Ovgoros is a Turkish community of the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 28 kilometres north of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 110 metres, on the southern slopes of the Pentadaktylos range, at the western end of the Karpasia peninsula. Its neighbouring villages are Gerani, Avgolida and Krideia.¹ At the 1960 census it had 362 inhabitants.

Name

The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) gives the name as “Όβγορος, τό” (Ovgoros), in the neuter.² The village appears in the same form, “Ovgoros”, on Kitchener’s British map of 1885.³

Founding and first records

On the land of the village there is the place-name Palion Ovgoros (“Old Ovgoros”).⁴

Frankish rule

According to the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, under Frankish rule Ovgoros belonged to the Giblet family, which also held Agios Andronikos in the Karpasia and Pyla in Cyprus. The family came from Genoa and took its name from the town of Giblet, ancient Byblos south of Tripoli in Lebanon, of which its ancestor Hugh Embriaco was the first Frankish lord. Its members held the highest offices in the Frankish kingdoms of the East.⁵

Turkish rule

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, which cites the Cypriot writer Nearchos Kleridis, in the early 18th century a persecution forced the Greek inhabitants of Ovgoros and of other villages of the area, among them Avgolida, Galateia, Galinoporni, Krideia, Koroveia and Agios Efstathios, to abandon them, and from then on Ovgoros became a Turkish village.⁶

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Ovgoros is recorded as a Muslim village, with 7 property-owning households. The owners had cotton fields, threshing floors and an abandoned garden, while most of their land was barren or fallow. They had 65 olive and wild olive trees, more than 550 sheep, oxen, cows, mares and 25 beehives.⁷

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the land of the village was sown mainly with cereals and fodder crops and planted with olive and carob trees, and in 1973 its stock-breeders kept 794 goats, 693 sheep, 72 cows and 17 oxen. A large part of the land was uncultivated and covered with pines, cypresses and scrub.⁸ To the north the land of Ovgoros rose to the Kantara forest, below the medieval castle of Kantara.⁹

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Ovgoros had 201 inhabitants in 1881, 264 in 1891, 318 in 1901, 400 in 1911 and 418 in 1921.¹⁰ In 1931 it had 386 inhabitants, of whom 379 were Muslims and 7 Christians, and in 1946 431, all Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 362 inhabitants, all Turks, and in 1973 around 400 (estimate).

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 three soldiers were killed in the area of Ovgoros.