Morfou is an occupied town of the Lefkosia district. It lies 34 kilometres west of Lefkosia, at an elevation of 50 metres, near the Serrachis river, at the western edge of the central plain of Cyprus, which is named the Morfou plain after it, as is the bay to its west. It was the centre of the whole region, with three parishes, and a municipality from 1883.¹ In the 1960 census it had 6,642 inhabitants, of whom 6,480 were Greeks and 123 Turks.

Name

The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) writes the name “Morfou, tou”, and Cypriots used it in the neuter gender. The philologist Athanasios Sakellarios, who described the town in 1890, connected the name with Morpho, an epithet of Aphrodite mentioned by the Greek poet Lycophron and the Greek traveller Pausanias, who saw a temple of Aphrodite Morpho in Sparta. Sakellarios thought it likely that in antiquity there was a town or village here named Morpho, from which the plain also took its name.² In the chronicles of Frankish rule the town is written Morpho or Morfo, and the Franks called it “le Morf”. The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron, in his account of Saint Mamas, also gives the form Themorfo.³

Founding and first records

One of the earliest written records of Morfou is a document of Queen Alice of March 1220, signed as a witness by the knight Laurentius de Morfo. According to the French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, Laurent du Plessis was knighted at Morfou, which was already a large town, famous for the relics and the festival of Saint Mamas, and from it he took the name that his descendants kept.⁴

The town was divided into three parishes, of Agios Mamas, Agios Georgios and Agia Paraskevi, which the Gazetteer records as its quarters. Chrysiliou, north-east of the town, which has its own page, was also one of its quarters. On the land of Morfou, on the river that Bustron calls Ourios (the Serrachis), lay the medieval settlement of Mnassi, where the church of the Panagia tou Mnasi survived until 1974.⁵

Archaeological sites

The most important archaeological site of Morfou is Toumba tou Skourou, a hill north of the town, near the Ovgos river, which is a declared ancient monument. In 1936 the archaeologist Porphyrios Dikaios opened a trial trench there, and in 1955 Hector Catling’s archaeological survey for the Department of Antiquities recorded an extensive settlement of the Late Bronze Age on the site. The same survey located at Morfou a site with a medieval kiln for the pottery vessels used in sugar production.⁶

In 1971–1973 the expedition of Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, directed by the American archaeologist Emily Vermeule, carried out three excavation seasons at the Toumba. The site was the workshop quarter, according to the excavators most probably the potters’ quarter, of a larger town, which was founded around 1600 BC and abandoned around 1220 BC. They found a stone building with plastered basins that connected with one another, most probably for washing clay, a storeroom with rows of jars, from shortly before 1200 BC, and three pieces of jars incised with Cypro-Minoan script. The six chamber tombs were rich: the first held 630 objects, among them cylinder seals, bronze objects, scarabs and fragments of Minoan vases, and another held ostrich eggs, ivories and a lapis lazuli cylinder seal. The Minoan vases and the pottery from Palestine show contacts with Crete and the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean. The invasion of 1974 abruptly stopped the research. According to the expedition’s report of November 1975, the storeroom of the finds was looted, and vases stolen from it, bearing the expedition’s registration numbers, were later found in the United States and returned to the Department of Antiquities.⁷

In 1956 the plough brought to light a tomb of the Archaic ancient Greek period at the site of Ampelia, about three kilometres north-west of the town, where many tombs had been looted long ago. In 1960, during levelling works near the Ovgos and the road to Myrtou, the archaeologist Kyriakos Nicolaou of the Department of Antiquities uncovered part of a building with three rooms, three small cisterns and a water channel. The largest room had a paved floor and walls faced with marble and painted plaster. Among the finds were a broken marble statuette of Aphrodite and a piece of a marble relief. The archaeologist Vassos Karageorghis identified the building as a sanctuary of Aphrodite, similar to the temples of the goddess at Soloi.⁸

Antiquity

The town at Toumba tou Skourou belongs to the pre-Greek period, and the excavators considered it a centre of pottery production. The Cypro-Minoan script on its jars shows that the script then used on the island was known there. The tombs at Ampelia show that the area was also inhabited in the Archaic ancient Greek period. To the Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) period belongs the sanctuary of Aphrodite at the Ovgos, which the excavator dated from the statuette of the goddess. Thus the cult of Aphrodite in the place, which recalls Sakellarios’s interpretation of the name, is also attested by excavation.

