Milia is a large Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 20 kilometres northwest of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 50 metres, on the plain of the eastern Mesaoria, between Gypsou, Pigi and Peristerona. In the 1960 census it had 1,141 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

In the survey of Cyprus by the British officer Herbert Kitchener, in the first years of British rule, the village is written “Milea”, and in the official gazetteer of Cyprus Milia.¹

Founding and first records

According to the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, the village may already be mentioned in 1196, in a bull of Pope Celestine III confirming the rights of the Latin archbishop of Nicosia. Among the districts of Cyprus whose tithe belonged to the archbishopric the bull names “Melyas”, which Mas Latrie identifies, with reservation, with Milia in the eastern Mesaoria.²

On the village lands, south of the settlement, the Gazetteer records the place-name Paliochori.³

Archaeological sites

Around Milia there are rock-cut tombs of the pre-Greek period. In 1928 the police reported clandestine digging there to the Cyprus Museum, and the Swedish Cyprus Expedition obtained a permit to investigate the site in February and March of that year. The Swedish archaeologist Alfred Westholm excavated a number of tombs, most of which had already been looted, and published four of them, at the site later scholars call Vikla–Trachonas. They were tombs with a dromos and a burial chamber, used again for later burials. They contained vases imported from Syria and Greece, which show the contacts of the place with the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean. In one of the tombs there was, besides the pre-Greek burials, a burial of ancient Greek times, which shows that the site was used for centuries.⁴

In 1957 the Department of Antiquities cleared another tomb of the same cemetery, long since emptied by looters. From the sherds they had left behind about a hundred vases were mended, among them Bichrome vases from the coasts of Syria and Palestine and White Slip vases of exceptional quality.⁵

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Milia is described as a mixed village, with 21 property-owning households and a church. Their land was mostly fields, some sown with black-eyed peas, cotton and wheat, and much barren land. The only trees recorded are nineteen mulberries. The households had more than three hundred sheep, a few cows, pairs of oxen for ploughing, and beehives. Almost half the value of the village’s recorded property was held by a resident of Nicosia.⁶

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of Milia is dedicated to Saint Epiphanios. It was built in 1902–1906, in the southern part of the old settlement.⁷ According to the government publication of 2019 on the displaced municipalities and communities, next to it was the “cave of Saint Epiphanios”, with rock-cut rooms, where by the village’s tradition the saint came to rest in quiet.⁸ A second parish church is that of Saints Andronikos and Athanasia, of the 19th century, on the western edge of the old settlement.

On the village lands stands the monastery of Panagia Avgasida, an Ancient Monument. Its church dates from the 12th and the 15th century. The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, describes a small church with two aisles and remains of the monastic enclosure. Inside it was the tombstone of a layman, with fragments of a Greek inscription and the date 1482.⁹

The chapel of Agios Georgios, of the 14th–15th century, is also an Ancient Monument. The village also has the chapels of Agia Marina and of the Panagia.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew citrus, cereals and fodder crops, and stock-breeding was fairly developed.¹⁰ According to the 2019 publication, a good number of people from Milia worked in Varosha.¹¹ The Co-operative Credit Society of Milia was founded in 1923 and the Co-operative Grocery in 1948. According to the Encyclopaedia, the painter Andreas Chrysochos came from Milia.¹²

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Milia had 253 inhabitants in 1881, 345 in 1891, 410 in 1901, 538 in 1911 and 643 in 1921.¹³ In 1931 it had 826 inhabitants, 825 Christians and one Muslim, and in 1946 1,132, all Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded religion only). In 1960 it had 1,141 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 1,134 Greeks. In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school had 151 pupils and six teachers.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 651 inhabitants of Milia signed, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters records 13 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Milia was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. The Red Cross tables submitted to the European Commission of Human Rights record that on 2 September 1974 74 people from Milia were transferred to Gypsou. The Commission found it established that a detention centre existed at Gypsou, where the Turkish forces held Greek civilians in confinement.¹⁴ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

Two inhabitants of Milia, one civilian and one soldier, were recorded as missing. Neither disappeared in the village; one disappeared in the area of Agyrta and the other in the area of Gaidouras. The remains of one have been located and identified, while the other is still missing. Four more inhabitants, two civilians and two soldiers, were killed elsewhere: two at Gypsou, one at the new port of Ammochostos and one in the area of Tziaos.

According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Epifanios into a mosque. When a new mosque was built in the village, around 2015, the church was abandoned; its crosses have been removed. The church of Saints Andronikos and Athanasia is in poor condition, and of its furnishings only the beam of the iconostasis remains. In the cemetery the wall has partly collapsed and the grave crosses lie scattered.¹⁵ The 2009 list records that the monastery of Panagia Avgasida was demolished by the Turkish troops.