Lysi is a large Greek community in the occupied part of the Famagusta (Ammochostos) district. It lies 23 kilometres west of Famagusta, at an altitude of 60 metres, in the Mesaoria, near the old Nicosia–Famagusta road; part of its land, in the south, lies within the British military base of Dhekelia. It has been a municipality since 1986.¹ It is the birthplace of the EOKA hero Grigoris Afxentiou. At the 1960 census it had 3,737 inhabitants, all Greeks.

Name

The origin of the name is not known. The Italian sources of the 15th and 16th centuries write the village “Lissi”.²

Founding and first records

According to the village tradition, recorded by Savvas Xystouris in a book on the history of Lysi and repeated by the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the first inhabitants came from a nearby settlement and settled beside a monastery of the Prophet Elijah, where they worked on its estates. Later people came from the neighbouring settlement of Panagia, bringing with them their patron, the Virgin, to whom the great church of the village is dedicated. According to the same tradition, around 1700 four families came to Lysi from Panagia; the Encyclopaedia itself considers that the tradition refers to the strengthening of the village with new inhabitants, since Lysi already existed in the 15th century.³

Lysi first appears in a written source in the 1460s, in the list of the fiefs distributed by King James II. The list is preserved by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron.⁴ On the land of the village the official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) records the place names Aglassyka, with the church of Agios Georgios of Aglassyka, Panagyies and Asprochoma Palion.⁵

Archaeological sites

In 1967 bulldozers destroyed about four tombs of a previously unknown cemetery at the bridge of Agios Georgios, two kilometres north-east of Lysi. The Department of Antiquities recovered several vases of the Geometric ancient Greek period, among them a large amphora, half a metre high, which is kept in the Cyprus Museum.⁶

Five hundred metres west of the village, the villagers levelled in 1963, while preparing the ground to build a chapel, the ruins of a basilica of the early Greek medieval period. The Department of Antiquities archaeologist Athanasios Papageorghiou traced the foundations of a three-aisled church with three semicircular apses; a small hexagonal marble slab may show that the floor was decorated with marble inlay (opus sectile). The basilica cannot be later than the 7th century.⁷

Antiquity

The tombs at the bridge of Agios Georgios show that the land of Lysi was already inhabited in the Geometric ancient Greek period.

Greek medieval period (“Byzantium”)

The basilica west of the village shows that in the early Greek medieval period there was a Christian community there with a substantial church. The 2009 list of the Church of Cyprus also dates the ruined chapel of the Virgin (Panagia) to the 6th–7th century.

Frankish rule

In the 1460s James II granted Lysi, together with Panagia and Agios Theodoros, as a fief to Alfonso Ribera and his son-in-law Arigo d’Alvet.⁸ Under Frankish rule, in the 13th century, the Greek Orthodox chapel of Agios Themonianos was built outside the village (see Churches and monasteries). In Lysi the Register of Ancient Monuments also lists the ruins of the castle of Sigouri, the “Castel Franco”, which according to Bustron was built by King James I at the end of the 14th century.⁹

Venetian rule

Under Venetian rule Lysi 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 Lissi” comprises five villages, among them Lysi, Makrasyka and Agios Theodoros.¹⁰

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Lysi belonged to the district of the Mesaoria and is recorded as a Christian village, with 56 households with property. The land was mostly cotton fields and other fields, with a few gardens, 33 olive trees and six fig trees. The animals were more than 1,700 sheep and goats, cows, oxen and mules.¹¹ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, a manuscript chronicle of Lysi, with brief notes for every year from 1800, was left in the occupied village in 1974 and its fate is unknown; Xystouris published a copy of it.¹²

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of the village is dedicated to the Virgin (Panagia) and is an Ancient Monument. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the villagers spent ten years building it with voluntary labour, on the site of an older church, with dressed stone which they carried in their carts from Voroklini, and it was completed in 1888. Its architecture shows the influence of the Gothic churches of Nicosia and Famagusta, and its feast was celebrated with a great fair on 8 September.¹³