Greek medieval period (“Byzantium”)

The 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas records that Saints Theodosios and Polemios were honoured at Morfou, of the three hundred Christians who, according to tradition, came to Cyprus from the Holy Land and lived as ascetics.⁹ According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the church of Agios Mamas is built over the ruins of two churches of the early medieval Greek period and one of the middle medieval Greek period. The British architect George Jeffery saw marble capitals at the monastery which, in his view, came from an earlier church of that era.¹⁰

Frankish and Venetian rule

Morfou belonged most of the time to the royal domain. In 1310 it was a village of the Prince of Galilee, Balian of Ibelin. After the capture of Alexandria in 1365, King Peter I gave the title of Count of Edessa (of Rouchas, as the Cypriot chronicles write) to John of Morfou, who was also Marshal of Cyprus. Bustron, in the 16th century, calls Morfou the village of the Count of Rouchas.¹¹

The constable James, later King James I, relied on Morfou in the war with the Genoese in 1373: according to Machairas, he gathered provisions from Morfou and Pentageia to supply Keryneia and Agios Ilarion. When the peasants rose up in 1426, after the invasion of the Mamluks, one of their centres was Morfou, where they appointed their own captain. The revolt was suppressed: the leaders at Morfou and Lefka were hanged or mutilated, and trials were held as far as Morfou.¹²

The Morfou plain was one of the areas where sugar cane was grown, mainly along the coast. In 1468 King James II sold the year’s sugar from Morfou to the Venetian Andrea Cornaro. The place-name Zacharomylos (sugar mill), on the town’s land, still recalls this production. Under Venetian rule Morfou was the seat of a bailiwick of the royal domain, with villages such as Zodeia, Pentageia, Peristerona, Akaki, Argaki and Lefka. According to Jeffery, in the early 16th century Venice sold the lordship of Morfou to the Synglitikos family.¹³

Turkish rule

Under Turkish rule Morfou remained the centre of the region. In 1668 Pietro Senni of Pisa noted that Morfou had two Greek churches and a mosque.¹⁴ The English traveller Richard Pococke, who passed through in 1738, admired the “magnificent” monastery of Agios Mamas, and the British consul at Aleppo Alexander Drummond, who toured the island a few years later, wrote that Morfou was a very pleasant place, a league and a half from the sea, and its church the finest building of its kind on the whole island. The Cypriot historian Archimandrite Kyprianos (1788) mentions Morfou, together with Polis tis Chrysochou and Kouklia, among the so-called chiftliks, that is, large farming estates, and the British consul Michael de Vezin, at the same period, notes that its area produced cotton, wheat and barley.¹⁵

In the Ottoman property survey of 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Morfou is recorded as the administrative centre of the region, with 224 property-holding households. They had mainly fields, but also cotton fields, vineyards, mulberry trees for the silkworm and fields of madder, the plant from which a red dye was made. They also had three watermills, an olive press, about 1,800 sheep and goats and a hundred oxen. Among the owners two converts to Islam are also recorded, Emin and Dervis Hasan.¹⁶

British rule

In 1890 Sakellarios describes Morfou as a town that lived from farming, the seat of the district, with Greek elementary schools for boys and girls and a Greek Scholarchio (secondary school). In the early 20th century the town acquired a station on the Ammochostos railway, which Jeffery in 1918 found large and busy.¹⁷ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Morfou was one of the first places in Cyprus to have electricity, before 1927, while in the 1930s the colonial government founded there the Central Experimental Farm for the improvement of crops and livestock. Around the town the services of the whole region were gradually gathered: a district court, a hospital, a district administration and district offices of the government departments.¹⁸

Churches and monasteries

The great church of the town was Agios Mamas, which dates from around 1500 and is a declared Ancient Monument. It combines a three-aisled basilica with Gothic elements and a dome. In its north wall, under a carved 16th-century arch, is set the sarcophagus that Cypriots honoured as the tomb of the saint.¹⁹ According to the tradition, already recorded by Machairas, the sarcophagus with the body of the saint came from the sea to the shore of Morfou. A pious man, warned by the saint, dragged it with his oxen and his sons, and where it stopped and would move no further the church was built. Myrrh was said to flow from the tomb, healing the faithful. In the 19th century the people of the area still told the story to their children, and the saint’s festival, on 2 September, was one of the largest on the island.²⁰

Around the church extended the Monastery of Agios Mamas, which the 2009 list also dates to around 1500. Sakellarios saw marble Corinthian capitals in its courtyard. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the Metropolitan of Kyrenia lived at the monastery for a time under Turkish rule, and the first Greek school of the town was housed there. In 1973 Morfou became for the first time the seat of its own metropolis, with Chrysanthos as its first metropolitan.²¹

