Prastio is a Greek community in the occupied district of Lefkosia. It lies 6 kilometres south-west of Morfou, at an elevation of 30 metres, in the plain of Morfou, and to distinguish it from the other villages of the same name it was called Prastio Morfou. Part of the village was the quarter of Neo Leivadi, built in the 1950s by families from Leivadi in Pafos. In the 1960 census it had 545 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

In the printed table of the 1950 plebiscite the village is written “Πραστειόν (Μόρφου)” (Prasteion Morfou).

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Prastio has 16 property-holding households, Christian and Muslim. Their property was mainly fields, with wheat fields, cotton fields and threshing floors; they had almost no trees, only three olive trees. They had more than 300 sheep and goats, a few oxen and cows, and beehives.¹

British rule

The village of Leivadi in the district of Pafos was abandoned in 1954. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the colonial government then decided to dissolve it and to resettle its inhabitants elsewhere; it had bought from Kykkos Monastery the estates of the monastery of Agios Nikolaos, north-west of Prastio, around 800 skales of land, and made them available to the people of Leivadi at 23 pounds a skala. In this way many of them settled at Prastio. They named their settlement Neo Leivadi, but it soon merged with Prastio, and many called the village Prastio–Neo Leivadi.² The official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) records Neo Leivadi as a quarter of Prastio.³

Churches and monasteries

The old Greek Orthodox church of the village, in its old centre, is dedicated to Saint George and dates from the 18th century. It is single-aisled, with a vault and a bell-cote. At the south-eastern edge of the village the new parish church, of Agios Stylianos, was built in 1973. The cemetery lies among the orchards, about 850 metres south of Agios Georgios.⁴

North-west of the village, towards the coast, stood the monastery of Agios Nikolaos, known as “tou Paratzi”; the Gazetteer records the monastery and the locality under the name “Πάρακης” (Parakis).⁵ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, after it was dissolved the monastery became a metochi (dependency) of Kykkos Monastery. The people of Leivadi rebuilt its ruined church in 1955, and services were held there from time to time until 1974.⁶ In the village there was also the church of Agia Mavri.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Prastio lies over the large underground aquifer of the Morfou area, and the boreholes sunk there allowed large areas to be irrigated. Before 1974 the main crop was citrus, mainly oranges and grapefruit, and on a smaller scale vegetables and cereals.⁷ In the survey of 1832/33, by contrast, the inhabitants’ property was fields and flocks, with only three trees.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 190 inhabitants in 1881, 182 in 1891, 202 in 1901, 220 in 1911 and 237 in 1921.⁸ In 1931 Prastio had 305 inhabitants, all of them Christians, and in 1946 382, all Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In the years that followed, when the people of Leivadi settled in the village, the population grew, and in 1960 Prastio had 545 inhabitants, all of them Greeks. In 1973 it had 1,364 Greek inhabitants. In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of the village had 162 pupils and five teachers.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 228 inhabitants of Prastio 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 Prastio was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population suffered ethnic cleansing. Some inhabitants stayed in the village; according to testimony to the European Commission of Human Rights, in February or March 1975 people from Prastio and from neighbouring villages were moved to Morfou, to the detention centre that had been set up in a school and in private houses, where they were held in confinement until July 1975.⁹ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

Two inhabitants of Prastio, both soldiers, were recorded as missing; they were lost on the Keryneia–Panagra road and in the Lapithos–Karavas area, and their remains have not been located to this day. Four inhabitants of Prastio, two civilians and two soldiers, were killed elsewhere, in the areas of Kontemenos, Pano Zodeia and Mia Milia. In the village itself, at Neo Leivadi, one dead is recorded, a civilian.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Stylianos into a mosque,¹⁰ and the church of Agios Georgios into a cultural centre. The 2009 list records the church of Agia Mavri as desecrated and looted.