Ornithi is a small Turkish community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 33 kilometres west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 80 metres, on the plain of the Mesaoria, a little west of Afaneia, within whose land the official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) records it.¹ The old church of Agios Artemios, an Ancient Monument, survives at Ornithi. In the 1960 census it had 18 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

In the Latin bull of 1196, the first written record of the settlement, the name is spelled “Ornithia”, and in a Venetian list of the late 15th century “Casal Ornithi”.² The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus in 1918, also writes it “l’Orniphe”.³ The Gazetteer has “Ornithi, to”.

Founding and first records

According to a local tradition recorded by the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, a devout Christian was carrying the icon of Saint Artemios, the patron saint of neighbouring Afaneia, and prayed to the saint to show him where to build a church. The sign was to be the crowing of a cock (ornithi); at dawn he heard a cock, built the church where he stood, and around it grew the settlement, which was named Ornithi.⁴

Ornithi first appears in a written source on 13 December 1196, in the bull by which Pope Celestine III confirmed the possessions of the new Latin archbishopric of Nicosia. It was published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie.⁵

By 1918 the original Christian village had disappeared entirely, even the traces of it marked on the British map of 1885. Jeffery found only the small church still standing, its key kept at Afaneia.⁶

Frankish and Venetian rule

The bull of 1196 names Ornithi and Afaneia as the two villages that Aimery de Lusignan, whom the bull calls king of Cyprus, had given as an endowment to the Latin archbishopric of Nicosia.⁷ The village stayed with the archbishopric until the end of Venetian rule: in a Venetian memorandum of the late 15th century on the revenues of the clergy, “Casal Ornithi” is listed among the nine villages of the Latin archbishop.⁸

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Ornithi is recorded as a Muslim village, with 19 property-holding households. Most of its land was barren or fallow. The owners had irrigated gardens with wells and waterwheels, a few cotton fields, threshing floors and a handful of olive trees. They had more than 750 sheep, pairs of oxen for ploughing, cows, mules and beehives.⁹

Churches and monasteries

The old church of Agios Artemios, a two-aisled building, dates from the 15th and 16th centuries and is an Ancient Monument. Jeffery found it in good condition in 1918: a small, plain rural church with the look of an Orthodox church and an ordinary iconostasis. Above the apse, in the gable, is set a carved coat of arms with a displayed eagle, Latin work of the 14th century, which according to Jeffery may have been brought there from some older building.¹⁰

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Ornithi had 68 inhabitants in 1881, 44 in 1891, 37 in 1901, 29 in 1911 and 33 in 1921.¹¹ In 1931 it had 33 inhabitants, all Muslims, and in 1946 24 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 18 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Ornithi was occupied by the Turkish army. The 2009 list of churches in the occupied areas of the Church of Cyprus records the old church of Agios Artemios as looted and desecrated; the occupation authorities illegally turned it into a hay barn. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the church was restored in 2019, and in 2022 its exterior was in very good condition.¹²