula. Its land reached as far as Cape Kormakitis, the north-western tip of Cyprus, and included the islet of Kormakitis and the small bay of Limanoudi.¹ In the 1960 census it had 177 inhabitants, of whom 165 were Greeks.

Name

The 19th-century Greek historical researcher Athanasios Sakellarios writes the name of the village in 1890 as “Louvera”. The British architect and curator of ancient monuments George Jeffery writes it in 1918 as “Liveras”, as does the 1931 census.² The origin of the name is not documented. According to the Union of Communities of Keryneia District, the inhabitants said that the village took its name from the Livas, the west wind that often lashed the place.³

Founding and first records

Livera is not mentioned in the 15th-century lists of fiefs and royal villages preserved by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron and the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, nor in the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33. According to the Union of Communities of Keryneia District, the present village was created in the early 19th century by inhabitants of Karavas who settled there.⁴

In the early 20th century the settlement was still very small: Jeffery describes it as a small hamlet inhabited mainly at harvest time.⁵ On the village’s land, to the south-east, the official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) also records the site of Kolia as a settlement.⁶

Antiquity

Cape Kormakitis, on the land of Livera, is the ancient Krommyou Akra (Cape Krommyon). The Greek geographer of the 1st century BC Strabo mentions it in his circuit of Cyprus after Soloi, and notes that it lay opposite Cape Anemourion in Cilicia, at a distance of 350 stades. The Greek name shows that this tip of the island was known to the seafarers of the ancient Greek world. Sakellarios identifies Krommyou Akra with Kormakitis and notes, west of the village, ruins of various periods.⁷

Jeffery records the report that at Livera there were ruins of an ancient temple and that columns from it had been used in building the neighbouring chiftlik of Cherissa, on the land of Kormakitis.⁸

Roman period

The apocryphal Acts of Barnabas, a text of the medieval Greek period, relate that the Apostle Barnabas and the Evangelist Mark, on their second journey through Cyprus, arrived by ship at night at a place called Krommyakita, which the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia identifies with Kormakitis. There they found two servants of a pagan temple, Timon and Ariston, who gave them hospitality in their house.⁹ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, local tradition connects with the passage of the apostles a spring of the village, where they are said to have quenched their thirst and rested, and Limanoudi, which the inhabitants also called Kakolimionin.¹⁰ The Gazetteer records on the village’s land the place-name “Neron ton Vournon”.¹¹

Greek medieval period (“Byzantium”)

At the site of Pano Galala, east of the village, near Limanoudi, survive the ruins of a Christian basilica of the 6th century, from the early medieval Greek period. The basilica shows that there was a Christian settlement in the area at that time, whose name is not known.¹²

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village is dedicated to Saints Constantine and Helen and dates from the 20th century. It stands in the south-western part of the old centre of the village, and the cemetery was on its north side.¹³ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, an earlier church of the same saints had been built of mud bricks in 1894.¹⁴

The basilica of Galala, an Ancient Monument, is the most important monument on the village’s land. There was also the chapel of the Apostles Paul and Barnabas, of the 20th century, dedicated to the apostles whom tradition connects with the place.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew cereals, fodder crops, citrus fruit, olives and carobs, while a large part of the land was barren, with mastic bushes, wild olives and wild carobs. Stock-breeding was important: in 1973 twenty-six stock-breeders had more than 1,500 goats and almost 930 sheep. The village had a small fishing shelter, for a single boat. On the shore, where in the first decades of the 20th century ships anchored, there survives a large carob store for export, which according to the inscription on its front, below a carved cross, was built in 1905.¹⁵ In 1952 the Livera Cooperative Credit Society was founded.

Education

In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of Livera had 15 pupils and one teacher.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 34 inhabitants in 1881, 34 in 1891, 54 in 1901, 99 in 1911 and 112 in 1921.¹⁶ In 1931 Livera had 121 inhabitants, all of them Christians, and in 1946 189, of whom 160 were Orthodox and 29 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 177 inhabitants, 165 Greeks and 12 Turks, and in 1973 123 Greeks. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the village was inhabited only by Greeks, and the Turks of the 1960 census were inhabitants of a neighbouring chiftlik that had been included within its boundaries.¹⁷

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 83 inhabitants of Livera signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 10 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Livera was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. According to the Union of Communities of Keryneia District, the inhabitants left under the bombing, and those who stayed were later forced by the Turkish army to leave.¹⁸ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

One inhabitant of Livera, a civilian, was recorded as missing. He went missing at Kormakitis, and his remains have not been located to this day. Two other inhabitants, a civilian and a soldier, were killed elsewhere, between Orka and Livera and in the area of Zodeia.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Saints Constantine and Helen into a mosque; the bell and all the crosses were removed, and of the iconostasis only the wooden frame remained. In the cemetery no trace of the graves survives.¹⁹ The chapel of the Apostles Paul and Barnabas was demolished.