Neo Chorio, also known as Neo Chorio Kythreas (locally Niochorko), is a large, mainly Greek community in the occupied district of Lefkosia. It lies 12 kilometres north-east of Lefkosia, at an elevation of 120 metres, in the Mesaoria plain, a little south of Kythrea. Its land stretched from the foothills of the Pentadaktylos to the Pediaios river, and its estates were irrigated by the water of the Kefalovryso of Kythrea.¹ In the 1960 census it had 1,387 inhabitants, of whom 1,157 were Greeks and 230 Turks.

Name

The inhabitants called it “Νιόχωρκο” (Niochorko).²

Founding and first records

At the beginning of the 20th century the British architect George Jeffery counts Neo Chorio among the villages spread around the lower channels of the Kefalovryso.³

According to the village tradition, recorded by the folklorist Nearchos Clerides, the first inhabitants came from an older village, Kourkousa, a few kilometres to the west, near the Lefkosia–Kythrea road, which was abandoned after a great drought. The farmers said that their ploughs struck the foundations of houses there.⁴ About three kilometres west of the settlement, on the land of Neo Chorio, the official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) records a place-name meaning “dry village”, and it was there that the inhabitants placed their old village.⁵

Turkish rule

By the 17th century the village already had its own priests. According to the community’s website, the icon of Saint John the Baptist (Timios Prodromos) in the chapel of the same name bore the date 1672 and was a dedication of the priest Christodoulos, his wife and their children.⁶ According to a tradition recorded by the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the mosque of the village was originally a Greek Orthodox church, dedicated to Saint Nicholas, which was converted into a mosque during the years of Turkish rule.⁷

According to the village tradition, in the massacres of July 1821 the priest of Neo Chorio was also arrested and taken to Lefkosia to be executed, but was saved at the last moment through the intervention of the agha of Palaikythro.⁸

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Neo Chorio is recorded as a mixed village of Christians and Muslims, with 44 property-holding households. Their estates were mainly wheat fields, orchards and threshing floors, and 29 entries concern shares in the running water, which were valued at almost one third of the total value of the village’s property. They had 338 olive trees, two water mills and an olive press, around 430 sheep and goats and 27 oxen.⁹

Churches and monasteries

The parish church of the village is dedicated to Saint Charalambos, its patron saint, and stands at the southern edge of the old settlement. Around it lay the old cemetery.¹⁰ According to the community’s website, it is a single-aisled basilica with a tall bell tower of dressed stone; it was built around 1830 and consecrated in 1944. The village priest Papagiannis Zografos painted the Pantokrator on the canopy of the Holy Table and icons of the iconostasis.¹¹

About 300 metres to the north stands the chapel of Saint John the Baptist (Agios Ioannis o Prodromos). According to the community’s website, it is older than Agios Charalambos; set into its dome were plates, one for each family that built it, about 27 including the priest’s, and its feast was celebrated on 7 January.¹²

In the plain, about four kilometres south of the village, towards the Pediaios, stands the Greek Orthodox country chapel of Agios Theodoros. It was built around 1940 on the ruins of an older church, and services were held there once a year, on the second Sunday of October.¹³

Economy and society

The water of the Kefalovryso was private property, divided into shares among the inhabitants of Kythrea and the surrounding villages, and one of its divisions was called “of Neo Chorio”. According to the community’s website, which draws on files of the State Archives, in 1934 the community asked for a loan of 320 pounds to improve its water supply, the largest of the seven villages of the area that took loans for the same purpose at that time.¹⁴

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew cereals, fodder crops, olives and citrus, and in 1973 the village had around 380 sheep, 550 goats, 150 cows and more than 5,800 poultry. Because of its proximity to Lefkosia, a large part of the inhabitants worked in the town and in the industrial area of Mia Milia.¹⁵ In 1928 the Neo Chorio Co-operative Credit Society was founded, under the name “I Proodos” (“Progress”), and in 1953 the Co-operative Grocery. In 1948 inhabitants of the village and of the surrounding villages founded a joint-stock company that ran a modern olive press, and from 1952 a flour mill as well. The first club of the village, “Avgerinos”, was founded in 1929; in 1952 it was followed by the Cultural Association, later “Apollon”.¹⁶

Education

The village had a teacher as early as the 18th century. According to the community’s website, the 18th-century Cypriot historian Archimandrite Kyprianos records in 1788, among the subscribers to his book, the teacher Dimitris Karakasis from Niochorko. In the first years of British rule a boys’ school was founded, a little later a girls’ school in the churchyard, and around 1952 a new, large elementary school in the east of the village, towards Chrysida.¹⁷ From 1969 the children of the village attended the Gymnasium of Kythrea.¹⁸

Population

The population of Neo Chorio grew steadily, according to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia mainly because of its proximity to Lefkosia. According to the same source, the village had 578 inhabitants in 1881, 532 in 1891, 603 in 1901, 736 in 1911 and 812 in 1921.¹⁹ In 1931 the village had 821 inhabitants, 698 Christians and 123 Muslims, and in 1946 1,178, of whom 959 were Orthodox and 219 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,387 inhabitants, 1,157 Greeks and 230 Turks, and in 1973 1,421 Greeks.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 598 inhabitants of Neo Chorio signed, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 10 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Neo Chorio was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population suffered ethnic cleansing. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

Forty-one inhabitants of Neo Chorio, 34 civilians and 7 soldiers, were recorded as missing. Nineteen were lost in the village itself and the other 22 elsewhere: 9 at the Pavlides Garage in Lefkosia, 4 at Strongylos, 3 in the area of Tziaos, 2 at Voni, and one each in the area of Lapithos, in the Exo Metochi - Mora - Angastina area and at Gypsou. The remains of 24 have been located and identified; the other 17 are still missing. Three more inhabitants of Neo Chorio, two civilians and one soldier, were killed elsewhere, at Kythrea, in the Sakkaria area and at an unknown place. In the village and on its land 27 dead of 1974 are recorded, all of them civilians.

The 2009 list records the church of Agios Charalambos as looted, desecrated and in need of immediate shoring up, and the chapel of Saint John the Baptist as looted and desecrated. The crosses have been removed from Agios Charalambos and the bells are missing, and the figures of the prophets on one side of the iconostasis were painted over with white paint. The chapel of the Baptist was desecrated and used as a hay barn and storeroom. Of the new cemetery, on the road to Trachoni, only part of the wall remains, and its graves have been destroyed.²⁰