Agios Georgios and Agia Paraskevi, of the 19th–20th century, were also parish churches. On the town’s land there were also the Panagia tou Mnasi, of the 19th century, the chapel of the Panagia in the cemetery and the churches of Agios Mamas tis Kelias, Agios Theodosios, Agia Triada, Agios Stamatios and the Panagia Chrysorroiatissa.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Morfou lay over the largest aquifer in Cyprus, and before 1974 it had the largest irrigated area on the island. The first orchard growers, in the early 20th century, raised water with alakatia (animal-driven water wheels) from large pits, and others brought running water to the surface with laoumia, that is, rows of wells joined by an underground tunnel. With boreholes, from the 1940s, citrus fruit became the backbone of the economy: in 1966 Morfou had 2,147 hectares of citrus, about one third of the Lefkosia district. In 1973 160 craft and industrial units operated in the town, mainly fruit and vegetable packing houses. From 1969 to 1974 the town celebrated its harvest every year with the Orange Festival.²²

In 1964 the growers founded the Morfou Cooperative Citrus Marketing Organisation (SODEM), and from 1949 the Morfou Cooperative Grocery operated.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before the community school was founded the local man Leontios, father of the scholar and poet Sappho Leontias, taught at a private school. The first Greek community school was founded in the middle of the 19th century by the Metropolitan of Kyrenia Meletios, and in 1878 it had about 180 pupils. In 1918 the Greek School was founded, at first a three-class gymnasium, and in 1951 the gymnasium building was built, which also served the surrounding villages. From 1937 to 1957 the Teachers’ Training College operated at Morfou, and was then moved to Lefkosia; its Agricultural School became after 1960 a six-class Agricultural Gymnasium.²³

In the school year 1973–74 the three Greek elementary schools of the town together had 797 pupils and 28 teachers, and the kindergarten 132 children and 4 kindergarten teachers. There were also the First, Second and Third Gymnasium, the Agricultural Gymnasium and a school for children with special needs, with 21 pupils.

Population

Morfou grew steadily. In 1931 it had 4,335 inhabitants, 4,205 Christians and 130 Muslims. In 1946, together with its quarter of Chrysiliou, it had 5,512 inhabitants, 5,319 Orthodox, 179 Muslims and 14 others (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). It was then the largest settlement of the district after Lefkosia itself. In 1960 it had 6,642 inhabitants: 6,480 Greeks, 123 Turks, 32 Maronites, 6 British and one other. In 1973 7,466 Greek inhabitants were recorded.

Municipality

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the first mayor appointed was Aziz from Smyrna. From 1896 the mayoralty was held by Greeks, among them Kostis Georgiades, for more than thirty years, and Polykarpos Nikolopoulos, in whose time the Municipal Market was built (1951–1953). The mayor in 1974 was Polykleitos Iakovides.²⁴

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 3,230 inhabitants signed in the three parishes of the town and in Chrysiliou, essentially all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 104 Greek inhabitants of the town who took part in or supported the Struggle.

At the demonstration of 28 October 1955 in Morfou British soldiers fired on the crowd, and one of the wounded, the EOKA fighter Georgios Charalambous from Agios Epifanios Soleas, died a few days later. The EOKA fighter Christos Tsiartas from Polystypos joined EOKA at Morfou.²⁵

The Turkish invasion of 1974

According to the Union of Cyprus Municipalities, Morfou was captured by the Turkish army on 16 August 1974, in the second phase of the invasion.²⁶ Its Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. Those who had stayed in the town, about 600 according to a witness before the European Commission of Human Rights, were confined in September 1974 in the Second Elementary School and in houses next to it, with barbed wire and guards. Later inhabitants of neighbouring villages were also brought there. According to the same witness, the detention centre operated until July 1975. The Commission found that their confinement, in the school and in the houses, was a deprivation of liberty contrary to Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, for which Turkey is responsible.²⁷ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

Fifteen people of Morfou, 9 of them civilians, were recorded as missing. The remains of 5 have been located and identified, while 10 are still missing. Eight went missing in Morfou itself; the other 7 at Agios Georgios Keryneias, in the Synchari–Belapais area, in the Agios Ermolaos–Pileri area, in the Klepini area, in Keryneia, at Koutsoventis and on the Keryneia–Panagra road. Nine other people of Morfou, 2 civilians and 7 soldiers, were killed elsewhere, at the Athalassa Psychiatric Hospital, at Kazivera, in the area of Lefka and Limnitis, at Karavas, at Lapithos and at Templos in Keryneia; one was wounded in the fighting and died in 1975 at the 401 Military Hospital in Athens. In Morfou itself 13 dead of 1974 are recorded, all civilians, 12 within the town and one in its area.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Mamas into a museum, Agia Paraskevi into a mosque and Agios Georgios into a cultural centre. The chapel of the Panagia in the cemetery is used as a storeroom and is in danger of collapse. Agia Triada and Agios Stamatios were desecrated and looted, and the Panagia tou Mnasi was desecrated and is in danger of collapse. The old Greek Orthodox cemetery was levelled and is used as a site for road-building materials and as a car park, and the new cemetery is in ruins.²⁸