Pentageia is a large Greek community in the occupied district of Lefkosia. It lies 11 kilometres south-west of Morfou, at an elevation of 20 metres, in the plain of Morfou, near the shore of Morfou Bay. Its land is crossed by the Kargotis and Atsas rivers, and on it, near the sea, stands the metochi (dependency) of Kykkos Monastery at Xeropotamos.¹ In the 1960 census it had 1,105 inhabitants, of whom 1,059 were Greeks.

Name

The 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas writes the village “Πενταγία” (Pentagia), and the Italian and French sources of Frankish and Venetian rule “Pendaia” and “Pendaies”. In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950 the name is written “Πεντάγυια” (Pentagyia), and the official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) records it as “Πεντάγεια, η” (Pentageia).²

Founding and first records

Pentageia appears in the sources as early as the beginning of the 14th century: the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florios Voustronios, in the events of 1310, mentions Morfou as a village “of the district of Pentageia”.³ Machairas mentions it from the events of 1363 onwards. The 19th-century Greek philologist Athanasios Sakellarios identified it with Setrachos, which the 12th-century Greek scholar John Tzetzes mentions as a city and river of Cyprus; the identification has not been confirmed.⁴

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the settlement formerly consisted of five smaller settlements or parishes, one of which had grown up around the monastery of Agios Georgios. The Pentageia Community Council names them Pano Pentageia, Kato Pentageia, Agios Georgios, Stavros and Armena, and these names survive as place-names on the community’s land.⁵

Archaeological sites

At the locality Mantres, south of the village, the Cypriot archaeologist Vassos Karageorghis excavated in 1960, for the Department of Antiquities, an intact chamber tomb from the beginning of the late pre-Greek period, around 1600 BC. The tomb held two successive group burials, of 22 and 12 people, bronze objects, faience beads and many vessels with a white coating (White Slip). Karageorghis argued that these vessels prove that this pottery was of Cypriot origin and not Syrian, as many believed. The same report records, between the village and Mantres, at the locality Myloi, a Roman cemetery and an important settlement of the Greek medieval period.⁶

In 1963 the Department of Antiquities recorded another tomb at Mantres, a little later in date, which had been looted, but most of its finds were recovered. In 1964 it excavated four tombs of the Archaic ancient Greek period at the locality Koutsoullos, east of ancient Soloi, with amphorae, jugs and lamps.⁷ In the summer of 1974 Kent State University of the United States began an excavation at a pre-Greek settlement at Pentageia, which was interrupted by the Turkish invasion.⁸

Antiquity

The tombs at Mantres and the settlement whose investigation began in 1974 show that the area was already inhabited in the pre-Greek period. In the ancient Greek period Pentageia most probably belonged to the kingdom of Soloi, whose capital lay a few kilometres to the west; Voustronios writes that “near Pentageia was the city of Soloi”.⁹

Frankish rule

Under Frankish rule Pentageia gave its name to one of the administrative districts (contrade) of the island, which also included Morfou.¹⁰ At its head was a governor, the “civitano” or “chevetaine”; in March 1468 King James II appointed to this post, for one year, Giacomo Maltese, who lent him 100 ducats and was to recover them from the district’s guard tax. According to the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, this tax was most probably paid by the inhabitants of the areas most exposed to pirate raids, such as Pentageia.¹¹

Its position on the sea made it a target of raids. According to Machairas, in 1363 twelve Turkish ships landed at Pentageia, plundered the area and took captives, and in 1373 Genoese galleys came as far as there, where the constable, that is the commander-in-chief of the kingdom, James de Lusignan, was waiting for them with three hundred men. The following year he was gathering provisions from Morfou and Pentageia to supply the castles of Keryneia and Saint Hilarion, which were still holding out against the Genoese. Pentageia also had a harbour: in the treaty with the Genoese, described by Machairas, the king undertook that ships coming from Turkey would no longer put in there, but only at Keryneia.¹² In 1462–63, according to Voustronios, the galleys of Sor de Naves, who was fighting on the side of Queen Charlotte against James, tried to plunder the place, but the governor of Pentageia, Demetrios de Coron, gathered as many men as he could find and drove them back to the sea.¹³

Venetian rule

Under Venetian rule Pentageia was one of the twelve districts of Cyprus, and one of the ten coastal ones; its governor was appointed by the Venetian governors in Lefkosia.¹⁴

