Strongylos is a mixed community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 28 kilometres west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 50 metres, on the plain of the Mesaoria, between the old and the new Lefkosia–Ammochostos roads, about three kilometres east of Askeia.¹ In the 1960 census it had 392 inhabitants, 163 of them Greeks and 227 Turks.

Name

In the sources of the 15th and 16th centuries the name is spelled “Strongylon” (in the 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas), “Strongelo” and “Stronghylo”.² On Kitchener’s British map of 1885 it is written “Strongylo”,³ and the official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) has “Strongylos, o”.⁴

Founding and first records

Strongylos first appears in a written source in the early 15th century, in Machairas. When the king sent men to stop the Genoese nobleman Thomas de Campofregoso from reaching Ammochostos, he deceived them by saying that he was going “to my brother-in-law’s village at Strongylos”.⁵

In the village’s land the Gazetteer records the place-names Agia Marina and Nion Chorion.⁶

Frankish and Venetian rule

In the 1460s Strongylos was a fief of the de Nores family. In the list of the fiefs distributed by King James II, preserved by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron, Giacomo de Nores receives “the villages of his father”, Strongylos among them.⁷ According to the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, in 1463 Giacomo de Nores was among the Cypriot nobles who had taken refuge in Rhodes; he later returned to Cyprus and received from James the fiefs his father had held.⁸

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Strongylos is recorded as a mixed village of Christians and Muslims, with 61 property-holding households. The main crop was cotton. The owners also had irrigated gardens with waterwheels, a field with a well, many threshing floors and large areas of barren land. They had about 640 sheep, 35 pairs of oxen for ploughing, cows, mules, horses and beehives.⁹

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village is dedicated to Saint Paraskevi. It stands on the western edge of the old settlement, and its date is not known. The cemetery of the Greek inhabitants lies in the fields, about 500 metres east of the church.¹⁰

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the village’s land was sown almost entirely with cereals, and stock-breeding was well developed: in 1973 the inhabitants kept 1,126 sheep, 305 goats and 214 cows.¹¹ In 1960 the Second Cooperative Credit Society of Strongylos was founded.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Strongylos had 280 inhabitants in 1881, 275 in 1891, 292 in 1901, 329 in 1911 and 349 in 1921.¹² In 1931 it had 339 inhabitants, 167 Christians and 172 Muslims, and in 1946 390, of whom 184 were Orthodox and 205 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 392 inhabitants, 163 Greeks and 227 Turks, and in 1973 126 Greeks and about 180 Turks (estimate). In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school had 14 pupils and one teacher.

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for union with Greece 112 inhabitants signed, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Strongylos was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

Eight inhabitants of Strongylos, all of them civilians, disappeared within the village itself and were recorded as missing; their remains were later located and identified.

The 2009 list of churches in the occupied areas of the Church of Cyprus records the church of Agia Paraskevi as looted and desecrated. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the church was repaired in May 2017 and in 2022 its exterior was in good condition. Of the cemetery only the foundations of the enclosure wall and scattered fragments of grave crosses survive.¹³