Syrianochori is a Greek community of the occupied district of Lefkosia. It lies 6 kilometres north-west of Morfou, at an altitude of 10 metres, in the plain of Morfou, near the shore of Morfou Bay.¹ In the 1960 census it had 630 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, on old maps the village is marked as “Sirianocari” and “Sirianicori”.² The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) also records on the village’s land, near the shore, the locality Syrianos, and similar place names elsewhere in the district, such as the quarter Syriania and the locality Syrianos at Kythrea and the locality Syrianoi at Alampra and Kapedes.³

Founding and first records

Near the village, on the land of Morfou, lay Pnasi, a small monastery. The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron writes that the torrent he calls Ourios, most probably the Serrachis, ended at the village of Morfou and the village of “Mnassi”. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, “Mnassi” is Mnasi or Pnasi, and the place name was therefore already known in the years of Frankish and Venetian rule.⁴

Archaeological sites

In 1963, at the locality Santeni, about one kilometre east of the village, a pre-Greek tomb poor in finds was discovered and investigated for the Department of Antiquities. It contained two jugs, one of White Painted and one of Black Slip ware, and the skeleton of the dead person in place. The Cypriot archaeologist Vassos Karageorghis, who published the find, noted that it shows the existence of a cemetery unknown until then.⁵

The Greek philologist Athanasios Sakellarios, who travelled through Cyprus in the 19th century, writes that a few small granite columns survived in the village.⁶

Frankish and Venetian rule

On the village’s land, near the mouth of the river, the Gazetteer records the place name Zacharomylos, that is a mill for processing sugar cane.⁷ Sugar cane was grown in the plain of Morfou in the years of Frankish rule: in 1468 King James II sold the Venetian Andrea Cornaro, to pay off his loans, the sugar of one harvest of the village of Morfou, as shown by a document published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie.⁸

Turkish rule

In the land survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Syrianochori is a Christian village with 33 households with property. Their property was mainly fields; they had only ten trees, mostly olive trees and one mulberry tree, 220 sheep and goats and 25 oxen.⁹

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of the village is dedicated to Saint Nicholas. It is single-aisled, with a bell tower at the north-east corner; according to Cyprus Religious Heritage it was most probably built in the Middle Ages and extended at the end of the 19th century. The British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus at the beginning of the 20th century, saw it renovated in 1918. The village cemetery lies about 800 metres south-west of the church, outside the village.¹⁰

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the main crop of the village was citrus, mainly orange and grapefruit trees, on 212 hectares in 1966. The orchards were irrigated from boreholes in the Morfou aquifer, the largest in Cyprus; over-pumping brought sea water into the aquifer, and some boreholes were abandoned. In 1973 the inhabitants kept more than 500 sheep and 500 goats, oxen, cows and poultry. The same encyclopaedia mentions a fishing shelter and an experimental fish-farming station near the mouth of the river, and artificial lakes from the time of British rule where grey mullet were bred.¹¹

In the marshes south of the village grew an abundance of kazavin, a plant like a small reed. With it the inhabitants once built huts in their orchards and made a kind of cord, the tonos, with which they wove chairs and mats, according to the same encyclopaedia.¹² Place names such as Psarolimni, Kalamidia, Leivadia and Stoma tou Potamou, which the Gazetteer records on the village’s land, recall this landscape.¹³ In 1952 the Syrianochori Co-operative Credit Society was founded, and in 1967 the village’s Co-operative Grocery.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 286 inhabitants in 1881, 290 in 1891, 285 in 1901, 316 in 1911 and 340 in 1921.¹⁴ In 1931 Syrianochori had 370 inhabitants, all Christians, and in 1946 410, all Orthodox (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 630 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 775 Greeks. In the school year 1973–74 the village’s Greek elementary school had 92 pupils and three teachers.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 263 inhabitants of Syrianochori signed, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters records 6 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974, as the Turkish army advanced, the inhabitants of Syrianochori were forced to leave.¹⁵ The village was captured and its Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. Some inhabitants stayed in the village; according to testimony to the European Commission of Human Rights, at the beginning of 1975 people from Syrianochori and other neighbouring villages were taken to the detention centre set up in a school at Morfou, where they were held in confinement.¹⁶ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants’ return.

Seven inhabitants of Syrianochori were recorded as missing, six soldiers and one civilian. None was lost in the village itself; four were lost in the area of Lapithos and Karavas, one in the area of Kazivera, one at Keryneia and one on the Keryneia–Panagra road. The remains of two of them have been located and identified; the other five are still missing. One more inhabitant, a civilian, was killed in the area of Galini.

The 2009 list records the church of Agios Nikolaos as seriously damaged and in danger of collapse. At the visit of Cyprus Religious Heritage in 2021 the church was in good condition, while in the cemetery the enclosure wall had collapsed in places and the crosses of the graves were scattered, most of them broken off their bases.¹⁷