Turkish rule

After the Ottoman conquest Pentageia became the seat of one of the seventeen administrative districts (kazas) of the island, as the Cypriot historian Archimandrite Kyprianos writes in 1788.¹⁵ The settlement itself, however, had shrunk greatly. In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Pentageia is a Christian village with six property-holding households. They had wheat fields, a good deal of barren land, 35 olive trees and a few oxen and cows.¹⁶

British rule

In 1918 the British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus, describes Pentageia as a small village with poor mud-brick houses, and notes that the great bay was still called “the bay of Pentageia” even then.¹⁷ A few years later the village began to grow quickly. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the mines of the area, the ore processing and loading installations at neighbouring Karavostasi and the railway that linked Pentageia with Lefkosia and Ammochostos contributed to this. A hospital operated near the village, mainly for the mine workers, but it also served the whole area until 1974.¹⁸

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of the village, north of the old centre, is dedicated to Saint Nicholas and was built in the 20th century.¹⁹ The 2009 list also records the old church of Agios Nikolaos, which has collapsed. The old cemetery, around Agios Nikolaos, closed in 1940; the new one lies at the southern edge of the village, among orange groves.²⁰

At Xeropotamos, near the sea, stands the metochi of Kykkos Monastery, with the church of Saints Sergios and Bacchus, of the 16th to 18th century. Jeffery mentions that a Greek inscription of the 16th century, no longer visible, recorded the founding of the monastery, and that in its enclosure and its walls there were ancient architectural members from Soloi, among them five large marble capitals.²¹

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Pentageia lay over the largest aquifer of Cyprus, that of the western Mesaoria, and with boreholes and the water of the Atsas and the Kargotis large areas were irrigated. Before 1974 the main crop was citrus, mainly oranges, and vegetables and cereals were also grown. The metochi of Xeropotamos gave work to the inhabitants, and in 1956 its land, more than four thousand donums, was leased to an agricultural company, which turned it into a modern farm with citrus and avocados, a crop until then unknown in Cyprus.²² In 1943 the village’s Co-operative Credit Society was founded and in 1955 the Co-operative Grocery.

Education

According to the Pentageia Community Council, until 1915 the children of the village went to the school of Petra. In the school year 1915–16 an elementary school operated at Pentageia, with 27 pupils, in a rented house, and in 1917 a school building was built with contributions from the abbot of Kykkos Kleopas and the mining company and with the labour of the inhabitants. In the year 1957–58 the school had three teachers and 114 pupils. In March 1974 a new school with eight classrooms opened, on land donated by Kykkos Monastery.²³ In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school had 203 pupils and six teachers.

Population

Pentageia grew quickly in the 20th century. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 184 inhabitants in 1881, 177 in 1891, 127 in 1901, 171 in 1911 and 319 in 1921.²⁴ In 1931 it had 420 inhabitants, 410 Christians and 10 Muslims, and in 1946 736, of whom 716 were Orthodox, 10 Muslims and 10 others (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,105 inhabitants, 1,059 Greeks, 19 Turks and 27 others, among them 19 British, and in 1973 1,322 Greeks.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 449 inhabitants of Pentageia signed, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 13 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

On the Pentageia–Xeros road the British had a camp, where EOKA members from the area of Pyrgos in Tillyria were held, among them the fighters Georgios Nikolaou and Stelios Tritaios.²⁵

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Pentageia was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population suffered ethnic cleansing. The inhabitants fled before the advancing Turkish army. Some stayed in the village; according to testimony to the European Commission of Human Rights, in February or March 1975 people from Pentageia were moved to houses in Morfou, where they were held in confinement, and the last of them were released only in July 1975.²⁶ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

Four inhabitants of Pentageia, all of them soldiers, have been missing since 1974. None was lost in the village itself; they were lost in the area of Lapithos, at Agios Georgios in the district of Keryneia, in the Lapithos–Karavas area and in the area of Agios Ermolaos. The remains of 2 have been located and identified, while 2 are still missing. Two more inhabitants, soldiers, were killed elsewhere, one at Athalassa and the Lefkosia General Hospital and the other at Panagra. In the village itself two dead are recorded, both civilians.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Nikolaos into a mosque. The metochi of Xeropotamos lies inside a Turkish military camp; according to the Pentageia Community Council, the church of Saints Sergios and Bacchus was desecrated and is used by the Turkish army as an ammunition store.²⁷