Sygkrasi is a mixed community in the occupied district of Ammochostos (Famagusta). It lies 19 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an altitude of 30 metres, near the foothills of the Pentadaktylos, at the eastern edge of the Mesaoria. North of the village is the Sygkrasi dam.¹ At the 1960 census it had 277 inhabitants, of whom 175 were Greeks and 102 Turks.

Name

In the Italian sources of the 15th century the village is written “Syncrassi” and “Singrassi”, and in the survey of Cyprus made by the British officer Herbert Kitchener in the first years of British rule “Synkrasi”.²

Archaeological sites

At the northern edge of the village there is a sanctuary of the Ptolemaic Greek period. In 1967 the Famagusta District Museum reported wall remains there, close to the spot where broken limestone statuettes and two badly damaged heads of life-size female statues were found. Among the smaller heads published are a female head wearing a kalathos, that is, a tall basket-shaped headdress, and a veiled head.³

Greek medieval period (“Byzantium”)

The oldest church of the village, Agios Prokopios, dates from the 6th and the 10th century, that is, from the early and the middle Greek medieval period, and shows that the place was already inhabited then.

Frankish rule, Venetian rule

In the 1460s King James II gave Sygkrasi as a fief to Marco Gabriel. He is mentioned by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron, who writes that during James’s struggle for the throne the people of Ammochostos, then held by the Genoese, went to his house to kill him, and the captain of the city imprisoned him because he was a friend of James.⁴ At the end of the 15th century, in a Venetian statistical memorandum published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, Sygkrasi is recorded among the three villages of “maestro Bortolamio”.⁵

The 19th-century Greek scholar Athanasios Sakellarios noted in 1890 that a Latin inscription survived in the village church.⁶

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Sygkrasi is a mixed village, with 24 property-holding households and a church. They had cotton fields and other fields, gardens with fruit trees and mulberries, some with water-wheels for irrigation, running water for one water-wheel, and barren tracts. They had more than 900 sheep, oxen and cows, horses and mules, beehives and eleven camels.⁷

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of Agios Prokopios stands on the southern edge of the old settlement and is an Ancient Monument.⁸ According to the 2019 government publication on the displaced municipalities and communities, a large fair was held on the saint’s feast day, 8 July.⁹

On a hill west of the village stands the 18th-century chapel of Panagia tis Afentrikas, which is also an Ancient Monument. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, people suffering from contagious diseases came there for help.¹⁰ The ruins of the 16th-century chapel of Agios Nikolaos are also an Ancient Monument. One kilometre north of the village is the 20th-century church of the Agioi Paides.¹¹

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew cereals, fodder crops, carobs and some citrus; in the northern part of the village land lies the small Asprovikla state forest.¹² According to the 2019 publication, the dam north of the village, the “chavouza”, was built in 1900, and its water irrigated the area.¹³ The Sygkrasi Cooperative Credit Society was founded in 1929.

Education

According to the same publication, the Cypriot writer Loukis Akritas taught at the primary school of Sygkrasi, and the rural life of the villagers inspired his novel “O Kampos” (“The Plain”).¹⁴ In the school year 1973–74 the Greek primary school had 20 pupils and one teacher.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Sygkrasi had 133 inhabitants in 1881, 213 in 1891, 243 in 1901, 264 in 1911 and 307 in 1921.¹⁵ In 1931 it had 343 inhabitants, 206 Christians and 137 Muslims, and in 1946 345, of whom 222 were Orthodox and 123 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 277 inhabitants, 175 Greeks and 102 Turks, and in 1973 154 Greeks and about 30 Turks (estimate).

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 116 inhabitants of Sygkrasi signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters records 47 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Sygkrasi 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.

One dead of 1974 is recorded in the village itself, a civilian.

According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, all the crosses and the bell have been removed from Agios Prokopios, Panagia tis Afentrikas and the Agioi Paides are in poor condition inside, and in the cemetery the grave crosses lie broken and scattered.¹⁷