Sysklipos is a Greek community of the occupied district of Keryneia. It lies 14 kilometres west of Keryneia, at an altitude of 380 metres, on the southern slopes of the Pentadaktylos. Its land rose to the ridge and included part of the forests of Lapithos and Karavas, while to the south the slopes became gentler. In the 1960 census it had 337 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

The origin of the name is not known from a reliable source. In the 1460s the village is written “Sischipo”. On the map of Cyprus drawn by the British officer Herbert Kitchener in the first years of British rule the village is recorded as “Sisklipos” and “Siskelib”.

Founding and first records

Sysklipos first appears in a written source in the 1460s, as “Sischipo”, in the list of the fiefs distributed by King James II. The list is preserved by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron.¹ The area of the village, however, was inhabited much earlier, as the archaeological sites in the surrounding area show.

Archaeological sites

In 1959 the survey service of the Department of Antiquities, as part of the surface survey of the Keryneia area, located many pre-Greek sites on the hills between Krini and Sysklipos. They show that the southern slopes of the Pentadaktylos around the village were already inhabited thousands of years before its first written mention.²

Frankish rule

King James II gave Sysklipos as a fief to Plissin Mustatoso, together with neighbouring Agios Ermolaos, which Bustron writes “Santo Armola”, and a village “Facli”.³ The same man, under the name “Plichy Moustatouze”, appears in an order of the king of April 1468, published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie. By it James halved, from 30 to 15 ducats, the annual sum he paid to the royal treasury, half in money and half in kind.⁴

Turkish rule

In the land survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Sysklipos is recorded as a Christian village with 14 households with property. Their fields were mainly wheat fields, with a little cotton, small gardens with mulberry trees, and threshing floors. Of the 283 trees recorded, most were olive trees, many of them mountain olives, and there were also almond and carob trees. The village had an olive press, and the inhabitants had five pairs of oxen, cows, 50 goats and a few beehives.⁵

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village is dedicated to Panagia Chryseleousa and dates from the 19th century.

North of the village, higher up the slope, stands the ruined chapel of Agia Evdokia, of the 13th or 14th century, which is an Ancient Monument. According to the Union of Communities of Keryneia District, beside it ran the spring of Agia Evdokia, with cold water.⁶

In the village there was also the chapel of Agios Georgios, of the 18th century. The cemetery lies in the fields, about 500 metres north-east of the old centre of the village.⁷

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew mainly cereals, fodder crops and olives, while the northern, mountainous part of their land was covered with pines, cypresses and scrub. In 1973 sheep, goats, oxen and more than 73,000 poultry were raised in the village, the second largest number in the district after the town of Keryneia. The same encyclopaedia describes the houses of the village as stone-built, of the local stone, with the flat earthen roofs of traditional architecture.⁸ In 1947 the New Co-operative Credit Society of Sysklipos was founded.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 167 inhabitants in 1881, 217 in 1891, 251 in 1901, 320 in 1911 and 380 in 1921.⁹ In 1931 Sysklipos had 396 inhabitants, all Christians, and in 1946 454, all Orthodox (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 337 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 256 Greeks. In the school year 1973–74 the village’s Greek elementary school had 20 pupils and one teacher.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 259 inhabitants signed, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Sysklipos was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants’ return.

Twenty-two inhabitants of Sysklipos were recorded as missing, 21 civilians and one soldier. The remains of two of them have been identified; the other 20 are still missing. Twenty were seized in the village itself, one in the Lapithos–Karavas area and one at Agios Ermolaos. One more inhabitant, a soldier, was killed in the area of Agios Pavlos in Lefkosia. Four dead of 1974 are recorded on the land of Sysklipos: three civilians, who were killed in the village, and one soldier, who was killed on the Kalampakki height, in the Pentadaktylos area.

The church of Panagia Chryseleousa was desecrated, looted and is used as a hay barn. The chapel of Agios Georgios was desecrated, looted and has collapsed.