The chapel of Agios Themonianos, also known as Agios Euphemianos, two and a half kilometres south-west of the village, was built in the 13th century and is an Ancient Monument.¹⁴ The chapel of Agios Synesios, three kilometres south-east, on the boundary of Kontea, dates from the 14th century, and the chapel of Agios Mamas from the 15th or 16th century. There were also the chapels of Agios Georgios and of the Prophet Elijah (Profitis Ilias), of the 19th century, and the ruined chapels of the Virgin, of the 6th–7th century, and of Agios Theodoros.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, boreholes irrigated large areas, and the villagers grew citrus fruit, vegetables, vines, almonds and cereals. Stock-breeding was highly developed, and in 1973 Lysi had the largest numbers of sheep and oxen in the district. It was also the second industrial centre of the district after Famagusta, with workshops making clothes, metal goods, furniture, leather goods and food. Lysi was a small town, with a hospital, a veterinary station, banks and, from the 19th century, inns (khans). The Agia Eleni hospital was built by the villagers with voluntary labour in the 1930s. The first society of the village, “Anagennisis” (“Rebirth”), was founded in 1895, the first savings bank in 1916 and the Cooperative Credit Society in 1923. The folk poets Pavlos Liasides and Giakoumis Atsikkos came from Lysi.¹⁵ In 1945 the Lysi Olive Growers’ Cooperative Society was founded.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, a school was already operating at Lysi in the middle of the 19th century, with the support of the church, in one of its houses. The first school building was built in 1878 in the churchyard, the building of the First Elementary School in 1920 and a second one in 1960. In the last years before 1974 there was also a gymnasium, which served the surrounding villages as well and acquired its own building in 1971.¹⁶ In the school year 1973–74 the two Greek elementary schools had 586 pupils, 323 and 263, and 18 teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Lysi had 759 inhabitants in 1881, 941 in 1891, 1,138 in 1901, 1,423 in 1911 and 1,674 in 1921.¹⁷ In 1931 it had 1,998 inhabitants, 1,994 Christians and four Muslims, and in 1946 2,927, of whom 2,924 were Orthodox and one Muslim (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 3,737 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 4,537.

Municipality

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the British authorities made Lysi an Improvement Board in 1950, but the villagers rejected it because it had been imposed by the colonial government, and until 1960 they had a village council of their own. In 1962 Lysi was declared a municipality and the first municipal elections were held in May, but after objections from the Turks that the declaration breached the Constitution, the government turned the municipality back into an Improvement Board. In 1986 the people of Lysi, by then refugees, declared Lysi a municipality again; the municipal authorities have their temporary seat in Larnaca.¹⁸

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for union with Greece (Enosis), 1,717 inhabitants of Lysi signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 85 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle. Eight EOKA fighters who fell in the Struggle came from Lysi: Grigoris Afxentiou, Patroklos Kokkinos, Michail Kailis, Kallis Sakkas, Dimitrakis Anastasi, Georgios Chatziionas, Anastasis Souroullas and Christofis Panagidis. Stylianos Lenas and Fotis Pittas of Frenaros were also active in Lysi.¹⁹

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Lysi was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. The inhabitants fled before the advancing army.²⁰ A physician told the European Commission of Human Rights that he was in charge of a military hospital at Lysi and that, after an air attack, he moved all the patients to Famagusta.²¹ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

Four dead of 1974 are recorded in Lysi and its area, all civilians. Fifteen inhabitants of Lysi, seven civilians and eight soldiers, were recorded as missing. Ten went missing in the village and its area, and the others in the area of Lapithos, at Trachonas, in the area of Agios Georgios (Keryneia), in the area of Mia Milia and in Famagusta. The remains of ten have been located and identified; five are still missing. Five more inhabitants of Lysi, all soldiers, were killed elsewhere: four in the Agios Pavlos area of Nicosia and one in the area of Agios Ilarion.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of the Virgin into a mosque. When a new mosque was built, around 2019–2020, the church was abandoned; all the crosses have been removed from the building, but the marble altar and the large wooden iconostasis survive. In the cemetery, next to the church, all the grave crosses have been cut down and removed, the larger monuments are damaged, and the crosses and names on the grave slabs have been covered with black paint.²² On 8 September 2019, a service was allowed in the church for the first time since the invasion, on the day of its feast.²³ The occupation authorities also illegally converted the Gymnasium building into a Turkish army camp.²⁴

The 2009 list records the chapels of Agios Themonianos, Agios Synesios and Agios Georgios as looted and desecrated; the roof of Agios Georgios has collapsed. The chapels of the Prophet Elijah and of Agios Mamas were demolished. The 13th-century wall paintings from the dome and apse of Agios Themonianos were cut into 38 pieces and in 1983 were offered in Munich to the Menil Foundation of Houston, with the story that they came from a ruined church in Anatolia. Only Cyprus could show where they came from. With the consent of the Church of Cyprus, their owner, the Foundation bought them in 1984, conserved them and returned them in March 2012; they are now in the museum of the Archbishop Makarios III Foundation in Nicosia.²⁵ The chapel itself was later restored.