Nikitas is a Greek community in the occupied district of Lefkosia. It lies 4 kilometres south-west of Morfou, at an elevation of 40 metres, on the flat plain of Morfou, and 2 kilometres east of the neighbouring village of Prastio. In the 1960 census it had 740 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

The village took its name from Saint Niketas, to whom its church is dedicated. On Kitchener’s map of Cyprus, in the first years of British rule, the name is written “Nikita”.¹

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Nikitas is a village with a mixed population, with 17 property-holding households. Their property was mainly fields and barren land, threshing floors, a few olive and fig trees, some oxen and cows, and a few sheep and goats.²

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of the village, in its northern part, is dedicated to Saint Niketas. It was built in 1904, and in 1932 the bell tower was added at the south-east corner of the roof. Around the church lay the old cemetery of the village; the newer one was about 300 metres to the north-east, on the old road to Morfou.³

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Nikitas receives little rain, but it lies over the large underground aquifer of the Morfou area, and boreholes allowed a large part of its land to be irrigated. Before 1974 the main crop was citrus, and on a much smaller scale vegetables and cereals. According to the same encyclopaedia, the Cyprus railway passed close to the village.⁴ In 1959 the Nikitas Co-operative Credit Society was founded.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, which cites the Cypriot scholar Ieronymos Peristianis, before 1878 there was no school in the village, and the children of Nikitas went to a school in Morfou.⁵ In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of Nikitas had 73 pupils and three teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 160 inhabitants in 1881, 151 in 1891, 136 in 1901, 130 in 1911 and 146 in 1921.⁶ In 1931 Nikitas had 185 inhabitants, all of them Christians, and in 1946 251, of whom 250 were Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). By 1960 the population had almost tripled, to 740 inhabitants, all of them Greeks. In 1973 it had 428 Greek inhabitants.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 144 inhabitants of Nikitas signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 15 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Nikitas was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population suffered ethnic cleansing. The inhabitants fled before the advancing Turkish army.⁷ According to testimony to the European Commission of Human Rights, in February or March 1975 people from Nikitas, Pentageia and Prastio were moved to houses in Morfou, where they were held in confinement, and the last of them were released only in July 1975.⁸ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Saint Niketas into a mosque. Its crosses were removed and all the furnishings of the Orthodox church were taken away. Of the new cemetery only a few foundations of family tombs and fragments of crosses survive, and of the old one, around the church, no trace remains.⁹