Mandres is a Greek community in the occupied part of the Famagusta (Ammochostos) district. It lies 28 kilometres north-west of Famagusta, at an altitude of 290 metres, on the southern foothills of the Pentadaktylos range. Part of the Kantara forest extends over the land of the village.¹ At the 1960 census it had 398 inhabitants, all Greeks.

Founding and first records

The British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus, notes in 1918 near Mandres and Agios Iakovos, at a place he calls “Kirillis”, the ruins of a settlement that seems to have had a circular wall, with traces of a church.²

Archaeological sites

At the site of Galaktini, near the village, levelling work in 1969 exposed a deposit of a sanctuary of the archaic ancient Greek period, which had largely been looted. The Department of Antiquities recovered fragments of clay and limestone statuettes. A small draped limestone kouros, 27 centimetres high, from the same sanctuary is in the Pierides collection in Larnaca.³

North-east of the village, at the site of Melissoudkia, a tomb of the beginning of the Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) period was found in 1967, which revealed the existence of a cemetery. It held plain vessels, jugs, flasks and bowls, and a bronze coin of Ptolemy III.⁴

Antiquity

The sanctuary of Galaktini and the tomb of Melissoudkia show that the land of Mandres was inhabited from the archaic ancient Greek to the Ptolemaic Greek period. The historical atlas of the ancient Greek and Roman world (the Barrington Atlas) marks an ancient settlement at the site of the village, inhabited from the archaic ancient Greek to the early Greek medieval period.⁵

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Mandres belonged to the district of the Mesaoria and is recorded as a Christian village, with eight households with property; the village church was also a landowner. They had vineyards, cotton fields, grain fields and a threshing floor, 32 wild olive trees, one olive tree and ten carob trees, 440 sheep, a few oxen and cows, and three animal pens.⁶

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of the village is dedicated to Saint Mamas and dates from the 19th century; it stands on the northern edge of the old village, and the old cemetery lay around it. One kilometre to the east, in a small wood, stands the chapel of Panagia Galaktini, in ruins for many years.⁷

Three kilometres east of the village, on the mountain, stands the monastery of Panagia of Tochni. Its church dates from the 12th to the 14th century, and the monastery is an Ancient Monument.⁸

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the villagers grew cereals, fodder crops, olives, carobs, almonds and apples, and stock-breeding was fairly well developed, with many goats. Much of the land was forest, part of the state forests of Kantara and Ypsarovounos and the small forest of Spalathovounos.⁹ In 1939 the Mandres Cooperative Credit Society was founded and in 1947 the Olive Growers’ Cooperative Society.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Mandres had 127 inhabitants in 1881, 145 in 1891, 189 in 1901, 205 in 1911 and 262 in 1921.¹⁰ In 1931 it had 296 inhabitants, all Christians, and in 1946 371, of whom 370 were Orthodox and one Muslim (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 398 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 354. In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school had 55 pupils and two teachers.

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for union with Greece (Enosis), 215 inhabitants of Mandres signed, essentially all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 171 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Mandres was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. Many inhabitants fled before the advancing army.¹¹ Those who stayed were held in confinement: according to tables of the Cyprus Red Cross submitted to the European Commission of Human Rights, on 8 September 1974 130 people from Mandres were transferred to the detention centre at Gypsou.¹² Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

Six inhabitants of Mandres, five civilians and one soldier, were recorded as missing. None went missing in the village itself: five went missing at the police station of Tziaos and one in the Syngchari–Pella Pais area. The remains of five have been located and identified; one is still missing. Two more inhabitants of the village were killed elsewhere: a civilian at Gypsou and a soldier in the Agios Pavlos area of Nicosia.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Mamas into a mosque. When a new mosque was built, around 2009–2010, the church was abandoned and is decaying; all the crosses have been removed from the building. The new cemetery is abandoned, its wall partly collapsed and the crosses scattered. The buildings of the monastery of Tochni, which had been partly repaired, are falling into ruin again.¹³