Palaikythro is a large, mainly Greek community in the occupied part of the district of Lefkosia. It lies 12 kilometres east of Lefkosia, at an elevation of 100 metres, in the Mesaoria plain, and its land is crossed by the Pediaios river.¹ In the 1960 census it had 1,113 inhabitants, of whom 862 were Greeks and 251 Turks.

Name

In the chronicle of the 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas the village is called “Παλόκυθρο” (Palokythro), and in the Italian sources of the 15th and 16th centuries “Palochitro”.²

The name links the village with Chytroi or Kythroi, the ancient city in the area of present-day Kythrea, a few kilometres further north. The 18th-century French scholar Michel Le Quien notes that the bishop of Chytroi Spyridon, who took part in the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787, is referred to in two of its sessions as bishop “of the old city of Kythroi”. The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus at the beginning of the 20th century, writes that Palaikythro was the seat of the first bishopric of Chytroi.³

Founding and first records

The first written mention of Palaikythro is in the chronicle of Machairas. In the years of King Hugh IV, when locusts were doing great damage, the Patriarch of Antioch Ignatios asked the king to have an icon painted with Saint Christopher, Saint Tarasios, Patriarch of Constantinople, and Saint Tryphon. He blessed it and sent it to Palokythro, where the plague had appeared, and told the inhabitants, whenever locusts came, to carry the icon out in procession and to hold a service. In this way, writes Machairas, they were saved from the locusts, as the priest Philippos told him.⁴

On the village’s land the official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) records the place-name “Paliokklisia” (“old church”) and, as a settlement, “Kkiflliki tou Meliou”, that is, a chiftlik, a large farm estate.⁵

Archaeological sites

In 1956 the Department of Antiquities recovered for the Cyprus Museum the pottery of a looted tomb, in a cemetery in the southern part of Palaikythro that had not been known until then. The vessels belong to the late pre-Greek period, and among them there were plates of Mycenaean pottery, that is, vessels from the Mycenaean Greek world or in its style.⁶

In 1969 the Department investigated in the village a second tomb of the same period, half looted. It held local pottery, small Mycenaean stirrup jars and a plain jug with a sign of the Cypro-Minoan script, incised after firing. The Mycenaean vessels of the two tombs show contacts with the Greek world of the Aegean.⁷

Frankish and Venetian rule

Palaikythro was not a fief. It was a royal village, that is, it belonged directly to the state, and the seat of a bailiwick, one of the administrative districts of the royal villages. In a Venetian statistical memorandum of the late 15th century, published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, the “bailiwick of Palochitro” has fifteen villages, among them Voni and Exo Metochi.⁸

The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florios Voustronios mentions Palaikythro among the twelve villages watered, winter and summer, by the great spring (kefalovryso) of Kythrea. Its water came down from Kythrea and Chrysida to Trachoni, Neo Chorio, Voni and Palaikythro, as far as Exo Metochi and Epicho, and turned more than fifty mills.⁹

Turkish rule

The 18th-century Cypriot historian Archimandrite Kyprianos mentions Palaikythro among the villages from which the janissaries of the island were paid. Their land gave the tithe of every product and each inhabitant paid one piastre a year, the tax called “spentza”.¹⁰

In April 1750 the British consul at Aleppo, Alexander Drummond, spent the night in the village. He writes that he saw no antiquities, but he was taken to a spot where, a few years earlier, the foundations of a temple of Aphrodite, about a foot high, had survived. The kadi, to save the cost of quarrying, had taken the stones to build a house.¹¹

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, 33 property-holding households are recorded at Palaikythro. The estates were mainly wheat fields, with a few gardens, two threshing floors and just ten olive trees. After land, the greatest value lay in the shares in running water, that is, in the water of Kythrea, and in the animals: more than 1,100 sheep and goats, 19 pairs of oxen and four camels.¹²

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village, in the eastern part of the centre, is dedicated to the Panagia Galaktotrofousa and was built in 1896. Jeffery refers to it as Panagia Chrysogalaktousa. Around it and on the neighbouring plot lay the old cemetery; in the 1940s it filled up, and a new cemetery was made outside the village, to the north-east.¹³

As early as 1890 the Greek scholar Athanasios Sakellarios noted at Palaikythro the ruins of a church of the Greek medieval period. Jeffery describes a ruined medieval church, known as Agia Aikaterini or Agia Eirini, which had at one time also been used as a mosque, and believes that the locust icon was kept in one of the churches of the village. The 2009 list of occupied churches of the Church of Cyprus records the chapels of Agia Aikaterini and Agia Anna as ruined.¹⁴

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew cereals, fodder crops and olives, without irrigation, and supplemented their income with stock-breeding. In 1973 the village had almost 1,000 sheep, more than 600 goats, more than 350 cows and oxen and 15,800 poultry. Many inhabitants worked in Lefkosia.¹⁵ In 1937 the New Co-operative Credit Society of Palaikythro was founded and in 1952 the Palaikythro Co-operative Grocery.

Population

The position of Palaikythro near Lefkosia helped its population to grow steadily.¹⁶ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 342 inhabitants in 1881, 363 in 1891, 411 in 1901, 556 in 1911 and 626 in 1921.¹⁷ In 1931 it had 674 inhabitants, 523 Christians and 151 Muslims, and in 1946 909, of whom 718 were Orthodox and 191 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,113 inhabitants, 862 Greeks and 251 Turks, and in 1973 976 Greeks. In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of Palaikythro had 130 pupils and 4 teachers.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 406 inhabitants of Palaikythro signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 17 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Palaikythro was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population suffered ethnic cleansing. The European Commission of Human Rights, in its report of 1976, notes that the church and the school of the village were used as places where the inhabitants were gathered, and records the testimony of a farmer from Palaikythro who was taken on 21 August 1974 to Voni, where about 500 people were held in confinement, the men in the church and the women and children in the school.¹⁸ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

In Palaikythro and its area 19 dead of 1974 are recorded, all of them civilians. The Commission heard testimony on the killing in the village of seventeen civilians, members of two neighbouring families, among them ten women and five children, and found that the testimonies corroborated one another.¹⁹ It also recorded testimony that at Palaikythro Turkish soldiers executed, in two incidents, 30 to 40 soldiers of the National Guard who had surrendered.²⁰

Eleven inhabitants of Palaikythro, 7 civilians and 4 soldiers, have been missing since 1974. One was lost in the village itself and 10 elsewhere, mainly at Voni (4), and also in the area of Tziaos, at Afaneia, in the area of Agios Ermolaos, at Assia, in Lefkosia and at the Pogazi hospital. The remains of 7 have been located and identified; the other 4 are still missing. Three more inhabitants of the village, 2 civilians and 1 soldier, were killed elsewhere, in the area of Tziaos, in Lefkosia and at Voni.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of the Panagia Galaktotrofousa into a cultural centre; in 2021 it was being used as a storeroom. In the new cemetery not a single cross is left standing, the family tombs are damaged, and of the old cemetery almost nothing survives.²¹