Monarga is a small Turkish community of the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 22 kilometres north of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 40 metres, on gentle ground that slopes slightly towards the sea, next to Bogazi and close to Agios Ilias.¹ At the 1960 census it had 76 inhabitants, of whom 18 were Greeks and 57 Turks.

Name

The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) gives the name as “Μοναργά, η” (Monarga).² The British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, also notes the form “Monagra” in 1918.³

Archaeological sites

At the locality Trachonas, on the land of Monarga,⁴ there was a known ancient cemetery. In 1965 the Department of Antiquities recorded there a tomb of the Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) period that had been found by chance. It held plain jugs and cups, clay lamps, alabaster perfume flasks, a clay rattle shaped like a hedgehog and coins of Ptolemy II, the Greek king of Egypt who then also ruled Cyprus.⁵

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Monarga is recorded as a mixed village, with 7 property-owning households. The owners had cotton fields, small fruit gardens, threshing floors, springs of running water and watermills, and more than 470 sheep and goats, oxen and horses or mules.⁶

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village, a small 20th-century church, is dedicated to Saint Paraskevi. It stands in the centre of the old settlement, and around it lay the cemetery of the Greek inhabitants.⁷

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Monarga had 61 inhabitants in 1881 and 1891, 44 in 1901, 35 in 1911 and 31 in 1921.⁸ In 1931 it had 43 inhabitants, all Muslims, and in 1946 59, of whom 3 were Orthodox and 56 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 76 inhabitants: 18 Greeks, 57 Turks and one Englishman. The 1973 census recorded 22 inhabitants, all Greeks.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Monarga was occupied by the Turkish army. Its Greek inhabitants were ethnically cleansed, and since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent their return.

According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, which visited the village in 2022, all the crosses and the bell have been removed from the church of Agia Paraskevi, and private houses and gardens have been built around it, so that today it can be reached only from the west. No trace of the cemetery survives.⁹