Pigi is a large Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos (Famagusta). It lies 20 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an altitude of 40 metres, on the plain of the Mesaoria. It is almost joined to the neighbouring village of Peristerona, and the two villages are known together as Peristeronopigi; they also shared their primary school and their cooperative society.¹ At the 1960 census it had 1,038 inhabitants, all Greeks.

Name

In medieval documents the village is written “Pigui”, “Piguy” and “Pigi”; in the survey of Cyprus made by the British officer Herbert Kitchener in the first years of British rule it is “Piyi”, and in the official Gazetteer of Cyprus Pigi.²

Founding and first records

According to a tradition recorded by the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, a shepherd from Peristerona saw a pig digging in damp ground. When he dug there himself he found water, and the place was called Pigi (“spring”) before the settlement was even built.³

According to the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, Pigi is already mentioned in 1196, in a bull of Pope Celestine III confirming the rights of the Latin archbishop of Nicosia. Among the areas of Cyprus whose tithe belonged to the archbishopric the bull names “Pigui”, which Mas Latrie identifies with Pigi in the north-eastern Mesaoria.⁴

Archaeological sites

In 1965 the Department of Antiquities excavated two tombs beneath the village itself, which had already been looted. Both date to the early Ptolemaic Greek period. The tombs yielded plain perfume flasks and matt-glazed cups, which were registered in the Famagusta District Museum.⁵

Frankish rule, Venetian rule

In the 1460s King James II gave Agia Varvara and Pigi as a fief to Antonio Santa Maura. This is recorded by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron in his list of the fiefs the king distributed.⁶ At the same time part of the village was a fief of Arnaou Rous. In an act of the royal treasury of February 1469, published by Mas Latrie, the king took from the fief of Arnaou Rous a serf (paroikos) of Pigi, Giannis tou Argyrou, giving the lord straw in exchange, and on the same day, at the request of Arnaou Rous, freed him from all the obligations of serfdom.⁷

At the end of the 15th century, shortly after Cyprus passed to the Venetians, Pigi was a royal village, that is, it belonged directly to the state and not to a feudal lord. In a Venetian statistical memorandum published by Mas Latrie it is recorded together with its neighbour: “Casal Pigi et Peristerona”.⁸

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Pigi is a Christian village, with 33 property-holding households and a church. Their fields were cotton fields and grain fields, with a few threshing floors and a good deal of barren land. There were almost no trees, only five olives; the households had a few sheep, cows and pairs of oxen for ploughing.⁹

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of Pigi is dedicated to the Archangel Michael; it stands on the north-western edge of the village and dates from the 16th–18th century. It is an Ancient Monument. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, its northern part is the oldest, and the southern part, with the bell tower, was added later.¹⁰ The village also has the chapels of Agia Marina, Timios Stavros and Agios Georgios, all of the 20th century.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew unirrigated cereals and fodder crops, and stock-raising was one of their main occupations.¹¹ According to the 2019 government publication on the displaced municipalities and communities, from 1935 the people of Peristeronopigi organised annual district livestock shows in the village.¹² The Peristeronopigi Cooperative Credit Society was founded in 1926.

Education

According to the same publication, 69 teachers from Peristeronopigi had been trained by 1974.¹³ In the school year 1973–74 the Greek primary school of Peristeronopigi, shared by the two villages, had 251 pupils and eight teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Pigi had 291 inhabitants in 1881, 346 in 1891, 450 in 1901, 590 in 1911 and 674 in 1921.¹⁴ In 1931 it had 804 inhabitants, all Christians, and in 1946 1,068, all Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,038 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 1,103 Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 600 inhabitants of Pigi signed, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters records 41 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle. The EOKA fighter Andreas Epifaniou came from Pigi.¹⁵

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Pigi was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. The Red Cross tables submitted to the European Commission of Human Rights record that on 8 September 1974 36 people from Pigi, Sygkrasi and Lapathos were taken to Gypsou. The Commission found it established that there was a detention centre at Gypsou, where the Turkish forces held Greek civilians in confinement.¹⁶ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

Twelve inhabitants of Pigi, ten civilians and two soldiers, were recorded as missing. Five disappeared in the village itself and the other seven elsewhere: at Peristerona, in the area of Kato Deryneia, at Voni, at Lefkonoiko and in the area of Gaidouras. The remains of five have been located and identified, while seven are still missing. Four dead of 1974 are recorded in the village itself, all civilians. Three more inhabitants, one civilian and two soldiers, were killed elsewhere: at Gypsou, in the area of Ovgoros and at Agios Pavlos in Nicosia.

According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the church of the Archangel Michael is in poor condition: the dome of the bell tower has collapsed, the crosses and bells have been removed, and of its furnishings only the beam of the iconostasis remains. The village’s new cemetery is in ruins, and the grave crosses lie scattered.¹⁷